In Which I Take a Calculated Risk and Hope I Don't Regret It

The past 14-ish months have been hard, haven't they? When my kids' schools closed in March of 2020, I had no idea the pandemic would be a very real thing that we were still dealing with in May of 2021. But the fact is that, while things are looking up in the U.S. we are not out of the woods yet and in many other countries the outlook is still very dire.

That's why I was incredibly upset yesterday when the CDC announced that it's okay for fully vaccinated people to be unmasked in nearly any situation. Since simultaneously we have decided as a society that we want to protect people's privacy and not make anyone reveal their vaccination status, this feels like a recipe for disaster. I hope I'm wrong. I hope that a combination of lowering cases and rising vaccinations means that vaccinated people plus unvaccinated people who never believed in masks going unmasks will not lead to a speak in cases. Obviously since this change was announced yesterday the jury is still out.

I have been fully vaccinated for over a month now. Mr. Engineer was fully vaccinated a week later and Squirrelboy (who turned 16 in March, just in time to qualify to be vaccinated when that age group came up) was fully vaccinated two weeks after that. At ten, however, Kittygirl does not qualify to be vaccinated. Vaccines are being tested for her age group and they'll hopefully be approved sometime this summer or early fall at the latest, but, in the meantime, with the new guidance only one member of our family is required to wear a mask.

I tell my kids life is unfair all the time, but this is one little bit of unfairness the rest of the family can rectify just a tiny little bit. Even if lots of other people in our community choose not to wear masks because of the new guidance, our whole family will continue to mask in all the places we have before. We're not going to make Kittygirl be the only one.

With vaccinations on the rise and cases on the decline in the U.S., in person events are starting to happen again. Most relevant to our family, the Friends for Life Orlando Conference, which I blogged about in 2019, is being held in person this summer. In summary, in case you don't want to read that whole post, this is a conference for people with type 1 diabetes of all ages and their families. It's an incredible place to find community with others who understand diabetes, learn new things, and simply have fun. The flagship conference is normally held every July at the Coronado Springs resort at Disney World. In 2020 the Orlando conference went virtual, and the parent organization, Children with Diabetes, has since held several other weekend virtual conferences. They have been well done, but nothing beats an in person experience.

As of the announcement, there was a promise that a ton of safety procedures would be in place. Those include masks for everyone except when eating (and only eating when seated), assigned seating for meals, and significantly reduced capacity allowing for social distancing. We had about a week to decide whether we wanted to take the risk of traveling to Florida at a time we knew the pandemic would still be going on before registration opened. I knew that if we wanted to do it, we should register as soon as possible after registration opened. For the children's programs in particularly, capacity was significantly reduced. There were only 60 spots available for Kittygirl's age group. Mr. Engineer and I talked about it and decided that the risk was small enough with the protocols in place that the experience was  worth it for me and Kittygirl. Unfortunately, it won't work for the whole family to attend this year because the dates overlap with Boy Scout camp. We also decided that our risk wasn't greatly increased by spending two days at Disney theme parks after the conference ends.

I'm hoping that the news from yesterday won't change the protocols that are in place in July. Either that or that case counts get so low it doesn't seem particularly risky to be around a bunch of unmasked people. I know some people whose kids have type 1 diabetes and/or other chronic health conditions who have hardly left their houses since March of 2020.  I know others who have had a much more nonchalant attitude than our family has had. As seems to happen often, I fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. We've been more careful than average, but we've allowed Kittygirl to go to stores with us, have outdoor playdates with friends outside our bubble, and play at public parks. This trip to Friends for Life and Disney World, however, will be by far the biggest risk we've taken during the pandemic.

My calculus is that the psychological benefit far outweighs the smallish health risk. Let's hope I'm right.

In Which Virtual Is Actually Pretty Good

If you had told me six months ago that my 9 year old would be using Zoom regularly this year I would have believed you. Then the pandemic hit, and most of us started using Zoom or some other video meeting interface pretty often. Our first experiences were kind of mediocre. Her teachers had a weekly class Zoom meeting, but it was poorly attended and not that engaging. Random kids in her grade would have their parents set up a Zoom meeting so that they could talk to their friends. Some parents set up meetings with grand intentions for the kids to speak Spanish with each other, but that never happened. Kittygirl tried one of those meetings, but it was set up by a boy and she was the only girl who joined. She left the meeting after just a few minutes. 

