What is an educator to do?
Everyone whose eyes and ears are open in the Time of COVID has a valid perspective. They remember what normal seemed to be, and in their perception of what now is, want their future to be like their perception of the past. They do not want to be afraid of an invisible virus made mortal. They do not want their world to be reduced by quarantine or sheltering or any other mitigation that restricts their living. They want the economy of their community to return to the opportunity of choices and the prosperity of merit. They have had enough of the survival culture of the pandemic. While they cannot resurrect the dead or cure the ill, they want to get on with their living.
Join the herd! I have not heard a single person in our community want less.
It has only been nine months since the first pandemic shutdowns in our state. It seems like longer. It has been a full, complex, and devastating time. A candid photo album of this three-quarters of a year shows us that more than COVID has diseased our sense of normal. No pundit I, but parallel to the pandemic have been rising illnesses in our political, cultural, economic, and spiritual well-being. Our faith in truth, justice, and the American Way visited the ER multiple times and has not emerged in good health, in fact it is incredibly sick. Like too many COVID patients shuttled from one hospital to the next looking for someplace with an open bed, our faith in us remains on a gurney.
The egocentric nature of perception creates a mirage of wants that hinders our going forward. With personal and familial well-being being centerpiece, the landscape needed to support our mirages may be oppositional and even non-negotiable with another’s. Considering all that has been said and done in these months, the concept of and interest in our commonwealth eludes us.
What is an educator to do? What stories do we teach to children that assist their growing and knowing about the world they are inheriting from their adults? No book on today’s school shelf is adequate.
Ironically, to be a teacher through the mid-1900s meant a person graduated from a Normal School, the name given to the school of education in a college or university. If anyone can get us back to normal, it should be a graduate from Normal. But, not to be.
An educator’s normal is the curricula and pedagogy of the pre-pandemic. That is the past many want to be our new present and future. However, if we are to prepare children to rise out of the pandemic, we must address all the ills of the era and that curricula and pedagogy will not fit the bill. There is need for an entirely different discussion. What is the new truth, justice, the American Way that children must learn? We can teach children to read, write and do their sums, but if doing these does not lead them to knowledge of whatever the American Way is to be, we have failed.
We have work to do.