The Pre-K topic mostly flitted past my radar recently. I subbed in a Pre-K classroom near my home after I retired so I do know a little about Pre-K. On-line Pre-K classes? You’d have much better luck teaching deep sea diving at home. Pre-K kids learn by doing. They learn by sitting down and tracing their letters, sometimes with a guiding hand. They learn by getting their cup of crackers and carton of milk. They learn by taking the paintbrush and building their Batman. They learn by throwing the ball, jumping on the trampoline, and riding the tricycle. They learn by singing and dancing to YouTube, hopefully with friends but the friends are somewhat optional. They learn by playing games and putting on costumes.

Can a child do some of this through online learning? Of course, and many are trying to learn online right now.

But what’s the point? Why not cut our parents loose with a simple set of requests: Teach Jay his letters and numbers, up to twenty if possible. He will benefit by knowing the names of a few shapes such as circles, triangles, squares and rectangles. We can add helpful suggestions: Talk about the shapes in the bag of peas and carrots. Discuss the steps in your process as you make the cookie dough, A list of helpful YouTube videos should be provided.

Then I’d cut those parents loose with a warning about the problems that too much screen time can create. Social skills cannot be truly taught online. You have to be in a shared space competing for the same truck, building blocks or paintbrushes. Creativity can be taught online as skills develop, but at four years of age, Lego, wood blocks, crayons, paper, an easel and a paint brush will work dramatically better than pictures on a screen.

Eduhonesty: Screens are not hands-on learning when you are three or four years of age. At worst, they are close to useless. Preschoolers can’t keyboard. It’s too early for them to be taught that skill. (Yes, rudimentary keyboarding might be doable for some but they will learn the keys much faster in a few years — and they will have a much better sense of what they are doing and WHY they are doing it.)

To make Pre-K learning work online, a dedicated parent or guardian is required — otherwise known as “the person to manage the keyboard and follow the directions.” I’d call this a waste of time. It’s also a highly prejudicial situation, favoring those kids lucky enough to have someone free to manage that keyboard — plan # 23,956 to widen the achievement gap, I’d say. Can online Pre-K learning be done? Yes, without doubt.

BUT WHY MAKE LIFE SO HARD? Why not give parents a list of things you want their kids to know, like those numbers, then cut them loose with helpful websites and useful construction toys? And let them bake cakes and paint pictures in coloring books while counting the beans going into the cooking pot? All the items in that Pre-K learning curriculum? A parent or guardian can get you most or all of the way there WITHOUT having to be online at a certain time in a certain program along with everyone else.

We are adding unnecessary layers of complexity to Pre-K, burdening parents who are often already lost trying to keep up with the demands for their older elementary and middle school children. If we add to household stress, who do we honestly help? As dad, grandma or whoever is minding the house gets snappier and less patient, how does learning benefit? We are probably teaching some colorful language as confused adults try to figure out where the latest lost link went.

Risk vs. reward — realistically, what are online Pre-K’s rewards? I see few that can’t be easily accomplished WITHOUT online Pre-K. At least one huge risk glares out at me: online Pre-K helps weld children to their electronic devices harder and sooner — the exact opposite of what I would choose for America’s children today.

A post to support union efforts to open schools AFTER VACCINATION.

While waiting for a Whole Foods pick-up, I read an article about white people receiving a disproportionate number of the available COVID-19 vaccinations. Chicago has tried very hard to get those vaccines into communities of color. Other municipalities throughout the country are working on that as well; yet statistics show non-Asian people of color are getting shots at lower rates than white people. Despite best efforts, environmental racism has slipped again into the American picture.

In Los Angeles County, only 7% of Black residents age 65 and over have received their first vaccination, less than half the figure for white senior residents. “About 9% of Native American seniors and 14% of Latino seniors have received at least one dose.” (L.A. Latino, Black seniors fall behind in COVID-19 vaccine access compared with whites (msn.com) Some 17% of whites and 18% of Asian Americans have gotten at least one shot. Northern California mirrors this set-up in which blacks and Latinos have fallen noticeably behind whites and Asians in getting vaccinated.

From Racial Disparity in COVID-19 Shots | The Portland Observer (February 1): “An early look at the 17 states and two cities that have released racial breakdowns through Jan. 25 found that Black people in all places are getting inoculated at levels below their share of the general population, in some cases significantly below.”

Eduhonesty: Urban teachers and other teachers who work in poor areas — disproportionately areas of color — will not be surprised by these findings. I have watched the craziness associated with those shots unfolding, and I have known that the families of the kids I taught were going to get hammered by the COVID vaccination process. Nothing else was possible.

How do you get that shot?

Almost without exception, you go online. You go to the Walgreens queue, the CVS queue, or your county queue. You add sites for favorites, some with names like Service Dashboard (mhealthcheckin.com). And then you go back, over and over again until you happen to get lucky. You may post on neighborhood apps like Nextdoor to get tips. Who is getting shots? How are they doing this? You add yourself to random lists for clinics. Phone numbers exist on some of these sites but you have to get to the site to find the phone number.

