The Day the Internet Died…

As my colleague entered the classroom, her expression was equal parts exasperated and frustrated.

“Chris, can you give me a hand? I’m having some technical difficulties... A-gain.”

It wasn’t the first time one of our teachers has been in to see me during this year of hybrid-plus teaching. As a part-time tech integration specialist in a middle school, most days are filled with frantic phone calls and not-so-quick “quick questions”. Our staff has encountered numerous technological misfortunes this year- both real and imagined- including a “broken projector” (it was muted), Google Classroom “acting funky” (it was), to no one being in a teacher’s Google Meet (she spelled her own name wrong) just to name a few. In my mind, requests like these are good. They mean that I’m needed, helpful, and productive.

As I rushed out of the room behind her, the teacher across the hall peeked his head out. “Chris. Do you have the internet? I don’t, and the kids don’t seem to either.”

“Yeah. That’s why I came to see you. We can’t do anything online?”

As if on cue, two more kids, Chromebooks in hand, made the turn into the 8th-grade wing with similar claims of lost connections.

It appeared as if we’d encountered the worst possible circumstances for teaching in 2021.

No internet.

Now usually we are quite fortunate. An internet interruption like this is typically over not long after it starts. Our district technology reaches out to our internet provider, something magical takes place, and voila: we’re back online.

Not today.

I mentioned before that I am a part-time tech integration specialist because I’m also a part-time teacher. The period was about to end and I was about to teach my Global Issues class, a course that I’ve proudly built to take place entirely online. The optimist in me figured the internet would be up and running before the toll of the late bell.

I was wrong.

At the start of class, I usually open a Google Meet so that virtual learners can attend class. I usually present a Google Slide deck that contains explicit directions for my attending and at-home learners. My students usually head to Google Classroom, open up the most recent project we are working on, and review the digital comments and feedback I’ve given them. I usually chit-chat for a bit, provide an overview of the day’s objectives using my slide deck, and then use GoGuardian and Google Classroom to provide real-time feedback to support my students.

Usually.

Refresh (pause). Refresh. Wait a while (two seconds). Refresh.

Each time, the request was met with the dreaded Google Chrome timed-out error webpage confirming what you already knew. You’re (gasp) offline.

The questions came at a fast and feverish pace.

“Mr. A. What are we going to do today?”

“We can’t work on our projects, can we?”

“Do you think the internet is going to come back soon?”

At this point, we were 7 minutes into class, more than 15 minutes into the outage, and I honestly had no idea what to do. So I said the first thing that came into my head.

“Let’s go get some freeze pops.”

Schools in New York can get impossibly hot towards the end of the school year and one of the ways you can foster goodwill with your students is to reward them with an occasional freeze pop. While the day wasn’t that warm, I figured a walk to the teacher’s lounge and some frozen sugar would do us all some good during our internet hiatus. And who knows? By the time we got back, the internet might be working again.

It wasn’t.

“Uhhh… Let’s go for a walk outside.”

As we passed through the exterior doors we realized we weren’t the only ones with this bright idea. We saw a group of students setting up an impromptu kickball game while their teachers looked on. Two boys had taken a ball and were pitching to one another. As we rounded the building, we spied a group of 7th graders playing duck-duck-goose. A little further into the journey, we passed sixth-graders on a nature walk. The fields in the back of our school were littered with classrooms of kids untethered from their Chromebooks, simply hanging out.

On our walk, my students and I ranked freeze pops in order from best to worst flavor (blue-red-orange-green-purple-any shade of yellow), shared some of our favorite pet stories, discussed the differences between their, there, and they’re, and postulated what we would do if the internet never came back. Not just in school but for our lives in general.

Just a half-hour earlier, I thought that having no internet was the worst possible circumstances for teaching today.

Now I knew it was exactly what we needed.

Before the pandemic, most teachers saw technology as an accessory to learning, something to add interest or foster engagement.

The pandemic changed all that.

Whether they were ready or not, teachers were thrust into a world of online learning, forced to create paperless classrooms, develop asynchronous and synchronous instruction, struggling to meet the needs of hybrid and virtual learners simultaneously. Teachers and students alike are now spending hours-upon-hours staring at screens, working by themselves, oftentimes sitting just six feet from one another.

That day, those 54-minutes when we were all without our lifeline to the web, showed me that now more than ever we are in need of another far more important connection.

“Can we do that again next time?”

“Best class ever!”

Sure, some of this enthusiasm came from a day without work but fundamentally their joy came from being seen and heard.

As we move forward toward an eventual post-pandemic world in education, we need to remember this important lesson: the true measure of a school is not its internet connection, it is its human connections.

That’s the lesson I learned the day the internet died.