APS is giving up on this school year. And I pretty much have too.
Yeseterday, the Superintendent announced that the last weeks of school will consist of four days a week of teacher time. For my kids, this means an average of just 75 minutes each day. The rest of the learning time is on us parents. One rationale given for canceling the paltry 75 minutes of Friday instructional time for my two Kindergarteners was “for students to engage in learning activities with their families.” As if the 26 hours of formerly school-based “learning time” the children now spend exclusively with their families were not enough.
My kids are doing well enough all things considered. They can still be cajoled into participate in the distance learning activities and they have plenty of books, magazines and creative educational options at home. But they are losing their connection to school, to their friends, and to the concept of a learning schedule. For my kindergarteners, they spend so little time “in class” that they are struggling to remember their classmates. They confuse them with preschool classmates and cannot remember their faces since they only see them as a tiny square in gallery view during the classroom Meet on weekday mornings. During spring break, only a few of their classmates showed up for daily Zoom playtime I set up. And no one except my daughter showed up for her teacher’s storytime Meet. Kids at that age do not bond well over the computer. And it is virtually the same for my fourth grader who has shown little interest in maintaining social contacts outside of classtime.
I am concerned that social distancing is shrinking our children’s worldview. My kids have experienced so little of the world, their country, their state, or even their city – and now they are forbidden from getting close enough to anyone outside our immediate family to have a real conversation. How will our children emerge from this isolated reality? Will they still be curious and feel confident enough to explore without this ever-present fear of getting or sharing germs? It is not easy to shut down exuberant children and make them tow the line for the sake of others. And, I am loathe to crush their spirits, knowing that their questioning and defiant instincts will serve them well as they grow up.
We cannot afford our children to be afraid of others, to be followers without critical thinking skills, to be concerned only with themselves and the tiny family circle that comprise their entire universe now. They will grow up in a country in transition – a new reality that will emerge from the ashes of the broken economy and broken society. The fissures of political divisions in the United States and in the world have been ripped open by this pandemic and only time will tell whether and how we can stitch them back together to create a better future.
We are all in this together, and I am impatient for a time when we start acting like it.