Virtual school as a whole was pretty unimpressive this spring. I don't blame the teachers. This was thrown on them very suddenly. They were provided with no training. They were also told they were not allowed to lower students' grades during the last 9 weeks when we had to go virtual and that they couldn't introduce new content. It was a pretty terrible set of circumstances.

Our first positive virtual experience was with a virtual Cub Scout campout in April. There was a whole schedule of suggested activities with the opportunity to share what you were doing via Facebook, plus Facebook live events where you could interact with others. Frankly, the planning was better than some in person campouts we've attended. We even had a real campfire in the backyard during the closing campfire program.

This summer everything the kids had planned to do was cancelled, but we managed to have some really impressive virtual experiences. We were particularly sad that FFL Orlando, the amazing diabetes conference that we've attended for the last two summers, had to go virtual.this year. However, it was actually done extremely well. They even had virtual versions of the Thursday evening banquet and the Saturday social events. One of the best parts of FFL is connecting with other parents of kids with diabetes and adults living with diabetes, and the organizers did their best to recreate those random connections by having virtual "hallways" - Zoom meetings that you could join at any time  between 8am and 8pm. 

It was disappointing that kid and adult sessions alternated during the virtual conference so I had to find something for Kittygirl to do during my sessions, but I understood practically why they did this. Many families simply don't have enough devices for multiple family members to be on Zoom at the same time.  Both the kid and adult sessions themselves, however, were quite good. I figured the adult sessions, that are often lecture type presentations would be pretty easy to translate to a digital environment, but I doubted the kid sessions would fare as well. To my great surprise, Kittygirl absolutely loved her first year in the Tween group even though it was virtual. They did an amazing number of fun activities along with learning some things about diabetes and meeting some famous people with diabetes. They even made "carb creatures" out of food and showed them off.

FFL was just one of several positive virtual experiences we've had this summer. Kittygirl also did a virtual diabetes camp that was surprisingly good. The week of the virtual FFL conference and for a week after that we were isolating as much as possible so we could safely visit my parents, so we signed each kid up for a week of virtual camp the second week. They were both excellent. 

Squirrelboy did a Cyber Film Camp with the Verdugo Hills BSA council, which is based in California in the heart of the moviemaking industry. He got to learn from professionals who do the kinds of things he hopes to do for a living, and he managed to cooperate with a group of 7 other scouts from 4 different states to make a short film. All the films made by the campers were shown in a film festival this Sunday, and I was really impressed. Squirrelboy's film even won the audience award, which was voted on by the Zoom seminar attendees.

Kittygirl did a virtual camp with Lexington Children's Theater. She at first wasn't excited about the idea, but then I told her it was based on a Percy Jackson book, which she is obsessed with, so she agreed. For three hours every day over Zoom the kids rehearsed a short play and then they presented it via Zoom on Friday. It was kind of surreal to have the kids saying their lines on camera in their homes instead of together on a stage, but it was amazingly good despite that. As a bonus, my in-laws who almost never visit and my brother who lives in Germany were able to join the Zoom meeting and watch Kittygirl's play. That never would have happened if it had been a normal end of camp presentation.

This year has not been what we expected. It looks likely that it will continue like this at least until the spring of 2020. Sometimes this makes me really angry. I'm particularly angry that the government in the U.S. has done a really pathetic job reacting to this pandemic. However, lots of individual organizations have really stepped up and embraced this unusual time. So many new people signed up for the virtual version of FFL that the organizers have committed to having a virtual version even when the in person version is safe again (hopefully that will be 2021, but all bets are off at this point). The Verdugo Hills council is planning to do the Cyber Film Camp again next summer. My husband's company is investigating allowing employees to work from home in come cases long term. I think this pandemic is going to fundamentally change the way we do some things, and in many cases it will be for the better.