My ninety-some-year-old parents took that computer offline maybe five years ago. It sits upstairs gathering dust, too complicated to manage now. My Episcopalian church has many members who have fallen out of worship services this year. They don’t do Zoom meetings. Some don’t have the technology necessary to do those meetings.

The students in my 99% poverty school did not normally have computers. Online activity happened on cell phones that only some students possessed. Parents’ phones could fill in gaps, but easy internet access simply was not there. Sometimes NO internet access existed outside of school or fast-food restaurants. And across America, many schools are empty or lightly populated, while students with school-issued technology sometimes sit in fast food parking lots. You can do the COVID shot search on a phone, but that search requires its own basket of background knowledge — one some parents may not possess if they grew up in that techno desert.

My school is 60% Hispanic, 30% Black, 5% two or more races, and 99% poor. That demographic background forms its own whammy in terms of getting vaccinated. Many parents in my district work multiple jobs, trying to get enough of a low wage to support themselves. They can’t easily haunt vaccine information sites. While Spanish language translations are generally available, not all immigrants are strong readers, especially if they come from rural areas of impoverished countries.

As to our Black families …

“’It’s frustrating and challenging,’ said Dr. Michelle Fiscus, who runs Tennessee’s vaccination program, which is doubling the doses sent to some hard-hit rural counties but is meeting with deep-rooted mistrust among some Black Tennesseans.” (Racial Disparity in COVID-19 Shots | The Portland Observer)

The ghosts of “The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” are with us still and will be with us forever. That experiment spanned forty years. People have not forgotten that untreated subjects were allowed to die.

Let’s throw in another few facts:

Poor families often have transportation challenges. How many afternoons did I stand with students in cold hallways in the Illinois winter as students tried to find some way home? They had stayed to study and did not feel up to a long walk in subzero temperatures. For liability reasons, the district did not want teachers driving students. We did not have an activity bus for stragglers. Some families remained without transportation for long periods, waiting to make enough money to fix a car that had been sitting idle for weeks or even months.

Uber and Walgreens are working together to offer free rides to vaccination sites for members of communities of color. (Walgreens and Uber team up to make sure underserved communities have access to COVID-19 vaccines – CBS News) Efforts like this can help solve the transportation crisis — and crisis it is likely to be. Unfortunately, people can’t simply drop into Walgreens for their COVID-19 vaccination. These shots are often being delivered en masse at special sites. Friends have travelled over thirty miles to get their shots. Some are even putting a 50 mile range into their searches. I can speak for the fact that Illinois has excellent public transportation between suburbs and Chicago (That transportation requires people to use trains and busses in COVID times, of course.), but moving between suburbs is much more complicated. Sometimes you have to go into Chicago to go out again, hopping from trains to busses and back again. It was 7 degrees outside when I went to get my groceries today.

Internet connections, transportation, and vaccine hesitancy all work against communities of color. Criteria for receiving shots matter as well. Many workers under 65 do not realize they might qualify for a shot due to the nature of their work. Others do not qualify. Restaurant workers and construction workers are category 1C in many areas, and do not yet qualify. For a broad update: Tracking the covid vaccine: Doses, people vaccinated by state – Washington Post

Eduhonesty: Meanwhile, an update on teachers from Covid-19 Vaccine Rollout: State by State – The New York Times (nytimes.com) shows teachers are now able to get vaccines (if they can find them!) in about half of our states. (Updated Feb 8)

This county-by-county free-for-all is going as fast as it can. I’d like to take a moment to thank those men and women who are working all day, jabbing shots into shoulders as quickly as circumstances allow. So many people have been working so hard to help us get ahead of this plague.

But I want to double back now to teacher safety and make an observation I have not seen specifically highlighted elsewhere. Chicago has been locked in a dispute with teachers about reopening classrooms. Other urban districts are fighting the same fight. One important fact about that fight out should be put out front and center:

Unvaccinated teachers with students living in multigenerational, unvaccinated households will be at highest risk — and Chicago, Detroit, New York and other areas still have many unvaccinated teachers working with these high-risk populations. The CDC observes that the rate of infection in school children is tiny, but that data cannot be trusted. We are not testing asymptomatic and sometimes even sick kids. We know that children can be asymptomatic carriers. Until we conduct robust tests for asymptomatic COVID within the school population, we will not have reliable data on student and teacher risk profiles.

Vaccinations are moving quickly now. How much will we gain academically by forcing teachers and students back into that classroom prematurely? This is especially true since many families don’t seem to WANT their children to go back. I talk to friends whose schools are open but operating at about 40% capacity or less, many of those absences not due to any district plan. Less affluent students often live in multigenerational households with parents who know that they and the kids are likely to be fine if COVID comes home from school, but grandma might be another story entirely.

One last thought: The stress level is incredible out there right now, with many teachers debating whether or not to finish out their contracts. “Should I stay or should I go?” The many social media threads say. What can get lost in reading those threads is that once that question is asked, departure will remain on the table for the future. What about next year? The year following? The subs pretty much vanished this last year, as I predicted. I expect in the next few years, many teachers will go as well. At some point, going back to school to become an ultrasound technician may seem a smart move, despite the costs of more college loans. I now follow a group specifically dedicated to helping teachers get out of teaching.

