I'm Elise Hugh. You're listening to TED Talks Daily. Millions of school children are still learning from home instead of at school because of the pandemic. In a 2020 talk from TEDx-Rigleyville, educator Nora Flanagan reminds us of the heroic efforts that teachers undertook to connect with students during this stressful time.

And she looks ahead at what we learn from this difficult period to make learning more equitable and more supportive of children when schools do open again.

The last day of school was barely school.

I fielded complicated questions from students who braved

public transit to attend. I wiped down every desk between classes and reminded myself to breathe.

I held it together so hard when students said goodbye with a strange, scared weight on that word.

Colleagues and I exchanged glances in the hallway at once tense and comforting.

We were in this together, even if we were about to part ways for several months.

And when school, as we know, it stopped, we all took a long minute just to process that.

It seemed impossible.

400,000 students in Chicago now needed to learn from home, and we would need to make that happen,

both as the third largest school district in the country and as the human beings who constitute it.

But the seemingly impossible keeps becoming reality really fast lately.

So teachers jumped and adapted.

We learned to host online meetings.

We hung whiteboards on our living room walls.

Many teachers struggled just reaching out to see if their students were all right.

And in addition to making remote learning plausible, teachers have also been organizing food drives

and housing resources. They have made and donated masks by the thousands, and they've never

stopped reaching out. But this isn't new. This isn't dramatic heroism in the face of a pandemic.

This is teaching.

This is being invested in our communities.

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