Skip to main content

This is not school, this is SLIFE

The governor of Massachusetts officially canceled school for the state for the rest of the school year, and everyone is responding in their own way. This news will likely bring about a lot of different and difficult emotions. I’m sure most parents and teachers expected this to happen, like I did, since so many other states across the country are doing the same. But that doesn’t make it any easier to acclimate or accept that this mandatory social distance quarantine really will be our status quo for the unforeseeable future. 


I’ve seen a few people I know starting to post on social media regarding the school closures. “School is not closed,” some have professed, justifying that learning is still taking place, but just in a different way. 


Well, I’d like to counter that argument. School is closed, and it will be closed indefinitely. What we are doing right now is not school. It is not distance learning. It is not e-learning, or online classes, or hybrid education. This is a response to trauma. This is triage. This is SLIFE, (students with limited or interrupted education.) And I know the teachers are working hard to earn their pay by staying at home and creating online learning experiences from scratch, but I must dissent. This is not school and these kids are not learning anything. 


As an educator certified in trauma-responsive teaching, I can guarantee that children cannot learn academics during trauma. What they are learning right now is coping skills, if we are lucky, and evasion tactics, if we are not. They are learning how to save a screen shot for their video in a Zoom with their teacher, so they can play with their dog instead. They are learning how to open new windows or hide their screens so they can google if it is legal to keep raccoons as pets, instead of doing their reading response journals. They have multiple tabs open, navigating from google classroom to google docs to google slides to google forms, just trying to figure out which assignments are due on which days. But improving their mathematical reasoning skills, reading comprehension and scientific problem solving? Absolutely not.

I know that we are all in this situation out of necessity, not by choice, and I realize teachers are trying to put on a happy face in order to be the pillar for their students that they always are. But as a stay-at-home mom who is overseeing the “homeschooling” of the 9-year-old I have at home, I implore everyone to just relax. This is not the time for complicated online classes that require hours upon end of screen time. This is also not the time to inundate these kids with busywork we’d leave for a substitute. This is the time to assign silent reading from an actual book, finally memorize their multiplication tables, or dissect a flower. Or better yet, assign them to clean the bathroom or cook a meal. Now those are lessons that would put this time cloistered in the house to good use!


To all my fellow teachers, we see you and we know you are working hard and working beyond your comfort zone. But you need not comfort or placate our kids with mindless, endless work online. If we want our kids glued to a screen, we’ll put on Disney Plus. I know everyone is attempting to maintain normalcy right now, but that’s just not realistic, since normal fled as soon as pandemic arrived. Instead, let us all relinquish ourselves to survival mode, and remember this will be over someday. Just not May 4th. 

 See you in September! 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why You Should Travel with Little Kids

I took my first cross-country road trip when I was six-weeks-old. My parents loaded me up in an old Ford Wagoneer and drove me home from my dad's hometown of Pittsburgh, PA, to my hometown of Ojai, CA. After that, we traveled back and forth between the East Coast and the West Coast every summer of my life. A few times we flew, but most years we loaded up the car with the suitcases, the dogs, and the children and drove 3,000 miles across the country. This early exposure to travel instilled within me a joy of seeing the world, and since that first trip I have visited 34 states and 14 countries. And I hope to share that same joy with my own little ones. Traveling with children can be hard--it disrupts their nap schedules, may involve crossing timelines, and definitely pushes everyone beyond their comfort zones. But seeing different countries and different parts of our country as children gives them a greater appreciation for cultural and regional differences, and it widens their exper
10 comments
Read more

Is 5 Little Monkeys Racist?

I’ve seen a lot of Tik Toks debunking children’s nursery rhymes lately. I have two toddlers, so now whenever I hear one of those rhymes, I think about their unsavory origins. But my son loves, loves Five Little Monkeys. He’s just learning to talk, and can almost say it by himself. I’ve thought about telling him to stop singing it since I learned in the original lyrics it’s not monkeys jumping on the bed, but he just gets so much joy from singing it as he jumps up and falls down, I thought... no harm, no foul, right? As long as he thinks the song is about monkeys, it’s ok.  Until my niece came over one day, and the three toddlers were playing on an old mattress we have on the living room floor for them to jump around on. My son asked me to sing 5 Little Monkeys. At first it was cute, because they literally were jumping on the bed, but then I took a good look at the three of them.  My kids are half-Guatemalan but very fair, like I am. Whereas my niece is half-black, and her skin happens
Post a Comment
Read more

Reflections on Immigrant Life and the American Dream by a New Citizen

  Buenos días estudiantes de sexto grado. Mi nombre es Audelina Barrios, and I am a former student of Fuller Middle School. Soy de Guatemala, y viví mis primeros trece años de mi vida en mi tierra natal, pero desafortunadamente perdí a mis padres cuando tenía 12 años. Mi hermano y yo fuimos huérfanos por un año hasta que tomamos la decisión de empezar nuestro viaje hacia los United States to meet our oldest siblings.  In August of 2014 we finally arrived in the land of our dreams, the United States. During our first 4 months in the US, we lived in New Jersey with my oldest sister, Rosa, and went to a school where ESL didn't even exist. I was paired up with the only Latino in the school y sin saber una palabra en inglés. I felt like an outsider because I had no other friends and like I wasn't even part of the school system.  In January 2015 my older brother Francisco and his wife, Mae, adopted us and we moved to Framingham. My first school in Framingham was Fuller Middle School
Post a Comment
Read more