P.S. Meanwhile, readers living this modern version of the Old West, who have been lucky enough to get that shot or who are waiting for the County Sheriff to rescue you, may I ask if you can think of an elderly neighbor who might need your help? My brother managed to get appointments for my parents, but many of the elderly living on their own are simply lost right now. Do you know a friend or neighbor who can no longer navigate cyberspace?

Can you help?

What are we building? What have we built? In this time of Adderall, Concerta, Strattera (atomoxetine), Focalin XR, Guanfacine, Clonidine, Tenex, CBD oil, methylphenidate, caffeine, melatonin, Vyvanse etc., what is happening to our students? Where do they spend their time? For the most part, our kids are in school and or at home.

What have we done to school? I’ve described my last school year before retirement elsewhere, but let me boil it down fast: Testing for over 20% of the year, mandatory tests and quizzes based on Common Core standards that were sometimes a full six years above where students were testing. I was a bilingual teacher, so I had seventh grade students testing in early elementary math and English. The special education teacher across from me had to give the same tests and quizzes. She took to going over the Friday test with her students on Friday and then giving them the test on Monday. When I observed this was making me look bad, since sped was sometimes outscoring bilingual, she said, “They don’t remember it anyway.” I didn’t protest and I didn’t get mad. The whole thing was so crazy it hardly mattered. They couldn’t READ these required tests that were sucking up my entire year.

The administration told students and teachers that grades were to be based entirely on tests and quizzes, no doubt to motivate everyone. At that point, of course, my students pretty much all felt FUCKED. And they felt that way for the entire year. So did I, of course. This was a no-win scenario.

To make sure students did their best, all parties and field trips were cancelled until after the spring PARCC test, which came in two batches that year, ensuring almost no recreation ever until the end of the year. I vividly remember how nervous another bilingual teacher in my grade felt because we quickly allowed a gift exchange right before winter break. Fortunately, when the Principal popped in that day, they were all slaving over worksheets.

Adults don’t do well without an occasional break. They don’t do well when the informal team-building activities disappear, and all the birthday cupcakes and celebratory moments vanish. As to field trips — those journeys become lifetime memories for many kids. To an adult, that bus trip may be just another visit to the aquarium. To a kid, those swimming fish can be magic. We did manage one trip to the Museum of Science and Industry after the tests were all over.

But magic doesn’t help on the annual test, and breaks take time away from drilling for that test. So mostly, my kids had a dreary, dreary year, an often incomprehensible year, as people in a now-failed consulting company on the East Coast wrote tests for them.

Eduhonesty: And now I’d like to circle back to where I started. My list of drugs isn’t complete either. What are we building? Well, the pharmaceutical industry just loves us I’m sure. Look at all those quieter kids on Adderall, Concerta, Strattera (atomoxetine), Focalin XR, Guanfacine, Clonidine, Tenex, CBD oil, methylphenidate, caffeine, melatonin, Vyvanse etc. — all the more peaceful kids who are getting help. Some hapless kids are just caroming all over the classroom in their anxiety. At worst, their doctor suggested a pharmaceutical but parents could not afford the drug’s cost.

I am not against medicating children who require help. Although I will always regard medication as a last resort, I have also watched as anxiety disorders and ADHD have been skyrocketing in America’s classrooms. I know that sometimes medications work wonders for kids who cannot sit and/or concentrate, who are falling behind and whose social lives are impacted by their hither and thither moves through friend groups. Those drugs rescue many students.

ADHD often runs hand-in-hand with anxiety disorders, and I have written before about the fact that I believe some ADHD diagnoses may be anxiety instead. But a connection is natural, regardless. If you keep forgetting to put that homework in the backpack, and you know Mr. X is likely to say something snarky since you forgot the last two assignments — well, that can make any sensitive person anxious. When ADHD stuff happens often enough, anxiety may be a natural, daily occurrence.

Meanwhile the pressure on kids is as high as it has ever been, largely as a result of excessive testing.

If readers want a reason to pull in all this testing, my list of drugs should be put out on the table. When educational leaders keep telling kids that they must take standardized tests, benchmark tests, and unit tests created by outside consulting firms, on top of regular classroom quizzes and tests — while regularly including tests with portions students sometimes cannot read or understand — those leaders keep adding stress into students’ daily lives. Those leaders keep scaring those kids, at least until the kids get tired and detach from the whole enterprise. I’ve watched this happen.

Stress affects behavior, behavior leads to interventions, and voila! Another successful Adderall XR intervention. But how many of those interventions are we making necessary by creating toxic classroom environments?

I’m not saying all of these behavioral challenges are environmental. I am ADHD. Some people are simply wired to lose their keys and ignore the many alarms that try to remind them of the latest glitch in their schedule. But environment forms a huge part of how more anxious children function. Desperate administrators trying to get students to take tests seriously often emphasize the importance of those tests, telling students certain tests will affect their ENTIRE scholastic future. Then they hand those kids tests the kids mostly cannot understand.

