Like most educators, I’ve been teaching remotely on Zoom since March 2020, for almost three semesters. Now we are back in the classroom, which is a wonderful milestone.  Barnard College has worked so hard to equip classrooms, solve ventilation problems, reconfigure dorms, as well as set up and pay for extensive testing of students, faculty and staff. They have invested a huge amount of money, especially considering we are not a rich school, though people assume it is. Our Provost and President, and everyone working on the transition, have been extraordinary. I feel grateful to be here, but that does not mean everything has gone smoothly for me.

I had gotten used to being in my apartment, teaching and meeting my students for class on Zoom, even using FaceTime calls for advising when Zoom wasn’t the best option for them. I put in a huge amount of time preparing for these classes, doing things differently, even changing my courses to address and reflect our time of the plague when I was teaching the seventeenth-century literature. I checked in on their well-being to begin each class, making the class as intimate as possible, even though we weren’t in the same room. I asked students to keep their video on (unless there was a reason not to) so they could see one another and identify faces with a name. Amazingly, my students bonded, forming close friendships from being able to “see” each other. I might be terrible at tech but I’m great with human connections. Virtual class discussions were often better than in a physical space, where (unless it’s a seminar room) students typically see the back of each other’s heads and rarely make eye contact. Still, we all longed to be together again.

But I had a feeling walking into class that first day was not going to be my best, most graceful moment. 

As we prepared for courses to start in September, we were advised we should expect to still record sessions on Zoom, since there would be times when some students could not attend in person (either not feeling well, or having tested positive for Covid, or being a close contact).  So we’d teach in person, but not entirely? This was, I guess, hyflex and even more of a challenge than I expected.

The first day I showed up for my 17th-century class, but couldn’t get the computer to work properly to record. An hour later, I showed up for my other course (in a new building and beautiful room with the latest tech features) only to find that a couple of hours earlier a young male professor in another department had been given my classroom, leaving me and my 14 women students with nowhere to be! I stood in the hall and had what you might call an expletive-laced meltdown, but actually I had not lost control. I simply allowed myself to express justified outrage! I didn’t care if I wasn’t “lady-like” or “professional.” This happened in a liberal women’s college?

After kicking and screaming for four days, I was notified I’d been assigned a room, a modern one, but in the windowless basement! I thought of “The Chair” on Netflix, which I watched, and felt like the hilarious Joan, exiled to a subterranean room. I thought: why can’t they give the guy the basement room. I felt like a toddler yelling “I want MY room!”

Then several students in my class either tested positive for Covid-19 or just felt unwell. I told them I’d try to record the class and well… that was a bad idea. The computer in the classroom had no built-in microphone, so I had to either hold a large mic (which only worked briefly or not at all) or attach a little laveliere mic to my clothes. But the little one recorded my voice only if I stood right behind the computer, in which case I couldn’t see my class and they couldn’t see me! It was a disaster, the worst class I ever taught and I worried I’d lost them.

Knowing I have a tech disability, or that technology inexplicably shuts down with me (is it my strong energy or an incompatible frequency?), I despaired. But the AV guy came and assured me it wasn’t my fault. Instead, he explained, the audio system in the room was inadequate for the task.

What to do? I want to help ALL my students, but admittedly I cannot teach remotely and in person simultaneously. After a long sleepless night, I concluded I can’t be all things to all people. I decided to commit to my class, to focus soley on those who are present during the class. It is the only way I can be fully effective and not distracted. And if it won’t record? Well, I will share notes or meet with those who are absent. But I will not teach the same class several times to different people in a week. I think these days all of us feel the demands are just too much.

As if this was the only challenge. With mandatory mask wearing while indoors, it’s hard to recognize individual students and learn their names. I never realized how much our sense of a person, our recognition of their individual identity, depends on seeing one’s entire face. Moreover, often I can’t hear my students when they speak, which of course ruins discussion and the level of interaction I want with them. They have trouble hearing me and I end up coming home with a sore throat from having to shout for more than an hour.

We so want to be together, but are still anxious and fearful. My students, especially those I taught last year, long for more personal contact with me. But more than a year and a half of virtual communication has left many of us also fearful of in-person contact. Speaking for myself, I had long been fairly extroverted, but maybe I’ve lost that, living alone in my apartment with its soft rugs and pillows, feeling safest when alone. How do we get over that feeling? Or is it likely to be permanent, especially for some. We are pulled between such conflicting feelings.

It’s as if people and the world outside are potentially toxic, something I want to limit contact with. Yet my heart overflowed when some beloved students from last year asked to meet me in my office. We sat and talked for a long time, and it was just beautiful, wonderful. When they were leaving, most of them asked for a hug, something I would have gladly done before. I hesitated, but then thought, what the hell. They need it. I need it. And so we hugged while averting our masked faces, enjoying and feeling the love. 

I remain anxious, continually trying to be careful. But returning to class has taught me a very valuable lesson: we need each other.   

For some time the notion of “home” has been on my mind in many ways.

Maybe it’s because of the horrific pictures of the recent Surfside Champlain Towers collapse in Florida, all those condos crumbled, imploding on each other. The families with their children, asleep, buried there along with their belongings; those who escaped with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

During the pandemic, when many people lost their jobs, there have been moratoriums on home evictions, but also insane competition for overpriced houses as people tried to move away from New York City to more distant, quieter areas of the suburbs. Then there were efforts in various cities to find solutions to the problem of homelessness and the increasingly large number of people living on the streets. In NYC, many were moved into hotels that were empty on the Upper West Side to provide some with a safe and lovely room. But this was followed with concerns by the families living in those neighborhoods, which challenged their liberalism with perceived threats of danger and a sense that their own homes had become less secure.

