Investing in the plan we hope we won't need
We hope we won’t need battleships — we build and man them anyway. (San Diego Air & Space Museum Archives)
In our online meetings with students and parents of The Little Middle School, one question keeps coming up: “How long do you think we’re going to be doing this?”
We’re all craving certainty right now, and though the correct answer is, “Nobody knows,” I offer a different one: “We’re preparing to do online school for the rest of the term.”
The reason is simple: If things suddenly went back to normal, we would be relieved to leap into our former routines and even the commutes we once complained about. We know how to execute that plan.
By contrast, even though we have successfully moved all of our students online, this plan is a little more sketchy. Because it’s the one that is less developed, the new plan is where we’re putting our effort.
Lots of organizations and families have been in emergency mode for the past couple of weeks. And in emergency mode, there’s no room for anything extra. You focus on managing the immediate crisis.
We can make anything work temporarily, right? We can eat yogurt with a plastic fork, sleep on a lumpy couch, have cereal for dinner, watch TV all day. It’s reasonable to let things fall through the cracks when we’re just trying to survive.
However, as hours turn into days and days turn into weeks, we need to reevaluate our arrangement. A short-term emergency solution needs to be replaced by a more sustainable, if not permanent, one. Frozen pizza is not a healthy diet. Social media is not a social life. And a worksheet is not an education.
If my team and I, as a school, think that we’re only going to be online for a couple of weeks, we can half-ass it. No big deal if kids turn in crummy work or don’t participate. The content doesn’t need to be inspiring or interesting. We’ll be back to normal soon.
But if we allow ourselves to accept that we’re looking at two or three months, things change. We start looking for ways to innovate. What would it look like if the kids collaborated on projects remotely? How might we encourage the kids to go outside more? What if we wrote a movie together, to be performed on Zoom? How might we distribute not just worksheets, but new books? How do we recognize and reward students’ accomplishments from afar? How do we help kids take responsibility for their own learning?
If we make this investment into the new plan, the one we don’t have yet, we are risking only our time and energy. Admittedly, these are in short supply; but if we don’t make this investment, the mental and emotional health of our community, not to mention the academic and intellectual development of our students, is at stake. That’s an unacceptable trade-off.
If someone waved a magic wand and said it wasn’t going to be necessary for us to have this alternative plan, great! But in the meantime, we’re focusing our energy and attention on developing a better online program, acting as if we’re going to need it. We probably will.
All around us, businesses, schools, religious communities, families, and other organizations are trying to figure out what to do (and that doesn’t even begin to acknowledge the situation in the hospitals of the world). Our former plan, the one we came up with Before the Virus, is secondary right now. How do we make the best of our new circumstances?
The plan that was meant to get us through a temporary crisis might not be strong enough to hold for much longer. We need to play within the new rules to create a new plan. Along the way, we have the potential to discover innovations that are useful and valuable in any situation — but for now, let’s treat this one as if it will last awhile, even as we hope it doesn’t.