The Sorting Hat of the Pandemic
The pandemic placed the sorting hat on our heads, whether we were ready for it or not.
You are probably familiar with the term the ‘Great Resignation’ referring to the large wave of retirement that occurred during the pandemic. I am part of what some have referred to as the Great Reinvention—people who changed careers, or switched jobs during the pandemic. I call it the sorting hat of the pandemic. If you are not familiar, the ‘sorting hat’ is a term from Harry Potter. When the young wizards-in-training arrive at Hogwarts, they participate in a ceremony where the sorting hat is placed on their heads and the hat (a sentient creature) assesses students’ personalities and assigns them to the appropriate House—Slytherin if they are cunning, Gryffindor if they are brave, etcetera. The sorting hat is a perfect metaphor for the pandemic reshuffle, because the changes and choices people made during the pandemic were in many ways deeply tied to intrinsic elements of their personalities that influenced how they felt about the new circumstances suddenly forced on them, and how they felt about the way the people around them responded.
I left my job teaching at the Portland State-OHSU School of Public Health (SPH) in December of 2022, not because I did not like teaching, or my students, or Public Health, but as a direct result of things I realized during the pandemic.
For the six years prior to the pandemic that I worked at the SPH, I had always felt at home there and liked the vast majority of my colleagues. As soon as we went remote in March 2020, however, I started feeling estranged from my colleagues. I did not think we should remain remote that following fall, and in saying so I was out of step with everyone, as far as I could tell. If others agreed with me, they did not say so. My statements to this effect, made over Zoom, were met with blank stares, frowns, and silence.
In Zoom faculty meetings (which in and of themselves I found alienating and mostly a giant waste of time), I heard faculty repeatedly say things I did not think they believed—that they were at great risk of complications of a Covid infection (they seemed to assume teaching in person was the only place they could get Covid, and not from living their lives traveling and socializing) and that they were simply too scared to return to the classroom. However, the same people apparently felt comfortable getting on planes and going to Europe or across the country. Most of the department is between 40-60 and, being in the field of Public Health, are a relatively healthy group who had all been vaccinated early on (we were offered vaccination along with the OHSU hospital staff in December 2020). These same professors had been very vocal in past years about how we must put students of color, the marginalized, and the vulnerable, first. But now that seemed to have gone out the window.
These same faculty also repeatedly stated that the students were afraid to come back in person, yet no one seemed interested in conducting high-quality anonymized surveys of all students to see if this was the case for a majority of them. These statements about student preferences were based on anecdata—emails in which a nonrepresentative sample of students said they were afraid to come back. Again, the faculty are researchers in public health and know well what a biased sample these ‘data’ constituted. My email pointing this out to the Dean did not receive a response and no school-wide survey was ever conducted.
I started advocating for school reopening in August 2021 via emails to policy makers, and by organizing rallies alongside a small but dedicated group of parents. In April 2021 I started writing Op-eds in mainstream media (WSJ, The Atlantic, Stat News, Persuasion, The Oregonian, Time, and anywhere else that would listen, eventually publishing ~50 Op-eds) advocating for children to have the option go back to school fulltime, unmasked. In Portland, OR, our largest district reopened for a few hours per week that April, with masks required and six feet of distance. I sincerely believe the metro area districts would not have reopened at all in 2021 without the pressure we put on them. Many leaders in districts around Portland replied to us via email between Sept 2020-Feb 2021 essentially saying ‘buh-bye, see you next year’. It wasn’t until we shamed these superintendents in the New York Times and elsewhere that they magically dusted off their opening plans and allowed students in the buildings, at least for a few hours per week.
Despite mounting evidence available fairly early on that poor children and racial minorities were suffering the most academic damage, I was told during Zoom department meetings by colleagues that my school reopening advocacy was racist.
At the end of the term in June 2020, a month after George Floyd’s death, during a Zoom faculty meeting, we were urged to give all the students As, no matter the quality of work they had turned in, because all the students were traumatized and also busy protesting. I did not give them all As, and one of colleagues who happens to be Black expressed privately to me that just handing out As was a disservice to students paying for their credits and who want to learn. She did not do it either. We wondered whether the faculty just did not want to grade all the work the students turned it in—how convenient it was to just give everyone As.
These situations, and many more, convinced me I was too much of an outlier in my department. I hated teaching online and my students seemed to hate learning online. No one turned on their cameras and when they did--I asked the students to turn cameras on when they were speaking--they looked depressed and exhausted, with dark shadows under their eyes and unwashed hair. In one-on-one Zooms with me, they often cried and confessed they were deeply depressed, having suicidal thoughts, and wanted to drop out of school. Some did drop out. I went to get help from the OIT, our office of instructional technology, and none of the solutions offered to counteract my students’ apathy made any difference or made them engage more meaningfully. The reality on the other side of my computer was strongly at odds with the talk at faculty meetings about how the students did not want to come back in person and were fine online. Professors claimed to be ‘just as effective’ online. I knew I was not, and I highly doubt others were, either.
I won’t bore you with details about the friends that broke up with me during Covid, over my school advocacy and my repeatedly stating that people needed to get on with life, that keeping seniors isolated and alone was cruel, and that our city was crumbling in front of our eyes. Or maybe they never liked me that much anyway. I also became active in city politics for the first time, when I saw what was happening to Portland, and I am a much more engaged and informed voter now.
In the past three years, I have made many new friends and entered into wonderful new professional collaborations with people whose risk tolerance is closer to my own, who prefer in person gatherings, and who do not want to socialize in masks. This realignment is all part of the sorting hat that the pandemic placed on our heads, whether we were ready for it or not, and I believe it may be the one of the few good things that came out of the pandemic. If you are reading this Substack, you may have lost a few friends during Covid yourself. I hope you found new opportunities as well, and that some good came out of the sorting hat for you. Drop me a note in the comments if you were part of the great pandemic reshuffle too.
As you know, my dear Reshuffling friend, this is absolutely my experience, too. In the panicked spring of 2020, I was terrified of COVID like so many, particularly for my patients at high risk for serious COVID outcomes. However once we had highly effective and widely available vaccines in hand - and once we knew exactly *who* was at highest risk (and who wasn’t) - I was mystified by physicians and public health professionals who continued to treat the general public as a monolithic entity of uniform risk. We failed to empower the public and individuals with nuanced guidance about mitigating risk. By suggesting that we could eliminate the virus (which was never going to be possible based on the intrinsic properties of the virus), we moralized normal human behavior (ex. the need to see loved ones) and inappropriately suggested that health should be seen through the lens of a single virus. But health is not defined as the mere absence of COVID. Suggesting that it is *does* does irreparable damage to learning, equitable access to educational opportunities, social/emotional health, and physical health. I am glad I am vaccinated, I’m glad my kids and my patients are, too, but it’s past time we re-conceptualize health as more than a negative COVID PCR test.
My granddaughter was a 2020 high school graduate. She was great with remote.
Her brother, a grade behind her, did not. He dropped out. He went to a community college and got a GED and is now a 3 year electricians apprentice.