Yes, ladies and gentlemen, against all odds, against all fears, we survived!
Even our dynamic school system managed to get through the eclipse without self-destructing!
The Tower of Babel
What an educational opportunity this extremely rare complete solar eclipse is.
Few of us will have the opportunity to see more than one in our lifetime, unless we travel to get there.
However, our education system has struggled to seize the opportunity and has demonstrated how everything is just cacophony in the School Service Centers as much as in the ministry tower.
Have we ever seen a worse hesitation? Obviously. We are emerging from a global pandemic which made us see all the complexity of deciding whether or not to open windows in winter.
With the eclipse, the main issue with contradictory instructions in education comes above all, it seems to me, from the fact that no one seems to want to be responsible for anything anymore, especially not when it comes to talking about children’s safety.
Reminder of the year 2000 bug
I remember the madness surrounding the famous Y2K bug.
The youngest do not have this reference, but the change of century caused quite a panic when everyone started theorizing about the capacity of computer systems to survive the change of date bringing the first number from 1000 to 2000 in computers.
With the eclipse, we had the impression, for a moment, that the phenomenon was misunderstood by scientists, that the risks were of such disproportionate magnitude that children were even confined to rooms in the boarded up windows.
Reading the news, you would have thought that all Quebecers were going to go blind!
I ask without much hope of getting an answer, but what happened to the good old school activity of making an eclipse telescope from a shoebox?
Was it really that complicated?