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walkitoutI am not going to ask anyone to be grateful. Fuck that anyway. If you want to marinate in how awful this has been, you go there, and you stay there, and you do that hard.
Painful reality is not something to deal with through denial and avoidance. Transitions and change of all sort are tough, even when we want them, and quite a few elements of this one were ... not wanted.
A core component of the Now Times is rapidity of change. All planning — even education planning for the fall — requires a realistic appraisal of what we know, what we do not know, and at what point the planning product — the plan — is too late to have been worth producing. I am writing about EPftF because it is coming up Real Soon Now. August is definitely too late to figure this out.
EPftF needs to be done by August, for sure. But how much of the school year needs to be planned by then? I mean, we got into the school year we are currently wrapping up with a plan that is NOT AT ALL how it actually turned out. The plan went right out in the middle of March. I do not see how we can expect of ourselves a plan that gets us all the way to March 2021. But maybe get to Winter Break? Our school superintendent is talking in terms of planning the first 100 days. I think those are roughly equal.
Status quo bias is a powerful force. However, there are powerful forces against status quo ante (The Before Times, Pre-Pandemic Normal, etc.) and status quo (current form of remote / distance learning). The next few posts will contemplate variations / iterative improvements on those two forms, as possible alternatives. Even if you have favorites, I hope you contemplate alternates and run them by people you like to mull things over with. If we can all be flexible, and talk together about what might work and how, we will learn what we care about. Schools are a manifestation of collective values. If those values do not include flexibility, and willingness to BOTH actually commit to Making Something Happen and a willingness to modify what we make happen when things do not work as we had imagined, we are all well and truly fucked.
Painful reality is not something to deal with through denial and avoidance. Transitions and change of all sort are tough, even when we want them, and quite a few elements of this one were ... not wanted.
A core component of the Now Times is rapidity of change. All planning — even education planning for the fall — requires a realistic appraisal of what we know, what we do not know, and at what point the planning product — the plan — is too late to have been worth producing. I am writing about EPftF because it is coming up Real Soon Now. August is definitely too late to figure this out.
EPftF needs to be done by August, for sure. But how much of the school year needs to be planned by then? I mean, we got into the school year we are currently wrapping up with a plan that is NOT AT ALL how it actually turned out. The plan went right out in the middle of March. I do not see how we can expect of ourselves a plan that gets us all the way to March 2021. But maybe get to Winter Break? Our school superintendent is talking in terms of planning the first 100 days. I think those are roughly equal.
Status quo bias is a powerful force. However, there are powerful forces against status quo ante (The Before Times, Pre-Pandemic Normal, etc.) and status quo (current form of remote / distance learning). The next few posts will contemplate variations / iterative improvements on those two forms, as possible alternatives. Even if you have favorites, I hope you contemplate alternates and run them by people you like to mull things over with. If we can all be flexible, and talk together about what might work and how, we will learn what we care about. Schools are a manifestation of collective values. If those values do not include flexibility, and willingness to BOTH actually commit to Making Something Happen and a willingness to modify what we make happen when things do not work as we had imagined, we are all well and truly fucked.