When the pandemic shut schools down in the spring, teachers mobilized the educational home front and taught themselves how to navigate familiar and unfamiliar instructional challenges in the virtual classroom using the online platform Zoom. Now, teachers and students are in a new school year, amidst a raging pandemic, and witnessing some of the most momentous events that this country has ever experienced. The year 2020 brought the COVID pandemic and all of the existential questions that are central to social studies (e.g., What is the balance between freedom and security? Will the economy recover? Will these crises bring out the best in us?). George Floyd's callous death at the hands of the Minnesota police triggered a Black Lives Matter awakening across the country at the same time the country was opening up from the patchwork of state quarantine efforts. And, if that were not enough, a generation-defining presidential election is in full swing. In this article, the authors summon George Orwell's famous quote about the "power to face unpleasant facts" as they tackle Zoom, inquiry, and the current events that are shaping the nation. They begin by introducing an idea for teaching online, the Pomodoro method, in which they break an inquiry into 25-minute blocks of instruction. Then, they annotate a focused inquiry that they wrote this summer about the Black Lives Matter protests using the compelling question, "Is there anything new about the 2020 protests?" Within the annotation, they suggest how a teacher might structure the instructional blocks if she was teaching online and how those blocks might pedagogically stack to help students develop stronger inquiry skills.