Back in the spring one of the kids made me a pipe cleaner crown to wear when I was working. It was such a weird season: I was trying to get my class moved online and stay on top of my work, I was consuming a lot of news, and I was trying to help the kids make the transition to online school. It wasn't always easy for them to tell when I was thinking hard while staring at the laptop screen and when I was just looking grumpy while staring at the laptop screen, so I wore the crown when I needed to work without interruptions.
Today I donned the crown again. This is hard, you guys. It's a first-world privilege-y flavor of hard, in which we have jobs and savings and health (we hope! worrisome COVID exposure for one of the college kids, so we'll see what happens there), but it's hard nonetheless.
The school assumes a degree of parental availability that I find intensely frustrating, and a degree of tween tech savvy that I find unrealistic. I mostly get it; it's a terrible situation for them. But at the same time, it is making me BONKERS. Why would a teacher assume that I can go over to the school on short notice during work hours? Why would she pressure my child about it?
It seems like the teachers assume the tech learning piece will be quick and effortless. Install the browser extension and start using it immediately in this class discussion. Create a Flipgrid account and use their interface to upload a three-minute video, due today. Download this app and use it to submit your assignment in the next 30 minutes.
I am providing a lot of tech support and a lot of reassurance: it's not your fault if Google Classroom won't load. It's not your fault if Google Drive is laggy. If the audio isn't working on your school-supplied laptop, your teacher will work with you to complete the assignment later.
The kids are also dealing with some of the same video chat woes that the grownups are. Was that mean or just clueless? Was I weird and awkward in that conversation or was it normal for this weird and awkward situation? Peer feedback from junior high students is not improved by moving it online.
What I am finding with Stella is that the amount of figuring stuff out she has to do to make the technology work is siphoning off a non-trivial fraction of of her ability to learn the curricular content that the technology is supposed to deliver. I doubt she has any idea about the substance of the class in which she installed the browser extension, because she was so panicked about not being able to get it to work immediately. "Darling," I say, "everybody has trouble getting browser extensions to work sometimes. Grownups have trouble with this stuff too. It's going to be okay."
She would prefer it, I think, if it were already okay. I would also prefer it.
I have been feeling mounting frustration about the volume of interruptions. Elwood came home from the office on Friday and asked me how my day had been, and I surprised myself by starting to cry again. "I can't think hard about hard things if I'm interrupted all the time," I said, "and the school's assumption is that the kids can interrupt me. I can't work like this."
This morning at 8 I pulled out the pipe cleaner crown and a pair of earplugs, and I said, "If the house is actively burning down at some point in the next two hours, please let me know. If something is just smoldering, I expect you to address it yourselves. The fire extinguisher is in the pantry."
After those two hours I checked in with the kids and walked the dog around the block, and then I put the crown back on again. I was not asked to assist when the smoke alarm went off during lunch preparations, but I did need to assist with a medium-sized after-lunch meltdown. Were those things related-- would it have been a smoother afternoon if I had been more available in the morning? I don't know. I just don't know.
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