Fuck It, Let’s Have Class Outside Today

I mean it. It’s time for everyone to touch grass.

Adult recess is now in session. Photo by Brent Gorwin on Unsplash

There are days when I can’t bear to look at the news. These days are more frequent lately, in part because the news itself is getting harder to come by: Buzzfeed News shut down. Vice News shut down. Twitter, most people’s default news aggregator for the past decade or more, is entering its death spiral. It’s getting harder to see the world outside my own front door, and, to be honest, I am sometimes grateful. It’s time for something different. Something restorative. Fuck it: Let’s have class outside.

Did your teachers or college professors ever do this for you? Just move the whole class session outdoors, once it got nice, and force you all to critique each other’s terrible poetry under the shade of a spreading oak or something? No real learning was possible — everyone was concentrating on the sunshine and their friends passing by and possibly a butterfly or a dandelion or the promise that lies implicit in the fact of spring or something — and so, when teachers really wanted you to learn, they would refuse to move class outside. They would say that it was time wasted. They would tell you that it was just recess for adults.

Sometimes, though, the teachers would come in with an iced coffee, and they’d be a little rumpled, underslept or hungover or…