The worst lesson to learn from six months of a pandemic is, “it’s always like this.”
It’s hard, at 43, to learn that lesson. Your sense of normal does evolve over time, but I have had enough life experience to know that it’s not always like this. In the nearly 90 6-month periods I’ve experienced, there hasn’t been another remotely like the one that began in March.
But if I were 6, or 10, or even 16 or 18, that 6-month window begins to be a large percentage of your life. A child who turned five today has spent 10 percent of her life in lockdown. For a ten-year-old, who might only have 5 summers she remembers distinctly, one in five summers is a pandemic summer.
That’s the worst lesson – that’s it’s always like this, often like this, regularly like this. And our children and students can learn that lesson in one part of their life, even as they intellectually reject it in other parts.
So we – parents, teachers, leaders – must repeat and repeat it.
It’s not always like this. It’s hardly ever like this.
Whatever age you are, you will probably never again experience a pandemic like this. Never again. Not regularly, not often, certainly not always.
Make sure the people you love, especially the young people you love, aren’t internalizing the worst lesson of this pandemic.