Shutdown Food for Thought: The Wrong Question

An article posted Monday by Bridge Magazine posed the clickbait question, "If work doesn’t count, will Michigan students bother during coronavirus?" as its headline. I've heard a lot discussions over the past few weeks that centered around this very question, and it is very disheartening to me for a number of reasons. The first, and most important, reason is that it devalues education and learning. It implies that all we do is sell our ketchup popsicles to rooms full of kids in white gloves. Maybe I'm the nerdy outlier or my opinion is flawed by the rose-colored glasses I tend to wear, but learning is awesome. Learning is innately human, and it's going to happen without our intervention. We, as educators, are here to make that process more efficient and enjoyable for our students. My daughter's face when she looks up at Venus each evening and recognizes that it's in a little bit different place and figuring out that it's because planets move differently than the stars around it, like Orion's Belt, that are also moving, is all the proof I need that learning is enjoyable to kids, and I could list example after example here to prove that. Somewhere along the line "education" and "learning" split from each other, and now that's beginning to show pretty plainly if we have to ask ourselves the question posed in this headline. If what we are doing doesn't inspire our students, then what we are doing is wrong.
Second, this question implies that education is merely a means to a grade. In the testing and evaluation era of education as we have come to know over the last 20 years or so we've lost sight of why we're here. We've developed into a culture that struggles to see the value in anything without a letter or a number attached to it to prove how well we know it. Sit back and consider the things you've sought out to learn recently... I'm guessing that you didn't receive a grade for it, but you did it anyway. No one gave my son a grade on the construction project we completed last weekend, but he learned to read a tape measure and work with fractional measurements to make it fit together at the end.
Third, "packets..." blech. I seem to be seeing this word thrown around more and more recently, and I throw up in my mouth a little each time. At best, worksheets and packets are a way for students to practice skills and demonstrate their learning, and at worst, they are nothing more than busy work that emphasize the misconceptions above that learning itself is tedious and boring and about nothing more than a grade at the end. Packets aren't teachers. They aren't meant to teach new skills. We can't pretend that sending home reams of printed paper will teach students anything.
The question asked by this headline is the wrong question. It shouldn't matter that "WORK doesn't count" because LEARNING still does, and it always will, whether there's a grade attached to it or not. If what we have to offer as educators is relevant, meaningful, inspiring, and worthwhile, our students "will bother" with it.