I need to be up this morning at 6:45am, and I was really stressed out last night that I’d snooze through my alarms, so when I woke up on my own at 6:10am I decided to come up and write a blog post. The idea of being jerked away in the middle of a sleep cycle did not sound fun, so I avoided it (and got to write a blog post)!
It’s Monday, and it’s a real Monday in that my kids need to get their butts up and get ready for camp at the (in their minds) ungodly hour of 7am. After a year plus of 8:30am wake ups, we desperately need this practice before the start of the school year.
Which is rapidly approaching! I’m basically in full “let’s get ready for school” mode! Now that my house is pretty picked up (the surfaces are clear but the bag of surface shit remains – today is the day I finally tackle it), I can actually clean the floors. I’m really pleased that we had people over this past week, which provided a much needed impetus to get the house in order. 16 months at home really did a number on the place, and to be perfectly honest, it hasn’t had a really deep clean since we rented it out on AirBnB in 2018. I’ve been doing a lot more of that kind of deep cleaning as I’ve picked it up, so steam cleaning the floors will bring us to a good place.
Later this week I’m going to drive to work (for the first time in a month!) to see what the staff room is looking like. The secretary is being paid hourly to move the old staff room into the (much smaller) new staff room and she indicated (in late June when I last saw her) that she would be done by now. If she’s not done I’ll ask my principal what I can do to get the space ready. I have a feeling that I’ll have two choices on moving: (a) do it myself on the timeline that I am comfortable with (and work many more unpaid hours) or (b) wait until it’s done for me (on a timeline that absolutely stresses me out). It’s a lose/lose situation, and when my classroom is a factor, I’m sure I’ll pick the “lose” where I lose my own time (doing it myself), and not my sanity (waiting for someone else to do it).
Not a super interesting post, but it’s where my head is at. I have a few other posts rattling around but they feel hard (especially the one about thoughts as I fill out our will and trust and rank our guardianship choices for our kids – ugh it’s so hard). So instead I come here with what’s been happening and what’s about to happen. I really am in “get it done” mode because I have two weeks of both kids in camp and I really do need to get stuff done. I want to start the year feeling prepared, and after all the upheaval of the pandemic that requires a lot of time and mental energy.
I am feeling all kinds of feelings about starting the school year with the delta variant raging (even here where we have high vaccination rates!). I still believe that my kids (and students) need to be at school full time, and in the end I am most worried that either district will pull back on their commitment to full time in person learning. But I’m also aware that with this new “hyper transmissible” (that is the phrase they are using now) variant of the virus, my (unvaccinated, under 12-year-old) kids will be returning in person at precisely the time when they have the most chance of actually getting sick.
Yes, our vaccination rates are high, but my kids go to the schools with the children of the populations in this area that are least likely to be vaccinated. My daughter will be attending a middle school where I’m assuming very few of the 7th and 8th graders (let alone 6th graders that have already turned 12, of which there will be very few in the fall) will be vaccinated. So they’ll all be packed into classrooms, with new groups of students every period, transmitting this new hyper transmissible variant as well as adults do (because of their age). Yes they will all be wearing masks* (the only thing keeping me sane right now), but it feels like only a matter of time until my daughter comes home sick, especially since they’re now saying the approval for kids under 12 won’t happen until mid-winter (I can’t actually find where “they” are saying this, but I’ve seen it referenced in multiple places so I’m assuming it’s been said).
I have so many feelings about how much in person learning my kids missed out on, only for them to have to return when their actual safety levels are probably at their lowest. I’m not going to go on a rampage about who is responsible for this situation, but suffice it to say, I’m really fucking mad about it.
I am deeply grateful that I will feel really safe seeing 150+ students in my classroom every day, and that I don’t have to worry about unknowingly bringing this hyper transmissible variant back to my family. Yes, there are breakthrough cases, but at this point it makes more sense for me to stress out about my kids getting it at school themselves, and not me bringing it back to them. These vaccines are incredibly effective and I’m trying hard not to let the media’s incessant (and confusing) coverage of mostly anecdotal breakthrough cases lead me to believe otherwise. (Hey, breakthrough cases are exceedingly rare, but here is a bunch of them that happened.)
Well that went a direction I wasn’t intending, but I guess I’m not surprised. I can’t really write about my “returning to school” mentality without getting into all the thoughts and feelings I’m processing about my kids getting 10 days of in person learning when it was much safer for them to be in a classroom, only to return full time now that delta is raging. Because that is absolutely in the background of all of it, making it hard to concentrate on anything else.
How are you feeling about the fall, and the start of school?
*I feel so deeply for families in states where schools cannot require masks in the classroom – that is absolute insanity and I’m honestly not sure what I would do if my governor were asking me to have my kids sit in a room with 32 other unmasked adolescents, in an area with middling vaccination rates. I’m so relieved and thankful that mask mandates in our schools are assured.