The One About Storytelling and Staying Together

Dear Sandy Spring Friends School Families,

I hope that everyone is doing well.

Over for the past few weeks, we have been bracing for a storm. Except that it hasn't really felt like "bracing." We've been too busy reinventing how school works, how to best teach and learn and how to stay connected when we are suddenly atomized. 

Looking back, on March 13, we called for Sandy Spring Friends School to have the first of two "snow days" so that faculty could move into full virtual classroom mode.  We went virtual on Tuesday, March 17, and finished the week pushing our technology and our brains to new heights in order to deliver a curriculum to students across 15 (different) years of development. We have received a good deal of positive feedback, and we continue to welcome constructive criticism that will allow us to understand and deliver "what better looks like."

And then we had Spring Break, which didn't, really, feel all that much like what we imagine Spring Break to feel like.  Unless your idea of Spring Break is to go into a Panic Room and eat saltine crackers and wait for the threat to leave (I didn't really do that!).

Our niece who lives in Brooklyn called to ask if she could self-quarantine at our cottage at Broadkill Beach in Delaware. This is the same person who finagled two trips to Iraq to report on how the war has upended the lives of local women. No faint of heart, she. Her abandoning Brooklyn suggests to me that we (by we, I mean our country) are on the verge of stepping into the steeper part of the coronavirus curve. The curve we are doing all we can to flatten.  

When we first began the process to go from physical school to virtual school it felt, at least a little, like a fire drill.  I have always admired how good SSFS is at our fire drills.  When it comes to fire drills, we are quick, quiet, and respectful. Then again, our fire drills happen during daylight hours; there is no smoke, no confusion, nothing out of the ordinary. 

Over the next several weeks, we may feel we have moved from participating in a drill to being part of something that we are not in control of. 

Preparing for this next stage, we can take some solace in knowing that it is the one that we must complete in order to move on to the next one which is the one where the risk begins to decline, and we can begin to plan for our lives to return to normal. 

But first, we have the tough climbing which calls for us not only to alter our daily schedule, limit our trips to the store, check in with siblings and college roommates, and wipe down commonly-used surfaces. We also find that living through a pandemic alters some of the most basic ideas we have about who we are, what we value and, even, how we define a life well lived.  There can be some significant upside to this part of it. 

My grandmother was a good story teller. When we were little and my grandparents would visit for several days, she would tell us long bedtime stories which would be spread over successive nights. Each night the story ended like a chapter of a good novel, leaving us wanting to hear more but having to wait for the next bed time to learn what happened next. One story took place in Europe in the late 1300's. It was about a group of traveling troubadours: musicians, actors, and story tellers that went from place to place singing and entertaining. Each year, the entire village would look forward to their arrival and turn out when they came. One year, the troubadours brought a different kind of news everywhere they went. As the black plague spread, with great courage they took it upon themselves to go to every city, town and village to tell people that something terrible was happening and that they should prepare themselves. As you might imagine, these brave story tellers were, unbeknownst to them, the ones spreading the plague everywhere they went.

Even though this is a "not-what-to-do" story, I recall it now as we hunker down in self isolation and find new ways to sing to one another, tell spell-binding stories, and otherwise entertain in ways that remind us of our basic courage, our inclination to do good and our wish that we are all together again soon.