These positive experiences are why, even though our spring experience of virtual school was pretty pathetic, I'm cautiously optimistic about what it could look like in the fall. Our district has announced that we will begin two weeks later than originally planned, on August 26, and that school will be virtual only at least until the end of September, at which point local conditions will be reevaluated. If we do go back later in the fall it will be part time to begin with and 1-3 days a week will still be virtual. This time, there has been more time to prepare, it is expected that new content will be presented, and the superintendent says that work will be differentiated. I have a healthy skepticism about how this will go, and am mentally preparing to pull Kittygirl and homeschool her if she's as miserable as she was in the spring, but for the time being I'm giving everyone the benefit of the doubt. Overall, virtual is normally not as good as in person. However, I have experience really well done virtual and really poorly done virtual. Here's hoping that school this fall is closer to the former.

In Which I Propose a Completely Unrealistic Plan for Education During the Pandemic

Back when schools closed in mid March most of us really had no idea what that meant or how long it would last. A tiny part of me hoped the kids would be able to come back before the end of the year, but the more realistic part of me knew they wouldn't be coming back. However, at that point I was still hoping we could have a somewhat normal summer and I was confident kids would be back in school in the fall even if extra precautions needed to be taken, and that that would be the right choice.

Well, if 2020 had gone according to plan my kids would be starting school on August 12th, less than a month from now. That's definitely not happening. The school start has currently been pushed to August 24. The school has yet to release an actual plan for how they're going to do in person school safely during the pandemic. A survey came out a couple weeks ago for parents. A survey went out to staff too. It was supposed to be more comprehensive, but, according to friends of mine who are both parents and staff, it was exactly the same.

The survey proposed three options. All options included school buildings being closed every Friday for deep cleaning.

Option 1: All students (except for those whose families choose 100% distance learning) are at school 4 days a week. Masks are worn at all times (presumably except when eating, but this wasn't addressed).

Option 2: Schools are divided into A and B groups and each group is in the school building 4 days a week alternating weeks.

Option 3: Schools are divided into A and B groups and each group is in the school building alternating days (one M/W and one T/Th).

When I filled out the survey I ranked the options in order 1, 3, 2. Given that the Spanish Immersion at Kittygirl's school and the collaborative educational style at Squirrelboy's school are pretty much impossible to replicate through distance learning I really thought it would be best for those students to be in the building as much as possible, and definitely not just every other week. 

However, the more I've learned about the logistics of opening a school during a pandemic with actively increasing cases the more I think virtual school is the only safe option pandemic-wise. Yes, it pretty much totally sucked in the spring, but, if they have to do it for the whole school year, hopefully it will be better.

That, of course, presents its own problems. How will special needs students be served if everything is virtual? What happens to students who have a personal aid? What happens to students who have a reader due to a visual disability or dyslexia? What happens to English Language Learners? Who is going to make sure they're actually understanding the content? Will gifted students receive additional content during virtual education? Will students receiving remediation in a subject receive that virtually?

Kittygirl's and Squirrelboy's needs are actually served fairly well through virtual education. It's easier for me to handle Kittygirl's diabetes if she's at home learning than if she's at school. Squirrelboy's ADHD is unlikely to impede him when he's working alone in the office downstairs without a single distraction.

It still sucks, mind you, and they're still going to hate if that's the way it ends up going. I'm pretty sure most students will feel that way. And let's be honest, for most students, virtual/distance learning is going to result in a whole lot less learning than in person learning would have.

This leads me to wonder (and here's the completely unrealistic proposal), why don't we just call this school year a wash for traditional learning? The families with parents working from home or one parent not working can just keep their kids home. If they want to teach them traditional academics more power to them. If not, the kids can play outside, read books, draw, play with legos, whatever they want to do. The one think I think would be helpful would be to put strict screentime limits into effect.

What about the kids whose parents have to work outside the home? Perhaps we could open some school buildings and operate them the way emergency childcare centers (which have reportedly been largely successful at warding off outbreaks) have been run. Keep kids in small groups, wear masks inside except when eating, have surfaces cleaned frequently, etc. If accomplishing particular educational tasks isn't  on the agenda, I think this might actually work. Provide a lot of books, have a place to isolate books for a couple days after students read them so that any virus on the surface dies, and you should be good. Also spend as much time outside as possible.

What about teens? In my completely unrealistic plan, high schools would be retooled as teen hangout centers (distanced and with masks of course) that would also offer limited life skills classes. I think even seniors would not be dramatically hurt by spending a year learning life skills instead of traditional academics before entering college.

