This is a screenshot of my calendar from September 2020. It was J’s 3rd week of Junior Kindergarten, fully remote. They switched to a “hybrid” (4 days in-person, 1 day remote) model mid-October… which was followed by us having to quarantine for a COVID case on J’s bus, which turned into the entire district shutting down for two weeks, which turned into 6 weeks, which turned into “through the holidays and part of January just to be safe as we expect another surge,” which turned into “you can come back to hybrid but seriously please keep your home work space ready in case we need to bail out at any moment,” which carried us through the rest of the year. Ah, memories.

Back to the calendar: blue are my work meetings, pink is our family calendar, and brown are J’s class times. Classes involved whole group sessions, small group “cohorts” that alternated times depending on the day, live participation (read: paying attention and coming off mute to answer questions), homework to reinforce lessons, specials (music/PE/art), and the encouragement to have “purposeful play” (as in, no screens) in between. As you can visually deduce, the frequent and short class segments were perfectly tailored to the kids’ attention spans, and horrifically tailored to the kids’ working parents’ schedules.

This morning, after an entire academic year spent making it work with whatever was the expectation du jour — and, let’s be real, with some genuinely epic failures therein — J dialed out of his last remote class of the year.

I was surprised by how sentimental I got as he hung up on his class for (hopefully!) the last time. I’ve had my eyes affixed to this coming Friday as his last official day, but on the other hand, the remote classes are so symbolic of the absurdity of this, our first academic year as parents. Dave & I still have no idea what the layout of the Junior Kindergarten classroom really looks like except that J used to sit at the “purple hexagon” table and then moved to “orange triangle.” We have never set foot in the music room or the gym, and have only a vague sense of the playground sections designated to 1 group per day to reduce cross-contamination of classes. We can only imagine the state of his locker and how many belongings of his have grown comfortable in their home at his school’s Lost-&-Found.

But as with so many things since March 2020, there is some silver lining to the strangeness. In the case of Junior Kindergarten and these standing remote learning days, I’ve had a full year of unusual access to my son’s education, development, and relationships, witnessing the following:

• Our 5 year old demonstrating better VC etiquette than 90% of the adults I know, able to toggle between tabs, ‘pin’ screens to get closer visuals of the materials being reviewed, begin to troubleshoot tech issues like dropped connections, and, most importantly, transition from the level of nerves he had on his first day (hiding under his desk) to being a reluctant, then active, then eager participant, with progress and friendships and literacy to show for it.

• The astounding thoughtfulness of his teacher’s lesson planning, even with such little kids, even in such a bizarre setting… stories about virtual school, becoming “mask ninjas” in preparation for returning to in-person learning, and seasonally-tailored activities (such as practicing how to independently dress oneself for outdoor play in the snowy months — in order: pants, boots, coat, hat, gloves — set to the tune of “head, shoulders, knees, and toes”).
  
  
• A level of familiarity with the kids in the class that I would never be privy to otherwise, which has in turn facilitated far more robust color commentary from J over time… I know, for instance, that Logan is the fastest kid in class (which is saying something given that J considers himself akin to “the Flash”), that Emerson has a pet fish named “Prince,” and that Isaac will, without fail, find a dinosaur-related artifact to satisfy any show-&-tell prompt.

To commemorate the end of this chapter, I want to highlight 3 people without whom Dave and I would surely not be able to look back on this experience as fondly:

1. My manager, whom I will never be able to thank enough for the trust and air cover he provided me during this segment of my career where work/life felt relentlessly zero-sum.
2. J’s teacher, who not only handled the academic year’s challenges with poise and quick pivots, but also unwittingly taught me so much about how to effectively lead and interact with small children.
3. Jack Hartmann, who I had never heard of before September, would not assume would be a good candidate for kids’ entertainment, yet without question has the best days of the week song on the web (see Days of the Week Rap Back) — a highly informed opinion after comparing many (so, so, so many) other days of the week songs over the course of the year.