2020
I am the only one in my family who doesn’t wear prescription glasses. My ‘perfect’ vision growing up—good enough to be a fighter pilot, one optometrist told me when I was young—rankled my siblings as they were fitted for glasses at a young age. Twenty-twenty vision was one of the very few things that I could claim as better than my brother and sister. I had absolutely no musical talent like they did, my grades were no better than theirs, but I could see things they could not. Small victories.
Admittedly, there is an almost ghoulish irony to the year 2020 and our inability to see or imagine how it would unfold. When Marcy Kwitny and I first started writing to the community at the end of January about COVID-19, the prospect of what was ahead was unimaginable to me. And now it has been nine months since we moved to distance learning on Friday, March 13—another bit of irony. It was easy at first to swat down any predictions that this virus would last more than a few weeks—unless, of course, you were paying close attention to the immunologists who study these outbreaks. Sadly, too few of us were.
Much of what we initially missed has surprised us and reminded us where we stand as a community. I imagine many of our teachers did not see the courage they had within themselves to reimagine the way they taught. And our students, inviting us, their elders, into their virtual world with generosity and patience, were teaching us that the ways they had been connecting were essential to their health and ours. This new world, which much of the adult world had tolerated with mild disdain, would grow to connect us in ways unimaginable before. Parents, too, likely did not consider that a school’s role in raising their children was so profound. As a community, we probably had not realized how important our time alone would be to our collective ability to understand the intrinsic value of unscripted time together.
2020 will blessedly come to a close soon. Out of the horror of the pandemic, we will step forward together, emerging stronger. Our stories are bound and shared in new ways that will challenge us to embrace 2021 with a willingness to see possibilities like never before.
Be well,
JWB
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Admittedly, there is an almost ghoulish irony to the year 2020 and our inability to see or imagine how it would unfold. When Marcy Kwitny and I first started writing to the community at the end of January about COVID-19, the prospect of what was ahead was unimaginable to me. And now it has been nine months since we moved to distance learning on Friday, March 13—another bit of irony. It was easy at first to swat down any predictions that this virus would last more than a few weeks—unless, of course, you were paying close attention to the immunologists who study these outbreaks. Sadly, too few of us were.
Much of what we initially missed has surprised us and reminded us where we stand as a community. I imagine many of our teachers did not see the courage they had within themselves to reimagine the way they taught. And our students, inviting us, their elders, into their virtual world with generosity and patience, were teaching us that the ways they had been connecting were essential to their health and ours. This new world, which much of the adult world had tolerated with mild disdain, would grow to connect us in ways unimaginable before. Parents, too, likely did not consider that a school’s role in raising their children was so profound. As a community, we probably had not realized how important our time alone would be to our collective ability to understand the intrinsic value of unscripted time together.
2020 will blessedly come to a close soon. Out of the horror of the pandemic, we will step forward together, emerging stronger. Our stories are bound and shared in new ways that will challenge us to embrace 2021 with a willingness to see possibilities like never before.
Be well,
JWB
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