California, particularly Los Angeles, has faced increased problems with violence by and towards homeless people who have taken over areas by the shore, such as Venice Beach. As Slate reported in April, “Homelessness is the crisis eclipsing just about every other problem in Los Angeles right now” and has spread into every neighborhood. It’s clear the issue of homelessness is enormous and growing.

I also have a personal concern that hits closer to “home” for me, which I’m aware reflects my privilege as someone who has had meaningful work for most of my life, serving as a teacher and mentor of young people. Almost seventeen years ago, I moved from central Illinois to NYC to take up a position at Barnard College after living and teaching in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois for more than thirty years. I was part of a community with plenty of friends and didn’t want to leave them or my home behind. So I kept my house while renting an apartment in the Bronx, just north of Manhattan, where I could easily commute to and from my new job. And each day when I would return and look out at the Hudson River, I’d watch sunsets and clouds over the New Jersey Palisades, the weather moving in from the west, much as I’d watch the storm clouds in Illinois come over the Prairie.

Born under the astrological sign of Cancer, I’m a home body by nature, a nester. So, I made my rental apartment a real home, made it mine with rescued old furniture freshened with colorful pillows and soft rugs. My home in Illinois is my safety-net, which I own, whereas my apartment in a building of 600 units is a rental. And it makes me wonder. Will I always be able to have (or want) two homes? Does that feel right when so many do not even have a home? Do I remain in the rented apartment I love, even if I can never own it, knowing the situation there could change? 

 I want stability, security, permanence.  And I’m not the only one. 

My father was obsessed with having a home and not losing it. Born in Russia, homeless from 13 until he was about 30, he temporarily lived in caves for a few years in Palestine. After that experience, there was nothing he wanted more than a home, a real home, and when he finally had one in Connecticut, he filled it with so many things, including a framed sign he hung on the kitchen wall that read, “This house must not be sold,” as if he could command permanence.

That longing for a home, a safe dwelling, seems built into us all. Many animals have it too.

But when we look at history, we see things beyond our control; forcible changes in which people are driven from their homes and where entire communities have been destroyed. I think of the long history of Jewish diaspora—first written in the Bible, prophesied in Deuteronomy—the northern kingdom of Israel conquered by Assyrians, the southern by Babylonia, then later under Roman rule. I think of African families, transported to the Americas and made the enslaved property of white people; of Native Americans forced on the trail of tears. I think of Nazis taking Jewish men, women and children from their homes, sending them to concentration camps where they were gassed or shot.  Of Palestinians displaced from their homes. I think of war in Syria and Iraq, the destruction of homes.  A world of refugees.

Now we have learned about Indigenous children in Canada taken from their homes to church-run “schools” to de-program them of their native identity only to end up buried in large graveyards.  The minority ethnic Muslim Uyghurs and others have been imprisoned, sent to concentration camps (“re-education center”) by China. I think of the whole world where so many peoples have been displaced, so much migration (some desired, but much forced, like a punishment). Of course there are the natural forces—earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, hurricanes, mud and landslides, the fires in California that destroyed the entire city of (ironically, but aptly named) Paradise.

It’s hard not to go to a dark place as I think of all this. Yet, I think of the recent movie “Nomadland,” about people, some survivors of various traumas, who choose to live on their own in RVs or trucks, travelling around, forming their own communities, feeling free and independent. But still they’ve made their homes portable like the snail or turtle that takes its home with it.

There’s something in us that wants our home to be a symbol of rest, peace and security, however we define it, and yet deep down we know it’s impermanent, vulnerable. The prophets in the Hebrew Bible envisioned the people of Israel, scattered to “the four corners of the earth” brought back by God to their home and its center in Jerusalem. In the New Testament, Paul in Galatians chapter 4, redefines home to be spiritual, “Jerusalem above” (in heaven), not Jerusalem below, the earthly city. And yet, don’t we always long for a place here, while we are alive?

The seventeenth-century poet John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” ends with one of the most moving scenes of departure and exile, as Adam and Eve bid farewell to the only home they’ve known in a forced exile. Milton miraculously manages to show us their longing and immense loss, but also gives hope. Having eaten the fruit from the tree of knowledge, God sends the angel Michael to tell them they must leave the Garden of Eden. Adam worries he will no longer see God or be able to talk with God, but Michael tells him God isn’t confined to a place. In other words, the divine presence will always be there, wherever Adam goes, internally, spiritually and maybe in others who are also created in the image of God. Eve cries at losing her flowers and plants, which are like her children, the things she nurtures. In the last lines of the epic, they leave the Garden, holding hands.

    In either hand the hastning Angel caught

   Our lingring Parents, and to th' Eastern Gate

   Led them direct, and down the Cliff as fast

   To the subjected Plaine; then disappeer'd.

   They looking back, all th' Eastern side beheld

   Of Paradise, so late thir happie seat,

   Wav'd over by that flaming Brand, the Gate

   With dreadful Faces throng'd and fierie Armes:

   Som natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon;

   The World was all before them, where to choose

   Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:

   They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,

   Through Eden took thir solitarie way.

  We can’t help but weep with them, because that is also our story, living in the uncertain present with an even more uncertain future, seeking a home that can only be temporary, as we try not to think about that, as we make our “homes” wherever we are.  For this is the only way to live.