I went for a run today and was listening to a podcast that had been recommended to me by a teacher. It’s called Nice White Parents. It’s about some, well, nice white parents seeking to integrate their children into a public school in Brooklyn full of mostly brown and black children. It’s incredibly compelling listening (Sarah Koenig of Serial fame is an executive producer).
I had a knot of existential dread as I was running. It could have been the sheer number of people (masked and unmasked) on the trail. It could have been the morning spent reading about the Fyre Festival Republican Convention. It could have been all of the memories that popped up on Facebook of all the things I usually do this week, such as visit my mom and go to the Minnesota State Fair. It could have been the shame and discomfort listening to a story of classism and entitlement that I recognize in my own community.
All of that, yes. But I think it was mostly just the talk of school in general, which for us starts in a week. Listening to the stories of the (well-intentioned) parents and all of their passion and drive to make things better for their kids in the moment was actually reminding me that school was starting and I have done absolutely nothing to prepare for it.
As I wove past walkers and slower runners, I passed one woman who was standing off the path talking on her phone.
“It’s awful. I know,” she said into her phone.
I almost laughed. It doesn’t matter what they were talking about. Pick a topic.
It’s awful. I know. It’s a hashtag. It’s a mantra. It’s the truth. 2020—It’s awful. I know™
:::
I have been ignoring the start of school. Or “school,” as it were—we are remote until further notice.
Remote for Kai last year wasn’t great, but at least Kai can come to the table for a one-on-one lesson after all those years of therapy. It wasn’t clear that he was getting his IEP accommodations met, but with Scott acting as his aide, he was at least getting his work done. He also doesn't mind the solitude of it all. Ryan was less able than Kai to learn over zoom. She would get off the call and I would ask her about it and she would tell me that she hadn’t paid any attention, thanks in no small part to her raging case of newly-diagnosed ADHD. For Ryan, everything that made school tolerable—friends, social interaction, breakfast for lunch on Wednesdays, was gone.
For me there was a moment last spring where, between the teacher strike and COVID, I just decided to flush 4th and 7th grade down the toilet. I will admit 100% to phoning it in. I figured they’d be back in school in the fall and we could just fix it all then. As Kai would say, “That’s a problem for future me.”
And here we are.
:::
I did talk to some parents of Ryan’s classmates about a pod. We’ve done nothing apart from one zoom call a few weeks ago, however. I’d thought about hiring someone to assist the kids, but I’ve done nothing about that either, and now I’m seeing that people (probably those same nice white parents in the podcast) are giving such assistants $25 an hour with a $1000 signing bonus. No one has invited Kai into a pod and this makes me so sad that I can’t think about it. I feel guilty, like I’m just letting school happen to us without trying to control any part of the process.
The truth of it is that I have no idea what to do. I know some people are moving to cities that are in-person or hybrid, but that seems like a lot of effort for an uncertain outcome. I know some people decided to go to private schools, but a private school won’t address Kai’s IEP or Ryan’s 504 and will probably switch to remote after a week anyway and at the cost of a new mini-van per year per kid. I’ve heard of places that run camps in the summer that are charging $500 per kid per week to help them through their remote classes, but that’s a non-starter for Kai, who does not do well in camp settings. I know one family that advertised for a teacher to come to their home, with an offer to pay $2 more an hour than I make in my own job. This seems like maybe the best worst option, but I just…I don’t know. I don’t know what any of this is even going to look like.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
:::
The other day, I did come up with one idea while I was driving to work, and when I got home I asked Ryan if we could talk about school.
She pulled off her headphones with a heavy sigh of tween angst.
“I have an idea,” I said.
She groaned, not wanting to talk about school at all.
“What if we made you lunches like you get at school?” Ryan had started exclusively eating school lunch last year.
She smiled a little.
“Like chicken patties, for example,” I offered.
“I also like the chicken nuggets they serve with breadsticks, the spaghetti and breakfast-for-lunch,” she said brightly.
“We can get some of those compartmentalized plates, maybe.”
Ryan put her headphones back on and went back to Roblox, only to take them back off again.
“That wasn’t the school discussion I was expecting,” she said. “That was much more fun.”
“Sometimes, lunch is the best part of the day,” I said, and put “sleeve of chicken patties” on the Costco list.
Chicken patties. This is the only thing I’ve done to prepare. It is the only thing I have in my bag of tricks.
Well, not the only thing.
:::
I wonder what our children will think of all of this in ten or twenty years. Or fifty. I have to think that they will somehow still be fine, that this, too, shall pass. All of them will miss some important thing and never circle back to it, like exponents or the definition of onomatopoeia, neither of which I use in my adult life anyway. Most children across history have faced far worse traumas than this particular one. My kids aren’t having nuclear weapons dropped on them, or the sun blocked by clouds of thick black dust and locusts, or the sea swallowing them up in a single devastating wave. It’s just a few zoom calls and a laundry list of things that break my heart.
It’s awful.
I know.