What Is Normal Now?

 "Normal is nothing more than a cycle on a washing machine."

-Whoopi Goldberg


For my money, Whoopi Goldberg was at her best in Sister Act, but that's neither here nor there. As we sit here around a year from the first time any of us had any idea what a Covid was or that 19 of them were particularly bad, I think Whoopi's quote is worth contemplating. A week ago, we found out that sports seasons we had all but given up on having are immediately re-instated. Vaccines are rolling out in greater numbers, and we have all had the opportunity to put our name on the list to receive the vaccination we spent much of the last year anticipating as the way out of all this not-normal, but I find myself wondering how much of this not-normal is going to be normal going forward? 

Maybe some of this not-normal is actually really good. I've already had teachers tell me they never want to go back to making hundreds or thousands of copies per week. Pushing everything onto the iPads was a lot of work, and for awhile it felt very anti-normal, but at this point, does going back to the old way of doing homework on physical paper seem all that appealing anymore? I've had more than one person suggest that keeping two lunch periods may not be a terrible idea going forward. It is certainly cleaner and quieter not having all of them crammed in there at once. I had a conversation with a principal yesterday where he said that their students haven't used lockers all year. The teachers were initially very upset by this policy, but after six months of students carrying everything with them an never having an excuse to leave class because they forgot something in their locker, they want to have all of the lockers permanently removed. 

We still have a way to go before we start getting to make a lot of choices about what we want to keep the way it is and what we want to have go back to the way it used to be, but I think it is safe to say at this point that normal is a concept that is very much in a state of transition right now. I encourage you to be thinking about how normal we want normal to be when this is all over.

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