Last week, I got to help my granddaughter with her remote learning lessons from Athena Elementary School. Help isn’t quite the right word.

What I actually did was cheer her on as she listened to the videos and followed her teachers’ guidance. I was fascinated by the depth of what she’s learning — a far cry from my own second-grade curriculum. It was a joy to witness both her bright young mind and her teachers’ steady, encouraging voices.

She had fun, too.

“This was the best day ever!” she said as she stretched her hand across the keyboard to write, “Done.” after the last activity.

Of course, we were having a grandma day. Working parents don’t have the luxury of individual time with each of their school-age children, and remote learning can bring increased family stress. As a former teacher, I am impressed by what teachers at all levels are doing, but sympathetic, too — I can only imagine how difficult their jobs have become.

In fact, we are all living in a period of extraordinary stress. From a raucous presidential debate to COVID-19 spreading through the White House to worries about election results — and what might happen after the election — “2020” has come to stand for anything but “clarity of vision.”

White supremacist groups have been told to “stand by.” White domestic terrorists have plotted to kidnap a governor and try her for treason — echoing a threat I first heard when people with similar ideas invaded Harney County. Others have been arrested for planning to attack police in an effort to start a civil war.

Meanwhile, Black lives continue to end at the hands of police officers — among the latest, Jonathan Price, a much-admired local resident in Wolfe City, Texas.

Even my friend in Southern Oregon — a member of our poetry workshop group — has been dodging bullets from a drug war going on across the creek from her rural home.

Is it any wonder, then, that an afternoon with a 7-year-old and a school tablet can be an island of relief? We look for solace anywhere we can these days.

So, it was especially nice that an American poet was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature last week. Louise Glück was chosen by the Swedish Academy’s Nobel committee for “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”

“We are in a bleak moment in this country,” her friend and fellow poet Claudia Rankine said, “and as we poets continue to imagine our way forward, Louise has spent a lifetime showing us how to make language both mean something and hold everything.”

Imagining a way forward. That’s what we’re all trying to do, isn’t it?

Glück had been trying to do that herself. A single person, before the pandemic she had dinner with friends six nights of the week. For several months in the spring, she said, she had struggled to write.

“And suddenly I saw how I could shape this manuscript and finish it,” she told The New York Times. “It was a miracle. The usual feelings of euphoria and relief were compromised by COVID, because I had to do battle with my daily terror and the necessary limitations on my daily life.”

The book, she said, is about falling apart. “The hope is that if you live through it, there will be art on the other side,” she said.

The last paragraph of this interview was the one that won my heart. How has teaching shaped her own writing?

“You’re constantly being bathed in the unexpected and the new,” Glück said. “You have to rearrange your ideas so that you can draw out of your students what excites them. My students amaze me; they dazzle me. Though I couldn’t always write, I could always read other people’s writing.”

I heard that sense of loving wonder in the voices of my granddaughter’s teachers, too.

Challenging as these times are, teachers are working hard to help their students — and by extension, all of us — imagine a way forward, help us believe that we will find the art of our own lives on the other side.

Maybe there should be a Nobel Prize for Education.