Today I zoomed with my English teaching team to discuss gaps in learning we anticipate after losing the last quarter of the school year to COVID-19.
We spent 30 minutes unloading angst about returning to the classroom. We needed to say aloud our fears and frustrations before we could focus on the content we teach.
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Determining "gaps" means accepting the likelihood our students have done only minimal reading and writing during the past five months.
My freshmen also missed out on major units of study. They did not read "The Odyssey" (their ancient-lit baptism) or "Romeo and Juliet" (their first date with the Bard).
I love teaching these classics. They unlock allusions and open a treasure trove of humor. More important still, these works invite students to experience emotions of fellow humans--and to contemplate deep themes--across hundreds and thousands of years. How cool is that?
But so what? (The ultimate COVID Question!)
Maybe my students were learning other things this spring, such as how to survive as teenagers in small-town Iowa during a pandemic. That's content I wasn't tested over at 16.
Is some learning more worthy or valuable than other learning?
Maybe all learning is good.
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This afternoon when I called my parents to set up Zoom for Bridge, my dad said my mom was having a hard time on day #13 of their 14-day isolation.
Tomorrow they can, at last, leave their rooms, although they still cannot congregate with other residents or take off their masks.
When I see how hard these two weeks in their tiny rooms have been, I am even more glad I was able to provide them with several months of light, space, and farmyard to move about in.
"At your place, we could go outside and blow bubbles," my dad said today. "That was so nice."
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Today is my youngest sibling's birthday. On the phone, I told my mom a memory from that day:
My sisters and I turned cartwheels on the hospital lawn while Mom held up our little brother to the second-floor window "to watch us."
This memory led me to another: in preparation for our family's new baby, my mom had purchased shoe bags for my sisters and me. When we unzipped them on the morning of our brother's birth, we each found a babydoll and a hand-sewn layette.
When I think of my mother, with four children under the age of 9, preparing these precious gifts of love, my heart hurts.
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| Gotta love the internet. This is almost exactly what I remember our shoe bags to look like--except ours were pastel in color. |
When I mentioned the dolls in shoebags to my mom, she was delighted. "I'd forgotten that, but now I remember!" she said.
As memories do, that one linked me to the next: the fishbowl.
When my parents went on vacations, we would be left with a babysitter and a fishbowl of small wrapped gifts. Each day we could reach into the bowl and pull out a trinket: a wind-up toy, a novelty cereal spoon, Silly Putty.
We loved this ritual. As the fishbowl emptied, we knew our parents were closer to coming home.
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I encourage my students to revisit poems throughout their lives. Yes, maybe they read "The Road Not Taken" in 7th grade, but it will mean something else in 9th grade, and still something more when they have enough life experience to consider "how way gives on to way" in their own experience.
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Today as I revisited childhood memories with my mom, I see them in a new light--an appreciative and forgiving light that had been clouded out much of my life, until she lived with me during COVID and in mental decline.
In this light I see my mother's 34-year-old hands guiding the cloth of tiny doll clothes under the foot of the Singer sewing machine.
I see her, huge-bellied with her fifth pregnancy, packing four shoe bags, each with a small baby doll and layette.
I see her holding her newborn up to the hospital window.
She loved us.
Enough.
Be well.
Write.
Allison
For Adrienne: Wolf at one month and one day, dozing off after lunch.
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