Remote School Victories
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“Do you ever wonder how different life would be…,” he pauses for effect, searching my eyes, “… if we all had tails?”
“I really wonder about you sometimes,” is my absent-minded response, but he doesn’t hear me, as he’s already launched on a soliloquy about how most other animals have tails in some shape or form, and aren’t they useful?
He started 7th grade remotely last Thursday. His brother started 4th grade in the next room. Rather than backpacks, this year the object of everyone’s attention, the identity token that quickly gives classmates a glimpse about who you truly are, is the headphones that they all sport on their heads during each and every lesson. Just like with backpacks, there is an endless array of subtleties and price ranges to be confronted with. I chose the younger one’s more carefully, deciding on a decent pair with a volume limit clocking at 91 decibels, always mindful of his progressive hearing loss. The older one is using a pair he had for gaming that makes him look truly foreign to me.
Thursday was uneventful enough. Middle school starts a whopping *hour and a half* earlier than elementary school this year, because why not make parents’ lives a little more difficult? 2020 still has so much left to give! The good news is that I only had one grumpily tired child to contend with early in the morning. After eating breakfast and washing up, he was gingerly proceeding to sit down for his first zoom class in his pajamas. The European in me almost tackled him, but instead just blasted him with a brief but firm lecture about self-respect while he dressed, faster than he ever probably has. I shamed him enough that he let me brush his hair.
The younger one’s first day lasted a whole total of one hour. They were both done at about the same time, came downstairs talking over each other, rapid-fire and loud, and just as they reached the counter — they both fell silent. There, on the counter, where two items they hadn’t seen since March: their lunchboxes. It had made perfect sense to me that if we’re doing school at home, things should work (and look) like at regular school as much as possible. They were openly aggravated at first, my sense is that because the lunchboxes feel like real-school and remote learning feels like they’re playing hooky a little bit. But familiarity took over once they opened them and they found the old favorites in there and not another word was heard about the lunchboxes.
Friday went more or less the same — the older one had a grumpy start, but this time he got dressed voluntarily. The younger one breezed through an hour of class and felt truly accomplished. There were many emails and discussions about procedures, mostly for on-site students, and it hit me from a different angle that kids doing remote learning at our school are a small minority — about 20%. I shall now enter a new phase of pandemic parenting self-flagellation: throughout the summer, it had been about whether to send the kids to school or keep them at home. I was set on remote learning from the beginning, but that doesn’t mean I get to spare myself countless hours of self-doubt.
Now that school has started, the inner dialogue has turned to how they’ll fare when they return to the classroom — which, if all goes well, will be in ten weeks. I have worried endlessly throughout this mess about how the kids would do, how they’d feel, if they’re alright, always to prove again and again just how resilient they are. What seems like a big deal to me is usually not much of an afterthought to them. If there is a parenting lesson I’ve learned after spending so, so, so much time with my children through the constant real-life dumpster fire that is 2020, is that I should cut everyone some slack, myself included. So I’ll do the only thing I can do, really — take it one day at a time, and cherish the small victories.
So for now, I can say that day one and day two went well. And that is no small victory.
