Repetition + Routines

NOTE: During the shifts in education due to coronavirus precautions, I’m largely targeting this blog to daily reflections on these shifts. as accompaniment to prompts I’m sharing with my students.

It feels as though the world is upside-down right now.

If I feel this way, forty-odd years along my path with multiple metaphorical fires that previously flamed and burnt out, my students must feel it intensely. You might not be numb yet to rapid iteration and constant newness, the way that those of us who have spent our lives in education often feel. I can express some mild frustration with plans that (necessarily) change by the day or the hour, based on the next announcement by a national or local leader, but that frustration might feel anything but mild to someone on their first go-round to a complex experience. A teenager’s first order of business is to establish a sense of identity, so when the foundations that support that process (school, mentorship, friends, family routines, new experiences) are askew, everything must feel askew. 

That’s a long, wordy way for me to say that I get it, or I get it as much as it’s possible for me to get it. If we’re all feeling off balance, I have a sense that the vertigo may be strongest for young people. Although a school day might feel repetitive sometimes, there are a lot of school experiences that only happen once—junior sports seasons, senior seminars, important classes, proms, all sorts of traditions. There’s a gravity to experiences that only happen once in a lifetime, but which now seem uncertain or tenuous. There’s an intense, anxious gravity to all of it.

I don’t have any good balms for that anxiety right now. I wish I did. I’m trying to set up some routines (repetition) for myself. Throwing down some anchors, I guess, to make sure I stay afloat. Posting a daily prompt for my students is part of this, and participating in those prompts myself is part of it, too. Writing in this dusty old blog, a little each day, is part of it. I’m building a few more, but I’ll save those for future posts. 

I’m trying to toss some of those anchors to my students, too, without any requirement to catch them—at least for now.  Our plans will likely evolve, but hopefully establishing some routines will help us to make those shifts with empathy and trust in each other.

There’s a reason why the first prompt for photography and visual communications was repetition. I feel the disruption to routines, and I also feel the need for them. How about you?

REPETITION: MY SHOTS

REPETITION: SOME STUDENT HIGHLIGHTS

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