THEIR OWN WORDS SMALL MOMENTS

Emily Brisse, Upper School English teacher, reflects on life at Breck during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

Each semester, I tell my creative writing students to pay attention to small moments that stay with them. These moments, despite their subtlety, often contain the kernel of something worthy of their lingering.

On March 13, 2020, the last day of school before spring break and everything that was about to follow, I sat at a desk in my classroom, surrounded by 14 seniors who were leaning toward what had, until a few weeks prior, been a certain, sweet slide to their graduation. All of them were talking about what everyone was talking about: the COVID-19 virus. How it spread in China and Italy. How sports leagues were suspending seasons. How Tom Hanks had tested positive. Some of my students were nervous. Some were a little excited (“You think spring break will be three weeks this year?”). In my memory, I can hear echoes of each of these comments. But, while we sat together in a circle, one of my students said something that I remember word for word: “Guys,” she said, her eyes huge, “what if this is the last time we’re in this room? The last time we’re together at Breck?”

The average human, particularly the average teenager, isn’t wired to seriously consider change of that scale, not right away, especially when it relates to a milestone as anticipated as the end of one’s high school experience. So almost everyone else in the class laughed her off, saying, “Nah. It might be a while. But never again on campus? No way.”

We all know what happened next for these students: distance learning, Zoom grids, innovation and perseverance, yes, but — let’s be honest — also a lot of fear, exhaustion, and an acute grief for both the past and the future, as they had once imagined it.

In the years since that spring, through hybrid learning and mask guidance and vaccine rollouts, in conjunction with a cultural landscape rife with turmoil, I’ve thought about that girl’s far-seeing comment again and again. Why did it stick with me? Why do I keep recalling it? I think it’s because her words crystalized how quickly things as simple as sitting together in the same room can be taken away from us, and how important it is to regularly look up from wherever we find ourselves and take note of what, for us, makes that moment matter.

For me, during these recent years in the classroom at Breck, what’s made moments matter is their ability to remind me what makes both teaching, and teaching here, special. It’s the time where my advisee played jazz music for the rest of our group over Zoom to cheer us up. Or when I saw a student’s handwriting on a thank you note after months of only corresponding through screens. It’s having a full lively classroom again, the energy of many bodies in one physical space without fear of proximity. It’s lunch on the front lawn when the weather is nice, seeing whole faces, somebody playing music, kids flinging frisbees. It’s sound: for a while there, the hallways were so quiet, even people’s breathing muted behind their masks. It’s pencil lead squeaking across paper. It’s singing in the chapel. It’s the opposite of phones. It’s banter with colleagues in the faculty lounge, all of us standing in a circle, eating donuts, talking about China or sports teams or Tom Hanks, or whatever seems notable about the day. It’s also the morning of May 4,

2020, when the seniors graduated in an outdoor ceremony. After they received their diplomas, their parents drove them down Ottawa Avenue, where my colleagues and I were lined up in our own vehicles, many of us leaning out our open windows or sunroofs, cheering for these kids we hadn’t seen in person since March as they made their final drive away from Breck. It’s the looks on their faces: what they knew they’d lost, but the way they were embracing this moment, too, deciding what they would make it mean.

The girl from my creative writing class was right, of course. Something told her that moment sitting next to her unsettled classmates should be noticed. I wonder if she feels she ever got to say a proper goodbye to her peers and this place? I wonder if she feels she noticed enough about her time at Breck, when it was an unhurried average Tuesday on campus, right there for her to see?

As for me, I’m an English teacher, so I suppose one could argue that I’ve been trained to note and draw meaning from the small details. Yet despite my own teachings, despite the lessons of these past years, I rush through a thousand moments a day like anybody else. All I can do, I’ve learned, is keep encouraging my students, “Look around you, use your senses, be here now.” And when they do — when they remind me how — I do my best to pay attention. B