Penn State Clamps Down On Covid

Pity the poor colleges and universities. If they can't entice students to return to campus in the next few weeks, they may face a financial armageddon. For many students, a gap year is looking pretty good right now. But colleges and universities have to somehow navigate the gap between "I'm not writing huge checks and taking out tons of loans just to cyber school" and "I am not ready to risk me life just to hang out on campus."

Penn State appears poised to take a fairly aggressive approach. Their plan calls for campus to open for in-person classes, though after the Thanksgiving break, students will stay out and finish the semester (including finals) virtually.

Also, students have to sign a pledge.

The pledge has attracted some attention for being a sort of waiver, a "if I get Covid it's not Penn State's fault," sort of liability shield. And that's certainly part of it-- "I assume any and all risk of exposure to COVID-19 that may result from attending Penn State" plus acknowledging that such exposure could result in injury, illness, disability or death.

What's more striking is how strictly the university demands student follow a tight set of protocols. If you are wondering what a university looks like when they are trying to take control of the pandemic in ways beyond what we've seen from, say, elected government officials, here it is.

* Students must self-quarantine for seven days before coming to campus.

* Students must agree to be tested by the university at any time.

* They must fully and "candidly" cooperate with any contact tracing (this is turning out to be a problem in some places).

* Face coverings in buildings at all time and outside when distancing isn't possible.

* Observe distancing requirements in any on-campus or off-campus settings.

* If the student tests positive, they must isolate and "explicitly follow the University's instructions."

* Follow good hand hygiene.

The actual pledging part involves lots of acknowledgement of the situation and the student's personal responsibility for helping to keep Covid-19 at bay.

If, at any time, I am unable or unwilling to sustain these commitments to my fellow students and our community, I shall remove myself from the campus and complete the semester remotely.

Consequences for refusing to live by these rules on campus include suspension and expulsion. Penn State is apparently intent on signalling that they mean business; nobody in Happy Valley is saying, "Yes, well, masks are a personal choice." Despite the forcefulness, the document (which students must virtually sign before returning) does feel a bit sad and not-entirely-hopeful. The introductory paragraph notes that "Our return is tenuous and could be brief."

The whole thing is an interesting stance for an institution that has had long-standing problems in addressing its hard-drinking culture.

Penn State is supposed to start up again at the end of the month. We'll see how well a message of responsibility, accountability and "you'd better by God follow the rules" actually plays out, and if there are any lessons for other schools.

There Are No Writing Prodigies: What That Means For Writing Instruction

Mozart was composing and performing at the age of 4. Shirley Temple made her first film appearance at age 3, and within two years was a film star. Pascal wrote a treatise on vibrating bodies at age 9. Trombone Shorty was leading his own band at age 6.

But there are no child prodigies in writing. No classic novels composed by a six year old. No world-altering essays written by some young person in second grade.

That means that every writer starts out at the same level of skill and quality—somewhere between very low and none. Every author you have ever admired, enjoyed, or been inspired by started out as a not-very-good writer.

And that means that the path of a writer is always one of continuous growth, an unending journey that takes each individual across a variety of landscapes. Each path is a little different, featuring different obstacles and rewards. Each path varies in length, not because everyone is born with a pre-determined destination, but because so many people say, “That’s it. I’m done trying to go down this path.” Some people are better equipped to make the journey than others, but you’d be hard pressed to find a great writer who says, “Yes, I stopped working on growing as a writer because I figured I simply had no room for improvement.” Nobody arrives at the top of the mountain because they somehow had the gift of magically transporting there.

The implications for teachers of writing are important. Teachers are going to meet students who are somewhere on this journey, and teachers should not mistake the students’ location on the path for their ability to make the journey. The fact that the student has not progressed very far yet does not mean she can never travel far down the path.

So the teacher has to meet the students where they are and provide what they need to continue their journey. It may be support. It may be a critical eye. It may be additions to the students’ background of knowledge; it’s almost impossible to write well about things you know nothing about (even fantasy and SF writers are taking what they know and examining it from a different lens).

It is meaningless to look at a young student and declare she is a “bad” writer. She may be a bad writer today, but she may be an awesome writer five years from now. It’s the teacher’s job to make that journey possible for her.

It’s also meaningless to try to break the craft of writing down into a battery of skills and declare that the student has “mastered” some of them. It’s no more useful than dissecting the golden goose and breaking down and evaluating each goosely muscle; that’s not how this works. The ability to write a “topic sentence” in isolation may satisfy a test, but it has little to do with crafting an effective piece of writing. A piece of writing is an organic whole. The basic building block is not a sentence, but an idea.

