Write a essay about
your plan after the university reopen. 200 word
Answers
Answer:
In the midst of the COVID-19 breakout, many educational institutions have shuttered their physical plants; some have turned to online learning as a means of educational delivery. As of the end of March, more than 1,100 colleges and universities have shuttered, impacting some 14 million students. It was also estimated that 70 percent of public and private K-12 schools had closed, affecting more than 55 million children. And those data do not include the closure numbers for nursery schools and daycare centers.
Some of these institutions have set dates for reopening, albeit recognizing that this is a moving target. Others have closed for this academic year, meaning they plan to reopen in fall 2020. Whether institutions reopen sooner rather than later, we need to plan for these reopenings rather than just flipping the switch and expecting we can return to where we were pre-pandemic. Would that it were that simple.
Reopening Wisely
Many things need to take place prior to reopening successfully, and by that I mean more than opening a locked door. I mean returning in ways that enable students of all ages and at all stages to continue their educational progress successfully, both educationally and psychosocially. And therein lies the rub. What has happened between closure and reopening -- the Corona Gap is how I will term it -- has had profound effects on students and educators, and those impacts differ from community to community, family to family, student to student. The Corona Gap has been traumatic for many people; it has disrupted our lives in innumerable ways, some anticipated and some unanticipated.
I appreciate there are naysayers who will chant, no need to coddle; this virus situation isn’t that bad; buck up and be tough. I’m sorry, but that posture seems totally out of touch with the realities of the moment. It is not coddling or being a snowflake to reflect wisely on how to respond to a traumatic moment in our nation and in the lives of our students, faculty and staff.
Now, we have some experience with reopening schools postdisaster. With the abundance of school shootings and natural disasters, we have a repertoire of strategies and real-life experiences on which to draw. I helped a law school reopen post-Sept. 11, and that wasn’t easy. We wrote about it; we had symposia; we had therapists on-site for weeks.
The Corona Gap
But the Corona Gap is different in one huge respect: people have been quarantined and have not been readily available in the flesh to communicate, share, engage and touch those affected by the virus or the threat of the virus. Pause for a moment and think about all the scenes of communities after a school shooting: they have come together for memorials and vigils; there have been abundant hugs shared. Think about the activism generated after the Parkland shooting. Some of us remember Kent State.
The Corona Gap has involved a deprivation of the primary strategy for overcoming trauma: connectedness, touch, reciprocity, human engagement. Gone.
The list of strategies for reopening is long, but we need to be reflecting now especially on three central things.
The key word here is now. By listing them and describing them, it is my hope that we will move away from college and school reopenings with a flip-the-switch mentality and move to a vastly more thoughtful and nuanced approach that does justice to the impact of the closure on students, educators, parents/caregivers and communities. It is not too soon to begin our thinking about reopenings.
Three Strategies
Strategy One: We need to be working with students now during the Corona Gap in ways that open their pathways to learning and enable them to express how they are feeling about the quarantine and the stay-in-place orders that surround us. In this gap period, we must find new ways in which to remain connected, a central feature of trauma responsiveness. By doing this now, we ease the re-entry back into college or school as and when these institutions reopen. We need to be aware and respond to the psychological price of the Corona Gap.
There is no single way this can be achieved. We can do it through a variety of online and off-line activities, recognizing that what is beneficial for one community may not work in another. Consider these examples.