The Challenge of Returning to Normal
The world is changing while we are in it, and it is often difficult to grasp.
All communities are different, but in the last couple of years, all communities were impacted critically by the COVID-19 pandemic. Overnight, many organizations transformed their workplaces from brick-and-mortar operations to opening up new possibilities through remote and virtual options. However, since March 2020, we have also heard one of the most unified efforts from across political, economic, and cultural lines to "reopen schools and return to normalcy."
In March 2020, I was in the classroom as a special education teacher. I not only loved my job, but I also loved my students. When my school shifted to virtual learning, we were all taking a risk together to meet the needs of our students that we committed to supporting. However, the needs of everyone grew while we worked to help students and families. We often leaned into giving more than we had in terms of hours, resources, and ourselves. But we were used to this; this was a part of the job. The job began to weigh on all other aspects of my life in unintentional ways. The practices we build will become a habit; it started to feel "normal," working additional hours outside of the regular 10-12+ hours. As time moved on, a few things became clear.
1. Many people thought that the work of schools during the COVID-19 pandemic wasn't adequate to meet the promise of education. Virtual programs didn't equate to open schools, even though teaching and learning occurred daily.
2. We prioritized times when we were together but didn't prioritize why we were together. Becoming distant from friends, family members, colleagues, and others in our communities isolated us. As pushes to reopen schools progressed, no one considered the meaning of the time that we shared. What we are doing matters, and while efforts were made to build virtual programs, little attempt was made to ensure that these programs could provide resources in a highly efficient and effective manner.
3. People were suffering and continue to suffer. The pandemic highlighted several flaws in our current systems. Efforts that have been made were no longer adequate as things changed. A significant response has been to ignore the consequences and wish for the best. This careless disregard for others threatens our communities.
Words matter. When we talk about things, we must be intentional about the matter we are discussing and the people we invoke. When pushes for "reopening schools" arose, the response should have been that schools were already open. When community leaders urge us to return to normal, we must meet them questioning normalcy. What exactly was normal? Was it the routines that we shared? The spaces we congregate? The shared experiences we had? Or were we over-prioritizing systems that showed that they could no longer meet the demand of our current society?
We must take the time to define what is "normal" to be specific about what we are returning to. COVID presented a cultural shift for organizations to modernize, given the demands we are facing. Much of the work done to bring us back to March 2020 and push play has largely ignored feedback from communities about how things have changed since then. The normal that many Americans lived in was subpar, so is it beneficial to return to it?
If we wish to return to normalcy, we must develop more rigorous standards to help us define what normality is. For the last couple of years, we have all been reactive to the challenges faced. Proactive measures have been developed and researched, but they weren't commonplace before the pandemic, so our familiarity with them may be nonexistent or scarce. Overnight, familiar and ordinary things to us became distant as interacting with other people changed as well. Many people became more isolated than ever before. As a result, pushes to return to normalcy have overlooked these individuals as a collective. Suppose we want to design communities to be sustainable, efficient, and practical. In that case, we need to deeply consider the structures we have in place and how people interact with those structures. Our new normal needs to be better than the old one if we move into a post-COVID world.
Kaleb Banks
Co-Founder & COO