Writing is one of the hardest things to teach, because it is complex and messy. Any attempt to reduce it to something simple and clear will lose the essential heart of the work. And seeing students as people who either do or don’t have some kind of writer gene misses the vast reservoir of potential that is in each and every classroom.

Originally posted at Forbes.com

GA: Bad Cover-Up Management In Times Of Crisis

For years, I worked for an administration whose philosophy about any problematic or controversial issue was, "If we don't talk about it, the public won't notice and this will all blow over in a while."

It was a terrible management philosophy, not just because it was dishonest and unfair, but because it failed. It failed hard. Every. Single. Time.

See? Doesn't everything look better now?

People always found out, and they always got upset about the exact things administration was afraid they'd get upset about. And on top of that, they were upset that administration had been trying to hide problems instead of solve them or share them with the affected parties, which in turn meant that they had zero trust in leadership moving forward. It just always ended poorly, and yet, administration never learned.

We're seeing some of that already with the news out of Georgia, where a couple of photos of unmasked students crowded wall to wall in the hall made Paulding County schools look pretty--well, not good. Buzzfeed (yes, you really have to start taking them seriously as a news outlet) has the whole story so far.

The school's nurse had already quit over the policy. Football players at North Paulding had already tested positive. And the first day of school was a scary mess. The superintendent responded to the photo by offering "context" i.e. saying, "Hey, it happens. Not really anything we can do." The district has characterized mask wearing as a "personal choice," though students have reportedly pointed out that the school is perfectly comfortable with enforcing the length of shorts and the visibility of bra straps. The school has also reportedly been clear that staying home from school could result in suspension or expulsion.

Of course, only one other bad management move was missing, and that shoe dropped today-- the school suspended students who posted pictures of the opening clusterfarpfegnugen, and threatened the student body if anyone dared to be critical of the school on social media. The suspensions were rationalized by a school policy against posting pictures of minors on social media, which is fairly common and sensible policy, though as one student pointed out, not enforced every single time the issue comes up. The "no criticism" rule has, at present, not been justified-- nor will it ever be, because the law is mighty clear on the issues of student personal expression, even if that expression makes schools sad. Twitter posts today say that teachers have also been warned not to be critical of the school on social media. Good luck with that.

The school's position is bullshit from just about every angle, but I expect that North Paulding will be the last school we hear defend a policy of "Just shut up and try not to make our bad choices look bad."

Cyber Outsourcing

It's a sort of cyber school bait and switch that has implications for students and teachers in public schools. Let me offer a specific example of how it works, courtesy of my old school district.

On the district web page, you'll find a flyer for the newly christened Franklin Area Virtual Academy, a "100% online option for families." The flyer is a nice single page, including some photos of Franklin students in action, and it lists the many positive features of FAVA:

You get a Franklin diploma. You get access to Franklin facilities. It's tuition free. There's teacher support for the student. Students do their standardized testing at Franklin. Students "have the opportunity" to develop a hybrid schedule, part cyber, part bricks and mortar. They'll get guidance from a "district liaison" as well as an "opportunity" to get "district tutoring." And if there are further questions, they can contact the high school principal.

Everything about the flyer would lead one to believe that the district had hunkered down and used its own staff and resources to create an in-house cyber school. Not exactly.

Meet VLN Partners.

This Pittsburgh-based company offers virtual leaning solutions, including "turnkey virtual academies."

The company was founded in 2007 by Alex Stone, the same year he received his doctorate in education from Duquesne. Stone had taught at a cyber school and worked as multimedia developer, cited his doctorate as the basis for his company. He told the Duquesne alumni mag, "It’s inevitable: Public schools have to move into the online environment. They can’t just not do it anymore, but they don’t know how to do it. We give them the how.” It was meant in part as a "solution to help public school districts better compete with cyber charter schools that siphon off students." Within a few years, they had established themselves as major players with a variety of approaches, including helping districts build money-saving consortiums. It has been valuable work in a state where cyber-schools have enjoyed little regulation, oversight, or accountability, while soaking local districts for millions and millions of taxpayer dollars.

What exactly do they offer? Stone also laid out his ideas in his publication in 2008 of "The Holistic Model for Blended Learning: A New Model for K-12 District-Level Cyber Schools." That paper is trapped behind the paywalls od academia, but Stone was both interviewed and cited for a 2012 paper about holistic learning.

