Stuff my kids cried over in the last couple of weeks

 In no particular order:

- Ditching a whole school day when she was late to log in and too embarrassed to actually join the classroom Zoom meeting. (My 11 yo.) I hadn't noticed because I was downstairs, working, and she was upstairs in her room. She didn't tell me--until her teacher made her the next day. We then went to office hours and her teacher and I explained that all she had to do was tell her teacher she was late--nothing to be embarrassed about. 

- Ditching PE and getting caught because she lost track of time playing a video game. (Also my 11 yo.) She ended up with two extra hours of PE "homework." 

- No being able to find a notebook because it was in the second bag of school supplies we picked up at school on Oct. 1, which was left downstairs in the living room. (Still my 11 yo.) 

- Staring a new school online and not being able to make friends. (My 14 yo.)

- Forgetting a chemistry assignment and seeing their grade drop to a B. (Also my 14 yo.) She did the assignment, late, emailed it to her teacher and was able to get credit and bring her grade back up an an A.

On the one hand, I miss regular school.

On the other, studies are showing that older kids are more at risk of showing symptoms and transmitting COVID-19, particularly kids over 12: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/370/6514/286 

So going back in person is still not safe for our family. And that's a thing I would cry about, if I let myself. 

I was worried about the wrong kid. Or: the curse of online homework.

This summer, most of my anxiety focused on my 15 yo, who was starting at a new high school, in 10th-grade, online. We didn’t know what to expect. Her previous high school, where she had completed 9th-grade, hadn’t handled the pandemic and online learning particularly well. 

Fast-forward to the fourth week of school. My 15 yo has been complaining about not having a social life some. But overall, it’s probably the most relaxed I’ve seen her in years. Meanwhile, my 11 yo is a pack of nerves. 

I didn’t think I’d have to worry about her. She is at the same school. She already knew the teacher she has this year, who team-taught her fourth-grade class last year. The transition to online had been handled remarkably well. My kid also knows most of the kids in her class. 

I hadn’t anticipated what a pain homework would turn out to be (I should say that’s not because of her teacher.) 

In the past four days, there have been two major meltdowns both because she had trouble finding where the homework assignments are posted and because she feels like she has too much of it. For context, last year she usually had a vocabulary list to study every week, some math and some reading. This year, she has a bit of math every day, a weekly vocabulary list, a weekly Latin assignment, some reading and one major English Language Arts/Social Studies project once in a while. Plus PE homework. 

Now my 11 yo is not the type to keep things bottled up. Friday, around 9:50 a.m., I heard some very, very loud crying coming from upstairs. I went up to find my kid sprawled on our bed, sobbing uncontrollably, while my husband tried to calm her down. He had to leave to take a work call. I stayed. 

I finally managed to get her to tell me that she felt overwhelmed by how much homework she had. And that she didn’t even know where to find some of it. After a lot of listening, I managed to talk her into getting back to her classroom Zoom. Then I went back to work.

At 12:30 p.m., I sat in an online office hour with her teacher so we could discuss the issues.

One issue is that some of the homework is posted on a website my kid can’t access. The teacher thought it was because we were using a Mac. Or maybe she was logging in wrong. The district-provided Chromebook was supposed to solve all our problems. I went to pick it up from my kid’s school. It didn’t help. We called the district’s tech support. They spent about 20 minutes talking to my husband before saying that they couldn’t help, either. 

During office hours, the teacher very kindly helped us figure out where the homework actually was. She also promised a referral to the school counselor to help my kid avoid work-related panic attacks. I wish I could say that everything was better after that. But Monday, again around 9:50 a.m., my kid came down sobbing. It turns out that while she was having her last meltdown, she’d missed a bunch of work. So she was upset that she was behind, again. 

I’ll say this for my 11 yo though. She is really good at bouncing back. Within half an hour, she’d calmed down. It was as if nothing had happened. Meanwhile, I’d texted my therapist to set up an appointment for later in the week. And I’d signed up for yoga class.

PS: I realize that I’m extremely lucky that my kids are older. I have friends and colleagues with little ones who are much more overwhelmed. I just want to share what some of my struggles are. 

There's a foam sword in our school supplies bag

 There's a foam sword in our school supplies bag; one teacher was 30 minutes late to her own class; and breakout rooms are awkward: or: thoughts about stuff that happened in the past week of online schooling, in no particular order. 

I'll save the foam sword for the end because I have THOUGHTS. So let's talk about the other two items first. 

