2020 represents a stunning shift in educational practices and expectations around the world.  We will have to wait to see what the long term impact of COVID-19 will be on our education systems at a large scale, and whether those shifts are wholly positive or negative.  While only time will reveal the collective impact on the education of our kids, we all have plenty of evidence at the personal and local level that the disruption has been significant.  

Within just my family – a family of teachers – the impacts have been felt in interesting ways.  My younger sister, who lives in rural New England and who left regular employment as a classroom-based Waldorf teacher a couple of years ago in order to take care of a newborn, decided to launch a distance learning Waldorf classroom.  She teaches over a dozen students virtually from all around the United States and the world.  Suddenly, geographic distance is no longer a barrier.  While the demands of balancing family and professional life have not gone away, the fact that my sister can stay at home and work as a “classroom teacher” has been a game-changer allowing her back into the profession in a truly unexpected manner.  

My older sister too has “returned to the classroom” this year.  Her last foray as a public school teacher was literally 20 years ago, when she too left as a young mother.  When she returned to full-time work several years ago, it was in the private sector, developing music curriculum and organizing private music education for small groups of students as an after-school enrichment activity.  The pandemic and consequent restructuring of her work led her back into the public sector, where she is loving her new role as an elementary music and art teacher, albeit at a distance.  Suddenly, her days are filled by preparing standards-aligned instruction and popping from classroom to classroom, all from her living room.  

My mom, who went back to school about 10 years ago to receive her bachelor’s in education and continue her own journey as a licensed Waldorf kindergarten teacher, has been making the transition from in-person classes to distance learning.  Those with young children (or who teach young children) know that the pandemic has been especially hard for our youngest learners, for whom distance learning simply is not the ideal.  Yet, despite the challenges, my mom has been eagerly and tirelessly finding ways to connect to her young students.  Distance learning has forced my mom, and millions of other regular classroom teachers, to rethink how they structure their classroom, connect with students, and create opportunities for meaningful and powerful learning.      

One of the strangest professional experiences for me has been transitioning to a new leaderhip role in the depths of the pandemic.  For 7 weeks, I found myself leading an international school in Costa Rica while on the road all across the Western United States, doing my best to balance the logistics of traveling with a family of 8, and focusing on building new relationships with my new school community.  We thankfully received special permission to make the trip to Costa Rica, thanks in large part to the herculean effort of our school board and staff.  Yet even so, we remain in quarantine until the end of this week, and nearly a month into the school year, I still have yet to physically step foot on our campus.  

7 months ago, things looked very different for the educators of the Allen family.  What a strange, challenging, and sometimes even exciting world we seem to be living in.