This post is for all the worried teachers who are posting in various groups, talking about the lack of learning that will be part of the landscape of 2020. Yes, it’s a mess. Some schools had time to prepare packets and work for home. Some did not. Some schools have functional one-to-one device set-ups that have enabled them to shift easily to working remotely with Google classroom. Others simply never had the money to hand out all those Chromebooks to go home. Many students in those financially-challenged districts may live without wi-fi or easy internet access. The old option of sitting in a coffee shop no longer works within Illinois and other states. Those shops are closed.

(Cheat: Although odds are you can park near that coffee shop and use their wi-fi. Having taught in a poor district, I know that some kids across America have been finishing their homework by parking near their school or a handy wi-fi site, and working in the car.)

So what to do? Obviously teachers must follow administrative directives. If you have to keep posting to Google Classroom or whatever alternative you are using, post away. If you must call homes, then make the calls. If admin has stated that school is effectively closed due to the requirement to meet IEPs that cannot be met because the students in question cannot manage remote learning — well, then. You are closed. Accept this fact. The plan where no student is educated because a small group of students cannot be educated off campus has many teachers emoting on social media right now. Like the testing penalties from No Child Behind, this strategy makes little sense and is obviously producing less learning than alternatives. But the legal rationale behind that decision is understandable. Could the district be sued for not meeting its obligations? Probably. This is America. Anybody can sue anybody. A man on “The People’s Court” yesterday was suing the guy his dog had bitten, I think for defaming the dog or something. The district is probably safe from legal “remedies” if it shuts the virtual doors, however.

A tsunami has swept across U.S. education in the last few weeks. Congratulations to all the teachers and parents who are making this stunning shift in routine work somehow. But if it’s not working well, if strange edicts from admin or lack of connectivity are confounding your best efforts, I suggest making a chocolate cake or pulling out the Monopoly game in the closet. Let it go.

I am so sympathetic. When a man or woman has spent years getting kids ready for their next learning adventure, not being able to fulfill that mission can be heartrending. You want all your kids to walk into fifth grade or trigonometry with confidence. But these are wild times and we will have to trust next year’s teachers to patch the holes left in 2020’s knowledge. I have faith that our kids will navigate next year’s challenges.

Eduhonesty: I had mono and relapsed when I was in my first year of high school. That exhaustion and low-grade fever ate up the first half of my freshman experience, but eluded diagnosis until mid-December. The gym teacher glared at me as I sat out swimming, and other teachers seemed absolutely unsympathetic. The only expression of concern I ever got came from a geometry teacher who overheard me telling a friend when they were testing me for rheumatic fever. I was ninety-nine point eight degrees tired enough to walk into a wall, and pale as my notebook paper, but those teachers had never seen me before. The point of this story is I effectively lost the first half of that year. I went home and went straight to sleep. I could not concentrate in class. But I came back. I graduated high in my class and went on to get an M.A. in Secondary Education and a Masters in Business and Public Management.

Our kids will come back from this fractured year. I hope not too many educational leaders will prove stupid enough to worry about the year’s decline in test scores — they’d better decline this year. If they don’t decline, U.S. educational leaders should return control of the classroom to teachers immediately, since the Common Core or latest set of standards and those scripted lesson plans would be shown to be an abysmal failure in light of that result. I hope all those tests will be cancelled.

But our kids will come back. They will fill in the holes they missed, at least the ones they require to move on with their educations. And if they are hazy about the Battle of Shiloh, Siri or Google can fill in the gaps.

It’s going to be awful, but it’s going to be O.K.