An eclipse was coming, a full solar eclipse, Monday in the middle of my 6th period English class the moon would slide in front of the sun, plunging into darkness a wide swath of North America, including the small public high school in Washington, DC, where I was in my 10th year teaching and having a terrible time selling the joy of prose and punctuation to adolescents who weren’t all that interested in the subject. Or me.
The forecast called for cloudless skies at the time of the eclipse, who knows what might happen — dogs would howl, pigeons would roost, ancient tribal spirits would rise and dance to soundless rhythms — it was a once-in-a-lifetime phenomena, an astronomical miracle not to be missed. Whatever lesson I had planned paled in comparison. I spent that Sunday not devising tricky ways to teach about the evils of comma splices but driving frantically around the DC area, hunting convenience stores for those special tinted eclipse viewing glasses, only to find out that Washington, DC was sold out, had been sold out for days. Even the bins at Walmart were empty.
I would have to wing it.
But I wasn’t worried. That little high school school was a well-organized place, populated by well-organized teachers who planned their lessons weeks in advance. Surely the science department had bulk-ordered eclipse eclipse viewing glasses months earlier. There was a decent chance I’d show up the next morning to find a stack of glasses on my desk, or in my mailbox. If not I’d just have my English students sidle up to the science students and shamelessly mooch their technology for our deeper quests. As we humanities folks do.
Next morning the kids in my early sections came in talking about the eclipse, which apparently had made the cut on their Instagram and Tik Tok feeds. I showed them a Youtube video illustrating the mechanics of this celestial serendipity, and kept an eye on the clock, eager, for the first and only time that year, for 6th period to begin.
Finally the planet spun to 2:00 PM and in came my 6th period students, Sheila slow-walking and scowling, Luis playing Fortnite on his phone, Drew pilfering markers as he passed by the white board—these he enjoyed chucking across the room when I turned my back. As they settled into their seats, I announced there would be no daily journaling today, no grammatical corrections or literary endeavors, they were to drop their backpacks on their desks: We were going outside to watch the eclipse.
The kid looked at each other. Untrusting. Field trips, particularly spontaneous field trips, weren’t a thing at this school. The classes were 53 minutes long and each minute was planned to maximize what is known in the education world as “time on task.” Kids walked into classrooms to find precise instructions for a “do now” activity on the board and were supposed to immediately start clacking at their Chromebooks or lose points off their participation grade. This "going outside to watch the eclipse” thing must have felt like a trap.
“Come on,” I said. “We’re going.”
It was a small class, that 6th period, 13 students. One by one they began to stand and make their way with me into the hallway. Which was quiet and empty, because the other classes were still in session, doing the “do nows,’ I suppose. Through the little door windows as we walked past we saw the students craning their necks from the desks to silently wave or stare or stick their tongues out at us, and then get back to work.
This "going outside to watch the eclipse” thing must have felt like a trap.
But outside was a different story. Outside the parking lot was noisy and packed with bubbling children from the neighboring elementary school, 3-year-olds and 11-year-olds and all the year-olds in between, lined up with their clipboards with eclipse-watching charts and pencils and viewing glasses, the older kids telling each other you could go blind, the younger kids clutching stuffed animals, the teachers reminding them in kind elementary school teacher voices to keep their glasses on and stay in line and keep their hands to themselves, it would be starting soon.
And then it did start — we heard actual oohs and ahhs as the elementary school children peered up into the sky and pointed and took notes on their clipboards.
We of course couldn’t share the joy, naked eyed as we were. My 6th period students looked at me.
“Ain’t you got any of those glasses, Mr. Biderman?” one of them asked.
I explained about the city being sold out, how we’d just borrow from the other classes. When they came out.
We looked back at the high school building.
No one was coming out.
The elementary kids next to us kept oohing and aahing. One of my students said she thought she saw a 10th grader named Jailynn earlier that day with eclipse viewing glasses, and she was pretty sure Jailynn was in music class, so we all told her to run in and get them, in case the music teacher brought her class out too late.
Off she went, while the rest of us kept watching the little kids marveling up into the sky, mouths agape. Without glasses there was nothing to see — the sky was brilliant and blue and gave no indication that an invisible moon was sliding in front of the sun, carving a half-circle into its side. Again I glanced at the high school building, again no classes were coming out — but now here came the girl who’d run inside, not only with Jailynn’s viewing glasses but Jailynn herself, giddy at having been released from music class.
I asked Jailynn if her class was on its way out.
“No,” she said, “they’re not coming,” but her teacher had given her permission to stay out for 15 minutes, and it dawned on me then that the other classes were not going to come out to see the Great American Eclipse of 2017. Not even the science class.
But now we did have Jailynn’s glasses, our ticket to wonder. We huddled around her and took turns passing that flimsy pair of glasses back and forth, gazing up into the sky, watching the little round circle that was the sun get skinnier and skinnier, waning away as the moon pushed in. None of us had ever seen anything like it. Even Drew, the marker thrower, who never got excited about anything, stared up through those glasses for a good long time.
The world got darker and darker, until it felt like the early moments of night, just after sunset. There we stood, my 6th period students and Jailynn and me, an imperfect assembly of tiny, short-living human beings on a patch of planet Earth, peering up into the cosmos. A dog did indeed howl. A lonesome, wondering howl. I glanced one last time at the high school building behind us. The windows of the classroom began to flicker. They were turning on the lights.
You can't ask for a better learning experience. So sad that people didn't take full advantage.
Leaving us to wonder that the hell is wrong with people? It breaks my heart that many of our Puebloan neighbors stay indoors during eclipses, but at least they have cultural reasons for doing so. We educators at the Bradbury Science Museum once interrupted our inflatable planetarium program to march a class outside to watch a transit of Venus across the sun on our solar telescope Sunspotter. It was very exciting and the kids loved it, but back inside, I don't think any of us were able to readjust to the dark to get much out of the remainder of our star program.