“What are you doing? How are you keeping yourself busy?” I asked one of my 2nd-grade students on my phone call check-in. “Well, I am trying to keep my little brother and sister from destroying the house,” she replied. “That is a very important job!,” I told her and “I know your parents really appreciate the job you are doing.”  I see all these posts online of parents turning their dining rooms into classrooms with their children lined up, learning on devices, or reading to a stuffed animal or having a morning meeting on Zoom. That is great, it really is! But it is also not universal. There is also Stephanie, a 7-year-old keeping her younger siblings alive.

 

Peeking into my son’s bedroom the other day, I was heartened to see his Science teacher explaining bioengineering virtually with a toddler bouncing on her knee. Teachers as parents, parents and teachers, kids as parents, all the lines are blurred these days. Really, we are left with people helping people. Age and experience are not always relevant. The millennials are teaching the rest of us platforms, chrome extensions and how to mute or mics so we can all hear things without the reverb. People helping people.

 

When this is all done, our world no longer sick and sequestered, we will marvel at the speed at which we all learned, so many things we are learning and so quickly. Google Hangouts, Zoom, Google Classroom, Seesaw, Loom, Chrome extensions, Padlet all in a few days. We will also marvel at the compassion that we witnessed, gave freely and received warmly. Everyone seems to walk down the street, cross the street to maintain a 6 feet clearance whenever we see someone, but also make eye contact, smile and say hello with their eyes. They did not all use to do that. They used to walk right past you, feeling the wind as they passed, staring at their phones, not your eyes. I’ll take the eye contact and the smile. People helping people.