The Official Word

The first week of January I bought a thermometer for every one of my classrooms. Thanks to one of my parents. She asked, “Are you checking the children’s temperature? You’ve heard what’s happening haven’t you?” It takes me a moment to think if I know what she’s talking about. “What? No. What do you mean?” It seems like I should know. She tells me, “The flu. There’s a really bad flu in China.” That seemed vaguely familiar, and oh yes I did hear something about that and I say, “Oh yeah, I did hear about that.” She has an expression that looks almost like panic on her face, fear, like this isn’t the ordinary flu. And like she’s wondering why I’m not taking precautionary measures she asks once, but with great insistence, “Can you check the children’s temperature?” The look on her face. “I can have the nurse check temperatures,” I say. No reason why not.

The last week of January I woke up to a message from my friend Cathy. “Hey, are you guys okay with this virus thingy?” By this time the nurse has convinced me that she needs her thermometer back, so I’ve bought one for each of my classrooms. 7:03 am. “Yeah, checking everybody’s temperature every day.” Cathy’s been planning on relocating to Vietnam for months but now she’s thinking about it again. “I hope they can contain it. We may have to wait a bit before we come over now.” I’m still thinking this is far away. I write back, “Thousands of cases, not good. Bright side though, less than 100 deaths right? Out of the whole world?”

Then the world got a little smaller. 8:40 am. I learned that the virus was a bit closer to home. I wrote to Cathy. “Wow. Might change my tune. Confirmed case at the Phoenix Hotel, 1 km from the school.” This was January 26th, the fourth confirmed case in Malaysia, which makes sense. This is supposed to be the destination for the upwardly mobile Chinese middle class, the ones who Country Garden hopes will make Forest City the most densely populated area in the world in 30 years. That mobility and the dream of the Malaysia My Second Home (mm2h) program brought the “virus thingy” right to one of the first places on the map here, built just after the island itself and the Sales Gallery, the five-star Forest City Phoenix International Marina Hotel.

We were still on break for Chinese New Year but the leadership team met that afternoon. When it was clear where this was headed, I sent Cathy a note. 1:30 pm. “I’m in a meeting with the leadership team right now. We’re shutting down school next week. Closing the campus to outside visitors.” And that’s how it began. Instead of returning from break, we spent the week figuring out what to do about the coronavirus. We consulted with International SOS, and they supported us in closing the school. They saw it as a conservative decision based on the information we had at the time but what were they going to say? We were being too careful? We stopped allowing deliveries. Off-campus staff were asked to work from home unless requested by their supervisor. Everyone else was to report to work after breakfast on Monday as we began the process of figuring out how to support students at home, using systems we already had in place for online learning.

The school closure was announced on Sunday, the same day the first case was reported in Forest City. I was only too ready to regroup and use the time as an opportunity to do some training that we hadn’t had time to do during staff orientation at the beginning of the year. That wasn’t the kind of regrouping my staff had in mind. I had at first asked for my whole team to be there on Monday morning, including the off-campus staff. When that didn’t go over so well with the residential faculty, I backed off on that and told the off-campus staff to be available in case they were needed. I would call to let them know what to do when I knew more.

The early childhood school faculty met in my office that morning. Each one of them was wearing a surgical mask. The message was clear. They were taking this seriously and I didn’t understand what needed to be done. Obviously. I wasn’t even wearing a mask. The pastries and fruit I had so blithely offered to bring as a comforting treat in my email were left mostly untouched. They were in solidarity over the absurdity of my acting like this was going to be a chance for us to engage in a conversation about developing a culture focused on responsive interactions when I hadn’t even checked in with them about how they were feeling, or what they were thinking our next steps should be.

Either in that meeting or in an email exchange the night before my faculty had pointed out what must have been the hundredth “if..then..” I had heard in 24 hours. If the Head of School had instructed off-campus faculty to work from home unless requested otherwise by their supervisor, then …. There was no then. The “then” for them was just no. It made no sense to have anyone who didn’t live here on campus. It didn’t matter that there were only four cases in all of Malaysia. It didn’t matter that our off-campus staff had as much chance of coming in contact with one of those people as they did. The official word was no people from outside the gate allowed inside.

We cleaned and sanitized everything. We increased the frequency of our cleaning and sanitation, door knobs twice a day. We bought masks. The leadership team read what epidemiologists and medical experts had to say about how the virus was spread and talked about what we were going to do. We sat at the conference table and made sense of things, talked about what things meant and the consistency of the logic in what we would decide upon. In a group of 7 or 8 we had easily twice that many changes of position and “on the other hands” in an hour. More. While what we were going to do shifted from one extreme to the other on every aspect of our plan, our Head of School entertained every point of view. And then it was decided. We were going to reopen.

