When I was in high school, I had a calculus teacher who would sometimes disparage some of his fixed-mindset colleagues. “In her lesson plans, there’s a week-long gap at the end of November,” he’d say. “It just says ‘No School — Kennedy was shot.'”

Of course, he was exaggerating. This was 25 years after the Kennedy assassination. His point was that some teachers seem to be unable to adjust to the changing needs of their students, or evolving best practices of instruction. I don’t remember why my math teacher was talking about this. Due to a schedule quirk, our class had 7 more minutes than the other class periods, and he’d often go on non-mathematical tangents because he had extra time with us. But there are career-defining, world-changing moments that come along once a generation or so. My parents remember Kennedy. My generation remembers Challenger. Everyone remembers 9/11. And, there was a pandemic.

It’s been six years since those 16 days in 2020 when our world changed. For me, it started on Thursday, February 26, when all of my social media spheres converged. Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, and the state tech listserv all started talking about it at the same time. Nancy Messonnier, a director at the CDC, was in a press briefing earlier that week when she said, “you should ask your children’s schools about their plans for school dismissals or school closures.” The schools had no idea what she was talking about. The state department of education didn’t know this was coming. But you can bet that it was on our radar by the end of the week. So what IS our plan for school dismissals or school closures?

It was hard to get traction at first. The idea that we would close all schools for a virus was ridiculous. The possibility that schools would remain closed for more than a few days was unthinkable. This is tin foil hat stuff. We don’t do that. The conversations among state edtech leaders centered around things like state testing windows being extended, or how to sanitize the devices when kids come back to school after spring break. But the ones who were paying attention — the ones reading between the lines of the press conferences — knew even then that we were in for the long haul. The people listening to the scientists rather than the politicians knew the score. There was no cure. There was no vaccine. The only thing we could do was try to not get the virus. And that meant isolation. For everyone. For months.

There are things I can say now that I couldn’t say then. It was a horrible time. The stress was unbelievable. The uncertainty was unbearable. People were dying. But it was also exciting. We have an impossible challenge. We have a network of people who have been preparing for this for their whole careers. There were no expectations to succeed. We can save the day. And from an educational technology perspective, it couldn’t have come at a better time.

By early 2020, I had spent eight years focused on next generation learning in my school. That started with conversations among teachers, parents, and school leaders about what we wanted school to be in the 21st century. We outlined the role technology could play in teaching and learning. We enlisted instructional coaches and built a center for innovation that physically brought technology and learning together in a shared professional learning center. We created a plan to provide a device for every learner, and intentionally walked through that plan, making sure that the infrastructure, support, and professional development were all in place. At the beginning of 2020, we were midway through our fifth year of 1:1. Middle school and high school students were used to using Chromebooks as an integral part of their school work. Students in the elementary grades had classroom sets of devices in their rooms that they used regularly. Our teachers were comfortable with digital learning tools, and were used to trying new things and pushing boundaries. We had all of the pieces we needed to transform teaching and learning. Covid pushed us off the cliff. But we were ready to soar.

We didn’t soar. We soared like a rock. Everything was harder than we expected it to be.

One of the things I had learned in Africa all those years ago was that we should never be afraid to scrap our plans and start over. The mere process of careful planning prepares us to abandon those plans when we need to, and to adjust our response in the moment to the situations we find ourselves in. The more carefully built our plans were, the more prepared we were to deviate from them. Because we had spent years figuring out digital learning, it was much easier to move away from the things that weren’t working, and to try different approaches to address our evolving challenges. If you have turn-by-turn directions to get to your destination, a single wrong turn means you’re lost. But if you have a conceptual view of the map in your head, you can find an alternate route pretty easily.

When we moved school online, we learned quickly that technology can play an important, integral role in student learning. But student learning is not the most important thing schools do. Public schools are the glue that holds our communities together. We represent a common identity and connection in a hyper-local way. We have our differences. We have our challenges. But we’re all Minutemen. Or Bees. Or Explorers. Or Spartans. Those connections run deep.

The biggest challenge we faced during Covid had nothing to do with learning. It was connecting with and caring for our families. Our kids need adults to listen to them and care about them. Some of our families struggle with food insecurity or other basic needs. Many suffer with physical or mental health challenges. And the stress of that spring added to those needs when our resources were extremely limited. It reminded us that caring for each other is the most important thing we do. It’s more important than teaching kids to read, and teaching kids to read is the most important academic thing we do.

The schools we came back to were different from the ones we left. In my case, that was literally true, because I changed jobs during the shutdown. But even metaphorically, Covid changed us. It made us more flexible. It gave us a greater appreciation of working with a group of students in a classroom. And to a great extent, it tempered the digital enthusiasm that had permeated schools in the twenty-teens. The promise of digital had always been as a complement to classroom instruction. We use technology to improve student engagement. We use it to tailor student learning experiences to address their individual needs. Students use it to collaborate and demonstrate learning in ways that are impractical without it. It was never meant to replace teachers, or to reduce the need for human interaction.

I think we use technology a lot less now than we did before the pandemic. We scaled back the ubiquity of access, removing technology from kindergarten and reverting to cart-based solutions in grades 1-4. We’re more careful about our selection of apps and online resources for students. We’re less likely to embrace blended learning and flipped classroom approaches. We’re not experimenting with technology in the same innovative ways we were a decade ago. That’s probably good. We’ve settled down. We’ve moved beyond the blind enthusiasm. But we’re also less flexible.

Sometimes, I wonder what would happen if we had another pandemic. I’m not so sure that we would be as prepared now as we were then. We don’t have instructional coaches to help our teachers navigate an online reality. We don’t focus professional development on technology. We’ve reduced the availability of devices in our schools, along with the apps and digital resources that our students and teachers use. And we’re less inclined to try new things and experiment with our teaching practices.

But when I look across my office, I see the “Vision of a Minuteman” poster on the wall. That’s our portrait of a graduate, developed during the pandemic to articulate the characteristics that we want our students to leave us with. We want our students to create solutions, embracing the world and skillfully using critical thinking to bring creative solutions to problems. We want them to demonstrate a learner’s mindset, staying curious to maximize opportunities through a willingness to learn, unlearn, and relearn. We want them to embody confidence and empathy, demonstrating an awareness and sensitivity to others’ experiences. We want them to perservere and adapt, working effectively in a climate of ambiguity and changing priorities. We want them to engage with purpose, taking initiative and acting intentionally to benefit the broader community. And we want them to communicate truth to create collective commitment and action.

Those are all of the things that got us through the pandemic. If our students leave with those core competencies, they’ll be prepared for any challenges that come their way. And that’s good, because their generational moment is coming.