Is anything like this going to happen? Of course not. And there are probably serious health risks to this plan that I haven't even considered. The fact remains, though, that students, parents, and teachers are all seriously stressed out right now. If the pressure of accomplishing a traditional academic year could be removed while the pandemic is raging I think it would be better for everyone's mental health.

And just because I like including a picture with every post, here's a picture of my cats, who would be quite content if we chose never to leave the house again.

In Which Crisis Schooling Is Not The Same Thing as Homeschooling

So much has changed since I last posted about the coronavirus pandemic. The news changes every single day, it seems. For the record, I am still not any more worried about Kittygirl getting covid-19 than I am about any member of my immediate family. If anything, I’m a little more worried about me or Mr. Engineer getting it. Though neither of us has a chronic health condition, neither of us is in as good of physical shape as Kittygirl, and the fact is there are many more people in their 40’s getting very sick and dying than there are kids.

What we’re mainly focused on right now is working and learning at home. The last day of school for the kids was March 13th. The first announcement was that they would return on April 6th, after spring break. Then that was changed to April 20th. The latest word is that schools in Kentucky are closed at least through May 1st. However, I’ll be shocked if they return to the school building this year. I think our governor just likes to take things in slow steps as opposed to closing schools for the rest of the year in one fell swoop as many other governors have done.

Mr. Engineer began working at home on March 16th, the same day the kids began learning at home. Luckily for him, the project he’s currently working on only required him to bring home a little bit of equipment and would have been done mostly in his office under normal circumstances. His coworkers who were working mainly in the lab had it much harder. He has set up his home office in Squirrelboy’s room, using a table we normally use to serve food when we have a lot of people over for a cookout.

In Kentucky, school systems are allowed to apply to do something called “nontraditional instruction”  (NTI for short) on days when it is not possible to meet in the school building. This means that students are given work online or paper packets to complete so that such days can be counted as school days and don’t need to be made up. Under normal circumstances, this happens just a handful of times a year on snow days.

For whatever reason, our district has never done NTI, which means we sometimes go into June making up snow days. However, when it became clear that schools would need to be closed for an extended period of time, every school district was allowed to apply for emergency NTI status. Since our district had never done NTI before, there was a steep learning curve. On the 13th, all students were sent home with a brochure suggesting “unplugged” learning activities in each subject for their grade level. Some teachers also sent home additional work. Ironically, my third grader brought home quite a bit and my 9th grader was only given a book to read and told to finish an already started project for math.

Officially, the first week of school closure was NTI days and the second week was “snow days.” The third was spring break. Kittygirl had enough A lot of other parents I know (many, but not all, of whom were either working from home or still going into work) were overwhelmed those first two weeks. A lot of memes were passed around social media about homeschool parents suddenly being seen as superheroes or homeschool parents as mafia bosses telling public school parents “Welcome to the family.”

The thing is, though, we weren’t really homeschooling. As a former homeschooler, I can testify that real homeschooling bears little resemblance to suddenly having to educate your child when school is closed due to a global pandemic. Homeschoolers plan out their year ahead of time. They choose the curriculum they use. They are also normally involved in a homeschool community. They often do classes at a homeschool cooperative one or two days a week. They meet other homeschoolers at the park. They go on field trips. Maybe they meet up with another homeschool family to do a science experiment together.

None of these things apply to what public school parents are now being asked to do. We didn’t plan to facilitate our children's learning at home. We, in fact, had almost no warning about it. We’re not choosing what to teach them. And even people who were already homeschooling can no longer gather with other homeschoolers, be it at a coop, at a park, or at someone’s home.

In our case, the first two weeks weren’t too bad. Kittygirl worked on the math packet and read the book she’d been sent home with. Squirrelboy read the book he had been sent home with, worked on his math project, and did a lot more work than he otherwise would have on the three merit badges he has left to earn his eagle rank in Boy Scouts. He also started a series of short films with theme of going outside and being active.

In addition, the kids spent a lot of time outside. I took them several times a week to a park on the other side of town that has mountain biking trails. As you may remember, mountain biking is one of Squirrelboy’s favorite things. Kittygirl was turned off of mountainbiking last summer when Squirrelboy took her on a trail that she wasn’t quite ready for and she fell. However, she decided to give it another try and she loved it.

