A Year Later….Can we Imagine it?
In the middle of January, over a year ago, I left China for the United States to, among other things, deal with my father’s memorial. COVID was just a discussion and a minor issue in Wuhan at that time. The world was a very different place.
3 weeks later, we were re-scheduling flights back to China with an uncertain return date. Flights were cancelled, our return was pushed back. Finally, we just stepped out in faith, made a reservation, and got on a plane to go back to Qingdao. The world we returned to was a very different place.
When we left Qingdao, in the cold of winter, people were happy, they only wore masks because it was winter, and there were zero restrictions on anything. When we got off the plan and walked into the Qingdao Airport, we were met with something very different. Men and women in exposure suits greeted us and masks were required by everyone. We were escorted to a holding area then sent to our apartments where we spent the next 15 days in quarantine. Only then could we go out and about in Qingdao.
Even our first days in Qingdao were not normal. We were not allowed in certain restaurants, because we were foreigners. Immigrants potentially bringing COVID to the region. There were a few places we were able to go where we were invited in, but it was a long wait until the world returned to something close to normal.
The rest of the next year, well, it got better and better. As I write this, I am unmasked, sitting in a Starbucks surrounded by locals. There are no restrictions on distance or capacity. Temperature checks and contact tracing checks happen, but rarely. People do not move away from me just because I am not a local. The world has mostly returned to normal. Except we can not leave the country if we want to return to China for work. That is not yet a return to normal. It is not all due to COVID, in part it is also do to world politics.
I know the world will never be the same after this. I fear though that we will race too quickly back to what we thought was normal only to have another, more deadly disease rear its ugly head and smack us in the nose when we feel invincible. I fear that education is already the canary in the coal mine for this.
As an educator, I have watched my students struggle with online education simply because they did not connect with people. My students are privileged and with full access to the technology needed to be successful in this environment. They had everything they needed to ride this out smoothly. But they struggled because they did not have the human connection necessary in a school environment.
The first thing we did when the students returned to physical education? Played games. Competitive sports, funs games, anything that was active and they wanted to do we played it. They reconnected with the friend that were missing. Some of the students were online and watching the class, but most were face to face.
Now, after being face to face almost a year again, I wonder if we are better off. I don’t know. I fear we have gone back to what we did before. We are teaching units with limited connection to the world. Our students learn few life skills in the school instead they learn academic skills, or not based on their interests. Some of the students are struggling with school because it is hard and disconnected for them.
The last year has not been a lost year as some have suggested. It has been scarring and hard emotionally on so many people. It has not been a lost year unless we do nothing to make this year better. Unless we make changes to education that shift away from the old standards and towards a volatile, uncertain future where people adapt and respond quickly to what happens. The criteria we have held up so long as the gold standard crumbled to dust this last year. We watched the skill set we thought our kids needed get spectacularly torched and replaced with a new required set of skills that is far more important.
I challenge you in the coming year as you prep for the next academic year, think long and hard about what it is that you want the world ahead to look like. What skills do our students need to know? You know the answer is not the core academic work we have held up in years past. We need an entirely new skill set and more importantly, mindset. If we keep doing things the same way, we will get the same results.
What if we looked to those who are on the cutting and bleeding edge or education? Those true risk-takers and innovators like Sir Ken Robinson and his family who recently asked “Imagine if…?”
Imagine if we..
· Got rid of the regular school building and repurposed older buildings as learning sites?
· Threw out the block timetable, six period timetable, or any current timetable and envisioned what the school day looked like that supported true learning?
· Valued technology as a learning tool and not as a teacher replacement? What could we do in schools?
· Stopped doing things because they seemed cool or like a good idea and made decisions based on solid evidence about good instructional practices for our community?
· Based schools on the needs of the community?
· Met the community needs with the best educators and support we could provide and let them work magic?
· Cared more about you developing into an amazing human than just another kid who could do calculus?
· Connected students to community leaders, changemakers, innovators, entrepreneurs, and real businesspeople who could mentor them and counted it for credit?
· Brought back apprenticeships as a real option for students?
· Provided life skills as part of the curriculum rather than trying to explain why two trains are on the same track headed straight at each other at a high speed?
· We imagined it and made it happen.
There are parts of the world that will return right back to what they were a year ago. There are parts of the world that deserve to not return to the old normal. Those part weren’t working anyways and deserve to go away.
If we don’t have the strength to stand up and say that things need to change, we will deserve what we get because we stood by and did nothing.
In the past year, there have been incredibly intelligent minds telling us what needs to change. More importantly, there have been some incredibly intelligent, wise, normal people who have said that we must change. We are in the middle of the single most significant event to change education since well, the start of public education. We need to change. We need to ask ourselves if we are strong enough to make the changes necessary in our classrooms and communities. We need to be strong enough to as “What if…?” then act on it.
In the coming months, support the radicals, the rogues, and the rebel teachers who are taking a stand to make things different and better for education.