A new form of instructional delivery called Learning Object-Based Instruction (LOBI) is the force behind the Holistic Model for Blended Learning (Stone, 2007). Stone (2008) defined LOBI as “a new form of learning and teaching that harnesses the power of the Internet, allows for open architecture content authoring, and thrives in the Holistic Model for Blended Learning” (p. 65 – 66).

There is an awful lot of argle bargle associated with these ideas-- The collaborative development process differs from other processes, such as the systematic design and development processes, used in developing courseware bundles because digital media artifacts (learning objects) are viewed as tools used by curriculum directors to develop customized Web-based lessons and can be utilized transversely among several auxiliary learning environments. --but the bottom line seems to be that VLN Partners was founded by a guy with tech background, some edu-business experience, and a model that initially allowed for collaboration with client districts.

Over the decade, they've expanded their vision. VLN still seems to offer the more collaborative model, but has expanded to the "turnkey" model, which I suppose you could do if you'd been collecting teaching cyber-materials for a decade. Clients cite the financial savings, and really, it would be simple to undercut cyber schools in PA, where cyber schools are paid by a formula that has nothing at all to do with the actual costs of providing education. The company seems to have only a few employees (and only aa few of those are actual teachers), and Glassdoor reviews paint a picture of less-than-stellar management.

In their promotional video, VLN touts how closely it hews to your district's curriculum, as well as its basis in research about educational technology, which I don't find nearly as encouraging as a stroing background in education itself, especially if the district buying the product doesn't exactly have a strong curriculum to hew to.

I am no position to judge the actual quality of their edu-products; at least, for a change, this is an edu-biz led by someone who has some piece of background in education and not, say, running hedge funds. On the other hand, their only claim to a secret sauce to avoid the level of crappiness endemic to cyber-schools is the idea of using local ingredients, and it's not clear if that's really enough. They provide a really wide range of programs, starting with Cyber School In A Box, which can help a district set up their own in-house cyber school (and has been used in my district for a while). But it's really important to note that the top end of that scale is that "turnkey academy"-- essentially a complete cyber-outsourcing of your district's schools.

That's a fairly scary prospect, especially in places where the union has been stripped of power (or is just taking a long nap). It's quick, easy, cheap--really cheap if you use it to simply render some live teachers superfluous and lay-off-able. And as my old district is demonstrating, you can do it without even publicly admitting that you have outsourced some of the functions of your school district.

For those of you not in Western PA, two items to keep in mind. First, I don't imagine that Alex Stone is the only person in the country who has come up with this business model. Second, Stone has at various times expressed an interest in taking VLN national.

So keep your eyes peeled. This kind of operation may seem like a perfect solution in the times of the pandemic, but fans of public education might want to think a bit about what happens if the coronavirus goes away, and cyber outsourcing doesn't.

Viral Overconfidence

Well, this is an interesting piece of research.

A new paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology suggests that overconfidence can be transmitted socially, that being around overconfident people rubs off on other folks.

As with most psycho-social research, the experimental designs leave room for considerable debate, and there are plenty of needles to thread. I find it interesting that the transmission only appears to occur within people in your own tribe.

The research reminds me of a not-uncommon phenomenon in the world of student performance-- the group founded and led by somebody who's not very qualified, but who is absolutely confident in their awesomeness, and the group itself is filled with students who are vocal in their belief that Beloved Leader is awesome and the group itself is also awesome. These kinds of groups are aided and abetted by an entire industry of "competitions" that let them earn medals and awards.

The power of overconfidence is under-discussed in education, probably because the problems of confidence gaps loom so much larger in classrooms. But the effects are similar. A student who lacks confidence will not try, because not trying is the only tactic they believe they have for avoiding failure. The overconfident students will also not try--because they don't think they need to.

Both are also brittle and destructive. Someone lacking confidence collapses at the first sign of impending failure. Overconfidence lacks any tools to deal with failure, and has to retreat to blaming ("They must have cheated!!") or trying to overwrite reality ("No, that's actually what was supposed to happen").

A teacher who fills the classroom with viral overconfidence is just setting those students up for a crash (and setting a colleague up for a "You don't do things right like Mrs. Awesomesauce" headache). But a teacher who destroys student confidence sets those students up for a school career of misery.

Could this kind of viral overconfidence be used as a factor in group work? I don't think I've ever seen that phenomenon in action. But confidence is a huge factor in the entire student social scene, as powerful in its own way as tribal behavior. This is the kind of thing I read about and it makes we want to get back in the classroom and try tweaking some things. Could I nudge some growth by putting over and under confident students together? Probably not, because levels of confidence are used by teens to sort and recognize fellow tribe members.

