In the normal world, I should have been on a plane for a couple of hours today to meet with some wonderful friends and colleagues to talk all things music education.  It’s something I was looking forward to, partly because of these great people, but also partly because of the energy that’s generated by being in a room full of highly intelligent and passionate people.  It won’t be the same virtually but in these new days, you do what you’ve got to do.  Thanks goodness for Zoom.

Zoom has become our new best friend.  I know that there are other ways to work virtually with others, but this is the one tech thing I don’t mess up as much.  I can even put together my own meetings!  I feel so accomplished!  I like being able to see people, to see their body language occasionally (of course if they don’t make any noise, you’ll never see them) and try to read some of that.

So now some teachers are going to use Zoom to teach their students.  Classroom management should be interesting.  It will be like Hollywood Squares, for those of you who are older, watching to see if one of your students is messing around with a friend virtually.  These kids are so savvy – they would figure out how to communicate with each other somehow while you were trying to teach.  As a professional, despite the fact that we’re using a completely different medium to teach through, our teacher training and years of experience are the still the foundation.  This is not the same for these poor parents who are trying to homeschool their children right now.

I’ve seen a lot of memes lately giving parents a hard time.  NOW they’ll see it really is their child who is the problem, not the teacher.  Now they’ll see how hard it is to keep a kid engaged in math for 30 minutes and have them do their work, IF the parents understand the “new math” to begin with.  There are jokes about bringing corporal punishment and prayer back to these “homeschools”.  Yes, those of us who have done this for years know how hard it is to really teach, and I, like many other teachers have said more than once “they should have to try this for one day”, but seriously, we need to give them some grace.

There have also been some memes going around about how fast teachers and administrators were able to get this remote teaching stuff going because, well, we’re just that good.  Someone actually called it “Apollo 13ish”.  After all, no other profession would ever be expected to do this type of thing in that short amount of time and then actually accomplish it, right?  Well, I hate to break it to everyone, but unless you’ve been doing this remote thing before, we’re all flying by the seat of our pants.  Again, our foundation in the art of teaching helps, but it should give us some empathy for those poor parents who find themselves doing something in 24-48 hours that we’ve been doing for years.  Grace.

We need to cut ourselves and each other a break.  All of us.  Do what we can do.  After all, this has been quite the learning curve, especially for those of us who like to go, go, go.  Do some studying, listen to or play some music, play outside, paint something.  Sit with your family around the dinner table and play a game afterward.  Help each other around the house and make it cozy for the long haul.  Take time to be grateful and to give grace.  We’ll get it figured out – we’ve got some time now. And once in a while, check in on your friends through something like Zoom.  It’s the next best thing to being there.  Zoom, Zoom!