How many other ‘“BLANK” in the Time of Cholera’ articles have been written? How many of us have read ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’? Should we be re-reading ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’? Maybe ‘The Plague’?

Over the past few months every crack in our education system and ideology seems to have been exposed. The rush to create a facsimile of the classroom in digital space has resulted in simulacra at best and exactly the kind of rigid, prison-like space that is stereotyped and lampooned in school themed media. The discussion I hear over and over again is about ‘learning loss’, how to mitigate the amount of Knowledge that won’t be covered in this time and then that will be lost over the summer months, and then that may be even compounded by another round of digital learning in the Fall. Let’s think about that concern for a second.

Is learning really so immediately dependent on physical location? Are the walls of our school buildings imbued with some sort of magic that creates learning within and cannot influence without? Learning in the modern era is often ubiquitous and dependent on student interest and availability of information. Often there isn’t enough of the former and too much of the latter. Education in digital space must adapt to the challenges and opportunities presented by these unique and difficult circumstances. Realistically, education needs to be constantly adapting to new technologies, new thoughts, new ideas, and new circumstances. Value is left on the table every time phones or computers are banned from a classroom, now it’s impossible to ban phones and computers from our “classrooms”, so why not lean into it!

A century ago, Spanish Flu halted all formal education and disrupted common society drastically. Individuals did not possess the tools to maintain the kind of connection and interaction that we do today. Education now, in the time of COVID, is as always an opportunity. It’s a different opportunity, that’s for sure, but opportunity nonetheless. If you teach math, now’s the time to explore statistical analysis. If you teach science, now’s the time to follow real time lab experiments and see science move and act. History, the modern reaction to crisis and the historical reaction, art, music, all of the “disciplines” have never been more immediate (if you want them to be). And if you don’t teach a discipline, listen to your students and let them learn what they want to learn. We have to help each other the best we can right now, education and learning must meet the challenges and needs of young people in crisis in ‘normal’ circumstances, and now more than ever.