Like so much in the last few years, participating in the VIPEr Fellows project has forced me to do some hard thinking and has required me to give myself grace. Between the pandemic, starting as a new department chair in July 2020 (and continuing as of this writing), and adjusting to many other personal and global events, I haven’t done much of anything to the standards I would ordinarily hold myself. Teaching, of course, has come with additional challenges due to COVID policies of masking, social distancing, contact tracing, accommodations, hybrid/hi-flex, etc. But the emotional efforts of teaching and the care work of being generous and flexible with students has been exhausting. Every class meeting came with different emotional energy from my students—they very much wanted the complete experience of being in a small, upper-level chemistry class at Dickinson. They wanted paper hand-outs, group work, interesting in-person laboratory experiments, engaging and interactive lectures with demonstrations, but they were also hesitant about being in close proximity to each other and weren’t actually ready to mentally engage as much as they would have without the pandemic. Also, I wasn’t prepared to give them a full, normal class, regardless of how much I wanted to.

In a comically sad prelude to the semester, I accidentally showed up to my classroom at the wrong time on our first day of class. At least I was early and not late. After making it through the first day, it did not get easier. Daily, sometimes hourly, I would say to myself or to others, “This is not normal—we can only do the best we can given the circumstances.” Sometimes I said this while sitting in the fetal position on the floor of a colleague’s office, trying to convince myself. Wanting things to be normal, wanting people to be normal, wanting myself to be normal was not enough to make everything normal. Clearly. And having this as the semester in which the analytical lens of the Fellows project was pointed at my teaching was hard.

Now—during the summer and after the workshop—reflecting is kind of like holding a mirror in front of a mirror and looking down the hallway of infinite reflections. I’m thinking about the workshop, my last teaching of inorganic, how the pandemic and chairing (et cetera) have affected my teaching, how all of this has affected me, how my students did and what I might change to better meet their needs. Even finding a thread to follow or a foothold to start from is almost dizzying while inside the mirrored hall.

Fortunately, I do have a thread to guide me. My central memory of the workshop and the Fellows project is the kindness and support of the organizers and my fellow participants. I’ve used VIPEr frequently: every year my class is more and more VIPEr-Y, VIPEr-ISH. But this experience for me has been more about IONiC, the community of fellow inorganic chemists trying to do our best even when the world, our institutions, or ourselves don’t make it easy. I’m so grateful that the context of our wider challenges was always part of the discussion and that we were given explicit permission to color outside the lines of the workshop weekend when it felt necessary.  Being with others who have a shared mission and mutual respect was heartening and made the work together even more satisfying. Context matters, mission matters, support matters. IONiC and the workshop provide that, and I will try to carry it with me into the fall semester. This is a reminder to myself to be present in IONiC and be as kind as I can be to myself while doing the best I can for my students. My IONiC BONdS got a lot stronger.