One Year Later
A year ago this week, we chose to move our school online as a virus was spreading across the country and within our city. At the time, we didn’t know that we would be at this for at least another 12 months, that certain terms and phrases (Magnus, quarantine, Zoom, hybrid learning, abundance of caution) were going to become commonplace, that 2020 would be an annus horriblis beyond all imagination.
A global pandemic is a dreadful thing, and with well over a half a million of our friends, family, and fellow citizens lost, it would be both crass and myopic to suggest that Browning’s collective experience has been unduly challenging. At the same time, it’s honest to note that the pandemic has taken a toll on all of us—and a completely unfair, cruel toll on some of us. Just as we should not forget the suffering the past year has brought (and continues to bring) to our world and our nation, we should not pretend that this has not been a traumatic period for virtually everyone in our community. The past year has been full of hard moments: Ongoing safety and health concerns, frustration with restrictions and modified experiences, dashed hopes and heightened stress. The anxiety and fatigue of the pandemic has landed on all of us, kids and adults alike, in unanticipated ways that we are still trying to understand and overcome.
But if this has been a time of difficulty, it has also been a time of incredible resilience and, I believe, accomplishment. We have been denied so much of the freedom and ritual that gives a typical school year its form and expression, yet we have found ways to cultivate meaning and find success in strained circumstances. For all that has changed, some vital qualities have remained decidedly the same: Our faculty and staff are still applying all of their learning, experience, and love to be the best intellectual and ethical models for their students that they can, whether they are in-person or online; our boys are still showing up (literally and figuratively) to find joy in new ideas, in novel ways of expressing themselves, and—most always and most obviously—in connecting with one another, even when limited by pods, masks, and distance; and our families continue to give us patience, flexibility, and trust as they’ve had to make sense of how to interact not just with our school, but with the very idea of school in such fraught, ambiguous conditions. In these crucial ways, Browning’s fundamentals have not only sustained it, but kept it a place of presence and purpose in a decidedly uncertain time.
“It has been a terrible year that has revealed, again, that Browning is a terrific place. Thank you to all of our students, families, faculty, for sharing in this, together, and for giving us every reason to believe in the promise of what’s to come.”
Again, we dare not romanticize this period; indeed, it would profane all the loss, hurt, and frustration that have marked community life over the past year. No one would wish to endure an episode like this again, and all of us would do most anything to hasten its departure. We want, we need, the conditions of learning and loving that we once knew. They are coming, and when they arrive, we will be ready to take advantage of them not so much because we were empty in their absence, but because we found ways to be strong in the interim.
As we entered school in September, there was much that we did not know. We could not have counted on Browning being a place that would not close down over the next six months—but we kept our boys and adults safe and healthy through mitigation, testing, and cooperation. We could not have been certain that technology would not usurp the place of care—but we found connection in Halloween parades, science labs, ping-pong matches, coffeehouses, spirit weeks and advisories. We could not have foreseen all the challenges that we would face—but we made our way to March by dint of love, perseverance, forgiveness, and hope. It has been a terrible year that has revealed, again, that Browning is a terrific place. Thank you to all of our students, families, faculty, staff, and administrators for sharing in this, together, and for giving us every reason to believe in the promise of what’s to come.