Teacher Tom: To Continue Becoming

Teacher Tom: To Continue Becoming

To Continue Becoming

A few days ago, a medical doctor was being interviewed on CNN about the psychological impact of the pandemic on children. She provided several caveats along the way, but her bottom line response was "I expect that kids will bounce back."

It's a hopeful answer and one that is, in some fashion, true. More to the point, however, it's what we all want to hear. Perhaps in some ways, we need to hear it because, I suppose, we too hope to "bounce back" from our negative experiences. But no matter how hard we hope, over a half million people in the US died and it's estimated that 40,000 children lost a parent to this plague. I'd very much like for us all to "bounce back," but it hardly seems an appropriate wish, especially for these poor children. A young child doesn't simply bounce back from a parent's death. Indeed, the concept of bouncing back seems far more appropriate to, say, dealing with the loss of a baseball game, than the cruel lessons of life itself.

The doctor, of course, wasn't talking about these children, nor is she talking about the children who suffered themselves, or those who have spent the pandemic trapped in a household CONTINUE READING: Teacher Tom: To Continue Becoming

Parents, Stop Talking About the ‘Lost Year’ - The New York Times

Parents, Stop Talking About the ‘Lost Year’ - The New York Times

Parents, Stop Talking About the ‘Lost Year’

Teenagers and tweens will be fine, experts say — if adults model resilience.

They’re calling it a “lost year.”

On and offline, parents are trading stories — poignant and painful — about all of the ways that they fear their middle schoolers are losing ground.

“It’s really hard to put my finger on what happened exactly,” said Jorge Gallegos, whose son, Eyan, is in the seventh grade in Washington, D.C.

When Eyan was in fifth grade, he had a lot of friends, Mr. Gallegos said. He was home schooled for sixth grade, and he seemed to thrive.

But spending this year at home because of the pandemic has just been too much.

Eyan transferred to a new middle school for seventh grade, where nearly all of the other students had started in the sixth grade, prepandemic. He hasn’t met any of his classmates in person, and he hasn’t made a single friend.

Eyan has told his parents that he’s lonely. So lonely, in fact, that he has started posting on Discord and Reddit. Sometimes, when he’s bored, he even starts chatting with those strangers during class time.

His dad is sympathetic. “He wants to talk to people, and he doesn’t have anybody,” Mr. Gallegos said in a recent phone interview. But he’s also worried.

As a teenager, Mr. Gallegos went off the rails for a time. He was kicked out of high school, withdrew from community college twice and spent years fighting his way back, ultimately graduating from college and building a successful career with the federal government. There’s no way he’ll let the pandemic similarly spin his son’s life out of control.

“I’m going to make sure that we’re on top of this stuff,” he said. “I think as a parent, I have to do more.”

Virtually everyone has waded through hardships this past year — job losses, relationship struggles, chronic stress and, in the worst of all cases, the loss of loved ones to Covid-19. And parents with school-age children have battled the demands of combining their usual work and family responsibilities with at least some degree of CONTINUE READING: Parents, Stop Talking About the ‘Lost Year’ - The New York Times

John Thompson: Reflecting on “The Lost Year” for Students | Diane Ravitch's blog

John Thompson: Reflecting on “The Lost Year” for Students | Diane Ravitch's blog

John Thompson: Reflecting on “The Lost Year” for Students

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, read the New York Times Magazine’s report on the possibility of a “Lost Year” and wrote these reflections:

Three times, I had to take a break from reading the New York Times Magazine’s special education issue, “The Lost Year.” The Magazine’s powerful reporting delivered gut punch after gut punch, forcing me to put the magazine down, calm myself, and contemplate the suffering our children are enduring.

Three times, as these compelling and emotionally overwhelming student stories hit home, I would get sick at my stomach. I’d sense anxiety growing to the point where it hit as hard as when ideology-driven, Trumpian policies are announced. As these tragedies unfolded over recent months, I got into the habit of taking a break, breathing heavily, and relaxing, resulting in naps to calm my nerves.

The anecdotes in “The Lost Year” illustrating the damage being done to our most vulnerable children hit me especially hard because of decades working in the inner city and our most disadvantaged schools. But I must warn readers who may not have been covered by so CONTINUE READING: John Thompson: Reflecting on “The Lost Year” for Students | Diane Ravitch's blog