Pandemic thoughtstream 5 - rethink education

I had a discussion with a friend last week about planning for next season. A return to normalcy would take no time, everyone knows their roles and how things ordinarily function. But an effective Plan B or C? That’s hard. But that’s what we need to plan for and implement.

I began to think about the empty concert halls and businesses and thought: it’s time to rethink education and use of available spaces.

The USA, as a whole, is not doing a good job in containing the virus. This is not up for debate. The number of daily cases and rise in multiple areas across the country are frightening. Most rational people I know do not want to go sit in a crowded office and share the same airspace as dozens of other people daily. I certainly wouldn’t want to. Which means I don’t really want to subject my kid to school in this case either. BUT at the same time I do want him to go to some kind of school. THUS … rethink the model. In my typical, stream of consciousness approach, here is what I’m thinking:

Parameters-

We need to separate students and create clusters.

We should limit sharing teachers or spaces between clusters.

We need to try to adhere to social distancing as much as possible.

Options? - Outdoors may be an option in some parts of the country. Michigan gets awfully cold awfully quick…

What if…? Businesses, restaurants, museums, bars, cafes, malls, movie theaters etc have all been shuttered or mostly shuttered. That’s a lot of spaces that are going unused and a lot of business owners struggling to make payments, even basic payments like rent and utilities.

Rethink how we do education. How about: 

Create 10-student clusters.

Hire HUNDREDS (thousands?) of local experts in a field. (The government was handing out $600 weekly paychecks for me to sit at home (I don’t exactly have the phone ringing off the hook for conducting engagements or orchestral commissions right now). What if I were required to teach or provide *something* in exchange for this money. Something in my area of expertise?)

Rent spaces from all these closed spaces to create “classrooms”.

Students attend school in their assigned classroom for the week (or two).

Weekend is for deep cleaning.

Students go to a new classroom the following week.

The expert-in-residence stays at their “classroom.”

Even if school were only 3-5 hours a day, this would be better for working families than all virtual.

There are thousands of experts out there. They could be an expert in cooking, or business, or music, or mechanics, or engineers, or salespeople.

Actually perhaps they don’t even have to be experts. They could simply be willing proctors with a space to rent while students show up and do virtual school. Maybe this is option 2: local pods of people for the whole semester who do virtual school together in order to get some socialization, but avoiding the exposure of going to school with hundreds or even thousands of students in the same building. Again, there are working parents out there, how do they work if their kids have nowhere to go?

IMAGINE using the spaces of symphony halls or theaters to teach students about music or film. Or using a restaurant space to teach the intricacies of running a business (or making a souflée). How about fixing a car or changing a tire? Many people don’t even know the slightest thing about how their car works. A year of education like this would be invaluable to teaching a whole generation of kids about life, as well as gaining useful skills to use post-pandemic - all while bringing the community together safely and responsibly.