Where’s the Remote?
It’s time to reintroduce experiences long missing from the childhoods of those who are growing up these days behind flat blue screens that don’t know how to give a high five, keyboards that don’t know how to share a pb&j, software that doesn’t know how to push a swing or see stories in the clouds. Why not re-brand remote learning?
It’s time to get the children outside — sitting in the dirt, rolling in the grass, spying for grasshoppers, tracking birds at dawn and dusk, studying spring melt tumbling over river rocks, the sound of peeling bark, animal languages, rabbit trails.
It’s time to read library books under the shade of an old oak, to make a picnic in a meadow, to dig under the surface and look for worms. And what about a reintroduction to night, tracking the moon across the sky, learning its phases by looking, listening for creatures who move through the darkness, writing poems to the stars.
I grieve for the children who cannot see an unbroken horizon, a stretch of a seashore, the color of twilight. How can we depend on anyone to lead us into the future if they do not learn to live as friends more than consumers of what this gracious world provides?
REMOTE
Change platforms
from cable to clouds,
blue screen to wide horizon,
American Idol to hummingbird jazz,
Just Added to Milky Way.
Live, fresh episodes
playing
now.
