You Taught During A Pandemic?

For those that don't know me, I am a movie buff. While I don't frequent the movie theater because I think the cost of attendance is ridiculous, I do have a plethora of movies at home. One of my favorite past times is staying up late at night (probably too late) and catching the classics on television. In most cases, I own them on DVD, but I'm too lazy to get up, find the DVD, and put it in the blue-ray. Additionally, I also like to see what the broadcasting station decides to cut out and how they handle inappropriate language voice overs. It's a quirk of mine, but I own it. I also spend a great deal of time Googling things while I watch the movie trying to figure out the six degrees of Kevin Bacon where you try to find the shortest path between an arbitrary actor in a film and Kevin Bacon linked by films they have appeared in together or I am trying to prove the Caine-Hackman Theory for my senior thesis like Pig Man is doing in the obscure 1994 movie PCU. Again, it is completely absurd and I could probably use the time to sleep, but my mind is usually racing and I need to get it worn out before I can go to sleep.

The other night, I was flipping through the channels and saw that there was a marathon of the Back to the Future trilogy playing. It was going to get over at 1:00 in the morning, so I knew that I would have to make a commitment to see it all the way through the end even though part three, in my humble opinion, is garbage. But as any movie aficionado will tell you, sometimes you can enjoy the nuggets of brilliance in a movie even if the majority of it is trash. As I was watching the original movie I had an idea for this blog when I saw the classic scene where Marty questions Doc about building a time machine out of a DeLorean. You could say that this idea was like Doc's vision of the flux capacitor when he slipped and bumped his head while standing on a toilet to hand a clock. By the way, for those of you keeping track at home, Doc (Christopher Lloyd) and Biff (Tom Wilson) have a Bacon number of 2 because they both were in Back to the Future with Michael J. Fox and Fox was in The Magic 7 with Kevin Bacon. I digress, however.

As I saw the scene where Marty asks Doc if he built a time machine out of a Delorean and Doc responds by telling him that he did because he wanted to do it with style, I immediately thought of the teaching in a pandemic. Again, I know it is weird, but go with me on this. Years from now, we are going to look back on this moment in time and we are going to have some new teacher, student, or parent ask us, "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Are you telling me you actually taught during a pandemic?" You will of course be able to respond in the affirmative and your answer could be the stuff of legend like Doc Brown's response was. So your call to action is to prepare that statement now, because you have plenty of time to think of it.

For me, I don't have mine ready yet, but I want it to be so epic that it becomes meme-worthy. I want something that will really knock their socks off. I'm taking some motivation from the following:

Ultimately, each of us is going to have our story to tell and that is why it is so important to #OwnYourEpic. Teaching in a pandemic is part of your story so it needs to be told, but you need to provide the narrative instead of giving that ownership to someone else. After all, it's your story and you can tell it way better than anyone else. So what's it gonna be? You mean to tell me that you actually taught in a pandemic? How was that?

[Insert Meme Here]

#OwnYourEpic #Forge