This one goes out to the frazzled parents turned unexpected teachers this past year. Remember March 2020, when we all thought our kids would be out of school for a mere TWO WEEKS and then their academic lives would carry on as they always had? Wasn’t that a fun pipe dream? The year 2020 had been a nightmare for most everyone, but for the younger population (and their parents), the adjustments were overwhelming to the nth degree.
Let’s be honest, I graduated from elementary school a solid 20 years ago and had no intention of ever returning to explain concepts like silent “e” words or telling time on a clock. Speaking of, have you ever tried to teach a first-grader the logic behind telling time on an analog clock? It’s nearly impossible. Why is a 1 the same as :05? Why would a 6 ever equate to :30? Why is the big hand actually the shorter hand and the little hand the longer one? Does that make sense? No, no it doesn’t.
But that’s par for the course, because this year, absolutely nothing made any sense
When school was canceled temporarily in March, I was actually really excited to get to flex my “homeschool mom” muscles a bit. I grabbed a box of my daughter’s markers and created a multicolored schedule for the fridge, complete with breaks for lunch and cute little arts and crafts projects to try that I had been saving on Pinterest.
In the beginning, the experience was adorable. I was getting extra time with my kid, watching Bill Nye videos on YouTube, and googling corresponding household-item experiments we could try out together. It was legitimately fun… until it just kind of wasn’t.
The days started to drag on, and with each passing one, my girl started to ask more questions, like if she would ever see Mrs. Adams again, and if she would still get to go on her class field trip to the zoo and why some kids were still at school with masks on and others were at home staring at a computer screen much of the day. None of it was easy to explain. Stress was chasing me, and I’m sure it was chasing you, too.
When May came around, I think she and I were both kind of heartbroken
It wasn’t the kindergarten send-off she deserved. It finally hit me that my poor little kindergartner’s very first year of public school had been tainted, and the whole mess we were all in wasn’t even close to over. The world was still falling apart, we were all scared, and the anxiety in my house, and in the eyes of my kids, was mounting.
When it was time to consider going back in August 2020, we opted for Virtual Academy. The decision to choose that over in-person learning was so hard, and looking back, I truly don’t think one choice was better than the other. Both options came with their own set of pros and cons. For us, keeping our naturally anxious girl home to give her a semi-comfortable, albeit strange, school year made the most sense at the time.
So we picked up the district-loaned iPad, a stack of papers, and three workbooks, one for Science, one for Social Studies, and one for Reading. We trudged through, completing the weekly work and bickering relentlessly with each other.
The school year is so close to over that I can almost smell the sunscreen
We are coming up to the finish line, my new teacher friends, and I am so ready. I am ready to watch my girl grow and learn at a school she loves, hopefully without a mask someday. I am ready to pack her lunch, and kiss her nose when I drop her off, and bring treats for her class during her birthday week. I am ready for things to feel anything like normal, both for our little people and for us.
But what happened to our kids, it isn’t normal. And what happened to us because of it isn’t normal, either. We are human, first and foremost, and we didn’t sign up for this whole fiasco. But you know what? We gained so much, didn’t we?
We know now what we’re capable of
We know what our kids are capable of, too. We know that we can be what our kids need us to be, even when it’s hard. And our kids have more than survived this turbulent ride. I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but my daughter almost totally understands how you read time on an analog clock, so we’re doing something right over here.
It’s time (no pun intended) for a deep breath, a stiff drink, a pat on your own back. 2020 was the year we all tried our hands at a hundred things we never thought we’d attempt, from bread-making to TikToking to deep-cleaning to teaching.
Cheers to the summer, and cheers to the sight of the open doors of my daughter’s public school feeling like utter bliss when August rolls back around.
