You won’t hear me say “new normal” although it’s cute and catchy. Alliteration always allures me. But I won’t say “new normal” in the context of the Coronavirus crisis, because I don’t believe it.
Nine months into this mess, facemasks are not normal. Nor are loved ones refusing hugs. Or televised sports featuring cardboard cutouts and piped-in crowd noise, as if to soothe us into submission, lest we hear the truth contained in the silence of our stadiums.
Most importantly, it is not normal for Zoom to serve as school. So, yes, we have adapted to the pandemic. But with all the resilience we’ve shown, saying “new normal” sounds like surrender. I’m more optimistic than that, because even when I’m apart from clients, what we work on together is worth working for.
For example, at The Writing Salon, where I will resume teaching “On Point” and “To Make a Long Story Short” in January, a past session’s student, Erin Lewellen, became a private writing coaching client and has since produced this opinion piece for NBCNews.com and this story about her work to lead Global Citizen Year through the pandemic.
Two more writing coaching clients have joined me, one about my age and the other a middle-school student. If you want a writing coach, let me know.
That work extends to Creative Writing curriculum design and teaching for Citizen Schools, a non-profit that provides enrichment programs for underserved middle-school students. As a volunteer Citizen Teacher for Oakland’s Greenleaf Elementary, I partner with AmeriCorps teaching fellow Emily Yonce on work with students who bear the brunt of the pandemic’s academic fallout due to the digital divide.
My first two years with Citizen Schools, about 25 students personally handed me their poetry collections, comic books, or short stories. This term, just five students log-in, almost always leaving their cameras off, and just one consistently answers our writing prompts.
The cliché, “If I can positively impact even one child…” rings true.
Consulting on WeXL’s Boundless, featured in the video above, was a much different experience. Dozens of fourth-graders at New York City’s Girls Prep Bronx Elementary School participated exuberantly, with cameras and minds turned on, under the leadership of WeXL Founder/CEO Arabella DeLucco and Girls Prep Teacher Danielle Sacks Sierra.
The first season of Boundless had students produce their own video-based stories while learning from luminaries in the worlds of sports, entertainment, and journalism, such as Monique Billings of the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream, known off-court as a high-quality YouTube creator, and TV journalist and Miss Wisconsin USA 2020 Gabriella Deyi.
Student response to the program provides every reason for optimism. And Boundless might not have happened without the pandemic forcing hands. Still, even if some good comes from the Coronavirus crisis, let’s not succumb to accepting a “new normal.”
Next in Series–Coronavirus Diary: Anniversary
Series starts at Coronavirus Diary: Introduction
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