On March 12th, my kids tumbled off the school bus for spring break. I don’t have any photos from that day. I looked, but only found a collection of screenshots on my phone. An article I texted to my parents where I’d underlined the part urging people over the age of 60 to stay away from restaurants, movie theaters, and other public places. A meme I remember texting to a friend that reads “Today I completed a chore I’ve put off for six months. It took 15 minutes. I will learn nothing from this.” (Hi, who can relate?) Another article announcing that Tom Hanks and his wife had been diagnosed with COVID-19. I don’t have a record of what we wore or what we ate that day, but I do remember the gut-level feeling I had in the pit of my stomach, a feeling that knew already what would be confirmed by our school district in the coming weeks: they wouldn’t return to school to finish out the year.
I have plenty of photos for the rest of March. Most are of the kids around our house, sitting at the kitchen table for schoolwork, playing in the living room, running around the backyard in the unseasonably warm spring weather.
We figured it out. Spring Break was extended a week and then distance learning kicked in. The kitchen table became our schoolroom. We learned how to use Seesaw and my first quarantine purchase was a new printer so we could print pages of worksheets. We did math problems on the sidewalk using chalk. YouTube yoga videos in the living room became gym class. We journaled about distance learning for literacy and planted seeds and called it science.
March feels like a lifetime ago. At the same time, it feels impossible to find ourselves in September. So much has changed in seven months. It’s time for us to figure things out again.
I’ve been reading through emails to learn all over what elementary school will look like. We did this just last year, as my twins began Kindergarten. We learned a new school and a new routine, a new teacher and how to eat lunch in the cafeteria, how to ride the bus and how to find their classroom. This year those routines have been upended. This year I’ll be driving and picking them up from a different door, they’ll have a different classroom, they’ll be wearing masks, they’ll be sitting distanced from their friends in the cafeteria. Virtually everything we learned about their school a year ago has changed. Three days a week they’ll be learning from home. As I write this on September 7th, we don’t yet know what distance learning looks like, except that it will be very different from our routine last spring. We have desks and iPads and crayons and pencils at the ready.
Read the rest over on the Twin Cities Mom Collective.