Tuesday: vacuuming around laundry, unsubscribing, and random

School continues. T. is still quite independent. He even ate lunch at home today.

A. is less independent. But we are basically off the hook for PE as near as I can tell, as long as she stays active, and we have a blessing on lifting / bitgym / walk / just dance as staying active. This is helpful. I still need to figure out art activities occasionally, but this is very helpful in terms of reducing my level of anxiety about what she is required to be doing. I flat out refuse to worry about music, because she is still having a weekly (zoom) piano lesson, and if that does not count, nothing really matters in the universe anymore and I do not care.

I vacuumed around the laundry, which I hate doing because it is awkward, but I have dropped two clean jackets and had to get the dust off them which I hate even more, so I vacuumed the jackets and then I vacuumed the source of the dust. Thoroughly. I will now go back to ignoring it and be a lot more careful about dropping clothes back there.

I have a new comforter on the bed and honestly, I do not love it at all. I am edging on to just digging the old one out. In the meantime, it is fine to go to sleep, but then I wake up warm in the middle of the night and there is no obvious way to get to a good temperature. I finally dug a blanket out of the closet, pushed the comforter down and used the sheet and the blanket. Oh well!

While I was awake, I played my game, and decided to look around and see what Apple has on offer in terms of large format iPads. I currently have a 5th gen mini, which is awesome for what I bought it for (take it with me places to do stuff while waiting for a kid activity to complete, and it is bigger than my phone so yay). It is not awesome for what Now has presented me with: sit around the house and stare at a tiny screen to play my game, read news, etc. This is a conundrum. Blogging, unsubscribing to email, and duolingo all have very, very tiny fonts that are not obviously adjustable. While I can go do those things on my computer, duolingo then makes me use the trackpad instead of a touch screen, which I do not love, and the behavior of the tiles in duolingo without a touch screen is absolutely infuriating. Thus: a large format iPad. I should then be able to do most of what I want to do on the iPad, without having to go upstairs or cart around the logitech keyboard or tolerate the Less Than Optimal apple mac keyboard. Of course, that large format iPad will not arrive for a couple weeks, but it is looking like I am going to be spending a lot of time at home for a lot longer than a couple weeks so this is fine. I do not plan to ditch the mini, so I can still bring that with me if I ever leave the house again for a purpose other than a walk around the block.

I have been unsubscribing to everything I possibly can. I have gone through mass unsubscribe periods, but this is easily the most aggressive. I just Cannot right now with the email. I have to read email, because we are doing a refi, the schools are a freaking inundation of email, and delivery of non-essential items from Amazon has slowed down enough that I have more outstanding deliveries than I have ever had from them (to me -- Xmas, obviously, there are tons of deliveries to monitor). I cannot avoid any of those emails, and book group has also been highly active in email (getting up to speed on Zoom, getting a meeting going, random additional communication which is delightful but still more volume of email), which I do not want to ignore. I also had a big Lego order that got broken up into multiple deliveries (thankfully, it has all arrived except the Treehouse). And then there are the food deliveries to customize, monitor, etc.: Sunbasket, Imperfect Foods and Walden. I know I am unbelievably lucky to have all these things: a social group that wants to social, kids who are doing school and thus in my house and not somewhere else where I would worry about them much more, plentiful awesome food to cook and eat, toys to play with, and all the random shit I get on Amazon. But it is still an awful lot of email that I cannot necessarily immediately delete.

Sunbasket is simplifying their menu (whatever that means) and also NOT taking new customers. Wow. That is a whole thing to think about. They have also added some mechanism for people to self identify as elderly, disabled, etc. for priority on sold out weeks.

Anyway. Good luck with settling into the Now. I hope the email wave diminishes at some point. I hope.

ETA: In the course of catching up on a bunch of email (collecting contact information that had been included in email, and book recommendations for future book group selections and so forth), I spotted one I had missed from the school. I was thinking they might cancel April vacation week and continue distance learning, and then let the kids out at a reasonable time in June. And there it was: a survey asking for feedback on exactly that question. Woot!!!!! I mean, who knows what the district as a whole will say, but I am all in favor. A.'s vacation day camp has already been canceled, so school might as well proceed.

ETAYA: I have gotten my inbox (for my main email account) down to 260. It will not last, I feel sure.

