For middle school music educator Sue Berlenbach, there is no greater feeling than the one she gets while hearing her students sing. It’s a feeling she’s been missing these days.
During virtual chorus rehearsals, issues with delays and connectivity garble the sound when the class tries to sing all at once. It sounds like a “cacophony of sound” where it is impossible to differentiate one voice from another, Berlenbach said.
“It feels like a huge loss,” Berlenbach said. “I miss singing with students. I just never thought my career at Kearsarge would end like this.”
Berlenbach is retiring from full-time teaching this year after 37 years in the Kearsarge School District. She is one of many longtime teachers in the state who will retire after spending the last several months out of the classroom, thrust into the unfamiliar remote teaching environment.
Like all teachers, Berlenbach said she’s done her best to adapt, recording videos of lessons for students in her music education classes and meeting at regular times with her chorus classes virtually. But it hasn’t been the same.
There were rites of passage Berlenbach was looking forward to. She planned a farewell concert for this June to mark her retirement.
Her middle school students learned to sing “When You’re Smiling,” a piece that her grandfather, who played baritone ukulele, always played for her as a child. The final song of the concert was going to be “For Good” from Wicked to represent the closure of her time in Kearsarge. Students began learning some of the music for the concert at the start of the year.
“I think it’s tough for the students, too,” she said, last week by phone. “I think as humans, we need to have those closures, especially at transition times.”
Tracie Carpenter, a fourth-grade teacher at Abbot-Downing who is retiring from the Concord School District after 40 years, said she has been feeling similar emotions of loss about ending her career during COVID-19.
Since 1981, Carpenter has taught at least 800 students in Concord. She’s taught the children of students she’s had, and seen entire families pass through her classroom.
Teaching virtually from home has been an adjustment, she said.
“I never thought we could teach from home, but we have proven we can do this from home. Is it good from home? No. A lot can be said for actually seeing your students in the classroom,” she said.
Carpenter said there’s so much she learns about how well students are processing the information she is teaching through their facial cues and body language during class. Usually, that indicates whether she needs to spend more time on a particular subject or move on.
Carpenter and other teachers had no idea that they had already had their last day in the classroom when they left in March.
Carpenter sent report cards home in her students’ backpacks on her last Friday and wondered what the response would be from parents on Monday. They never returned to the classroom.
Over that weekend, Gov. Chris Sununu announced teachers and students wouldn’t be back until April at the earliest. Each teacher returned to school on Monday to plan lessons and pack up some belongings. Carpenter brought home her plants, not knowing how long she’d be away.
“In my heart of hearts I was really hoping that it would only be for a few weeks,” she said. “I guess I was in denial thinking, ‘we’ll be back, we’ll be back.’ ”
Berlenbach was preparing for the school-wide chorus festival scheduled for that Monday, March 16, the first day they had no school because of COVID-19.
As the weeks passed, it became clear that the threat of COVID-19 was not going away. The governor announced schools would continue with remote learning through the end of the school year.
“We didn’t know that day was the last day,” she said. “There was no goodbye.”
Carpenter set up a makeshift office in one of her adult daughter’s old bedrooms. She logs on every morning at 7:30 to check school announcements and write a morning message for her students.
She said attendance has been good for the most part for math and reading help. Some students don’t participate in as many class activities as others, and it’s harder than usual to touch base with them, she said.
The educators have also been meeting with longtime colleagues over video calls instead of face-to-face.
It’s a strange way to bookend two decades-long careers.
Both Berlenbach and Carpenter have seen their districts through major periods of transition. Berlenbach was a part of designing the new chorus and band spaces in the middle school building a decade or so ago.
Carpenter spent two years teaching in a mobile classroom on the old Conant School playground when they ran out of space before Abbot-Downing was built.
Berlenbach misses being able to be silly in the classroom with her students using the Viking hat with golden braids she used to put on while her students hit high notes, or sing show tunes to them in the hallways.
There have been a lot of traditions that Carpenter hasn’t been able to share with her students. She loves doing arts and crafts with her students. Since the beginning of her career, students made snowmen out of cans and bunnies out of lunch bags to collect candy and other treats from the Easter bunny.
Carpenter said she doesn’t know what she’ll do to commemorate her retirement.
“Right now, I’m just trying to get through day by day, week by week,” she said.
Teachers signed up for time slots to get into the empty school building to pack up their classrooms.
Carpenter went back to her classroom for the final time last week to pack up her belongings – the stuffed bear sitting on the window sill that was given to her by a student one year, a cross-stitch of a schoolhouse that sits on top of a shelf. On her desk, she has a Kermit the Frog mug filled with pencils that’s she’s had since her first year teaching.
She said she has an emotional connection to the school district. She grew up in Concord, and she and her husband, Herb, attended Conant and Rumford schools, which joined to form Abbot-Downing a decade ago. Her daughters attended Conant when she was teaching there.
“There are a lot of memories here, shared between all of us,” she said.
Recently, Berlenbach was named New Hampshire’s distinguished music educator of the year. She said it was a nice recognition after all of her years working with students. Next year, she’ll be teaching music part-time at Dunbarton Elementary.
“I know I’ll find a way to get that closure for ending my time in Kearsarge that I need, I have to,” she said. “I just don’t know how yet.”