Thinking of Recovery, Let's Plan a Family Outing

Daily pills to help students (and families) organize their study in Covid-19 times, when almost one billion children have seen their schools close. Signed by Marcello Bramati and Lorenzo Sanna, deans and teachers at Faes High schools in Milan. As reported by Time magazine, they are teaching online during the lockdown, in an ongoing experiment in remote learning. Every morning at 8.30 a.m., their advice, tips and good practices for students of all ages.

What's the first thing you are going to do when you'll be able to go out? With this headline, many newspapers try to add the first glimmers of rebirth to the sad balance of present days. The same questions often appears in homeworks and essays.

Let's try to answer it, planning a first family outing together. Field trip: a word of school and family language that has been forgotten or added to the list of sore points.

The school trip has been cancelled or postponed, but in fact it has vanished, like all school activities. In this period of forced isolation, relationships, everyday life and exceptional moments have disappeared. Even worse, laughter, fears and emotions have been taken out of classrooms, desks and corridors and have been confined to the screen.

So, let's reclaim our field trips and our future. Let's broaden our horizons beyond our doorstep and push ourselves further, but not too far. We'd better stay in our local area. Smartphones in hand, geography books and art history manuals on the desk, let's make our regions, now so painfully suffering, a joy and discovery field.

Let's imagine a walk in the mountains, the sun's warmth on the shore of a lake, the sea in the background. But also a castle visit, a park getaway, walls to climb... A short distance outing, but with the excitement of a new trip.

The students will happily run to friends and to boyfriends or girlfriends, to recover everything that is now suspended. But there is also a family outing to plan, a liberation to share. Before we return, in part, to separate.