As I said, the first two weeks weren’t too bad. I imagine they would still have been stressful if I were trying to work from home or if I had to go into work. Since I don’t work for pay right now, I’m able to dedicate a lot of time to the kids. I had actually just started sending off my first novel to agents and started work on my second, but the second can wait, and, if I actually get interest from an agent and need to do some editing on my novel I’ll figure out how to fit it in.

The beauty of the first two weeks was that the kids had minimal work that had been assigned by the school so, even though it wasn’t the same as homeschooling, it had some of the advantages. Kittygirl had time to do fun science experiments and watch educational videos. Squirrelboy had time to make some movies.

The teachers spent those two weeks training to teach via NTI and making plans. This has been the first official week of NTI, and it has been less than smooth. In fact, at times it has been downright torturous. The good news is that Squirrelboy’s school was pretty well positioned to start NTI. Nearly all assignments and teacher communication already came through Canvas, and most assignments were submitted through Canvas. The bad news is, the teachers are mostly assigning the kinds of work they assigned on days when they had a  sub. Squirrelboy generally hated that type of work and was never able to finish it in one class period thanks to his ADHD and dyslexia, so he’s been struggling with it. Kittygirl’s school was using SeeSaw Family for students to share some of their work with their families, so they decided to present NTI work using SeeSaw Classroom. They’re also using the web versions of their Math and Reading programs. There has been a steep learning curve for this. In fact, so many people complained about the math that the teacher suspended its use after Tuesday to reevaluate it and assigned work on IXL. The good news is, IXL is easy to use. The bad news is, Kittygirl hates it.

Gone are the lazy days when the kids could spend most of their time choosing what they learned about. I don’t blame the teachers. They’re doing their best in a bad situation. In many ways this is harder for them than it is for the students. They’re losing what is usually the best part of the year with this class of students. They miss them like crazy. And frequently they’re trying to help their own kids with online learning while doing online teaching.

I’ve seen a lot of complaining on social media about the work kids are being given during this time. I’ve even seen parents say they’re choosing not to have their kids do the work and encouraging others to rebel and declare the school year over or to file as homeschoolers for the remainder of the year and do whatever they want with their kids.

Educationally, that would be totally fine. Yes, the kids will miss some content, but it’s nothing they can’t catch up with when they’re able to return to school. Procedurally, it could be a big mess. Your child could be counted as truant and you could get in trouble. Or if you file as a homeschooler you might have to jump through a lot of hoops to enroll your child back in school in the fall. I know from enrolling Squirrelboy in high school after homeschooling for middle school that it was a tedious and annoying process for which I had to provide a lot of paperwork including a schedule that we didn’t actually follow every day and a transcript for which I had to go back and estimate grades because we didn’t actually assign grades.

We’re now on day 5 of real NTI. For Kittygirl it has gotten steadily better, but some of it is still tedious and feels pretty worthless. She tells me frequently that she wishes we could just go back to doing what we were doing the first two weeks. For Squirrelboy, it remains frustrating and tedious. He’s been able to keep his grades up and complete the work, but he’s basically getting everything he doesn’t like about school and none of what he likes, which is particularly sad for someone like him who had a mediocre experience at best during his public school years before high school.

For those of you who are in the trenches with me helping your kids trudge through their online work or worksheets sent home, I salute you. For those of you who are working on the front lines in healthcare and essential industries and hoping your kids get their work done, you are heroes.  Everyone in the world is going through the same crisis right now, but it doesn’t look the same for everyone. For some people in some places, it’s a hurricane. For others, like my family, it’s more of a gentle rainshower. Yes, it’s annoying we’d rather be going about our normal lives out in the sunshine. However, it’s not a tragedy. Mr. Engineer still has a job, and his company is committed to keeping everyone employed. To do this, they’ve given everyone a 20% pay cut, but this isn’t a financial hardship for us. Though it gives me little time for myself, I have the time and ability to help my kids with their work. The kids miss their activities, but it’s actually been nice to have more time in the evening to go on walks and play games together as a family. None of us have gotten sick, and, if we do, we have good odds because of our ages and good overall health.

Our biggest challenge is slogging through the kids’ work.What we are doing, however, absolutely does not fit the definition of homeschooling. Homeschooling is one of many good ways to educate your kids. Crisis schooling at home, however, is what we have to do right now, but absolutely not an ideal way for kids to be educated long term.