To The Future Through The Past

Remember a week ago?
When there was toilet paper?
I had this feeling as kids were streaming out the front gate of our school. It was something like fear, or concern, or anxiety. I was nervous. Because I had no idea what we were sending them out into. A world of shelter in place. When we sent all those children home for what we figured was an extended Spring Break we had two hours to prepare work for them to stuff into their backpacks and smiles for our parents as we handed them over. "See you in three weeks." We did this without any real reckoning for what that might mean.
A week ago, I figured I would be showing up and working in my room, dealing with all those little projects that I had put off for one reason or another. If that other reason was the business of teaching and managing a few hundred kids. Suddenly I was presented with an opportunity to inventory and repair, tasks that generally get squeezed into bite-size morsels between other responsibilities.
That was before the custodial staff was sent home and we all went home to the distance currently described as "social." Safe. Secure.
Then came the business of busy-ness. Attempting to remain on task while so much of the rest of the world seemed to be off doing all that binge-buying of toilet paper. I sat in front of my computer trying to figure out how to bring all those kids back to virtual school when they could be playing anything inside or outside. Maybe the nut I was trying to crack was getting parents to corral their kids back to the infotainment realm of educational websites. In the back of my mind, I considered how often I had to redirect students when they were only feet away from me. I wondered how much patience our parents and caregivers would have in this endeavor.
And that made me tired. While I waited for new email and texts to push me in new directions, I stuck with what I knew: If you build it, they will come. That works for a baseball diamond in an Iowa cornfield. Why wouldn't it work for a school web page?
So we wait. A week later, things feel a little less focused and a little more dire. We are all learning now. Not just about math and viruses, but about each other. What happens next?
I don't know.