Here's what I do know-- when we talk about confidence, we have to talk about confidence in what. We often jump to the idea that one is confident in their ability to get the job done, to successfully complete the task, that their confidence rests in their own competence and ability.

But there is another kind of confidence, which is confidence in one's own ability to cope with the outcome no matter what that outcome may be.

This is one of the things I learned years ago in divorce school. I fully expected to never recover, to never be able to uncurl and stand up and get back to doing stuff. But as it turned out, I was considerably more resilient than I thought, and I carried that (at least on my good days) forward. I re-acquainted myself withe the power of the question "What's the worst thing that could happen?" and learn to add "And if that happens, is there any reason to think I can't handle it?"

In the classroom, we can be reluctant to just say to a student, "No, that's wrong." But I think the key is to send a message of "No, that's wrong, but you will still be fine." It's the same message that more recently has morphed into the reminder to students and parents that students are more than a test score. Your failures may be real, but they don't have to define you as a human being. I think that's far more useful than trying to convince yourself that they aren't failures at all.

It's all a critical part of learning how to be your best self, to be fully human in the world--you have to strive to see reality as clearly as you can, including your own strengths and weaknesses, without letting them define your ability.

It is the opposite of standardization, which feeds the kind of viral overconfidence the paper talks about. In this approach, you set an artificial bar (especially one that your tribe is well-poised to clear) and then you treat that artificial bar as if it is proof that you are wise, smart, and destined to be successful in life. And then whenever anything doesn't go your way, you blame that failure on someone or something else. Or you just tell yourself that everything is fine. Just fine.

Catholic Church Looks To Cash In On Espinoza

Well, this is not exactly a surprise.

Now that SCOTUS has poked another huge hole in the wall between church and state, and now that the Catholic Church and the Trump administration have been forging closer ties over support for school choice (aka getting tax dollars to Catholic schools), and now that Betsy DeVos is insisting that financial aid intended for public schools should go to private schools-- now that all that is going on, it should come as no surprise that the Catholic Church is now arguing publicly to be given more taxpayer dollars.

It surfaced here in the National Catholic Register last Thursday. The op-ed is penned by Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Cardinal Seán O’Malley and Archbishop José H. Gómez, from New York, Boston and Los Angeles, and it leads with the Espinoza decision, saying it "corrected an historic injustice." Also, the Covid-19 pandemic is sad and affecting everyone. And then they move quickly from there to demanding their cut of taxpayer funding. Their talking points include the following:

* Catholic schools have been around for two centuries. They would like you to focus on the part of the Catholic system that serves the upwardly mobile poor, and not the part that serves exclusive wealthy folks.

* Catholic schools educate lots of non-Catholic students, like them Protestants, Jewish folk, and Muslims. Well, as long as they aren't, you know, gay, or have too costly an IEP.

* Catholic schools are facing a financial crisis and many "will close." Parents might have to pull kids out because of their own financial hardships. We're going to come back to this point in a moment.

* Catholic schools are worth saving because they help poor kids and make society better.

* Catholic schools are better and cheaper than public schools. They provide "healthy competition," which is a bogus notion. And then there's this bit of baloney: "Year after year, 99% of our students graduate from high school..." First of all, that's just sloppily inaccurate, since a goodly percentage of their students are not in 12th grade. Second, as always, watch the cohort. In other words, don't tell me how many of your seniors graduate from your high school, but tell me how many of, say, your freshmen are still there after four years and then graduate. Third, I notice this sloppy sentence just says that their students graduate from high school, so I guess if someone leaves Catholic school after eighth grade and then graduates from a public school, they still count. Which is still not impressive since Catholic schools automatically select for families with committed and involved parents.

* Catholic school closures would cost taxpayers big bucks because Catholic schools spend so much less per pupil. And in this pandemic time, they're keeping schools from overcrowding.

The Catholic leaders have a solution!

To enable families to provide the best education for their children and stabilize enrollment in Catholic and other non-government schools, Congress should also adopt a federal scholarship tax credit modeled after successful state-level credits.

By a remarkable coincidence, this is exactly what Betsy DeVos has been pushing with her Education Freedom tax credit program, aka super-vouchers. The writers argue that this is just the kind of program that Espinoza upheld, which, yes, sort of. In fact, the unfortunate truth is that the argument in favor of Espinoza was always going to lead here, because the argument is basically "if the government funds something, they can't exclude somebody from sucking up some of those delicious tax dollars just because they are a religious organization."

