Today is the start of a new school year for the students in the district where I live, including my son.
The usual trappings of the beginning of the year are somewhat lost right now. No new backpack—he doesn’t need to carry books from one class to another. No school clothes—he can wear the same things he’s been wearing for months (except that he seems to have grown three inches this summer.)
Maybe more to the point, the feeling of a new school year is kinda absent. Every year when I was a student, the start of school felt like a shift in the light, a quickening of energy, a turning of my attention from summer activities to looking forward to seeing friends, getting class schedules, wondering what this teacher or that subject had in store.
Obviously, some of that is still happening. My son got his class schedule, and he’s anticipating the new school and new teachers. But instead of walking onto the campus of the high school for the first time, getting to know the halls and the rooms and the sounds, making it his own, he’ll be in the same place we’ve all been since March—our house.
How can we create the container of a new experience in a familiar place? This is relevant to me because of my son, but it also applies to people starting new jobs virtually, or onboarding to new roles or teams. What are the important elements of starting something unfamiliar that we can imagine in a new and creative way for this different time? No backpack, no new hallways…what can we do instead?