For decade after decade, schools were getting by with one spring test, not heavily emphasized, and with tests designed by the classroom teacher. Those tests were much fairer measuring instruments since the teacher taught the material and then TESTED CHILDREN ON MATERIAL THEY HAD ACTUALLY BEEN TAUGHT. In this set-up, many more students knew they could succeed. A student could win at these tests by studying because students knew what to study. Often the exact topics for the test were conveniently laid out in a study guide, one that might include sample problems.

We desperately need to go back in time, back to the time before children became sources of exploding data. We need to stop using data as an excuse for supporting testing that steals irreplaceable classroom minutes for little or no advantage. We need to stage a full-scale retreat.

And I suggest those exploding pharmaceutical interventions in elementary school back up my case.

P.S. From an interesting article about differences between the U.S. and Great Britain: Generation meds: the US children who grow up on prescription drugs | Health | The Guardian

“According to America’s Centers for Disease Control, 11% of four- to 17-year-olds in the US have been diagnosed with ADHD, a label for those who are disruptive in class and unable to concentrate; just over 6% are taking medication.” 

That’s over one in ten with ADHD diagnoses, with over one in twenty medicated. That medication may be helpful and entirely appropriate. Nevertheless, it’s time to actively pursue an agenda of making school a kinder place — starting with reasonable targets and decreased TESTS and TESTING time.

I’m carefully picking out dry spots or clumps of snow to step on as I walk my dog. The only rule is to avoid the ice. I take off my winterwear, filled with feathers and fake fur, remove the red and gray coat from my dog. The world keeps roaring along. The snow keeps falling.

But politics has shifted. The world this week is the world of Amanda Gorman, the young African-American Harvard graduate, whose inaugural poem “The Hill We Climb” spiraled into viral heights immediately after the new administration began. We should celebrate Amanda’s poem, a poem for Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and all of us. We should celebrate the United States of America, which for all its flaws has occasional glorious moments. A few couplets from the poem that resonated with me: .

We have moved into a new U.S. incarnation — and many people are sleeping more peacefully. Lots of concerned citizens came furiously together to make this time happen. Now we have to build and rebuild. We must take the immigrant children out of cages forever. We are long overdue at attempting to provide a living wage and affordable health care for all. We also have to reconnect with our relatives and neighbors. Or at least calm the waters.

But it’s not healthy to just hurtle from crisis to crisis. It’s not healthy to keep going, going, going with our guts churning and our hearts hurting. Our students and children need us to help them frame their worlds right now.

Let’s celebrate free elections. Let’s celebrate an America where little girls may begin growing up believing that they can be President — not because it’s allowed for girls, but because gender, color, and sexual preferences may soon become irrelevant considerations in picking candidates for high office. Let’s celebrate a peaceful transition. Yes, soldiers were sleeping on marble floors in the capitol building, but the swearing-in of our new leaders happened without serious hitches.

Our kids need to hear: It’s a great, new day!

P.S. If you voted for the other candidate and you don’t think it’s a great, new day — can you celebrate democracy? Celebrate the fact that every two-four-six years we get a chance to make our voices heard? Kids need to hear that their voices matter and their thoughts count. That’s what elections are about.

As teachers push back against going live in areas like Chicago, I’d like to try to put a face to these protests. Who are these teachers?

She may be just out of school, nearing retirement or anywhere in-between. In elementary school, the odds are almost 9 out of 10 that she’s female. In middle school and high school, she’s probably also female, but she’s sharing the hallways with many more men. She’s likely to be much less worried about COVID if she’s younger and on her own, but starting teachers sometimes live with their extended family. That starting salary in many locations comes in somewhere in the mid-thirties and Montana’s average starting salary is only $30,036. (Teacher Salaries in America – Niche Blog). Since it’s an average, that means lots of people are starting below $30,000.

The kids who are coughing openly and furiously are not in the classroom this year, But kids are always sick. Let me repeat this: Kids are always sick. And some kids’ noses run like faulty faucets. They leak perpetually. Those kids may not be home.

“It’s just ‘Benjamin,'” mom will say, and the teachers know she’s right.

The rooms are small, even with reduced class sizes. The masks don’t always work well. Watch a mom with little masked kids in the grocery store if you have doubts. And Benjamin cannot deal with his nose without removing his mask. Unless he just covers his mask in snot, which some kids will do, the same kids who cover their sleeves in snot.

Now, let’s say you are Benjamin’s teacher. If you are especially unlucky, Benjamin had a fever last week. Was it caught on the first day? The second day? Maybe Benjamin’s not the talkative or complaining type. I got insanely sick a couple of years ago, and I’m, pretty sure the source was a nonverbal specIal education student I helped one morning. I didn’t catch the problem until he took my hand on the way to the bathroom before lunch. That hand was HOT.

Now let’s say you are that older teacher or young teacher living in a multigenerational home. You wake up with a slight sore throat. A very slight sore throat. You know your school is short of subs, like so many other schools. They are using paraprofessionals to cover classes — not legal, but they have to put some adult into those rooms — because they have no one else to cover classes. Unfortunately two of the school’s paraprofessionals just quit. There’s no one to cover for you. And you are probably fine.