So, about those equity issues

When schools started closing shortly before Friday the 13th of March, they closed down in a wide variety of ways. My own district first said Friday would be a half day --- classic fakeout -- then canceled Friday entirely after we had already left for the day. D'oh. Making absolutely certain no one cleans out their locker or desk or office or whatever.

The initial closure was brief, and then the state guidance took over. First, the state extended the closure. Then, the state gave guidance that some kind of educational continuity was necessary.

But before the state gave that guidance, there was a lot of enrichment talk and social and emotional connection to the school and teachers talk. Which is delightful, and I am fine with that. I mean, it would have been more helpful to say, sorry, tell your kid to log into google classroom and check their school email for what they are supposed to be doing. Also, help them get zoom working on their device. If you do not have a device with a microphone and camera, or you do not have internet access, tell us so we can connect you. Honestly, that was the most useful stuff, after, hey, if you need food, tell us, we will bring you some on the school bus. They did, ultimately, communicate all that, but the amount of email that had to be sifted through to get to that point was cartoonish. I am only now digging my way out from under.

I realize that for younger kids, the message was different and involves SeeSaw? Maybe? I do not know; my kids are 5th and 8th graders. My kids also both have IEPs, one in a substantially separate classroom, the other with a full time aide. It was with great interest that I waited to find out what the plan was for that. While I understood that the hey, if you are hungry, tell us, came first, and that distributing devices to get kids connected came second, I felt like somewhere after that, the whole, oh, you have an IEP thing would probably come up. But instead, it seemed like basically the decision was going to be to not actually have distance learning, just enrichment and social and emotional connection sustained.

Really.

So, you know, that IEP form actually has an entire chunk on it about what will be done to help with regression, far more common and more severe with kids who need 504s and IEPs than with less neurodiverse kids, and honestly, regression should NOT be underestimated for the entire school population. And yet, the idea was, since the law says that kids with special needs are not supposed to get something that is functionally Less Than the mainstream population, the school was just not going to educate anyone? OK, but there is a minimum standard here, with the regression issue it hits kids with IEPs and 504s harder than those without (in theory, anyway). Just Not Doing Anything was not actually addressing the equity issue.

And yet, with the exception, shockingly, of New Hampshire (and possibly somewhere else I failed to notice) all over the country white, middle class people, with and without kids, with and without special needs, plenty of them teachers, just wisely nodded and signed off on the idea that it was somehow a justification for Not Educating, that there was an equity issue, and if you cannot do it fairly, you should not even offer anything.

Um. That is not equitable. That differentially impacts the neurodiverse. AND white, middle class people with the ability to sign kids up for for-pay home schooling online curricula and a variety of other things are way less impacted by shutting down than, well, anyone who is not a member of that group.

NOT schooling is NOT a solution to the problems of equity in schooling.

If I hear that again, I am probably going to say something that damages my relationship with you. Try not to suggest that Not school is a solution to the problem of equity. Definitely do not fucking blame poor people and/or special needs people for Why We Are Not Doing Distance Learning.

I mean, it would have been fine to just say, hey, we have no fucking clue what we are doing, give us a couple of weeks to get over ourselves and we will have something in the meantime here are links to entertain you and the kiddos and wow is this hard. I would have been fine with that. I mean, I like what NH did better, especially after hearing from a parent who is dealing with it (with a special needs kid). But right now, there is just a bizarre circus of misunderstanding, miscommunication and wisely nodding along with absolute insanity, that is only starting to abate.

I should probably say something here about the hilarious uselessness of the email checkin I received for one of my kids today. It was an utter fuckup of cutting and pasting, with the gender pronouns referring to my kid switching back and forth throughout the email. Super weird! I have been going out of my way to tell team members about what A. and I have been doing. I mean, we sent email to the music teacher (zoom piano lesson! with a brief video!), the art teacher (uploaded to artsonia! and sent more pictures and a video to her!), the PE teacher (BitGym! lifting! walks!) and the classroom teacher (regular checkins to tell her how great her assignments and lessons are and to double check that our efforts to get A.'s work submitted were successful). What little I am getting back from them to fulfill on the IEP is slightly more useless than crickets. [ETA: To be fair, I think we successfully scheduled a speech therapy appointment for tomorrow. I will try to remember to report back on that.]

Which is fine. This is hard. I get that. And honestly, this may be a marginally better placement for A. than being at school. I am having fun with it, for that matter. Hopefully all the other families with special needs are getting help that is useful for them.