Back to School
“We were emotionally six-years-old,” my now nine-year-old said to me, sitting crisscross-applesauce on her bed, twisting her sheets in her hand. “But she expected us to act like second graders. It was so hard.”
Like a lot of folks the night before school starts, my daughter was up late last night, anxious about the first day. At the top of her list of worries was her teacher’s temperament. Would she be kind like last year’s teachers, or tough like the one she had in second grade, the first full-year back at in-person elementary school?
They’ve been through a lot, the little ones.
She was just getting used to Kindergarten when she left on Spring Break in 2020. When school started again, it entailed watching short instructional videos at home and filling out worksheets.
It meandered its way into a hybrid of Zoom meetings where the kids often wandered off, muted themselves, or sent each other misspelled messages and emojis over the chat feature and asynchronous work on a Chromebook.
Then, she went back for two days a week with half of the overall class. Each kid was masked and separated at their own desk and surrounded on three sides by a personal Plexiglas sneezeguard/study carrel. There were strict rules against sharing supplies. The kids could remove their masks at recess and were permitted to play tag, but could only make contact with the end of a pool noodle grasped on the other end by “it.”
In second grade, COVID protocols ended for the most part. And my daughter’s teacher seemed to expect a group of second graders. She had high expectations and no patience for shenanigans.
But the kids she got had missed out on nearly a year of training in how to do school. They were used to reading while in their underpants under the kitchen table eating a snack. They were used to getting up to use the bathroom whenever they felt like it. If they had to share or take turns with something it was in a small group setting.
There were wider gaps in their education than usual. Some parents had been able to keep their kids on task. Some had to juggle multiple kids and multiple jobs and couldn’t. My kid’s first grade teacher forgot to teach spelling and I didn’t notice and pick up the slack.
I’m sure it was an arduous task to be faced by these semi-feral children and try to get them up to anywhere near meeting grade level-appropriate state educational standards, to teach the rules and procedures of school, to manage their anxieties and social-emotional deficits.
My kid’s teacher told her class that they were not allowed to cry in the classroom. It had an impact.
And here we start another year.
Both of us, me and the kid, are worried about whether the staff will have the patience and emotional intelligence to deal with children who still carry the trauma and educational gaps caused by the early stages of the pandemic.
Today, I watched my kid step over the school threshold, going indoors where it’s crowded, where there are a lot of kids, where the ventilation isn’t the best, and where they tend to sneeze unexpectedly on each other.
At drop off, I didn’t see one kid wearing a mask. (Not that I made my kid wear one. I had tried to hold on to that for a while until I found out she’d been taking the one I put on her in the morning off as soon as she got to school cause only one other kid was still sporting one.)
It's not like COVID is over. The virus is still evolving. The kid isn’t in an identified high-risk group, doesn’t have diabetes, cancer, a chronic illness, HIV, or heart disease. But getting long COVID is a danger as is an infection leading to an increased risk of diabetes and heart disease (according to a source in this CNN article I read this morning).
So here I am at my desk on this first day of school, wringing my hands, hoping the kids and their families get boosters, hoping folks stay home if they are sick, hoping that the teacher is nice.
How are you doing?
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