Welcome to the New Normal
How quickly the phrase ‘mute your computers, please’ has become 2020’s unofficial motto.
My son doesn’t like home schooling. When he told me this, I was a little surprised, because he does like hanging out at home and doing his own thing. He also would wear nothing but pajamas for the rest of his life if I let him. But he misses his friends and teachers, and he enjoys the stimulation of in-person learning.
Because of this, I was surprised this Sunday when he set up his Chromebook and a small whiteboard in a corner of the family room and started playing home school. When I walked in on the class in session, he was intently reading “Tales of Beedle the Bard” aloud to his pretend students.
My own students are on my son’s side when it comes to home schooling, even though they are at least 12 years older. The very last thing they want right now is to have to pack up and go home to resume their college classes in the Zoom meeting format. Like my son, they miss their friends and the stimulation of being close to real people instead of watching them on a screen. Though my students haven’t said as much, I imagine their friends are more exciting than their parents, too.
Nevertheless, when an unforeseen event meant we had to shift an in-person class to fully online one day last week, they did it with a notable lack of complaining. They get it. Right now, this is the life we have, and we are all rapidly getting used to it.
This is not to say that things are going smoothly in our new pandemic educational system. On the first day of classes, I had a hybrid group — half in the class and half learning from home. I logged in and set up everything, only to find that the Zoom link would not work. On another day, the university system kicked me off the computer and wouldn’t let me back on. “Sometimes these things happen,” the IT guy told me helpfully.
When I listen in on my son’s online classes, I am perversely cheered by the tech problems they have. His teacher asks the class for the one hundredth time that day would they PLEASE mute their computers, leading me to marvel at his patience, and laugh at how quickly the phrase “mute your computers, please” has become 2020’s unofficial motto.
There has been a lot of talk about “normal” over the past few months — the last few years, even. People talk about “getting back to normal,” while the more realistic (or cynical) talk about the “new normal.” Our society seems to be holding its collective breath waiting for things to return to some state of stasis where we can feel like we are on top of things rather than being in danger of getting run over by the latest calamity.
I suspect I am not alone when I wonder exactly what “normal” means these days. When I started teaching back in the last years of the 20th century, I was one of the first to teach English in a computer lab. The technology we rely on today to accommodate the pandemic is so far beyond those creaky old MS-DOS machines that it’s hilarious to contemplate. It also underscores the fact that “normal,” at least in the sense of things remaining steady, has never really existed.
What 2020 is showing us is that normal is a nice dream. The chaos, confusion, and anxiety that constitute our lives now has always been the reality for many. What we are experiencing now is the democratization of despair. That’s our new normal.