Remember snow days? Weather would be bad and school was cancelled. With remote learning, you aren’t dependent on if the buses can get through to have school. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have a “snow day”. In the spring semester when remote learning was still new and we were all just trying to get through each day, our town had a power outage. Not from snow, I can’t even remember why, but the town was out for about 2 days. No school!
When it’s the whole town, you know you don’t have to worry about your kid missing anything. This weekend, though, our modem died—poof, no internet at the house. And since it was just us, I knew my daughter would miss school for the 2 days it would take the modem to come. That’s a lot of work to make up. So what’s a remote learning parent to do?
FIELD TRIP!
On Monday and Tuesday, my daughter and I nestled in our car next to the school so she could hook up to their internet. Their schedule is live teaching for 4 hours, then lunch, then the afternoon is their pre-recorded specials classes and live meetings with teachers as needed. So we spent both mornings camped out so my daughter got her lessons and didn’t fall too far behind. We pushed off the afternoon pre-recorded specials, as they are only once a week and aren’t due until next week’s class, so she can do them over the weekend. Four hours in the car per day was enough!
Our new modem arrived Tuesday evening, just before I had a scheduled virtual meeting, so at least that worked out.
I hope that is the end of our adventures in education for a while. Now we just have to figure out how to co-exist with each other as my daughter, husband, and I all fight for bandwidth during the day.
Anyone else having remote learning adventures?
Get Out the Vote – CoronaLife Day 215
This week overall has not been a productive one for me, writing-wise. I chipped away at Veritas but still feel that I need to do more with the scenes I am working on before I can move forward.
We are five and a half weeks into the school year, and I am exhausted. Not because of the schooling—the teachers have been phenomenal and my daughter is old enough to be pretty independent about her work. I am perennially exhausted during the school year. My body clock and the real-world clock do not sync well at all. As a result, I stay up too late because that’s when I have my energy, and then only get about 6 hours of sleep on a good night. During the summer, I never napped during the day, because I could sleep as long as I needed, but these days when I have to get up with my daughter, I find I crash into a power nap once a day.
I did get one big thing done this week: I voted! Here in New Jersey, we are all vote by mail this year. We did it during the primaries, too, as we were still deep in the worst of our pandemic first wave. We got our ballots last week, and this week I filled mine in and dropped it off. The nearest drop off to my house just happens to be the actual county elections office, so I walked it right in and handed it over.
Please, if you are eligible to vote, do so. We have always held America up as an example of a thriving democracy, but the reality for years has been that we have more people who don’t vote than who do in most elections. Even in Presidential election years, we are often hard pressed to get more than 50% of the voters to the polls. Voter apathy is the single largest danger to our democracy. Don’t like the choices you have? Vote for the one closest to your beliefs, then spend the next election cycle finding and supporting someone you like better. If we want a country whose representatives more accurately reflect who we really are, we all need to get out there and vote.
As John Lewis said in his final words: “Democracy is not a state. It is an act.”
So act.