The Best Paragraph I've Read:

"The cost of keeping children out of classrooms is high, educationally and socially. Lost instructional time is hard to recapture; some high-school students may drop out. Schools provide meals, social services, and, for many students, a safe haven, and they allow parents to go to work."

This paragraph comes from the New Yorker in an essay titled: The Complex Question of Reopening Schools.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/01/the-complex-question-of-reopening-schools

Zac and Don discuss many of the issues surrounding whether schools can safely reopen in fall.  Their discussion includes the challenges of teaching children at home, the multiple roles that schools serve for their communities, and the growing desire for people to get back to a sense of normal - which means sending their kids back to school.

Another Best Paragraph I've Read:

"Teachers ask kids to do a lot to build this environment. Teachers ask kids to pick up the new handout on the way in, get the old handout from yesterday, get an extra if you lost it or if you were absent, get out your pencil, get an extra pencil off my desk if you need one, find your seat, and sit down on your seat that several other students have already sat on. We ask them to find a partner, find a new partner, go to the corner of the room that corresponds with the character you most agree with, film a video outside, form a circle, two circles, now switch. We ask them to get a Chromebook from the class’s Chromecart that four classes have already touched that day. They’ll need to line up to put away the Chromebooks and make sure to plug them in. Sometimes they need to go to the back and get the markers, crayons, paintbrushes, tissues, paper towels, bandages (so many bandages), and textbooks, and they’ll do this a dozen times in a class period. As they weave in between the desks, they nudge and bump their peers and step on their backpacks, breathing one another’s air and smelling one another’s stink."

This paragraph comes from an essay by Harley Litzelman titled:  We Cannot Return to Campus this Fall.

https://thebolditalic.com/we-cannot-return-to-campus-this-fall-1ad91b8a65e0

Zac and Don then incorporate Mr. Litzelman's ideas into the second half of their conversation.  This part of the discussion includes the practices of the modern day teacher and how they could be impacted with social distancing, school budgets, different models that schools could follow in the fall, and whether students themselves should have a say in whether they have to return to the classroom.