About a week ago, I thought it would be nice and cathartic to write about my new job and all the chaos that comes with being a long term sub. And then coronavirus got real, and I discovered a whole new level of crazy and teaching unknowns.

Over the past month, I watched my students go from making jokes about the disease, even though I didn't want them to, to wondering when we would shut down, and to legitimately being scared for their own health, to the point that I had multiple students wearing gloves in class.

Teaching is no walk in the park, but it gets harder when you're dealing with a pandemic.

On Thursday March 12th, Ohio's Governor Mike DeWine announced that all Ohio schools would be closed for three weeks starting Monday. There was no communication from the school district about it beforehand; their plan was to go until the government told them not to, and didn't think the call to close wasn't coming for a while. And to make matters worse, I found out from my students.

The hardest part about going to school on Friday was the uncertainty of my job and what things would look like for students. As a long term sub, I felt that I was the last person to know everything in every situation, but it was every teacher who didn't have a solid idea of what was going on.

The two hardest things to work against were fear and rumors about the disease, and fighting against the idea that there would be NO school for three weeks.

Half of my students weren't in class on Friday, and I don't blame their parents for not sending them. Prior to DeWine's announcement, I was trying to convince my students that they were safe, and that the people in charge would make the right decision, and we would still have a couple of days together. Friday, I did very little in terms of classwork, and instead focused on trying to calm fears, and try and give some sense of order and information to the craziness of the situation.

I started my morning with trying to remember what I was planning on teaching, and trying to disassemble a Chromebook cart so that I could pass them out to my students. Luckily, my students helped me take the cart apart, and put it back together, but even with that taken care of, I felt like I was being pulled in too many different directions to focus on what I needed to. I taught my first two classes, but by third period, I wasn't able to focus on anything other that the fact that I wasn't sure if I still had a job.

When I went and asked the principal about it clarified that I had a job, but didn't have any more details after that. I was so overwhelmed by the whole day, and knowing that I hadn't lost a job that I loved, I ended up crying in the bathroom at school. Then for the rest of the day, I was trying to figure out what I would be teaching online and how.

The hardest part was trying to give information to my students, when I had none. There's nothing that prepares you to tell your students what to expect during a pandemic. The only thing I knew I wanted to do was to answer any questions they had, and I had to be calm enough to not make them feel worse.

Being fresh out of college, I know that I'm not much older than my students. The age gap was most obvious with this situation. I didn't know what to say, because there was only so much that I know, and I didn't want to spread misinformation. I've never lived through anything like this before, and truly don't know what to expect. I was also looking for someone to give me answers, and I was supposed to be the person in that situation to give the answers. They don't teach you how to deal with pandemic crowd control in teacher school.

There is so much that isn't known about coronavirus, and so much that's not known about what will happen. It's so hard to be a teacher during this time. So much of my job was upended a week ago. No one knows when we'll go back, or even if we will go back at all. I don't know how to teach online, or what to even expect out of my students with online learning. No one could've seen this coming, and no one truly knows how this will end. There's so much more that can change, and I can only hope that I can provide my students with some sense of normalcy in this chaos.