Whew

The last two weeks have been crazy. I drove to work all five days last week and on Monday and Tuesday of this week and I have to admit, I REALLY don’t miss my commute.

Being on campus with students was weird. It was good, but it was also intense. I think it was stranger than it might have been because we brought back our Advisory classes for 2 hours of social emotional learning (SEL) so it ended up being a lot of sitting in a circle tying to get middle schoolers who have been interacting with school through a screen for a year to engage in a meaningful discussion with masks on. It felt like I was the only light in a room full of black holes that just sucked all my energy from me. It was exhausting.

But I’ll only have to do it for one more week (after next week’s spring break) because the board has decided that we are neglecting our students by even attempting Phase 3 and they want us to move straight into Phase 4. So in mid-April the students start coming onto campus for their academic classes. Because our classes have 32 students and we can only fit 16 into a room, we will be splitting classes in half and students will only actually be on campus two mornings a week. There seems to be expectations in the parent community that when our county public health officer changes his guidance in alignment with the CDC’s, we can bring all our students back at once, but there is no way our classrooms can fit 32 with even three feet between desks, so a lot of parents are about to get really upset. (It might work in the elementary schools though… we shall see).

Having said that, over a 130 students at our school of 600+ students are opting to stay home for the rest of the school year. That is compared to just 20 at the other, similarly sized middle school in our district. It’s so interesting how even in the same small town attitudes can be so different.

Once we move into Phase 4 I return to distance learning because I’m an elective teacher so they won’t mix cohorts for my class. I’m expecting that will be the case in the fall too and when I float that belief people either think I’m probably right or can’t imagine we won’t be back like the Before Times by then. At this point I’m mostly just curious to see how it ends up.

Meanwhile my kids’ district is still floating possible dates for returning while their actual school site is being very non-committal (I imagine this is district messaging so they can look good even though really it’s not going to happen). If my son sees the inside of a classroom for four weeks (possibly 2-4 times a week depending on how many kids in his class want to come back) I’ll be happily surprised. If my daughter goes back at all I’ll be astonished. I’m thinking of either possibility as an early academic summer camp my kids may get to be a part of.

We got their school assignments and they both got what we wanted. I wasn’t all that happy about it though because SFUSD has still not committed to any possible plans for the fall and I have no faith that my daughter, who will be starting middle school, will be back in the classroom in any kind of meaningful way in September. That was a big topic at yesterday’s board meeting – the fact that SFUSD has no plans to bring middle or high schoolers back this spring and how that means they will miss out on $15M worth of state funding that requires they bring just one secondary grade back by mid-May.

(Also my daughter’s friends, who all applied to the same SFUSD middle school, all got into the same parochial school that has been open all this year, so I’m pretty sure she will be alone at the public school, which makes me way less excited for her to go there. I honestly didn’t think there was any possibility all three of her friends would get into a school that has only one class per grade, with a rising 5th grade taking most of those spots. I guess the joke is on me! None of us got into the charters we applied to, and there are wait lists of over 200 per grade at all of them for next year.)

Also discussed at length at the board meeting was the fact a board member who authored tweets in 2016 accusing Asian Americans of “taking advantage of white supremacist thinking to assimilate and get ahead” and referring to them as “house n*****s” (she used asterisks) refuses to step down (despite a vast majority of SF politicians requesting she do so), and instead issued a statement basically apologizing that her words made Asian Americans feel bad (but not admitting they were racist or even biased). I’m so tired of our school board making national news for being awful.

Yes, I have tried to start the “but shouldn’t we just leave SF already” convo with my husband but he keeps kicking it down the road (claiming he’s too tired… but when is he not going to be too tired? We’ve been too tired for a year now!). So yeah, I don’t think that discussion will go anywhere even if we do have it. I’m starting to research possible Bay Area (and beyond) destinations so I have some places for him to consider, but it’s hard because I know exactly why he won’t want to move to any of them. Still, I’m going to keep trying.

The final thing making our days harder is the fact that our son’s friend, who we’ve been enjoying a reciprocal “park playdates” relationship with is now totally AWOL because his grandparents are fully vaccinated and want to see him all the time. My inlaws are also fully vaccinated but remain too afraid of the variants to see us. My own parents are also fully vaccinated but my mom had shoulder surgery so they can’t have our kids yet. Without being able to take his friend (and have his friend’s mom take him) to the playground, we are really struggling to get him outside and with peers.

Also the child care situation at my district no longer works for us because the kids are back in there but he’s not and the schedules conflict so now we don’t really have any childcare on the two afternoons a week we were clinging to. Meanwhile his behavior continues to veer into total meltdown pretty much all day when he’s home. It’s really hard.

I’m really glad next week is spring break. We aren’t going anywhere (like it seems so many people are!) but just not worrying about all this (as much) for five days will be nice. Plus getting ready for Phase 4 (the schedule for which is still not confirmed for elective teachers) will hopefully ease my work anxiety a bit.

I have been tentatively looking toward the summer, but I won’t be writing much about any plans here because I’m not interested in being excoriated for my choices in my own space. I have been following public health guidelines all year – and have been more locked down than the vast majority of the country – and I’m done putting my possible choices out there for others to judge, especially when I know my own husband can help me determine what is safe or not for our family.

I think the biggest thing weighing on me is the idea that returning to our post-pandemic life won’t actually make me happier. There is a lot about it I don’t miss, and I worry those parts will be back before the parts I need to stay sane return. My husband can’t fathom that I feel that way, which surprises me until I remember that his post-pandemic life was very protected from the chaos of our kids’ commitments. It’s understandable that he expects everything to be better once they are at school and he is at work.

It feels like 2021 has been really hard. I wonder if it’s just that I thought it would get easier but instead it stayed the same, and my perception is that it’s worse. You’d think by now I’d have lowered my expectations.