So I'm not going to bet that the Catholic church won't eventually win this argument nationally (they've already won it in a couple of states).

But it's still baloney. Take this:

This is not a choice between tax-payer-funded public schools and tuition-based independent schools. Public schools and independent schools equally deserve and urgently need our government’s assistance.

Well, no, unless you're planning to tap some infinite pool of money, it is a zero-sum choice game. Nor do independent schools "equally deserve" taxpayer dollars. Let's say your town has a community pool that's open to everyone, but a local group decides that they want their own private pool for just the people they want to let swim there. When there's a need for maintenance and upkeep, are both pools deserving of taxpayer support? Of course not.

Nor do Catholic schools just "close." The language used in the op-ed is carefully chosen, but if you've been in a community that went through the process (we've watched this unfold locally over the past couple of years), you know that Catholic schools don't just close like the tide going out or wildflowers blooming. Catholic schools close because the Catholic church chooses to close them. The Catholic church swoops into town and says "You aren't pulling in enough students" or "we don't want to spend more money on this building" and, to the accompanying sound of parent protests, the Catholic church itself shuts down the school.

And it should be noted that in many cases what's needed is not an infusion of dollars, but an infusion of students. If we're going to praise the virtues of "healthy competition," well, this is what that looks like in some communities--Catholic schools have lost the competition for a big slice of the market. 

Arguments like the one in this op-ed talk about Catholic schools as if they are orphan private schools, with no possible source of income except tuition and aid, when in fact they are attached to one of the wealthiest organizations/businesses in the country. And I think we can say "businesses" because the US Catholic church pulled in billions of dollars from the Paycheck Protection Program.

Even if you convince me of every talking point above, I'm going to ask why that isn't an argument that the Catholic church should provide greater financial support for their own private school system. Why should the US taxpayer be footing the bill for a private, exclusive organization run by one of the richest companies in the country?

Don't Waste Time

This is personal. You may want to move on. But I need to write this out because one of the people I would ordinarily talk it out with is not here.

Merrill and I taught together for just under thirty years. We were the same age, but she had gotten a late start on her career, having first worked in the world of newspaper advertising, just one of the many parts of her biography that hinted at the toughness that backed up her magnolia-sweet proper belle exterior.

A love story (that is not mine to tell, but which has inspired me at many points in my own life) brought her here, far from South Carolina, with a young daughter from an earlier marriage. We were looking for someone to fill a new gap. Merrill came with impeccable credentials, an impressive background of knowledge, and a recommendation from a local giant in teaching English.

Over the years, we settled into regular spots-- I taught the juniors, and she taught the seniors, and so we often worked as a team. In a district that didn't always provide a lot of curricular direction, we had to make sure we were hitting the right bases with our students.

And she knew all of the bases. Her knowledge and love of literature was huge, and it just kept getting huger over the years she taught. The great headline-making showpiece of her classroom was the annual end-of-year unit for the 12th grade honors (later AP, after Merrill made the extra effort to get the official upgrade for the course) for which she first taught Paradise Lost, and then had the class split into two groups to put John Milton on trial for either whether or not he successfully made the ways of God clear to man. The trial was a huge piece of theater, with students portraying Adam, Eve, and various other characters; the jury was composed of lawyers and judges from the community. It was the project that people talked about year after year.

But there was so much more going on in her classroom. She taught those seniors--the ones who know they're supposed to go to college for some reason, but they aren't sure why to what they want to do when they get there-- she taught them to think like college students, to develop the disciplines of reading and writing and interpreting. She taught those seniors who were headed straight into the "real world" how to communicate effectively, to deal with nuts and bolts like resumes, to be responsible, that there were plenty of aspects of literature that were fully accessible to them even if they weren't "college bound."

And like all the great teachers, she cared, enormously. Students knew they could talk to her about anything, at any time of the day. She was a mother hen in the best sense of the word, and her students--even the ones with whom she butted heads--knew she cared about them, not as projects or work-related responsibilities, but as human beings. Every Friday, she told her seniors to keep it "safe and legal" over the weekend.

She took the work seriously. She was up well before the crack of dawn, in her classroom hours before students arrived, and she took truckloads of papers home every evening. She was department chair for forever because nobody else wanted to try to match her level of organization. And nobody in the entire district was better at shaking down publisher's reps, who waltzed in, heard the sweet southern accent, and figured they had another easy mark.

