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  2021-01-25

  A Semester of Outfits

  I haven’t grown in height since junior high school, and, as a result, I have A LOT of clothes. As sort of a fun game for myself and my students, I do not repeat an outfit through the 180 days of the school year. When school shut down in March, I switched to permanently in joggers, since I no longer left the house. When we began synchronous Distance Learning in August, I knew it was really important for my mental health and to try and portray a sense of normalcy for my students to still dress just like I was going to teach in person in a normal year. Since I don’t get to see all my students five days a week due to our block scheduling format for Distance Learning, I decided to post my outfit to my class Instagram each day, as an “ootd,” just for fun. It’s become sort of an interesting keepsake of my pandemic experience. If you look beyond the outfits and into my eyes you can tell the days I was anxious, worried, tired about the rising case counts, the unknowns, the state of our country, and locally, the true fear of whether they would force us to return to teaching in person. But the pictures also capture that in between the ever rising death toll, wildfires, political discord, racial tension, Capitol riots, life had to keep moving forward. And even during a semester of turmoil, you can see a lot of pictures show joy behind my eyes... and not only when the Dodgers won the World Series, allowing me to retire my 1988 World Series shirt! A new semester starts today, we’ll see what the expression in my eyes says about the state of the pandemic and the world in the weeks to come.