"[The day after the election] was one of the most difficult days of my teaching career, partially due to the state of shock many of us found ourselves that morning. There was a fog that followed me around throughout the day, one that slowly and painfully dissipated as I came to terms with our new American reality.
That was the personal 'pain' that I experienced, a pain that doesn't even come close to the pain, trauma, fear and confusion felt by my students. In hindsight, it felt as if my fellow educators and I were the nurses and medics on the front lines, our students the casualties of a bitter, destructive and decisive war. They returned with confused minds, wounded souls, and frightened hearts.
All I could think to do was write, and so we wrote. We thought, we took deep breaths, and then we wrote some more. In total, students wrote for 15 minutes. And then, as all voters must do — we moved on.
This act of moving on felt the most awkward and counter-intuitive of all the actions we took today. As educators, we are trained to be figures of consistency for our students, figures of routine, figures of normalcy. Doing that — on a day that felt anything but normal — felt like both the right and hopelessly optimistic thing to do."