So, Tuesday after Labor Day, my 15 year old was supposed to have chemistry, starting at 8:50. I usually don't check on her, because she's pretty responsible. I also usually can't hear her when she's in class, unlike her 11 year old sister, who is, well, loud. So I'm sitting at my own computer, working, when I get a text from said 15 year old, who should be upstairs, in her room, learning. 

"I've been waiting for half an hour and my teacher hasn't started the meeting. Should I email her?"

After checking that she was signed into the right meeting, I advised her to go ahead and email her teacher--which is exactly when the teacher actually started her Zoom, 30 minutes late. According to my kid, there was no explanation about the during the class. I gotta say, I'm a little disappointed it didn't turn into the glorious disaster described in this Twitter thread when a second-grade teacher kicked herself off her own Zoom.  Guess high school students are too mature or too bored for that.

Speaking of, my 15 yo's government teacher has kicked himself out of his class Zoom repeatedly, it turns out. Apparently, he's even shut down his computer by accident at least once. My daughter thinks it's because her teachers are older and don't have a good handle on the technology they have to use. I think it's because the contract the teachers' union and the district signed only allowed for one week of paid hands-on training. Otherwise, it was up to the teachers to spend their summer familiarizing themselves with the platforms they would have to use and restructuring their classes--during a time when many of them were home with their own kids. 

Meanwhile, my 15 yo was complaining that it's impossible to make friends at a new school while learning online. I suggested that she could make friends when she's assigned work on projects with other kids. And that's when both she and her sister informed me that "breakout rooms are awkward." Apparently, without the teacher's presence, no one wants to start a conversation and awkward silence reigns until someone breaks down and pipes up. My 11 yo informed me that she often is the one who does that. I'm not surprised. 

Finally, let's get back to the foam sword. It was handed to me by a school staff member when I went to pick up school supplies for my 11 yo. She goes to a Title 1 school--meaning high poverty--so all students always receive the supplies they need for free. (This is a nice change from her previous school, where I think our family spent about $100 on supplies for her classroom every year. But I digress.) We also received a canvas tote full of workbooks and paperbacks that she will use during the rest of the year. 

The sword, it turns out, was for fencing, which she is going to do via an Zoom once a week, during the school day. And that is making me very, very conflicted. On the one hand, she also has two hours of PE a week so with fencing, she'll get way more than the 20 minutes of PE per day that California mandates. 

On the other, all 5th graders don't have fencing. It's just her class. She is in what's called the Seminar program, which brings together kids that scored at the very top of her district's gifted and talented test. That's why we are at this Title 1 school. Not all school have Seminar and this particular program is wonderful. But it's only offered for  about 60 kids in third through fifth grade. And I can't help feeling that the other 140 kids in her school are missing out. 

I keep wondering what would happen if we treated all kids like we treat these "gifted" kids. What would happen if we tailored instruction to where students actually are, rather than forcing on them specific standards because of their age? What would happen if we trained all teachers to teach like Seminar educators? What would happen if all kids could take fencing and learn cursive from a Harry Potter themed workbook? 

Just something to think about. 

Zoomaggedon missed us

Well folks we appear to have avoided Zoomageddon, which struck many San Diego Unified households this morning, when many, many kids weren’t able to log on to the teachers’ Zoom meeting. Good thing it was only a meet and greet. 

Best I can tell, it’s because we were using our own devices rather than the district-provided Chromebooks. I’m hoping to find out more tonight when my kid’s elementary school principal will hold a meeting with all of us parents. 

But if I’m right, it’s yet another example of the digital divide that persists in schools in California --and around the nation. 

About 60 percent of kids in San Diego Unified qualify for free and reduced lunches. That means they come from households that make about $47,600 a year for a family of four. My 10 yo’s school has so many of these kids that everyone gets free lunches. I think I’m pretty safe assuming that these families rely on district-provided devices. 

So: our family, which right now has three laptops and a desktop, had a fine first day of school. I have a couple of colleagues who only have a home computer, provided by their work, and their kids’ district-provided Chromebook. Their morning wasn’t smooth. Basically, they were unable to work for an hour because their kid took over their computers. But hey, at least they had that option. 

It's unclear how many hundreds, or thousands, of families did not.

One last, funny note: My 14 yo’s government teacher was Zooming from his balcony and referring to himself in the third person. Hm. 

Would you publish a picture of a drowning child on the front page of a newspaper?

