Not long ago, we had a speaker at a professional development day who, as part of her spiel, talked to all the teachers about being resilient. She hammered home that, as difficult as the job of education is, we should work to find ways through dark times, take care of ourselves, and be shining lights to our students.
I contemplated her words quite a bit, both as I was sitting there and in the weeks following. There are many jobs that take a level of resilience to persevere, not just education. Just like some of you, there are days I get out of bed and really don’t want to go to work, but I do anyway. There are days I’m at work and would rather not stay, but I do.
And I thought about our students. It’s one thing to tell educators to be resilient, but shouldn’t we work on that with our kids too? Too often, I will hear or see students who, when the going gets tough, just give up. Sometimes there might be extenuating circumstances with outside difficulties, but other times, the effort just seems like too much.
I had one student tell me that he was told by a parent if something in a class was too difficult, he should just guess or fake his way through it. What does it matter anyway?
Wait, what? Is that really the path we want our young people to take? Life is hard sometimes. Every time it gets hard, should we just give up on that area that’s tough? If people like Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison had given up when things were difficult, where would we be? (Probably in the dark!)
Developing resilience can be a process. Life tests us at many turns, and we don’t always know the answers. Heck, often it’s not even a multiple-choice test where we might guess right by accident! Losing a job, the end of a relationship, the loss of a loved one all provide us with roadblocks to a happy life. But we find a way because we have to.
These are difficult times with the onset of the coronavirus. When the outbreak first started, there were plenty of jokes and offhand remarks. Those have started to dry up. So many areas of our society are taking a “better safe than sorry” approach. That’s probably the right way to look at this, but it’s making life difficult.
This is where resilience comes in again. We have to be a strong, hardy people. Some of our lives might be turned upside down. People could be quarantined and have to survive on Netflix, books, and their stockpile of toilet paper. Businesses will suffer. Those of us who love sports will be swirling in a black hole for at least the next month, with nothing new to watch.
It’s how we come through this in the end that is important. Hopefully, this is a relatively short-term pandemic and we can resume normality within a month or two. But if it’s not, our resiliency will truly be tested.
What will happen if society makes a lot of shifts based on all of this? We could move past the coronavirus only to find that our way of living has changed completely. Or we could just pick up where we left off. It might all depend on how resilient we are. Maybe some things will change for the better, but we’ve already started to see some of the worst that humanity has to offer with hoarding of supplies and fights in stores over necessities.
One of my classes just finished a wonderful book called Memory Boy, by Will Weaver. In this novel, Mount Rainier erupted and was followed by other volcanic activity. The book picks up two years later, when ash still lingers in the air, even here in Minnesota. The story follows a family from Minneapolis trying to escape the horrors of the big city and find a safe place in what is now a dog-eat-dog world. The coincidence of reading this while the pandemic spread was not lost on my students. We had many good discussions on the situations and how we hoped they wouldn’t appear in our world as a result of this disease.
You never know. Most of us should weather the storm and get back on track if disruption appears. In fact, who knows? Between the time of my writing this and when you read it, everything could have escalated so rapidly that my words are meaningless. Or they might be so prescient that you wonder if I just wrote it the day you’re reading it.
I hope we can all be resilient in these difficult times. I hope we can be kind and helpful and caring and, most of all, human.
Word of the Week: This week’s word is chrysocracy, which means rule by the wealthy, as in, “The chrysocracy that was established in the midst of the crisis didn’t last long once things got back to normal.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!