I could think of 1,000 metaphors (and likely have) for what teachers, administrator, counselors, support staff—anyone who walks in and walks out of a school each day for their chosen field— have been going through for quite some time.

No one who is in it wants me to use *another* metaphor to better explain it. No one outside of education looking in really needs a metaphor to understand it either.

But I’m going to do it anyway.

We are tired of talking about the dark cloud education has become. We are tired of wondering what will ever fall back into place, where our 2019 teacher selves have been shipped off to. We used to be waiting for the cloud to lift.

Now we’re just stuck inside the cloud and can’t get out. We hear the storm before it comes, we also see its aftermath. We try to dodge the raindrops. We cannot.

We have reinvented and reimagined almost everything but the students front of us (We actually did not reimagine them properly, as it turned out). We digitized everything including our very personalities and talking heads. We took a hard right on the track we were on in 2019. We came to a full stop. And stayed there.

But we’ve done all the things. Taken care of ourselves, taken care of our students, took time for SEL and brought the person back to in-person learning.

But—we still sit beneath a cloud. It rains failure and rules and referrals and board meetings and banned books. It hails grading policies, morale committees, and substitute crises. It cracks loud with thunderous possibilities of a changed system but then lightning strikes again (a new demand or rising issue)- and breaks apart the career inside the cloud a little more.

There’s no no doubt things are changed forever- we’ve accepted this. But mourning the simpler life in education without a looming cloud still stings a bit. Talking about “the way it used to be” is not just for veteran teachers anymore. Teachers with less than a decade in the field are having nostalgia for a time when everything seemed—brighter.

And the experts- whether they be educational gurus, consultants, or even just parents who have seen the educational system work at a very personal level in their home— want to find someone to blame. But there’s no one. Not state or federal lawmakers. Not parents. Not board members. There’s no one to blame for the pandemic and all it exposed about kids and learning and— how important the space inside a classroom is— so it’s us. We are the common denominator. We facilitate curriculum. We connect directly with kids. We must be the ones to blame for the cloud, right?

Nope. No one is.

Between home and school, assessing a child’s myriad of needs has changed. There has been a culture loss for students who have not physically spent the majority of past two years in a school building. Kids have chosen from a list of autopilot selections: Tik Tok, Zoom, Snapchat, Instagram and (sometimes) even your online classroom. They have been able to be passive in their socialization, inactive in their education, and unchallenged in coping with so many things. They are under a cloud, too.

But in waiting for the clouds to lift— education itself is eroding. Teachers are more likely to pick up an umbrella and just wait out the next storm rather than be involved in helping to predict the next. With new rain boots and a bright yellow poncho, they have watched storm after storm after storm after storm—- pass.

And who can lift a cloud that’s so heavy with political issues, educational philosophies, and the seemingly endless needs of our students? We are not strong enough. We have tried and we are tired. (Tried and tired are the same word almost, aren’t they? Just two letters switched?)

I’m not sure how to end this metaphor. I want to be super cliche and say that brighter days are ahead. That the few storm chasers among us will help us to predict what’s up ahead. That our newer teachers will be better for all they’ve had to juggle. But I can’t.

I can offer my umbrella. I can say thank you for sticking with our bad weather pattern for two years and counting. I can tell you that if the cloud doesn’t lift anytime soon, you will still be okay. You may get a little wet, that’s all.

And there’s likely another educator, somewhere (I know so-so-so many of them) willing to let you borrow her umbrella.