Out with a Bang and a Whisper

At the end of the school year, everyone in my family felt that distance learning was generally successful for us. But we were also very ready for the school year to end. After getting off to a strong start, we barely limped across the finish line for the last week of school. But it was also a strong finish. Because nothing is ever simple.

Out with a Bang

One of the things I was most concerned about turned out to be one of the biggest successes. Before I had kids, I thought elementary school graduation ceremonies were dumb. Then my oldest went to the same elementary school from kindergarten through fifth grade and the little ceremony they held in the gym was actually really sweet and felt meaningful to the kids and parents.

This year, with my second child finishing fifth grade at the same school, it felt like the end of an era. I’d been a B.F. Day mom for 11 years, and while I’m generally not very sentimental, even I had to pause at that. I’m not sure that I’ve ever been involved with any institution as long as this little neighborhood school. It was  a little weird that we never set foot there for the last three months of it. And I was sad that my youngest would miss out on the little rite of passage.

But the school held a graduation ceremony on Zoom. They encouraged the kids to dress up, and even at the risk of bogging down, to keep their cameras on. The principal and each fifth-grade teacher said a little farewell (and a couple of them got teary) and a few students gave speeches. Awards were announced and applause was given. The science teacher made a slide show of then and now baby and fifth grade pictures. Each graduating student got one slide with a chosen quote, just like high school seniors in a yearbook. It wasn’t the same as sitting on the gym floor and cheering. But it really felt like a rite of passage.

And a Whimper

Sophomore year, on the other hand, just kind of faded away. The last day of school was originally scheduled for Thursday, but during covid, the governor mandated Friday. Rather than come up with one more day’s worth of material, all my teen’s teachers made Friday a make-up day, one last chance to turn in late work. But my daughter was already ahead in all her classes. So not only did she not need to log in on Friday, she barely had anything to do on Thursday. Wednesday is a short day anyway. So basically, over the course of the last week, she just went to school less and less and didn’t even notice the moment when she was “done for the year.”

Things We Kept Up

Throughout the distance learning, I supplemented with a bunch of little projects of my own. At the end of the school year, the girls were still doing a few minutes of Typing Club every day. My oldest was typing something like 35 words a minute – not impressive, but at least she wasn’t hunting and pecking anymore. My youngest had worked her way through most of the keyboard, but still had to learn q,p and punctuation.

We continued learning Bad Arguments, although we weren’t very regular about it. And we had read 40 of the Sonnets along with Sir Patrick Stewart.

We also finished Yale’s Science of Well-Being course on Coursera. To our surprise, we all actually ranked higher on the happiness scale at the end of the course than we did at the beginning. In my own case, I think the small but measurable difference had more to do with simply paying more attention – but it also helped that I’m getting a lot more exercise in my free time now that I’m not driving kids all over town every day.

My teen’s score actually jumped a lot, despite dropping quite low on factors relating to achievement (it’s hard for a competitive kid when sports are canceled). I think it was helpful for her to hear it explicitly stated (and not by me) that being rich and famous are crappy goals that don’t make people happy. My youngest had the biggest jump in happiness. But she preferred to keep her scores private, so I don’t know what changed for her.

Things We Dropped

However, as the amount of work assigned by the schools grew over time, we let a lot of things slide. We never got past the letter I in Morse Code. Even when an episode of Star Trek Discovery used Morse Code to satisfy a plot point, we didn’t get back to it. I think the problem was that we never really found a good way to practice it. Apps will only get you so far.

Somewhere along the line, my daughter abandoned her Coronaville manga and I didn’t really notice. I guess she got bored with it.

Since my teen was acing Chemistry – and enjoying it – I bought a culinary school textbook and built a Chemistry of Baking curriculum out of the first five chapters. The idea was that since her chem assignments never took as many days as she was given, she would do culinary chemistry on the days when she ran out of chem homework. She did the first assignment and never got back to it.

We stopped driving practice about two weeks into the lockdown and I think my daughter has been behind the wheel once since then. I know we’re going to regret it when she’s skating in Shoreline four times a week again and commuting to community college in the fall. But none of us can quite face driving lessons these days.

We also really fell down on the cleaning house every day, which is a crying shame. By the end of the school year, we still hadn’t made it to deep cleaning the upstairs, and the rooms where we started were already dusty and cluttered again. Sigh.

Maybe we’ll get back on track during summer vacation?