ordinary life

I taught in ten different classrooms before real stability—floated through schools like a substitute in my own career. Then came asbestos, portables, fire‑alarms that never shut off—and the refrain: “carry on like normal.” If harnessing chaos was a policy, we aced it. Now, “normal” feels almost fictional. And after 9/11 and hurricanes, COVID has rewritten even that. Maybe what needs to be normal is our care—not business, not calm, but our commitment to one another, even when the world tells us to act otherwise.