Hope. And Vision.

In the last two weeks, we have seen a change in COVID-19 coverage – a slight shift in focus from “duck and hunker down” to “what to brace for in the coming days” to initial “thoughts on what’s next”.  To me, this is not a case of the media running out of new ways to tell the story, nor is it whistling in the dark.  It is an essential element in keeping our perspective.

Hope is Essential

A priest friend once told me that the only thing we cannot live without is hope; initially, I thought that was a platitude, but the longer I thought about it, the more I realized that however dark our situation, we can bear it so long as there is hope for a better day. We have been living with a lot of tragedy and little hope for long enough.  This time of isolation will come to an end.  We will be able to join together again to work, play, worship, and love.  We need to embrace this truth and to share it with our children, who take their cues from us. 

Embracing hope doesn’t preclude being fully present in today.  It doesn’t mean that we bury the grief that we feeling individually and collectively.  We still need to feel all the feelings.  We need to name them and work through them.  If you need a good resource with some common-sense advice about COVID related grief and anticipatory grief, with ideas that you can process and then share as appropriate with children, please see https://www.centerforloss.com/2020/03/coronavirus-six-needs/?fbclid=IwAR2S2hiQSs798UT6zwuNym2FBAr-z8GbQdjUFQIpNb-RRFK9Vsx2sTZhd-8 . 

Today, firmly grounded in our present condition, let’s look with hope towards our collective future.  Let’s raise our focus beyond,  “When will we get back to normal?”  to consider what that normal should look like.  Times of challenge are times of choice.  We have an obligation to choose the future we want.  If we do not, if we merely return to the normal of our past, then everything we are going through right now has no meaning; this trial will be nothing more than a footnote in history.  Alternatively, if we choose what to restore from our old normal, what to carry forward from what we are learning now, and what to change for our future, then we can make this shared experience a true pivot point.  To do that, we need to think about the problems that we are facing in our own lives, in education, and in the world not just using our intellect, but also engaging our hearts in compassion and fortitude.

Fragility and Resiliency

The now-inescapable truth is that our planet is at once both fragile and resilient, and so are we.  There is an elegant, persistent urge for life that unfolds if it is allowed to do so.  In the words of Harvard Medical School psychologist Susan David, “Life’s beauty is inseparable from its fragility.”  It is easy for those of us who live in first-world nations to distance ourselves from that truth.  Our experience has taught those of us that we can have the beauty without having to embrace the fragility.  This has given us a misplaced sense of invulnerability.  In recent weeks, we have experienced losses on a global scale: personal, financial, social, and emotional.  We have been forced to look at a loss of freedom, security, and health for ourselves or loved ones.  We have been shown the limitations of the human condition in ways. 

But we have also seen the indomitable nature of the human spirit and our deep need to connect with one another.  Every day there are new examples of ordinary people engaged in ordinary and extraordinary ways to preserve and protect the health and well-being of friends and strangers.  We are caring for ourselves and others more intentionally. We are also learning that, while deaths to COVOD19 are still a very real and present danger, the worldwide death rate (all causes including COVID19) is between 61% and 94% (this is age-range dependent) of what statistics tell us we should have by this point in the year, due to a number of different factors.  https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm . 

And we have seen Earth recover in unprecedented ways: the smog has cleared in Beijing and Los Angeles.  In Wuhan, people comment on being able to hear the birds because it is so quiet.  The canals in Venice are now running with clear water.  The ozone layer is mending. 

We have seen fragility and we have seen resiliency. 

At this moment of fragility, we are poised to choose.  We have been knocked off autopilot and have shown the resiliency to persist.  And so the key question in all of this is how we are going to use our intellect, compassion, and fortitude to shape our culture going forward.

Visioning Education in an Evolutionary Moment

As we all know, sudden-onset homeschooling has sparked a newfound appreciation for teachers.  Some of that arises from the inadequacy that parents feel when they struggle do the job with their own child that teachers do every day with 25-30 children.  There has been some pretty funny dark humor tweeted and posted about parents applying to have a child transferred out of their class for being disruptive or uncooperative!  But the fact remains that parents’ appreciation for teachers is probably at an all-time high. 

