In a way it was inevitable, school edition

I remember hearing something on NPR years ago about progress made as a society.

They posited that if you were a doctor in the 1800s and got transported to (what was then) today into a modern operating room, you'd be lost. There would be no way to understand medicine or technology. And it's that way for many professions or occupations. The advances we've made would render most people unable to do their job.

But not so for teachers. If you took a teacher out of a classroom in the 1800s and moved them to today, it would be familiar. You still interact with students, still administer tests, and so on. Sure, the materials themselves may be unfamiliar and there could be a computer in use. But by and large, they could manage.

In the time between when I heard the story and today, little more has changed.

So in the spring, we had a pandemic and classrooms were closed and students switched not-at-all seamlessly to online education. It was hit or mostly miss. But the technology allowed for it.

And now here we are 6 months later. No one gave any thought to what we do when it was school time again. No one committed effort, money, or time to the problem.

Instead many just wanted us to return to school basically as it was around February. And with no thought given to how to keep kids safe.

Surely there were things that could have been implemented...but if we use the shooting in parkland a few years ago as a test case, that seemed unlikely. The simple answers - fences and more police - don't solve anything, they just sound nice and make politicians feel good about themselves. And because you can't just put a virus fence up, there is really nothing simple they can apply. 

And given that in nearly 200 years, teaching hasn't evolved at all, really, then 6 months was never going to cut it in terms of finding practical solutions for teaching during a pandemic.

We're so stuck in doing things the same, we have no interest in funding education, and the politics of the situation (from large scale, to unions, to the school itself) mean that there's really no possible outcome *today* that's going to be good.

It's going to take a serious overall of education that perhaps starts with private enterprise (much like NASA is now letting private companies launch rockets) take on the less bureaucratic nature of enhancing, well maybe reinventing, education.

Hopefully it starts to happen soon.

We started school today and it's marginally better than it ended last school year. But this isn't the answer. And neither is going back to exactly what we had before.

Photo from Teacher Magazine