2021 · Field note · 2018–2021
A certificate is useless if the connection drops
Charity work expanded into devices and connectivity, because remote learning and remote work were only real for the people who could stay on the call.
We already served communities for whom a laptop was a shared object. Asking those candidates to take a camera-on exam, or to keep a job that had moved into a video call, without touching the device question, would have been a lecture about fairness delivered from a good connection.
Device and connectivity support sat beside the teaching, not instead of it. A laptop that arrives with no tuition becomes a cupboard. Tuition that assumes a laptop the household does not have becomes a waiting list.
The same principle covers the communities we still name on purpose: rural places, people with disabilities, refugees, and older adults. Structural barriers are not a single profile, and the programme is poorer when it pretends they are.
Educators were in that circle too. Many of them were rewriting a year’s teaching in a fortnight. Supporting their practice was charity work in the strict sense: it kept other people’s learning possible.