Today RnB returned to school, and a lot is on our minds. How rampant will the so-called Delta variant (of coronavirus) become in our area? What will RnB’s new teachers be like, and will our children thrive under their tutelage? How will our children continue to grow and develop as the school year progresses? (And of course, the not so optimistic question: how will our state’s incompetent leaders continue to react poorly to the pandemic?)

Of course, the only answer to any of those questions is “wait and see”. All we know for sure right now is we’re as ready as we can reasonably be for the upcoming school year.

The Differences

This school year beginning is unlike others in several ways. Like last year, we’re in a pandemic, but now there is no virtual option and the state won’t allow school districts to enact mask mandates. Though RnB (and many other students) will be wearing masks to school, I know that quite a few will not be.

Another difference, unrelated to the pandemic, is that R is in fifth grade, the highest at her school, and will be one of the oldest children in the building. It will be the last year that both our children will be in elementary school. (Later, they’ll share one year of middle school and two years of high school.)

Preparation

Remembering my own summer vacations as a child, I didn’t want the children to become mentally lazy over the summer, so I worked to keep their minds active. I gave them writing assignments (descriptive, persuasive, and fiction), taught them chess (B has already beaten me once), kept them on task with daily Spanish lessons (via Duolingo), and encouraged them both to play Prodigy (an online math-based adventure game). R read dozens of books, averaging nearly one per day, and B made progress on the reading front too, though he doesn’t enjoy it and so it requires creative incentive solutions to get him to read.

Both also attended a variety of “camps” (which I put in quotations because in my aged mind a camp is a place or event at which one camps and conjures images of sleeping bags, mosquito repellant, and hopefully lots of hiking and swimming). At the YMCA, B spent a week honing soccer skills and part of another week learning basketball (the instructor for the basketball camp quit halfway through, so we got a partial refund). R went to “Cake Wars” camp at the Y and actually brought home a cake she made during the camp. In June, both attended a weeklong “STREAM” camp at Iduma Elementary School, and in July both attended Camp Invention at Timber Ridge Elementary. In addition to being enjoyable, these camps too served to stimulate mental processes in the children.

A Full And Fun Summer

But that gives the impression that our entire summer was about prepping our children for success, driving them hard to learn, and being way too strict and overbearing. Which isn’t how it happened.

As previously reported, we vacationed in Galveston in June, playing and swimming at the beach, among other fun times. And in July we enjoyed a joint vacation in Austin with my brother and his family, a trip that was mostly about fun for the children: parks and playgrounds, the Thinkery and Mt. Playmore, and swimming in the hotel pool.

While we were home, M took RnB to our neighborhood (HOA-funded) pool dozens of times, and later in the summer they swam a couple of times at the YMCA pool with a friend that B met in basketball camp.

They also had plenty of screen time, both with their mobile devices and the TV (though I gradually reduced screentime hours as the summer went on). They rode their bikes and took walks, had playdates, and more.

(And, difficult as it is to believe, both also helped me with household chores: dusting, cleaning bathrooms, doing laundry, washing dishes, and taking out the trash.)

Somewhere in all that, B had a birthday party too.

Meet The Teacher

Thursday of last week, we attended Meet The Teacher, and met both of RnB’s teachers, and learned that both will actually have two teachers this year. They’ll spend part of the day with their assigned teacher and then part of the day with a different teacher. That way one can focus on math/science while the other focuses on language arts, social studies, etc. In both cases, the other teacher is just next door. I suppose the classes will switch rooms/teachers at lunch time.

B will have his third Black teacher this year, something of a statistical rarity, and R will have her first. (It’s fairly well established that Black students who have at least one Black teacher do better in school and are more likely to attend college, graduate, and so on.) B has at least one friend from our street in his class, and R has two (very smart) friends sitting at her table with her, one of whom was her main competitor last year in the advanced reading competition.

We signed them up to ride the bus this year. Before the pandemic, they were always bus riders (it’s simply more efficient), but last year I took them to and from school every day in our minivan. I suppose it was over-caution, since it turned out that school kids weren’t high on the list of Covid-19 transmissions, but I kept seeing kids (and adults) at the bus stop with no masks, and just drove past. The downside is that it required forty minutes of driving time for me every day (ten minutes to the school and ten minutes back, twice a day), not to mention the twenty or more minutes of waiting in the pickup line in the afternoon, the increased wear-and-tear on the vehicle, extra emissions, etc. So I’m looking forward to getting back that hour per day, every day. This year, the school finally did something I suggested seven or eight years ago: have an app so parents can track the bus. (There’s a code issued by the school; not just everyone can get the app and track our buses.) I tested the app this morning; it showed when the bus began moving and headed toward our neighborhood; it was accurate to within a couple hundred yards.

A Word On Weather

This wasn’t the brutally hot summer we’d been led to expect by previous experience. Both June and July were our coolest since moving to Killen 12 years ago, and rainier than average. (July had so many rainy days that M struggled to schedule pool trips around it.) August started off cooler than average too (and there are no signs that it will get worse). There has only been a single 100-degree day so far (June 14). Part of me hates this, because it will provide confirmation bias for all the global warming deniers around us, but it meant that our kids were able to play outside without worrying about heat stroke, and it meant saving a lot of water on lawn-watering.

Conclusion

More so than most years, I’m not taking anything for granted. Given the latest pandemic news in Texas (that hospital leaders warned state lawmakers that the hospitals will soon be “overwhelmed”), we know things could change soon — like a return to virtual schooling or mask mandates, or something else. In the meantime, we’ll do the best we can.