By Lori Blake
KASB President
At the Blake house, having the remote control is a position of power. It can mean the difference between watching another cooking show, survival series, action-adventure thriller, our team’s next game or an ER drama. Most days, it is easy to yield the choice of entertainment. Other days, we get impatient forgetting how easy it is to meet the other’s desire with just a click of a button. Our instant gratification often wins instead of recognizing we can get to them all. It will just take time or a choice to move to a different space.
This living room dilemma seems to have parallels for what we’ve just experienced in 2020. Just as the remote holder can skip through the commercials, many of us would like to just fast forward to spring where we envision returning to “normal” operations. However, I would challenge you to press pause and reflect. I often remind my family that it’s OK to use that option. They won’t have to miss out on the next instruction or dialogue. They just have to use the technology and stop the story for a moment. When we use the pause and listen, that’s when the real stuff happens … a story from the day that was prompted by the characters on a screen, a feisty dialogue about something we disagree about, or a reflection about a new revelation.
In the world of schools, we have this pause built in to give ourselves the opportunity to reflect, rejuvenate and reset. It’san opportunity to learn from what we’ve just experienced. There are many things from 2020, I’d like to forget and never repeat. There has been loss for every human on earth. Whether it was the loss of income, the loss of activities or the loss of life, we all gave up something dear to us and we need to take the time to grieve. We need to acknowledge the sacrificeand pain to complete the emotion and to be able to move forward.
But when I rewind and play the movies of 2020 over again, there have been silver linings and lessons learned. We have come so far from where we were on March 17 when our state came to a halt. Yes, there has been division and fear of the unknown which quickly spread negativity, but let’s leave all of that behind. Let’s choose to embrace the positives. Look at us using our technology, our community resources and our creativity to solve some really hard problems. In just ninemonths' time, we joined together to answer the technical logistics of how to feed our students, deliver classroom materials, host graduations, inform our public and engage our teachers and staff. When we put our health and safety first, we reconfigured classrooms, gymnasiums and hallways to reduce the spread of the virus. And most importantly, we did whatever it took to teach a child in the sudden silence when we were forced to navigate a freaking pandemic, people. When we had to stop and plan to meet the most basic needs of life, we were able to compromise, communicate, unify, and celebrate the little things in life we were taking for granted or ignoring all together. Little things like being together in our home around the table for dinner every night, playing games, going fishing, walking the dog, reading books and yes, evenbinge-watching a new series on the streaming service of choice have resumed their normal place in our routine again. The loss of activity brought us grief in the loss of our community interactions but brought us back together to strengthen the importance of our family.
As we enter 2021, let’s not hastily try to return to the overbooked schedules and busy-ness. Let’s fill our time with the things that bring us joy and happiness and keep working together to find each student’s strengths, to instill their love of learning and to remember when we pause, we aren’t missing out. We are just stopping to give attention to the ones that need it most.
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