Learning Loss:
No one ever imagined that we would still be locked down in September.
September means back to school. New backpacks and shoes for the kids, and we teachers sigh to say good bye to the summer, but there are fresh bulletin boards and ‘Welcome’ signs, new rosters, and classrooms that had the floors polished in the summer. September meant new beginnings, new kids, a renewed sense of purpose after resting all summer.
Not that year. The schools had been shuttered since the March before when they told us all to go home. ‘I thought it was Easter, not Christmas, I heard a teacher whisper when the principal told us our spring break would be extended another week, to two weeks, to you know, ‘flatten the curve’. We all know the story now, yadda yadda, the kids of California never went back to the classroom that year. Nor the next.
I spent the last half of the 2020 school year sitting on the school yard asphalt by myself, surrounded with buckets of paint. Most teachers had to start Zooming, but since I taught ESL that year, they told me I could just go home and collect my paycheck. The thought of getting free money for doing nothing was unfathomable to me (but I guess a lot of stuff that happened that year was) but also immoral, so I asked the principal what else I could do to help. She gave me the perfect job of painting a giant map of the United States on the playground.
I sat, day after day, month after month alone, painting each individual state in a color palette of my choosing, my headphones on my head tuned in to Adam Carolla, the comedian I had listened to in the morning for years. He was a voice of sanity to me, my friend.
School officially ended that June along with my temporary job. Painting the map of the states had inspired me to drive across this country of ours. I wanted to see with my own eyes what was happening everywhere else. I was prepared to drive alone, anything to get away from the irrational craziness I saw when I wasn’t in the refuge of my asphalt canvas. I couldn’t bear to continue to witness the lines of masked people bracing themselves against the wind to get into the grocery stores, or physically fighting over toilet paper once they got in. I had to get the hell out of Dodge. The fact that the unelected health officer, Scott Marrow, told us to stay within five miles of our homes made the trip even more enticing. It couldn’t be like this everywhere. My friend Merry ended up going with me. ‘What if we die?’ she asked me before we left. After all, we were going into the eye of the storm, the scary states that didn’t lock down, where covid floated in the air like a thick invisible blanket, they told us, where faces were obscenely seen because of the lack of masks. “Then we die,” I said.
We didn’t die, and I was right. The rest of the country wasn’t like us. They all went back to school in September, rightly seeing the insanity of keeping kids at home staring into a computer. Not California. The 2020-2021 school year was upon us, and Newsom told us the schools were not opening, we had to continue to stay home to save lives. Remote learning they called it. It was a joke.
I didn’t know what I was going to do, but like the school year before, providence handed me the perfect job during that second Pandemic Lockdown School Year. A one-room school house out in the country, as though my classroom was a cross between Little House on the Prairie and Charlotte’s Web, in a rough-hewn wooden barn.
One wall had a white board where I kept track of the fourteen kids complicated Zoom schedules, another wall had horseshoes nailed into it in such a way that the students could hang up their backpacks and coats, another wall I covered with the kids artwork, and the fourth wall was non-existent. Like, there wasn’t one, the barn had three walls. That meant that I had an unobstructed, open-air view of the rolling hills, dotted with horses separated by white ranch style fences, and the smell of fresh hay and manure wafted around my classroom. The en plein air classroom was a draw for some of the parents of the students that ended up being in my ‘learning pod’ one of the pandemic concepts already fading from our collective memory, where it was said that a random number of kids, say a dozen or so, could be together and it was ‘safe’ especially if air was circulating, and boy did the air circulate there! Most pods had to buy HVAC systems, but ours was natural. As beautiful as a semi-outdoor classroom was, it also meant that many mornings were freezing cold, and getting the propane going on the one heater we had wasn’t always easy. Also, since we were on a dirt road, clouds of dust would float in and settle on everything whenever a car or horse went by.
I’d gaze out at the hills and horses and tell the kids that ranged from kindergarteners through fourth grade, that they were the luckiest students in the whole state. ‘Whoever gets their math done can go on the hayride!’ was my daily refrain meaning that some lucky kids got to ride around the ranch in the quad with Breen, my stepson, and owner of the Lazy H Ranch, and throw flakes of alfalfa in the feeding troughs.
One corner of the barn had eggs in an incubator at the beginning of the year, and as the months went by, we watched the chicks hatch and eventually turn into four rust-colored teenage hens. The chickens were like our kids that we had raised. They wandered freely around the classroom clucking softly, and some of the kids liked to hold one of them in their lap grounding them to reality while they watched their teachers trying to explain math on their laptops. The two barn dogs guarded us, but one always was licking his chops around the chickens, and the kids would scream at him to get away, until one day the dog came in the barn and I literally saw feathers come out of his mouth, like a cartoon. We didn’t tell the kids for days that he ate one of the hens, and I privately cried.
After ‘school’, we’d all go up to the hay loft and watch movies on a TV, and some of the kids would jump out the opening holding a rope, and land in the pile of soft hay below. Two giant tire swings hung in the trees further up the hill, a thrilling ride where up to four kids could comfortably sit and spin dizzily around holding on to the thick chains. The kids all got riding lessons on ponies in the coral for their afterschool program.
I was in an idyllic world, far from the ugliness of the lockdowns and people’s reaction to them. No television blaring propaganda, no radio to tell us to be scared. All it took was a mile or two to get out of town and completely change my reality into that of country living in the old days.
The Zoom teaching made me sad though. The Chromebook laptops were the worst part. I remember the sight of one kindergarten girl named Steele diligently doing jumping jacks solo out in the courtyard behind the barn for ‘P.E.’ while staring at the computer. A long-awaited annual fourth grade field trip to the Sanchez Adobe was watched by the kids on the computer while they pretended that they were making the mud bricks they usually got to make with their hands. Breen’s son, Chinny, in his senior year, wandered in and out of the barn. He usually stayed in bed until noon, watching his high school classes on his phone in bed. He missed most of his long-awaited football season, his prom, and his graduation, although the moms tried the best they could to make facsimiles, it wasn’t of course the same, the sadness was obvious in his eyes.
I was privy to see how more than a dozen teachers interpreted ‘teaching’ during the lockdown. I saw some teachers showing up over the Zoom every day, well, actually only four days a week, because they called Wednesdays ‘asynchronous learning’ a euphemism in the New Speak that meant ‘you’re on your own kid, and yahoo, the teachers get a day off’. Other teachers just directed their kids to watch videos, and sent home thick packets of busy work. I heard one kindergarten teacher tell the kids to go outside and observe nature for their science lesson.
That school year went by like I was in a dream. At the beginning, in September, we survived the ‘black day’ when the smoke from the fires was so thick the sun never came out, by hiking up to the ridge with flashlights, and watched the traffic below, the headlights barely visible. We made applesauce and carved pumpkins, and Santa and the Grinch made surprise appearances at Christmas. In the spring we planted flowers in decorated pots for Mother’s Day, and at the end we held a formal graduation, complete with graduation caps that the kids made themselves.
The horror of what the lockdowns did to most the kids didn’t hit me until the following school year.