Would you publish a picture of a drowning child on the front page of a newspaper? What if the child is not American? What if they were poor? Would that make a difference? These were some of the issues we had to tackle during my first month of journalism school at UC Berkeley.

The exercise was based on a real life incident that had happened in a small American town. A news photographer had snapped a picture of the child's grieving father, who was holding his son's body in his arms. The picture was reminiscent of Michelangelo's Pieta. If memory serves, the paper went with a less dramatic picture, below the fold.

The Washington Post home page, with the picture that most U.S news outlets used. 

That memory came back, not particularly welcome, during a visit to the Newseum in Washington, DC on Sept. 3, 2015. You've probably seen the news, by now. A 3-year-old Syrian boy, Aylan Kurdi, drowned while fleeing the conflict tearing his homeland apart. Most major American newspapers (The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal) used the picture of a police officer carrying the boy's body to go with the story. The boy's face is not visible, while the police officer's sorrow clearly is. Even the Daily News went with that shot, above a headline reading "The Dead Sea" (ha ha, not). News outlets used the picture on social media, but not on their home pages. Some, including the Post and the Journal, used it on their front page (though you have to wonder if that even counts, these days).

This is what we learned that day at Cal: respect for the victims and their family, which has to be balanced against news value. We talked about how the pictures of children dying in under-developed countries were more likely to end up on newspaper's front pages, as if they deserved less respect in death--and somehow in life too.

Of course, there were far more graphic pictures that didn't make it into U.S. newspapers, on their home pages and social feeds. There is a shocking and heart wrenching  picture of the dead little boy lying face down in the sand. In a larger crop, a police officer is looking at the body, shoulders hunched. In a tighter crop, there is nothing by the desolate small body.

This is the picture, cropped or not, that most of the rest of the world is now looking at, from Ireland to Dubai. The shock value is obvious. Kudos to Dubai's Gulf News for its "Humanity Washed Ashore" headline.

I can see both sides of the argument. One the one hand, this is a horrendous situation, made worse by Europe's refusal to truly confront the crisis. A shocking picture might serve as a call to action--assuming--very charitably--that this was the media outlets' intention. On the other, using the more shocking picture definitely smells of exploitation to me, in the hope that the image will go viral. And the boy and his grieving family deserve to be treated with respect.

So I go back to that discussion, 18 years ago now, about what our values need to be as journalists--and I side with most American editors today.

More on the boy's story and home pages from around the world in this Wall Street Journal video.

Also in this excellent New York Times piece. 

How I landed my first job

The first time I drove into a wildfire, I was just 25. It didn't seem like that big of a deal at the time. I really wanted a newspaper job and the day of my interview happened to coincide with day two or three of a very large wildfire in Southern California. So of course the editor, being short staffed, sent me up the mountain. Thanks goodness I wasn't wearing a skirt and heels.

I drove up in my 1978 Datsun, without air conditioning. I rolled down the windows, but a little ways up, smoke and heat came pouring through. Firefighters in full gear stood on both sides of the road, mopping up hot spots. I talked my way past a police officer, using the editor's business card, as I'd been instructed. I was starting to sweat in my sensible khaki pants and knit top.

At some point, I turned a corner and the fire trucks disappeared. I had made it to the evacuation center near Lake Idyllwild. Helicopters hovered overhead, headed for the lake, where they refilled the giant buckets they used for airdrops. I found a few campers stranded there, who told me their stories. My recently acquired cell phone didn't work up in the mountains so I found a pay phone. (Yes, I'm dating myself; it was 1999).  The newsroom told me that the road I had just come through had been closed. I'd have to make my way down on the other side of the mountain. Well, it would take me twice as long, but at least I didn't have to drive through the fire.

When I got back to the office, night had fallen. I fed my quotes to the story's lead writer. The editor then put me in charge of tracking the fire's progress. I worked with the graphics department to update the map of the blaze. I don't remember how many of the quotes I'd gathered ended up in the story, which is now behind a pay wall. I do know the story landed on the paper's front page the next day. The job offer came a few days later.

Pictures from the Jan. 11 solidarity march in Paris

More than one million people took to the streets of Paris Sunday, Jan. 11, to show their support for the victims of two terrorist attacks that took place in the city last week. They included famous cartoonists and less famous journalists, as well as policemen and several innocent bystanders who were shopping in a kosher supermarket.
My father was one of the marchers and took these pictures.