I have also seen posts lately that ask us to recall that high-stakes testing was instituted to hold teachers accountable, with the presumption that without external accountability, teachers would slack off.  These posts go on to note that now that schools are shuttered and testing is canceled, teachers are working harder than ever, calling into question the initial premise behind high-stakes testing.  Teachers are going above and beyond to make sure that children’s brains are stimulated but also to address their social and emotional needs, with even fewer resources than before.

As schools reopen in the fall with great uncertainty of their ability to stay open for the entire 2020-2021 school year, there will be a point where we ask what the new academic standards will be.  Children will have missed half of a school year’s instruction, but they also have lost the sense that school is a place of constancy – something to be counted upon.  There will be work to do to fortify children’s EQ as well as their IQ.  The standards must shift.

My vision for education is that as a nation, we take this opportunity to transform the business of teaching to a holistic model, with elements of what we believe as Montessorians featured prominently.  My “vision board” has schools with a variety of pedagogies, with these things in common:

• Decisions are based on one fundamental question, “What is best for the children?”
• Instruction adapts to fit the way that children learn rather than the other way around. 
• Executive functioning is valued as highly as factual recall in the standards and in the classrooms
• Practical Life is valued as highly as academics in the standards and in the classrooms
• Proficiency in both hard and soft skills is demonstrated without relentless testing
• Teachers see themselves as serving the needs of the child and government as serving the needs of the schools.  There is no carrot and there is no stick.

Of course, the vision board is only the first step.   But it is an important one so that we set our sights on changing hearts at every possible opportunity.  Not waiting for the recovery to start, we make our voices heard now – when the current system is in disarray.  We talk to parents, administrators, legislators, and friends about the change that our children need, using every avenue available to us.  When possible, we involve people who think differently than we do, seeking first to understand. We seek out opportunities to have a place at the table when decisions are made, but even when we are not given that opportunity, we make our views known by persistently living what we believe to the best of our ability.  It takes 4-6 weeks to establish new habits; let us take responsibility today for shaping our future by the habits we establish during this gift of time.

Through this all, we remember that no one’s heart was every changed by shaming or by intimidation.  Hearts are changed by invitation, by sharing, and through authentic dialog.  As Montessorians, we have been counter-cultural for a long time.  We just need to be counter-cultural out loud. 

Reflections for Adults:

This pandemic has given us a gift.  It doesn’t feel like a gift – at least not a gift that we asked for.  It has hit the “pause” button on a world that was spinning faster and faster every year. That is something that doesn’t happen very often.

Take a moment to reflect on what you have learned during this time.  It could be something you learned about yourself, your views/roles in education, your family and other loved ones, the world, your desire for connectivity, your faith, the degree to which you authentically control your life, or something completely different. 

Choose one aspect of your life.  It might be your personal life, your life as an educator, or your life as a citizen of the world.  Of what you have learned, which do you choose to make a permanent part of your life?  What do you hope to retain from life before COVID?  And what change do you want to see as we move into the building and rebuilding stage of this pandemic? 

What is on your vision board? 

Reflections for Children: Note: we can’t give children answers about what will happen and when, but we can make it ok to talk about what it was, what it is, and what we want it to be.

What are some things that you have experienced or learned because of the Coronavirus?    Are there some things that you are enjoying that you want to try to keep part of your life in the future?  What are you most looking forward to adding back into your life when the restrictions are lifted?  Are there things that you really don’t miss, that you would like to leave behind?

What would your perfect day or week look like? 

Image by rubylia from Pixabay

To everything there is a season, and time for every purpose under heaven:

A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck what is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones;
A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to gain, and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to throw away;
A time to tear, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate;
A time of war, and a time of peace.

Ecclesiastes 3