Will you go into school? Maybe you will. Let’s say you are older and suffer from acid reflux, which causes occasional mild sore throats. You may say, “I’m sure it’s just reflux.” Because it’s really too damn scary to consider the alternative.

Except you are scared. You get to school and Benjamin’s absent. Now you are walking on psychic eggshells. He didn’t look right yesterday — maybe a little too flushed. Was he unusually quiet?

“He’s got a fever,” his mom says. But no one has tested him. The lines are crazy long still in a few places, and testing is a nuisance regardless. He is not coughing and the doctor told mom testing could wait since he does not yet seem that sick. What now? You are going to have to wait to find out what is happening. Should you go home?

That’s Wednesday. What about Thursday and Friday? And the next week? Unless, of course, Benjamin sends his family and maybe his whole class into quarantine. Speaking of scary…

Eduhonesty: Vaccinate the teachers. Those states who have not prioritized teachers have their heads so far down into the sand they have clearly buried their brains. But, in the meantime, I’d like to ask all the parents and noneducators, the people who have never worked in schools, to visualize those classrooms. Remember what those rooms were like. Remember the smells? Those rooms where the smells lingered and lingered for hour after hour? Yes, districts have been working to improve air circulation. But in older buildings, that task is monstrously huge and expensive. Do you trust those efforts? Understandably, many teachers do not. Imagine daily life in those rooms in the winter of 2021.

Kids are always sick in elementary school, and often sick for most or all of the winter in middle school. High schools are a little better; diseases don’t work through high school classrooms with the same ferocity. Still, I guarantee some of our “Felicias” and “Benjamins” are perfectly capable of ignoring a low-grade fever to go to school so they can spend the day near their latest romantic interest.

This will be a short post. The Front page of the Chicago Tribune says it all today.

I do not personally know anyone yet who has received the first vaccination shot here in Illinois. I am certain those many thousands of healthcare workers are out there. But the elderly and the teachers? They are 1B — and we are hoping to start 1B next week in Cook County. Caveats are being issued all over the place — never mind the ongoing discussions of lack of overall vaccine, but I believe those vaccinations will be taking place over the next few months.

Those Chicago teachers? We are nearly on the cusp of vaccinating. Why are we forcing anyone into the classroom right now?

A few weeks or even months will not significantly change our students overall educational status. They might make all the difference in teacher health, however. This blog has been following long haulers from the earliest intimations that COVID-19 lingers in some people. Here is one last sobering article on this theme: Almost a third of recovered Covid patients return to hospital in five months and one in eight die (telegraph.co.uk)

This disease does not always come and go. The above article has the following subtitle: “Research has found a devastating long-term toll on survivors, with people developing heart problems, diabetes and chronic conditions.” Those chronic conditions are proving to be many, with long-term extreme fatigue toward the top of that list.

Eduhonesty: In viral hotspots — almost everywhere right now, it seems — schools should remain closed until vaccinations begin to rein in this monster. Opening those classrooms under these conditions is criminal.

From the John Hopkins coronavirus map for Cook County, Illinois:

Cases: 435,888
Deaths: 9,065

Reader, I would like to ask you to focus on the cases, rather than the deaths. What is almost one-third of 435,888? Let’s use the 29.4 percent in the linked article above to get a rough number. That’s 128,151 people who may no longer be actively sick with COVID, but who are still unwell, if the research from Leicester University and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in Great Britain is correct. A number remain extremely unwell.

P.S. Things I have learned from social media. They ran out of shots in New York. And in some states, teachers are not even 1B but are in the general pool.

I embrace lengthy discussions about today’s election craziness with high school students and mature younger brothers and sisters in middle school. Young adults are mostly following events anyway. There’s little choice.

Politics has stolen the front pages. In a sobering recap of how badly things are going, a new record was set yesterday: 4,400 people died from COVID-19, as the virus runs almost unchecked, ravaging our nation’s economy and psyche; yet you have to scroll down to the 21st story on the Washington Post website to find it that latest COVID information. Current events have pushed a full-blown plague off the front page.

A better time to flesh out the civics curriculum has hardly been seen in my lifetime. The only event of comparable magnitude that comes to mind is the resignation of Richard Milhous Nixon. I was a teen-age girl in Mexico at that time and I remember people asking me, “But why did he resign?” I would explain Watergate while they continued to stare blankly at me, before saying, “They all do that!” But in my country at that time, people thought more highly of their nation’s leaders. We did not believe they all did that.

Bill Clinton’s little hallway romp with the cute, young Monica hardly hits the meter today. Instead we look at pictures of National Guard members sleeping on the marble floors of the capitol building as we prepare for an inauguration like no other. I have personally tweeted that I’d like the inauguration to be conducted remotely. One advantage to a Zoom inauguration: The President-elect could be in Uruguay or on Mars for all any angry mob would know.

