Waiting for McMaster (or, the Day Senator Greg Hembree Visited Our Class)

ESTRAGON: And if he doesn't come?

VLADIMIR: We'll come back to-morrow.

ESTRAGON: And then the day after to-morrow.

VLADIMIR: And so on.

-Waiting For Godot, Samuel Beckett (1954)

In October 2020, I invited South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster, Superintendent of Education Molly Spearman, and Senate Education Chair Greg Hembree to my classroom. At the time, my district had been engaged in remote learning for the first two months of school, and was now announcing a transition to what it called “Phase 2” in which most of our students would be back in person. (Incidentally, at that time, the district cited a fall “below 10% positivity” in the school community as the trigger for moving to in-person learning. It should be noted that as of this writing, the county is somewhere around 27.4%. Thanks in part to a budget proviso prohibiting schools from having the majority of student learning remotely under any circumstances without jeopardizing funding, we will probably never return to remote or h…