teaching in a pandemic in an era of climate change, part 2
Scrambled egg class. The beat kind. Where insides are out and it’s messy. Cracked in a bowl and making it work. Second week of teaching in person during a pandemic and a student wasn’t let back into the building and into my class. ID flashed red. Access to campus not granted. COVID test positive or invalid or incomplete
Throw in tobassco, toss in pepper. Beat
Good thing Savannah made an emergency group text under the label of COVID and Climate Change Contingency plan. Security guards contact in white chalk on black board next to the desktop scribbled just an hour before. His voice on the other end, a familiar Caribbean. I’ve known him as a student, RA, TA, and teacher.
Still we remain through a decades change
Zoom the student sitting on the curb. Carry the computer around the class to others. What is sustainability if not improv.
Add parsley from farm share for flavor. Pour eggs into pan
Synthetic masks wrap plush rosacea. Smiles unseen. Still we are here. Hearts thumping all the same
Heat energy transforms the liquid scramble to solid. Making it edible.
We played musical chairs with fossil fuels. Peter had a revelation. What if we were stereotyping and assuming. He sat on a table fumbling with name card of someone else’s someone. In this game of make believe there was a farmer, design student, single mother of 3, CEO of Exxon Mobil, Politician, Trans refugee.
What if this person is human. So focused on our assumed identity for the role we forgot what our collective goal was. That all of us have access to energy without depleting finite resources
He looked down with a tinge of embarrassment or disappointment or shame. Neural dendrite with dopamine fitting to it’s opposing receptor. Making a surprising match that yields excitable growth. Like denim and tweed. Or salmon and pita
Or a student getting what you didn’t know was there to get
The third slide projected on the screen was of the brain with the prefrontal lit up from imagination. The 4th was of fire. Not an invention or discovery from our ancestors. But an admiration of the African savannas. How nature burns herself to make anew. 18 pairs of eyes stare forward with breath that is breathing. Synapses firing. Precious malleable tissue waiting for the world to tell them what to do.This our canvas. Our collective brain biosphere.
Eat here
The assignment was to reimagine how we got here or where we go. Zoe read aloud, poetically wrapping the all of us in a final spinning web.
It’s as we learned in class, energy is neither created nor destroyed only transformed. I heard somewhere we are all made of stardust. So maybe this isn’t a creation story but one of transformation.
Scrambled egg found the yoke. Whole and yellow and wet. Like gold. Alchemized from tiny bits of carbon.