But this post is about our little kids — our incredibly confused little kids on some cases. I’d like to suggest we back away from sharing too much information with elementary school age children. In middle school, a conservative approach should be taken with this topic. I know from my teaching years that the emotional maturity of a thirteen-year-old can be utterly unpredictable. Some are wise far beyond their years. Others go home to watch SpongeBob SquarePants while clinging to toy trucks and well-worn dolls.

As an elementary school-age child, I spent years living in fear after viewing a rather innocuous Outer Limits episode, “The Man with the Power.” During the day, I was fine, but in the dark as I lay waiting for sleep, I kept waiting for that lightening to pop up in the corner of the room. What if the room was destroyed? If I was killed by the falling ceiling? Or if I just disappeared, never to be found?

Children truly do believe in Santa Clause, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny. They may reach the realization that Santa is just dad or mom when they are five or when they are seven. Perhaps a few will hang on past seven years simply because Santa is such a great idea and their family keeps backing up the Santa story. Why was the Tim Allen movie The Santa Clause such a success? I suspect part of that movie’s longevity is the fact that many of us would like to live in a universe with a real Santa.

But kids truly believe. They believe in heroes and, unfortunately, they also believe in monsters. They can be scared of the lightening in the corner for years. I read a post last year about how to teach 9/11 in first grade. My gut response was NOBODY should teach 9/11 in first grade. It’s too soon. Some ideas should not be taught until children can put them in an at least semi-realistic context that will make sense to them.

Timing is everything. I had to be at least eight when I saw “The Man with the Power,” an episode filled with adult themes that all flew right over my head. But I was an imaginative child and that lightening remained after all the mysterious conversation faded away. Our kids right now can’t understand this talk of insurrection and the “end of democracy” or “end of our country.” But they get the word “END.” And they can tell something scary must be happening, especially in those homes that have been watching news they never watched before. They understand what “five people were KILLED,” means, if hazily, and they understand that “DARK, PANDEMIC WINTER” is a bad, bad thing. I hope not too many have been watching the TV from the stairs as that policeman stuck in the doorway screams.

PANDEMIC has already upended our children’s lives. Some have lost family members. More commonly, children have been running in fear of endangering family members, listening to explanations of why they can’t go to play with friends or visit grandma and grandpa.

“We can’t go this year. We have to protect grandma and grandpa.”

Protect them from what? Depending on their ages, the answer to that question will be more or less complete — but on some level, all our children understand that their grandparents are in danger. A scary new kind of death walks the world.

I don’t know what we will call this generation when it comes of age. I know that these kids will be a new generation like no other in memory. They will be the kids who grew up in the times of masks and the drive-thru. Some will be kids who knew dad’s job clerking at Walmart or driving a city bus just might get him killed. Others will be kids trying to recover from holes in their educations, despite best efforts by educators and families.

But we can rescue our elementary school children and their more-sensitive older brothers and sisters by NOT teaching them topics that are too scary for them to process. No one who believes in Santa Claus should be trying to understand what is happening right now to our democracy and the United States of America. Young children know America is where they live. DESTROYING America then becomes an absolutely terrifying idea. Donald Trump can become a terrifying idea — either TRUMP the EVIL MASTERMIND WHO IS DESTROYING AMERICA or TRUMP the HOPE FOR AMERICA WHO IS BEING DESTROYED by the EVIL SOCIALISTS. Kids know what DESTROY means, or its synonyms like wreck and trash. But Santa fans don’t know that lightening can’t come out of nowhere and destroy their bedroom or take their parents away. They don’t know that America will not simply disappear out from under them, sweeping their lives away somehow, probably with dead grandparents thrown into the bargain.

I keep seeing articles on how to teach what is happening. For adolescents, that teaching is wholly appropriate and I’d say vital right now. This is unfortunately the civics opportunity of a lifetime — a chance to help young people understand our government, contracts and law.

But I’d like to plead with teachers, parents and other adults watching this mess — to the extent possible, let’s keep the wee ones out of this mess. Let’s turn off the news. Don’t share the harsher, nitty gritty details. Let’s offer reassurance when complex topics arise.

“Everything in Washington, D.C. will be fine. Things don’t always happen the way we want them to happen, but this country is a great country and we will make things work out right. People are working right now to get it to come out right.”

That’s what our little kids need to hear. The adults have it in control. The adults will keep them safe. They live in a great country. Sometimes people have to work to get that country right, but when they do the work, they can fix the problems.

Hugs to my readers from the blue room!

Cell phones. Small, flat rectangles that easily fit into our hands, whether nested in Otter cases or cute pink, plastic unicorns made in China; these devices are thieves of time like no other. They are simply the laptop or desktop dwarf that holds… what? Messages, Zoom, YouTube, videos, books, movies, social media, photo apps, games, ride-sharing and dinner-delivery options, restaurant rewards apps, music, weather, news, email, and random bits and pieces of cyber detritus, like this app that finds stars and identifies planets.

But winter has fallen and the White Walkers of the Northlands are out there. In the North, children are sitting in houses. Many of them will not go back to school when winter break ends. They will not go anywhere. Maybe they will visit a friend or two in their bubble or pod, but how many children did not see grandma and grandpa this break?

