There is a rhythm that has developed in our home. I am daily astonished at how regular the routine seems. I always have this haunting yet excitable feeling that we will look back in 20 years and only then understand just how strange this whole experience was.
Juliette continues to struggle without a playmate. By the end of the day she devolves into tears. She has no one to play with. The boys don't like her games. She wishes she had a sister. She wishes she could see her friends. She has never developed the ability to play alone, a little surprising since she has never had friends close enough by to play with all the time. She asks why God sent covid, why the world has to be the way it is. She ponders over big ideas for a seven year old.
It only took one week for Colin to work out a schedule for himself. After the first week, Colin found himself with a pile of assignments due that same day. He pushed through to finish, but it provided the opportunity for he and I to discuss time management and the benefit of calendaring. We mounted a whiteboard in his room for him to track assignments for the week, and a simple checklist to make sure everything got done in time. Since then he's managed each day. I check in just to make sure he's on top of it, but so far all goes well. He may not get a lot of curriculum covered through online learning, but his work skills will benefit greatly.
The monstrous media has been rearing it's ugly head. Having grown up with little access to TV or video games, and having developed a healthy sense of creativity as a result, it's always on my mind in raising my children. It's not that I want to control every minute, but I want to make sure that my kids have large blocks of uninterrupted time for both boredom and its progeny, creativity. We have had several iterations of the media schedule, but this week's seems to be the most successful. They get 30 minutes of "junk food media" before 9am - whatever their little hearts desire. Between 9 and noon screens are used for learning: online classes, school work, or independent projects and learning. From noon until after dinner the screens are off, no questions. This is where it used to creep in before. "Can I use it to look up a song? Do a drawing? See a photo?" Find another way, is my mantra now. Finally, in the evenings, we alternate between a board game night, movie night, or video game night as a family. I'm always in awe of my children's compliance. It isn't a compliance from fear or threat of consequence. They seem to genuinely respond to my laying out the logic behind our decisions.
After 2 weeks of online teaching I have about 90% participation rate. 90%! I expected about 20%. And more than that, I'm having large participation numbers from students who previously had given me little to nothing in class. Students who used to duck out, misbehave, or simply choose not to complete work are putting in a lot of time with my learning choice boards. It's making me reflect on the reasons. My in-person classroom is generally engaging and low-pressure. I teach through songs, games and stories. I never force output from students. Something about online learning is making some students struggle, but others thrive.
James is still the only one who leaves the house, to get groceries twice a week (once for us, and once for his mother). We dart out once a week for our game of Car-dines. It's fun to see friends from a distance and strange all at the same time. It's the illusion of connection, but at once really nothing more than a tease. We shout a few ongoings from our lives between cars, straining to listen in the wind and over the children equally shouting at their friends.
It is easy to forget about the traumatic part of all this. Drastic change leaves an imprint on our lives, and yet because this change is masquerading as normalcy it's difficult to put a finger on what to gently correct as a parent and what needs nurtured healing. It's difficult to know if any of our mood swings should be checked or tolerated. As if mocking the situation, the weather in April has returned to a wintry wonderland of blowing snow and minus 10 temperatures. It leaves us without the desire to get outside much. Reading by the fire is fine, but by mid-April our habits of hibernation have grown tiresome. Trauma has also paralyzed me a little bit in that I could be doing a great many projects around the house - organizing, creating, building, designing - and yet I don't seem to find the minutes in the days. I try to remember that coping mechanisms are about survival, and perhaps my body subconsciously knows it cannot handle the stress of the mental output.
Our community theatre production of Matilda, in which I was musical director and Benjamin and Juliette had roles, has finally been postponed to next season. Soccer and baseball are both playing a "wait and see" game. School is being cancelled two weeks at a time, currently until May13 but who really knows. It is the constant state of not-knowing that taxes me most. We don't have the ability to see what the next few months are really going to look like, to make plans, to wrap our heads around it.
No comments:
Post a Comment