Merrill was fiercely loyal, and she never half-assed a commitment. Once she had committed to an activity, a committee, an organization, she stuck it out, even in the face of disappointment or just plain being taken advantage of.

We were a team for many parts of school life. I advised the yearbook; she was the business manager. I directed the school's variety show; she worked the box office. We had very different styles in the classroom, and over the years we had the occasional disagreement. But those disputes never lasted. Every year her students held a debate about Lady Macbeth; Merrill always sent one team to me because I believe Lady M is redeemable, and Merrill did not. She helped me land my first writing gig. She was my work sister.

I admired her depth and breadth of knowledge, her ability to be a positive force for so much of the staff, her love for her students. She battled illness. She knew how to balance being a good team player with maintaining her high standards, a skill I never exactly mastered. I also admired her courage; Merrill really didn't like situations where she had little control over what was happening, and yet time after time, she waded into exactly those situations, from moving to a strange small town to all the control one gives up to be an effective classroom teacher. I have little doubt that part of her longed for the safe, simple thing. She had the background to retreat into the role of the cutesy blond former cheerleader belle, baking tarts and sitting quietly on some civic committee. But she didn't, because she was so much more than that. She pushed herself, often in roles that were never going to provide much glory or recognition. She suffered through years on the bizarrely contentious humane society board, and everyone who ever got married in the Episcopal church owed Merrill for the smoothly-running ceremony. She ran a writing competition held in honor of the woman who first pushed Merrill toward our district. She never wasted a moment.

When I retired, she stuck around. She didn't have as many years in, and I don't think she wanted the department to lose both of us in one year. But last spring, she decided to take the retirement plunge. Then everything went to hell, and she didn't get a victory lap, a goodbye session with her last students, or a send-off from the staff that loved her. There was a retirement party scheduled for this month, but as you have by now sensed, it won't be happening.

Friday night, Merrill experienced what they call a major cardiac event in the middle of the night, and she passed away.

It hardly seems real. She was too young; this is much too soon.

As humans, we learn this same lesson over and over and over again. Do not waste time, for so many reasons, not the least of which is that we have no idea how much we have, or how much the people around us have. And I think as teachers we have a greater requirement to remember it, because it is easy to start imagining that the present--the time of classrooms and studies and youth and childhood--are some sort of swift empty present to be run past on the way to some "real life" that starts on some unknown future day. But real life is going on right now, right this instant, and it is not a rehearsal or a trial run or an empty placeholder. Yes, we can say that youth has the advantage that some choices can be unmade or remade, but it is still real life. And it is still not to be wasted.

If you want it in fancier words, this quote from Nick Cave crossed my desk just this morning:

This feeling… of alertness to the inner-spirit of things — this humming — comes from a hard-earned understanding of the impermanence of things and, indeed, our own impermanence. This lesson ultimately animates and illuminates our lives. We become witnesses to the thrilling emergency of the present — a series of exquisite and burning moments, each extinguished as the next arises. These magical moments are the bright jewels of loss to which we cling.

After retirement, you become sort of a ghost at your old school, but the magic of texting and social media blunts much of that effect. Most recently, Merrill had asked me about writing "the letter," and at the beginning of the summer, I sent her a letter on the occasion of her retirement, and she responded via text. Thank to technology, I can keep those conversations for years. They can serve as reminders; they will not substitute for all the retiree lunches we were going to enjoy once the pandemic subsided. We were going to make a swell pair of old retired friends. I have the picture above as well. Merrill and I for years and years led the seniors into the graduation ceremony, and when I retired, I made sure that taking that walk would be my last professional act. So that picture is of our last walk together.

These are scary, difficult times, not just because of the pandemic, but because of how some people choose to handle it-- less kind, more selfish, or just withdrawing and waiting for it all to end. We could do better. We could not waste the time we have, even if it seems like a meager, cramped time. We can be brave enough to step on into the times, to embrace and support the people around us, even in the face of heartbreak and fear. We can be smart enough and committed enough to focus on the big stuff and not the little piddly crap. Merrill was passionate and strong about what mattered, but she was never unkind or thoughtless. She was always goodhearted and classy.

These are not lessons from Merrill's death; there are no lessons to be learned there, other than sometimes people you love die and it really sucks. But since there will be no chance to learn new lessons from her, I can put a pin in the lessons from her life. I don't know what to do with all the conversations I'm going to want to have with her in the years ahead. I miss her. Remember-- don't waste time. Take care of the people around you, and for heaven's sake, be kind, babies.