For years now, education and child-rearing articles have warned about the dangers of too much screen time. Too much screen time is bad for kids? One might as well say water is definitely wet. We know that staring into screens creates trouble — short tempers, unfinished projects, and disconcerting zombie-like stares for starters.

But I want to flag those phones today. Cyber burn-out is the enemy for online teaching and learning. Phones eat into children’s limited attention spans, sometimes aggressively. And those limits are real, even if they vary greatly from child to child.

Parents, have you relaxed on the issue of phone time? A lot of us are stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues right now — or wish we were, because Mobile and Memphis at least sound warm. In January in the Northlands, it’s natural to pick up the phone to play a game or work on music lists. It’s also natural to look at our kids and decide not to interrupt their games or forays into social media. We don’t want the kids watching endless Hulu and Netflix. We intuitively sense how sick some are of hour after hour on their laptops, no matter how good their teacher may be. Even when the cobbled-together curriculum for remote learning seems relevant and useful, kids and adults have secret off-switches for electronics — that place where the zombie stare kicks in and a simple question nets a snarl rather than a helpful answer. Minecraft may engage the brain, but too much Minecraft can make Jayden a snarly kid.

Ironically, as electronic minutes accumulate, it’s easy to let the phones go right now. Who want to fight? Kids deprived of phone time push back in the best of times, as parents struggle to find the app or strategy that can rein in the monster. By a certain age, apps to restrain phone time often seem futile.

Eduhonesty: Stuck in the house? Kids and everyone else going stir crazy? Or at work and worrying about what’s happening at home as grandma or the sitter supervises — or does not supervise? Worried about your kids’ mental health, whether you are home or out in the world? When the schoolwork is out of the way, one strategy that will help children maintain balance is to get those kids off the phone.

Here is a starter site: 40 of the Best Art Projects for Kids – Left Brain Craft Brain

A search on craft projects will yield many sites. I’d ask my children what they wanted to do. Learn the guitar? This can be done in online classes, although you should consider masking up and venturing out early to buy the guitar. Purchasing first-time musical instruments requires a fitting process unlikely to work without making comparisons and holding the instrument.

I get together with a group of friends to sketch and paint throughout the week. We look through a series of pictures and decide on a favorite. Then everyone tries to create their own version of the octopus, door, tree, of whatever whim strikes at that moment.

If crafts are not catching on at home as you hope, I recommend exploring online learning. Online options abound. Some will stimulate conversation instead of inducing the zombie stare. Here’s a useful link:

Free online courses you can finish in a day | Coursera

The Coursera courses in this link might fascinate a high school student or academically-strong younger sister or brother. Yes, Coursera takes a student back online but “Feminism and Social Justice,” “Psychological First Aid” and “An Introduction to Consumer Neuroscience and Neuromarketing” might prove perfect for the right kid. These courses are guaranteed to engage the brain productively.

(Teachers, if you don’t know Coursera, please check this link out!)

Fight back, reader. Yes, the snows are falling. The children (and many adults) are sinking into lethargy as ice covers the sidewalks, and onscreen minutes proliferate.

Maybe your child needs a guitar or ukulele. Or you both do. Or a set of 24 watercolors and a starter pad of watercolor paper. You might melt some crayons to make the tried-and-true stained glass window. The whole family could participate in cooking lessons with the kids helping to plan the week’s menus. (I believe Coursera has a course on child nutrition ????.)

Reader, start looking for those phones. They fade into the background, almost becoming invisible. The world mostly goes quiet when the phones come out and right now, with the stress of COVID, politics, and work, quiet may seem desirable. But life with children, whether parenting or teaching — that life was never meant to be quiet. Children should not be staring. They should be dancing. Or mixing flour with sugar. Or massacring chords over and over on their musical instrument of choice.

Hugs and Good Luck to All in the New Year.

P.S. Watch out for violins. They make amazingly awful sounds at the beginning of musical instruction. If you don’t have a basement or attic for practice, I recommend keyboards or guitars instead.

“There is no question that distance learning has challenges. That’s why the U.S. Department of Education has reminded schools that if distance learning isn’t providing a student with a fully appropriate IEP or 504 Plan, they should make a determination as to whether that student will require compensatory (make up) services when schools are fully open once again. It isn’t an ideal solution, but you should keep it in mind.”

I translated this paragraph to “honest people know that some U.S. students are being sent up the creek into the whitewater without any paddles or life preservers.”

From IEP or 504 Plan for Distance Learning: Accommodations for ADHD Students (additudemag.com)

Many classrooms are empty now and we all know that distance learning serves certain students better than others. This is true for all students. Distance learning mostly favors visual learners with longer attention spans. It heavily favors lucky students with parents who can make time to help during the learning process, especially in homes with more disposable cash. That cash translates to headphones that cancel outside noise, a cell phone or tablet holder, a printer, reliable internet, and, most critically, a calm, quiet and comfortable place to study.

