"Don't let school get in the way of your education."
- My mother, via a bumper sticker she gave me in sixth grade
* * *
Among the curious details of life during this pandemic, there is one in particular on my mind this week.
It concerns a contradiction I have noticed.
Many of the people decrying what they claim to believe are the devastating effects on children of lockdowns, remote learning, and even mask-wearing are the same people who like to fret in public that kids today are being raised as fragile snowflakes.
So, which is it? Are the current precautions damaging our children, or might our children be tougher than that?
It will surprise no one who knows me to learn that I can see both sides. Of course, in the abstract, school closures harm at least some children. Worst off would be the children who depended on what we now call "in-person instruction" for the bulk of their daily food and the presence of what might be the only caring and conscientious adults in their lives (if any).
Beyond these acute examples, it is generally the case that children appreciate and benefit from well-established routines, and parents know from experience that they disrupt these at their peril. A kid who doesn't know what to expect is an anxious kid, but then surely we can all identify by now. All it seems reasonable for any of us to expect at this point is the unexpected, and the only question is why we weren't telling our kids that all along.
During the late-summer public conversations about what the fall term of school in the year of the virus might look like, some pontificators seemed to be arguing that even a few months of remote instruction—and the attendant lack of face-to-face contact with friends and teachers—risked dooming an entire generation to lifelong misery and dysfunction. "Children need to be in school," they wailed, although it sometimes seemed that what most of them really meant was "parents need to be able to punch in."
This was true, in a practical sense, but only because our leaders—with the full-throated support of more than a few members of this same segment of the punditocracy—had not seen fit to make it feasible for working parents to stay home without starving and/or defaulting on their mortgages, unlike the approach in more civilized countries, like Denmark.
It was certainly not obvious to me that my children "needed" to be in school for their own sakes, and—since I was able to work from home—we decided early in the summer that we would keep them there for at least the fall semester, whether that meant officially switching to "home schooling" or whatever local remote option, if any, that the county might offer.
The thinking behind this decision was that, while keeping Axl and Belle home might have some downsides, it might also benefit them in ways that could balance the equation. Having observed the workings of the local school machinery through the fourth-grade level, my opinion is that what we now call "in-person instruction" was never entirely harm-free even before the pandemic. Our children's elementary school, after all, is a place where classes regularly lose recess so they can "practice walking quietly in the halls"; where children's movements in those halls are guided by the same kind of color-coded floor markings followed by inmates in U.S. military prisons; and where—whenever the lunchroom gets loud—a red light is activated to indicate that everyone must finish their meals in pin-drop silence.
A certain amount of personality pruning and expectation stunting is crucial for helping children acclimatize to the frustration and hopelessness that will define most Americans' lives in the 21st century, but it was hard to see how a quick breather from all of this would set them back much.
* * *
In August, the county school system announced two options for the fall semester. Students could attend in-person for part of the week and remotely for the rest, or they could receive remote instruction all week. We were glad to take the latter option, even though it was obvious that the superintendent's description of how it would work was unrealistically rosy.
Indeed, with the first nine weeks over and the first report cards of the year in hand, I can report that our children's teachers mainly stuck with a pattern of heavy reliance on worksheets distributed via Google Classroom, allegedly educational video games, and not really much of anything that a lay person would call "instruction." We were okay with this approach, having decided on the front end that this would be a year for simply getting through and coming to appreciate that at least the assignments were straightforward enough to enable the children to operate relatively self-sufficiently—and enable me to get some work done—for at least a couple of hours at a time.
I will always wonder what might have been possible if, at the beginning of the summer, the local school authorities had had the courage and vision to throw their backs into designing real online instruction. Then again, one does not often find the opportunity to use the words local school authorities and courage and vision in the same sentence, and besides, there would have been significant practical obstacles to overcome. This state is sorely lacking when it comes to any kind of internet access, much less broadband, for one thing; for another, there are more than a few households where the closest thing to a dedicated "device" a student might be able to use is a hand-me-down smart phone.
To the school board's credit, the decision was taken in June to address at least the latter problem by using CARES Act money to purchase Chromebooks for each county student. Initially these were supposed be in hand by the beginning of the school year. According to the latest update from the vendor, the new target date is sometime in January, but the smart money is on yet another delay.
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This update about the Chromebooks was delivered at the most recent school board meeting, which was held virtually because of an ongoing local spike in infections. More than 100 people were listening as the board, apparently finding it unsafe to meet in person, convened on Microsoft Teams to consider the superintendent's request to force all county public-school students and their teachers to start meeting in person. That is, she was hoping they would grant her request to terminate the county's remote instruction offering as of the end of the fall semester.
For reasons that were not made clear to my satisfaction, the superintendent arrived at this meeting laser-focused on this goal and loaded for bear. First there was a presentation by the director of enrollment in which he informed us that, out of 1,000 students in the county's remote learning program, more than 500 had failed at least one course during the first 9 weeks and more than 200 of these were failing multiple courses. But actually his presentation put things slightly differently. Foregrounded in this slide was not the number of failing students but the number of courses they had failed, which came to more than 800. Who knows why the decision was taken to present the matter from this angle, but it certainly couldn't have been because anyone wanted things to look less dire.
