It's been almost 100 days since I was last in Slate's office in New York.

My producer, Ethan, and I left after finishing an episode on March 12th.

Every show we've done since then has been recorded from my closet in Brooklyn.

That last studio episode, the one back in March, had the title,

what if they close all the schools, which just seems totally naive now.

And the person I talked to actually sat across the table from for that episode was New York

Times education reporter Dana Goldstein.

Talking to you now versus talking to you in March, it's like we're on a different planet. I know. It really is crazy,

isn't it? Yeah. And just on a personal level, I think that was my last in-person professional

meeting. Back in the spring, Dana was thinking and writing about education during the

pandemic. But even she and her sources had a hard time wrapping their heads around the scale

of what might happen. When I wrote my first piece about the impact of the pandemic on schools,

it was, I think, February 27th.

And I had a line in there, like,

we may be about to embark on a mass experiment

and unwanted homeschooling.

And I have to admit that when I wrote that line

into my article, I didn't think that that would actually happen.

And in fact, that is exactly what happened, and it did become the reality.

It was in a few days of you and I last speaking.

In the interim few months, millions of kids and parents and countless teachers and administrators

have been plunged into a vast educational experiment. Working from home with her own toddler around,

...