I cannot tell you the final logic that went into that decision. I can tell you that it didn’t make sense to everyone, and the measures we took based on the best information we had available to us were not enough for anyone. What about having everyone wear a mask? Why not allow deliveries? We were saying it was safe here, and that we were taking every reasonable precaution but what we know about this virus is that it is not reasonable. That’s what’s so terrifying. In logic, we can prove that something is possible, but we can’t prove that something is impossible. We just don’t know. That uncertainty is an invisible truth embedded in every public policy. There is always a chance that something can happen that is beyond our control.

The thermometers I had bought so each of my teachers could have one for their own class were requisitioned for the tables set up as checkpoints at the steps leading to the Elementary and Upper School buildings. If you don’t have to be symptomatic to shed the virus, what is the point of taking temperatures? Well, it’s not going to hurt. It’s not going to hurt to wash our hands. And while we were not requiring our students or faculty to wear masks we provided them. There is always going to be a possibility that anything we do will be better than doing nothing.

I spent the better part of a parent meeting listening to a dad explain how our whole school needed to require for everyone to wear a mask. Listening to his reasons, I didn’t agree with him. But I still didn’t have a good reason not to wear a mask myself. I didn’t believe my wearing a mask was going to prevent the spread of the virus, but I also didn’t think it was going to hurt anyone if I did. I told him I would wear a mask. Until I thought of a better way to show that I respected the beliefs of those who thought differently about this than I did by my daily actions. This was weeks after the early childhood school faculty had stopped wearing their masks. Now this was solidarity of another type, I am not sure how absurd. 

None of our Kindergartners were wearing a mask that day. The next day, almost half of them were. All children of parents who attended that meeting where I said I would wear a mask. I had a moment where I worried that my willingness to adopt a practice that meant something more than I had intended might have been sending the wrong message. They wanted me to be an example and I had agreed, but only because I didn’t see what harm it could do. I was thinking of Gandhi’s talisman, and it seemed to pass the test, but whose side was I on now? Was I on a side?

Our actions are a semblance of our reasons for them. People interpret the official act with a logic that moves forward without nuance or qualifiers. Whatever the reasons for an action might be, its meaning becomes what others make of it. I wore the mask the whole week, even when I was working alone in my office, even after two of the dads who had their children start wearing masks visited me there to explain that it wasn’t doing any good for me to wear the mask in my office by myself. Until I understood how to use the awareness I had gained by wearing the mask to change my behavior without unwittingly starting a political movement. While I disagreed with them about the need to wear a mask, I respected their beliefs and agreed that we needed to do whatever we could to protect our students. It was a week before the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak was a global pandemic.

The official word is like any other word really, an approximation, a best guess. It doesn’t matter what the word is so much as what it leaves room for. Does it provide room for dialogue about personal and collective responsibility? I’ve said before that what makes it into the books is only part of the story. What we see in the news is even less. Fonts and symbols, the contrast of figure and ground that allows us to discriminate and recognize patterns. The meaning we make of the printed word is interpretation of what is hidden in the spaces between the words. Nobody really knows if what gets printed today will turn out to be true tomorrow, but critical distance will allow us to see the truth was always there if we knew where to look. The thing about telling our children the truth right now is that we don’t really know where to look.

The question becomes not so much what do we tell the children, as how do we teach them to listen. Who do we tell them they can trust? Who will keep them safe? Us? Their teachers? The government? If your child tells you their teacher said something that you think is right or wrong, what does that have to do with them as a learner? Do you tell them that’s right, that’s wrong? Wear a mask, wash your hands sure. If that's what it takes to stop a deadly virus. As a community though, how do we teach our students to listen without prejudice and trust the power they have to transform their fear, persist through challenges, and take responsibility for their actions?

A student may not see the point in doing what their teacher says, or they may think they shouldn’t have to do it unless they can first be convinced there is a good reason. While that may be right, the community recognizes the teacher knows some things the student doesn’t know yet and that is why we should not tell our children whether or not we think the teacher is right or wrong. It’s up to them. It’s their interpretation that matters. Whatever the parents and the teachers are thinking is incidental on some level. The real learning happens when the student recognizes that they don’t know something, but they are willing to find out.

There is wisdom in asking a child for answers, asking what they think about their problems without offering any solutions, or giving any indication if you happen to approve or disapprove of what their teacher or the school says. The focus should be on the student’s capacity to persist in making an effort to fulfill their self-identified responsibilities, not whether the world can be trusted. On a certain level, being a grown up means that you are not at liberty to explain the logic of your actions. There are no excuses, and no explanations are allowed. Just your best guess, the official word, and your continued solidarity in the seemingly absurd.