August begins the Janus pivot in the world of education, turning away from the much-earned summer that ends the school year and toward the coming new academic year. That sense of loss fades as anticipation for something new and fresh rises, cool weather, autumn leaves, holidays, pumpkin spice, another break all beckon on the horizon.

Not this year. This year, you wonder how quickly you can pass through the phases of grief to get through to the acceptance that will take the form of being prepared for what this fall will and could hold. This year, you feel sick with dread.

Denial: If you don’t begin to prepare, then the fall semester won’t begin. Right? The humor of this joke has not lasted because you want it to be true far too much. You can’t deny. You know that just getting prepared, doing anything, will alleviate some of the anxiety. Besides, your powers of denial are overly occupied elsewhere. Taxed like peasants under King John, begging for a Robin Hood. (That was an attempt at humor. Your humor has been taxed just as badly these days.)

Anger: This one scares you because anger has been bred in you. The grooves in the paths in your brain run deep toward anger. So much has pushed you into obsessive spirals of fury that left you depressed and exhausted. You have posts marked private here that you had to bleed from yourself like some medieval humor. Yet, still, weeks would pass where your energy was spent holding it at bay.

Who are what are you angry at? So many things and people. Yet, you can’t lash out at them.

Now, this, this preparation for a fall that you can see careening toward disaster, and you have to have a plan for falling off a cliff, smashing into a cliff, an explosion, drowning, and any other type of thing. You have to accommodate 90 different learning styles, 90 different emotional and psychological reaction to stress, 3 different types of learning environments, and all lessons geared toward “real world skills.”

You teach world civilizations. To freshmen. Who are not history majors. Who have not read an adult-level history book in their lives. Literacy is essentially the main “real world skill” you will be teaching. Not read-and-write literacy, but a deeper level of literacy.

The classroom, with social distancing, can only accommodate half of the enrolled students at a time. So the plan to have them in class one week and online the next, which you figured might work, means that you will have to meet with one half of the class on one day and the other half of the class on the other day. In other words, you will have them in class one out of every four class meetings. The other three will be online. You wonder, “why bother with the classroom at all?” So you will essentially have one collective office hour with them to de-brief from the previous week’s online work and explain the next week’s. You aren’t teaching history. You are explaining assignments and grading them. You are a t.a. All of the unpleasant parts and none of the joyful parts of the job.

The other class, which alternates in syncopation to the world civilizations class, is on the civil rights movement, subtitled African-American history since 1865. You so very much want to teach this class with these students in a classroom where you all can talk about the current events and work through the difficulties.

Yet, this class also has local issues connected to it that infuriate and terrify you. Not about Black Lives Matter, which you support and understand. More local to the school, the total ignorance of the administration about what the faculty does, and the fury felt by activist students and whose activism also suffers from weaknesses that faculty usually notice from student work in general, like the failure to do their research, and then excuses for their failures, and then blaming professors for their failures.

The students’ demands included classes in race and the history of BIPOC (a new term you learned and are happy to use but have also learned that failure to use gets you branded a racist because you have learned too that there are no gray areas, which is also a weakness of schoolwork). Yet, those very classes are offered every semester in all of the liberal arts and social sciences and humanities departments that are supposed to be so central to the mission of the school and yet so marginalized by the administration and marketing department.

When you pointed this out in a meeting, you were told to be quiet by two people, one a staff member and one a student. You were told you were being defensive and fragile. You were being neither. You were correcting a factual inaccuracy that went so far as to say that no classes were offered called “African American History” and said by a student enrolled in the very “African American History since 1865” course that you will be teaching.

So, you struggle with a little hostility.

You struggle with fear, too, after having watched someone you care about become the sacrificial lamb of a group of “woke” but complicit hypocrites. You watch apologies, efforts to do right, make good, improve, even just do, fall under attack in a world in which nuance and subtlty cannot exist. Discussion does not exist. Hell, even the term ally does not mean, “common goal.” There is only “with us 100%” or “against us 100%.” Your own person, white and female is suspect and therefore a target. Your every action wrong: help and you are a “white savior,” don’t and you are part of the problem or fragile. You end up paralyzed. And furious, because just feeling this way makes you feel like all of the work that you have done your whole adult life to be better than you were brought up to be is all for nothing. You aren’t any better, but you can’t go back, either. You are just here, and frozen, and a target.

All you really want to do with this class is help these white kids who fill it, who are so earnest, skip many of the steps and setbacks that you went through. That’s your mission. You are the white envelope. As a target, fearful and hostile and paralyzed, you are worthless.

Depression: The best parts of teaching gone. Worthless. A cloud made of the effort to hold yourself together between you and your writing. The anniversaries of your father’s illness and death and the beginning of the year of gloom. Clinging to sobriety out of a race with yourself to rack up more months than anything else because that fast road to “don’t give a fuck” seems so nice. An election that will only bring disappointment and fascist authoritarianism. What are you for? Nothing matters.

Bargaining: What do you bargain with? Or for? What will acceptance look like? Just getting through the day? No, more than that. It will be more like late spring, when you could be grateful, when you knew what that word meant. It has become abstract again. A thing you should feel, or a thing that feels mournful.

Now, this is loss. Still loss, but for what? Perhaps loss returns because of the big denial that we would all be back to “normal” by now, that this upheaval would have settled over the summer. It has not. So, you return to loss. You aren’t even sure exactly of what.