I have been thinking about the pandemic. I have the time. All the scenarios I see have waves and waves of Covid-19 dashing over us for the next year or more. Take a look, do you see a scenario where this goes away?

This makes sense. Why would the virus go away?

I am not going to write a post on the craziness of people who just need to defy common sense to get a haircut. That is too easy.

What I am interested in is how we move into a new normal? What will it look like? How do we as a collective figure this out?

A friend of mine sent me this out today. This makes lots of sense.

Adaptation for a species that can think can happen very quickly. We can’t waste time here. We need to think, we need to figure this one out. Other great societies have failed. We don’t need to follow others here.

My main concern now as we settle into the slow burn is education. One of the most social of all enterprises is threatened in an entirely new way. We need to start figuring this one out.

Over the past few days, we have learned that universities will be moving to a hybrid learning situation. I’m not sure what this will mean, but I think it will mean lots of on-line teaching and learning.

What will this mean at the primary and secondary level? I have no idea and I don’t know if anyone else does either.  The old ways are done. We need to figure this out.

Adapt or face the consequences. Adapt or become a wisper. Maybe learn to cut your own hair?

Our current tools were not devised to deal with a crisis like this. We can’t fall back on Zoom and hope everything works out. This is a time to be really creative. This is Florence in the 1400s, Great Britain in 1940. Adapt and do it quickly.

I don’t like Zoom, but I do agree that we need to find a way to adapt. Watch this short very funny video. Zoom is already a parody.

 

If I was going to be a character in the Zoom chat with the dogs, I think I would be one of the dogs whose camera got shut off!

What I am finding is that I am valuing old forms of technology. I really value the emails I get now. I read them carefully and I consider my response. Maybe I don’t get lots of emails, but I want to think of each email as a letter, just like the letters people used to exchange.

In a letter, you need to consider the reader. You should make sure it reads well, you should make it interesting.

To me, Zoom is like dogs at a meeting. Technology will not necessarily ease our journey into the new normal. We will have to think this through.

We still have a way to go to learn how to adapt to this new world. I am going to do lots of thinking about this because hopefully, I will have courses to teach in the fall and I know our daughter as a new law school student will be living in the online world.

Let’s keep adapting, it’s a slow burn.