Today is the first day of the day camp that SteelyKid and The Pip have been going to since they were toddlers; last Friday was the last day of the regular school year. This seems like a decent spot to pause for a brief reflection on this exceedingly weird year, and how the kids have weathered it.
In fact, the start of camp is a great moment for looking back, because the start of camp last summer was a real turning point. When the shutdowns hit, the kids’ schools went to a remote mode, but only in a very half-assed way– they were (rightly) concerned about accessibility of online options, so didn’t do much synchronous work. SteelyKid had a school-issued Chromebook already, so had somewhat more regular and in-depth assignments, but a couple of teachers were technophobes, and basically just put assignments on the Google Classroom site for the kids to work through and hand in. The Pip’s school just sent home worksheets that he would power through in about an hour in the morning, and they did maybe one live Google Meet a week.
(One of these provided the all-time remote education highlight, though: The Pip was doing his Google Meet class at Kate’s computer, on the other side of the Chateau Steelypips library from mine, and I heard his teacher say “[Pip], you have a question?”
(“Yeah,” said The Pip. “[Classmate], are you wearing pants?” which was followed by a startled squeak from [Classmate] who had, in fact, just been sitting there in his underwear.)
Anyway, this pseudo-remote education was a disaster, particularly for SteelyKid. Not grade-wise, but more personally because of the sudden loss of any human interaction for a couple of months straight.
Following on that, summer camp was a godsend. It was limited in scope compared to past years (free swim daily but no swim lessons, fewer activities than usual, no all-camp gatherings), but it got them out of the house and interacting with people who weren’t blood relatives. They were vastly healthier and happier for it (once The Pip got over no longer being able to play video games for six hours a day, anyway).
So, we were really hoping the local district would be able to come up with some scheme for in-person school, and happily they did. It wound up being really complicated. SteelyKid was in-person every other day, and joining via Google Meet on the Chromebook on the other days. The Pip went to school every day, but only had his main teacher in the room every other day, and on the off days was overseen by the music teacher as they joined a Google Meet with the teacher and the other half of the class in a nearby classroom. Neither group left their classroom during the day, other than outdoor recess for The Pip, and SteelyKid going to a different room for French (the other kids in the class stayed in place for Spanish)– they had lunch in the room, and in the middle school the different subject teachers rotated in, while in the elementary school, the “special” subjects were handled with pre-recorded video lessons.
This seemed really unwieldy, and also required some large-scale reorganization– the fifth grade classes were moved from the elementary schools to the middle school, to make room for splitting the regular classes into cohorts in separate rooms, and the middle school classes were shortened by several minutes and the start of the day pushed an hour later so they could clean and re-use the buses. This was a huge lift for the teachers and staff– as much as my faculty colleagues complain about being asked to do more, we had it relatively easy.
Back at the end of last summer, there was a lot of argument about whether schools could possibly be re-opened, with the usual overheated rhetoric about how the proposals favored by the other side were literally killing people in one way or another. One of the big arguments against re-opening was that school-age kids couldn’t possibly be expected to follow the necessary safety precautions. I’m happy to say that that turned out to be dead wrong– the kids were required to be masked all year, and they did it with minimal complaint. Having helped coach The Pip’s baseball team this spring (see previous post, with photos), I can say that the kids were way more conscientious about this than the adults– a handful of them stayed masked to the very end, after the league (following the state guidelines) said they no longer needed to keep masks on outside. Kids are resilient, and they did what they needed to do.
As a result, we made it through this pandemic year in a much better place than we could’ve ended up. It wasn’t easy or anything– SteelyKid still disliked the remote days, and there were the inevitable tech glitches from time to time– but they got it done. I really can’t say enough to praise the hard work and dedication of the teachers and staff who pulled this off, or the kids who held up remarkably well under the weirdest and most stressful circumstances any of us have ever seen (and I hope ever will see).