Not dwelled on was the fact that remote learning was working perfectly well for the elementary students, all of whom had received straight A's for the first nine weeks. Then too, after his presentation was over and in a classic example of what journalists call a buried lead, the enrollment director offhandedly mentioned that he had just sent letters firing the 200 worst-performing students from the remote-instruction program. That this information severely undercut the superintendent's primary argument for why the board should end the program—that is, because too many of its current enrollees were failing—went unremarked. Her secondary argument, that providing all of this remote "instruction" was turning out to be too much work for teachers, seemed highly questionable to me and, I assume, the parents of the other elementary-age students, but this too was never challenged by any board members.
To the contrary, all of this information came together in such a way as make most of the board feel safe giving the superintendent what she wanted. There was, first, lip service to the many parents of successful remote learners who seemed to have gotten in touch with various board members in the days just before the meeting. There were protestations about what a "hard choice" the board faced. They had "listened to both sides," they said, but "ultimately academics come first."
There was brief discussion of keeping the program but requiring a certain minimum level of performance, but the superintendent maneuvered skillfully to make this sound impossible and suddenly the board was voting on the main question, that is, whether to simply terminate the program after all. The first vote to save the program came from the one professional educator on the board, who we can probably assume is familiar with the concepts undergirding Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and so knows that academic pursuits can't "come first," because they can only be fruitful when students feel safe. She was joined in her vote to keep the program by the board's lone medical professional, but the other three members voted in favor of ending it.
Just like that, it was over. The program on which we had relied all fall and around which we had constructed workable academic routines for our children would terminate at the end of the semester.
Part of the reason those three board members may have felt comfortable voting to end the program is that there is, technically speaking, another remote option. This option, known in these parts as "the state virtual school," is an online learning program run, as its name implies, not by counties but by the state. Predating the pandemic, this program was originally created to deliver more varied and/or rigorous instruction than might otherwise be available at any given local school in the state.
In other words, and as the superintendent was forced to concede at the meeting, "the state virtual school is not for everyone." Middle and high school students must have a 3.5 GPA to be accepted, elementary school students must be recommended by their teachers as being able to work in a relatively self-directed and self-paced manner, and all enrolled students must have in-home access to an online computer. Special needs students would likely not be accepted into this program, the superintendent explained, because many of the supportive services such students require cannot be delivered virtually. It was apparent that several board members were learning of these requirements for the first time at this meeting.
We know some parents whose children have already been attending the state virtual school this fall, as it happens, and on Saturday we Zoomed and sipped wine with them and interrogated them about their experiences to date. It didn't sound great but it didn't sound terrible, and so this is the path we will at least start down in January. It will all be fine, of course, and yet we can't help but fret a little at the thought of yet another major disruption in the children's lives.
* * *
As I made my first notes toward this essay in the hour before dawn last Friday, Belle wandered in complaining that she was bored. That didn't concern me in the slightest, of course, but I couldn't help but notice that she looked very obviously tired, and I wondered if her apparently poor night's sleep was the kind of random occurrence that happens to everyone from time to time or if it indicated growing problems dealing with life in the pandemic era.
Multiple times during any given day, I find myself wrestling with this question. Is Belle's latest blanket fort an expression of an unmet need for emotional warmth and shelter or just a fun game? Is Axl's relentless accumulation of Godzilla and Pokemon collectibles from eBay a pathological coping mechanism or just the outgrowth of a newfound interest, with nothing to tell us about how the pandemic is affecting him? There are lots of sibling squabbles, but then those were never any big surprise Before, either. My fuse has certainly shortened since earlier in the summer, I must admit. Is this a normal fluctuation, or is all of this getting harder for all of us?
Looking at Twitter is never a good idea, but sometimes I have to do so as part of my day job and of course there is no predicting the trails one will end up following no matter how intentional and focused one tries to be. The other day, I found myself reading some tweets about how schools are responding to the current upsurge in infections. One tweeter worried that requirements for teens to wear masks at school were harming them by "cutting them off from others' facial expressions during a developmental stage when they are learning crucial social skills," or words to that effect. (I can't find this exchange now.)
In response, someone tweeted something like the following:
"My father and grandmother were refugees during World War II. More than once, she laid on top of him to protect him when Allied planes were shooting at them. From the age of 6 to 10, he lived in a displaced persons camp before being brought to the United States. He went on to college, a happy marriage, and a long successful life. The kids will be all right."
This is basically my position, not least because that little boy's wartime and subsequent experiences closely resemble my mother's, who to my mind seems to have been advantaged rather than disadvantaged by early experience of privation and making do. Eleven years into my career as a parent, I have been forced to conclude that children are not as easy to harm or break as many people seem to think, and I really do think it possible ours will come through the pandemic at least okay and perhaps even stronger and more self-reliant than they otherwise might have turned out.
Still, the current situation is obviously not one I would have chosen to sign them up for, and of course it sometimes occurs to me to worry that it is all affecting them negatively in ways that aren't yet obvious. Children are always learning, whether they are in school or not (and whether the lessons have to do with arithmetic skills or the dunderheaded pointlessness of so much of what adults consider important). I hope that one of the things ours are learning is that their parents (and their grandparents, who are playing a key faculty role in all of this at-home schooling) love them enough that they are willing to endure not insignificant travails to keep them, and the whole family, as safe as possible despite limited information and contradictory advice.
We're trying to do our best, in other words.
Just like you.
