"Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies."
- Edward Bulwer-Lytton
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I have spent some time curating a playlist of a few songs that encase my life during the Covid Pandemic, and more specifically, what it was like to be a virtual teacher during this time. I included five songs in the beginning, all of which I listen to often, but with titles that perfectly capture my thoughts and feelings on virtual teaching. The first song I added was Mess is Mine by Vance Joy. I added this song because teaching virtually during a global pandemic was an absolute mess, but I made that mess mine and I did what I could to persevere. It was not easy to teach virtually, especially as a first year teacher, and most days were not put together perfectly and tied in a nice, neat bow. Instead, most days I was surviving, learning what I could as I went. The second song I chose to include was You're Somebody Else by Flora Cash because teaching was almost the exact opposite of what I ever could have imagined. My first year teaching was nothing like I pictured, it felt like the profession of teaching was a completely new job. Along with this feeling, I also added the song All We Ever Knew by The Head and the Heart. Teaching virtually was so far from what I knew about teaching, and I often had to fly by in order to survive. All I ever knew about teaching had flown out the window and I was in an entirely different struggle that I had to learn to overcome. Next, I added the song Mind over Matter by Young the Giants, because I often had to adopt this mindset in order to overcome the struggles of learning to teach virtually. I had to put things into perspective and think in different ways to stay a positive person in my students' lives. Lastly, I chose the song Are You Even Real by James Blake because I was never able to meet a majority of my students face-to-face. I only saw most of my students through a computer screen, and sometimes that computer screen was completely black, so I often felt like I was questioning if my students were even real.
I also thought of a few song titles that I would add to this playlist if I could come up with my own songs. The first song title that I thought of was Looking Through a Mirror. I did not require my students to turn their cameras on due to privacy and comfort issues, so many of my students chose to keep their cameras off at all times, so I would be starting at a large black screen for the majority of my time teaching. Sometimes it felt like it was just myself speaking into a mirror instead of speaking to 25-38 students. Another song title that I would add to this playlist if I could would be You Live and You Learn. I thought that Covid teaching would be my most difficult year and that each year would be better than virtual teaching, no matter what, which was truly not the case. My second year teaching, which was face-to-face, I found that I struggled a lot more with teaching than I did as a virtual teacher, and I had to take what I had learned from virtual teaching as a first-year teacher and apply it to something that felt totally unrelated. It was difficult to find connections between what I had learned as a virtual teacher and what I needed to learn as a teacher teaching face-to-face. I had to continue to live and continue to learn in order to survive.
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