I’m trying to do a little bit of journaling every day during these weird, anxiety-laden times, and I thought perhaps I’d share a little of that with you.
Back to homeschooling, sort of
The kids’ schools are closed for the next two weeks at least, and today was our first day of pandemic homeschooling. The schools are planning “Virtual Days.” They aren’t starting that until Wednesday, though — in part because not all of the students had taken their school-issued laptops home with them on Friday — so today we just winged it.
Poppy had an essay to finish on “Lord of the Flies” for English class, so she worked on that for part of the morning. Pete and I, meanwhile, read an article in Scholastic magazine about Jordan Reeves, a young lady who made a confetti-shooting prosthetic arm with a 3D printer. He also watched an episode of “Marvel’s Hero Project” about Jordan, and then he made a short comic about another hero, Chef Jose Andres, who seems to fly in to every natural disaster to provide food and encouragement. Later we all did a chemistry experiment (three cheers for MEL Chemistry!) and watched an art video on Google Arts & Culture.
Adventures in e-Learning
I’ve been volunteering as an ESL tutor since November, and yesterday the organization I work with announced that they were canceling all in-person tutoring for the time being. I only have one student, and she suggested we try to continue our lessons over WhatsApp. So I downloaded it and we gave it a try this morning. We had a few hiccups — all technical difficulties on my part — but I think it’ll be a fine way for us to continue for a few weeks. (Although I am, of course, not convinced this will be over in just a few weeks. I’m consistently pessimistic, at least.)
The bright side
Everything is just worlds of anxiety, and I’ve been struggling with small, daily panic attacks for the last few days. I’m trying to be optimistic, though, so let’s talk about some things I was grateful for today.