Everything Old is New Again

by Rob Kahn

Spring 2019

A 19th century French critic once famously observed “the more things change, the more they remain the same!” Intended as a somewhat cynical observation at the time, the epigram has relevance for Landmark’s adjustment to a pandemic. It seemed to many in mid-March 2020 that everything had changed. Human connection was most central to our lives as educators and colleagues, yet overnight it became dangerous to connect. As we have adapted to our new realities, some expectations, structures, and routines of Landmark Elementary•Middle School (EMS) have mutated from their original forms, with a COVID-19 twist.

Visiting Landmark from the Comfort of Your Couch

Pre-pandemic, EMS hosted monthly tours and Informational Visits on campus for prospective students and their families. EMS students volunteered to be panelists at Morning Meeting, sat on stage in the Meeting Room, and answered questions from prospective families. Now, those same events are once again routine: admission representatives host parents on a Google Meet, Landmark students “drop in” on their break time either from home or from a socially distanced location on campus, and the overall effect is exactly as it was intended to be: informative, personal, and reflective of the new experience of being a Landmark student. Visitors (and faculty!) are amazed at the comfort level and presence of our students in a remote mode.

Good Morning Elementary•Middle School

The school day once began with Morning Meeting, a tradition that goes back decades. Eleven months into the pandemic, the prospect of 50 elementary students, 115 middle schoolers, deans, campus heads, teachers, counselors all in the same space is...horrifying? Definitely not advisable from a public-health standpoint. School assemblies everywhere have largely been discontinued, but not at Landmark. As the school day has built back a replica of former years, protocols for Morning Meeting are alive and well once again. Faculty volunteers have taken turns convening a link at 7:40 a.m. each day, as elementary or middle school students join their respective Google Meets. Prior to the meeting beginning, friendly chatting is again happening with social conventions in place including hand gestures, the chat function, mute buttons—modifications of in-person connections. Once the meeting starts, students watch from their homes or from a hybrid classroom on mute except for people who are speaking, and each day’s meeting consists of content, announcements, interviews. In short, very much a remote adaptation of the Morning Meeting.

Masks and social distancing are par for the course on Landmark's campuses— even outdoors.

Still Landmark

The altered landscape in other ways is stark. At any given time, so much of the school business has been moved to the cloud. Gone are the jostling crowds in narrow two-way corridors, diners jockeying for position around salad bars, crowded faculty workspaces, and in-person training sessions. Milkbreak and lunch remain, with the multicolored social distancing dots and the plexiglass shields to remind us all of what cannot be seen. Mentoring and supervisory observations are done virtually in many cases due to space constraints. Classroom teachers have adapted beautifully to smaller classes and are making the adjusted environment—with one-way traffic, face masks, social distancing, and cleaning protocols—work. But tutoring, paradoxically, is done remotely because the need for close 1:1 instruction with a focus on faces, mouths, and eyes cannot be done in a mask, and perhaps also because the reflexive need to share and explain in close proximity is too tempting. Until the pandemic ends, the days of a student and tutor sitting side-by-side in a tutorial station have given way to a virtual reality.