There’s no short supply of reflection during this unprecedented time: Reflecting on the things we miss as we socially distance ourselves. Reflecting on the things we can live without as we find ourselves potentially home for a longer streak than we’ve ever been before. Finally, reflecting on what’s most important in life.

I’m hopeful that as educators we can emerge from this virtual learning experience with some new ideas that we can apply to our classrooms — and maybe, if we’re lucky, apply to school on the whole.

Here are a few that strike me, in no particular order:

Our daily schedule is a relic (or worse)

The daily schedule of a high school student is absurd. I say this knowing a couple of things: 1) it’s always been this way and 2) no one would ever put up with that kind of schedule outside of schools.

How would you like to have seven different meetings a day with seven different bosses who expected you to work on seven different projects with seven different deadlines while also encouraging you to participate on the company team (extracurricular) and take on a second job (part-time work builds character)?

Would it sweeten the deal if I told you you could have five minutes between each meeting and somewhere in the neighborhood of 23.5-27.75 minutes to enjoy lunch with your friends?

I’m being a little facetious, but we all know the answer: no one would put up with this. Yet that’s the system we’ve created and stuck to like it’s the best choice.

Don’t even get me started with teenagers and sleep. They need it. We take it from them. Something doesn’t seem right about that.

Now we’re in a completely different world.

Can we emerge from this with a clearer understanding that the schedule we’ve concocted for our students is at best a relic, at worst wildly detrimental to fostering a passion for learning, knowledge, curiosity, creativity, and problem-solving?

I hope so.

Communication isn’t as easy as we think it is

When a student misses some key point of instruction, I’ll always feel like it was my fault. In virtual learning, it’s even harder to get the right message across. Well, let me rephrase that: It’s harder to be concise and get the information from teacher to student.

Students have an unpredictable array of devices and those devices hold various means to communicate. We expect them to check their email with flawless execution yet who among us hasn’t lost an email in the shuffle. Add to this the fact that they’re juggling a range of emotions and anxieties about the world that are beyond their capacity to control or even comprehend.

Meanwhile, if we’re learning anything from this virtual learning experience I hope it’s that communication isn’t always as easy as we think it is.

Even when we see students daily, there’s a chance for our message to get lost in the noise, and rightfully so. Do you remember the schedule I described above?

I hope we can emerge from virtual learning with more grace in communication, more capacity to provide opportunities to re-do work, and more understanding that what we’re expecting is but one sliver of the students’ life.

Frequent well-being checks should be the norm

I imagine we’re all making a point to see how students are feeling during this crisis. I know I am.

I don’t have anything else to add except student well-being and mental health should be closer to the top of the list of priorities when this is over.