A world ended since the last time I updated this blog.

After recovering from the flu, I spent February reflecting in a different medium: tiny zines. Then, suddenly, in March, everything about life that was familiar suddenly shattered.

On Wednesday, I was at the nearly-empty Met Museum with Art History; on Thursday, as both the Met and ALC-NYC decided we would close our spaces temporarily, I made my first Covid-19 zine; on Friday the 13th of March I began zoom school while sheltering in place in my home in Brooklyn.

We never went back. The end of the year came and went - we found new ways to celebrate, virtually, when we could not gather to say our goodbyes. It’s August now, and the virus is still raging across the US, though surges of new cases have slowed in New York. Across the country, there is a terrible debate about sending children and teachers back to school - how many lives are worth losing to return to a sense of normalcy? Some, seems to be the answer. Whatever the economy requires. It fills me with rage.

In these times, I’m more grateful to be an ALC facilitator than ever; even in March, with little planning and even less practice, we jumped into online community and thrived at the center of a global pandemic. Art History, instead of wandering the halls of the Met like we’d planned, got really into shared-screen doodles and invented a game called Guess! That! Deity! The D&D crew grew online, completed their mission, saved the multiverse. Anatomy and Physiology watched all 44 Crash Course videos about the human body. I continued making tiny zines at a Friday afternoon offering that proved wildly popular. I figured out how to teach crochet virtually and also started an offering called Art Jam - an hour-and-a-half block on zoom to make art and talk about whatever was on our minds - where I painted a self-portrait, complete with face mask, while talking to whichever kids showed up about art-making, yes, but also pandemic, the movement for Black Lives, transphobic authors and queer Harry Potter fanficton, pros and cons of conventional high schooling, feelings about family structures, anime recommendations, science fiction. I spent hours just talking to kids online, listening to them talk, witnessing their worlds, trying to find places to play together, to make meaning, to practice community.

Since the school year ended in June, I have been resting and grieving and reading and writing and protesting and quarantining and educating myself and making art, preparing myself for the year ahead. In that time Abby has worked tirelessly to keep up with shifting science, unreliable sources, and risk profiles and come up with a plan for next year that prioritizes the health and safety of the whole community.

My mother is a conventional school teacher of almost 30 years, who needs to teach one more year before she can retire; her school district (in a mostly white, wealthy suburb of NYC) plans to send everyone - teachers and children - back to school on the first day. We were talking about the magical thinking that underlies that plan when she said to me you have the best job in education right now and I realized she’s right.

I feel deeply proud of the ways we at ALC-NYC continue to rise to the challenge of this time. I’m proud of how we show up in our commitment to keeping kids and families safe, to helping them navigate this traumatic moment while still prioritizing joy and curiosity and play. Play matters, here at the end of a familiar world, because it indicates that a child feels safe enough to engage their creative thinking, to practice imagination. When I read the news, I still feel afraid about our future, but when I play with children I have hope. We can imagine a different world, if we practice imagination together.