Yes, many financially-disadvantaged parents are doing a heroic job of creating an at-home learning environment that works, but money makes this so much easier. I don’t want to diminish the efforts of struggling parents who are fighting to help educate their children while somehow also paying rent, car payments and grocery bills. But I also don’t want to pretend that extra $$$ isn’t hugely helpful during this school year. Many supplies provided by schools are being bought by parents right now– not all those schools went around handing out crayon caddies and glue sticks. Tech-savvy parents right now are more often able to stay home, in part simply because jobs that require significant tech knowledge tend to be jobs that can be done on a laptop with a cup of tea and cookies in a home office.

Still, a financially-disadvantaged student working at home on a school-issued Chromebook, using that less than optimal mouse and the school headphones that can only be heard in the right ear — that student may be doing fine. As always, the right instructor makes all the difference. Reliable software and a solid internet connection help, but back-up plans can rescue days when the Evil 64-G Nanites sent by Thanos somehow eat the day’s plans. Tenacity and grit can substitute for cooperative hardware and software.

But what about those kids with IEPs and 504 plans? The kids who don’t have the services they need to make use of that Chromebook?

Eduhonesty: Not all the grit in the world can substitute for the ability to read when no one is available to read for a kid who cannot decode words, especially not if that kid suffers from hearing loss too.

A partial list of the particular reasons why students receive special education services includes widely varying degrees of autism, Down syndrome, severe dyslexia, medical conditions requiring regular hospitalization, arthritis, autoimmune disorders, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, schizophrenia, spina bifida, exceptionally low intellectual functioning, traumatic brain injuries, blindness and/or deafness, and other physical and psychological conditions that impair learning. These problems may be combined with hyperactivity or other disorders. Concerns for these students may include memory, recall, compliance with instructions, sustaining attention, concentration, impulsiveness, organizational skills and emotional vulnerability. Some of these students cannot read or can read only the simplest books. Some cannot speak and may require assistive technology to communicate.

REMOTE LEARNING SIMPLY WILL NOT WORK FOR SOME OF THESE STUDENTS. The best teachers and special education departments may be unable to make a shift to home technology a viable path to education. What does that mean in the big picture? Compensatory services designed to make up for lost time when schools are fully open once again will be crucial for many students.

It’s not too soon to start creating next year’s plans for “Megan” or “Robert.” Every lesson that Megan and Robert cannot follow should be recorded. THIS IS THE TIME to make notes showing what our special education students missed during remote learning. Plans for Megan and Robert will be much more robust if we plan now when we know exactly what they are missing, rather than waiting until next year and trying to figure retrospectively which ideas slipped away.

Our compensatory plans for Megan and Robert should be well underway and if these plans have gotten lost due to the overwhelming details that come with shifting to remote learning, then it’s time to put the plans back on top of the agenda. There will never be an easier time to track and record that lost learning than right now.

Parents — I’d call the schools and ask when and how schools intend to pivot back to those areas where your child could not follow. Where possible, keep track of specific topics that you believe will need to be addressed next year.

In the meantime, let’s all be as kind to each other as we can.

Hugs to all my readers as we move into 2021, with hopes for a better year.

December 2020.

In 1943, Hugh Martin, a composer and lyricist for musical theater, wrote a Christmas song reflecting on the sadness and disappointments of the past year. The tone of the work stood in sharp contrast to the normal, joyful tenor of Christmas songs. Written for “Meet Me in St. Louis,” starring Judy Garland, the Christmas song expressed the sentiments of the young women in a family that was leaving behind an idyllic life in St. Louis and relocating to an uncertain future in New York. The palpable sense of loss and trepidation about the future expressed in the song was so strong that the 21-year-old Judy Garland and the director of the movie, her future husband Vincent Minnelli, asked Martin to change his lyrics to make the song less depressing. Martin made several changes, including changing

“…it may be your last

Next year we may all be living in the past.”

to the less ominous

“Let your hearts be light

Next year all our troubles will be out of sight.”

In 1957, to further expunge the downbeat sentiments of the original song, on the request of Frank Sinatra, Hugh Martin changed the line “Until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow” to “Hang a shining star upon the highest bough. “

And so with additional changes over the years, we have the present version:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Let your heart be light
From now on
Our troubles will be out of sight

Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Make the Yule-tide gay
From now on
Our troubles will be miles away

Here we are as in olden days
Happy golden days of yore
Faithful friends who are dear to us
Gather near to us once more

Through the years we all will be together
If the fates allow
Hang a shining star upon the highest bough
And have yourself a merry little Christmas now

Even with those changes, the poignancy of the song, with its emphasis on a diminished holiday in an uncertain and perilous world, remains. Those sentiments perfectly captured Christmas in the middle of World War II, with the whole country on a war footing and several million men serving abroad; the song became an instant hit and has been a standard ever since. When Judy Garland performed the song in 1944 before an audience of service men returning from combat or about to be deployed, soldiers wept.

And so this song seems also to capture the moment for us in 2020, as we approach Christmas during a worldwide pandemic, beset by profound political divisions and economic turmoil. As we muse about 2021, we can only hope and pray that we all will be together and that our troubles will indeed be far away. We may also reflect on the year receding and lament the faithful friends who will gather near to us no more. Until those troubles are far away, we will try to make our little Christmas as merry as we can. We hope that you are able to do the same.