This is one of my favorite Fred Rogers quotes, which is saying a lot, because I am a big fan of Mister Rogers.
I’m not a paramedic, a nurse, or a doctor. I’m not qualified to be in a hospital saving lives, or to be out rescuing people in need of medical attention. Mostly, when tragedies occur, I’m no more equipped to help than the average person. I always do what I can, but it never quite feels like enough, and I always stand in awe of the people out there doing the real work.
In this crisis, though I’m still not in a position to save lives, it seems that my unique and somewhat disjointed set of skills have real value for our current moment. My work over the last decade has mainly been at the confluence of technology and education, and right now, millions of teachers and parents are trying to figure out how to provide real learning opportunities to their students and their children. And if anything is keeping me going right now, it’s that I have been able to put those skills to use to help others find their way in this stressful moment, where the future is unknown and unknowable.
One of my grad school colleagues proposed a volunteer project, and I jumped on that email as soon as I saw it. There are more people working on this than I can even identify, to be honest – grad students, professors, administrators, School of Education leadership – all of them putting in uncounted hours to support K-12 teachers and parents, and provide them with helpful resources and a place to strategize, collaborate, and learn. My role so far has been to build the website: RemoteED.org. This is the combined labor of love of dozens of people from the School of Education at the University at Albany, and I am so grateful that I’ve been able to be a part of this.
I’ve also been able to do live coding lessons through my work, which is giving me a chance to create my own, small homage to the work that Mister Rogers did for children, including me. I try to make everyone watching feel valued and appreciated. I thank them for spending time with me and the team. I tell them what an honor it is to be able to share time with them, and to show them coding projects that I hope we can all enjoy together. And then we create new things in Scratch!
It doesn’t fix the world or heal the sick, but I hope it makes them feel seen and valued. I hope it gives them a distraction when they may be afraid and uncertain. I hope it helps them to see learning as a joyful experience in a hard time.