everything is horrible and nothing is ideal
As schools around the country at every level make plans for the strangest fall in a good while, it’s hard to balance expectations from the former times against the realities of today. Some folks are worried because school won’t look anything like it has in the past. Kids staying put in one room the whole day! Not eating in the cafeteria! The desks so far apart! And so on. Often an old guard out of school for some time and far from decision making, they fret that what schools propose, the hybrid and adapted models, simply won’t work. It’s not what school is, because it’s not what school was for them. School has got to be face-to-face this fall. Not because it’s safe, but because that’s the way it is. This nostalgic concern cannot be allowed to hinder a well–planned return to school.
It’s not like it used to be is a perfectly natural reaction to, like, everything right now. I say it’s an old guard fretting, but all us veterans of the before times have had the feeling. We’re all grasping for anchors to hold us to life in a previous world. But we must be careful. It’s not like it used to be often precedes so why bother. It stifles a solutions–oriented conversation that we desperately need to have. It quashes the kind of creative thinking thinking necessary to make the start of school as small a disaster as possible.
We have to put aside all memories of school as it was. We must imagine school without cafeterias, without passing time. We must imagine making older students caretakers of the younger, providing daycare for parents who have to go back to work. We must escape the confines of brick-and-mortar buildings and imagine classes in tents on the lawn. We must imagine remote learning. Not because any of these things are the solution, alone or together, in a given place. Not because they are ideal. But because—however little they resemble school as we knew it before—they are possible.
There is a legitimate kind of practical concern: do we have the space, the personnel, the budget, to make our plans work. Practical concerns abound, but they can be solved for. To say that the situation is far from ideal, while true, is not solvable. Not one administrator I’ve heard of is *ahem* remotely happy to be doing remote learning this fall. No one on any side of the system is looking forward to week-on-week-off hybrid formats. Schools are planning for these possibilities because they have to: it’s their task to solve the problem. Unideal solutions are our best chance to keep students, faculty, staff, and every person in every freaking community in these United States safe.
We need to act boldly, and right now. We need to think openly about what is possible in the future, free from the stubborn limits of what things were like before. Because the future, for schools, is coming up fast.