Learn at Home

If only the Corona Virus would move through town as quickly as a mood swing at the Burk house. We’re on voluntary quarantine, with our schools closed until April 12. So far. Day 1: Boy is up with the sun, dressed and ready for a day in the yard. He has the tractor hummin’, trailer hitched, hauling a load of sticks and debris and–roped on the back, caravan-style–cartloads of mulch for my gardening agenda. He’s done chores without being asked, he’s done his reading without being asked (I thought it was the Armageddon but now, with this revelation I think it’s the Rapture). His idea of life is this: eternal Saturday, an endless string of days that begin and end outdoors (and carpets that vouch for it), with a little “computer time” and a peanut butter sandwich thrown in midday. Boy is in his glory. Even his skin smiles with that deep “snow day” glow of one awakening to find the day something it so rarely is: his.

Day Two: Hanover County Public Schools releases “Learn at Home” packets. The worksheets pile into our e-boxes, an impressive compendium of all five subjects, plus gym, with cover sheets and daily assignments to make a homeschooler giddy. It’s a brick. Will is not giddy. He is devastated. For most of the morning he is not only house bound but room bound, setting up folders, dutifully tackling the printouts I left for him at the kitchen table (Surprise!), unhappily reading so he can write (by hand!) his Language Arts. I realize, in retrospect, that this this will be the true education of our boy. As a perfectly gleeful and woefully immature 8th grader, his work ethic at school answers to two motivators only: he works to avoid punishment/consequences/poor grades, and he works because he likes and respects a particular teacher and so does not wish to disappoint. Nothing about the content of the work, since it is school, seems to catch his initiative or industry. Today he is miserable. A pack of seat work AND two parents inconveniently around to supervise? Miserable. He disappears into the cave of his room so long that even I question the rationale. My yard and gardens go untended.

Sophie, I’m sure, has the same “Learn at Home” packet for seniors, though I didn’t even open it. She will have laid it out before herself as an Everest to be climbed and she will be to the first level before I can get my boots on. I think she went into this time with a fair bit of back-log, so the mother of all snow days sits well with her. At first, anyway. She strings a hammock in the side yard and climbs into it with classic literature, a combination I thought I might not see before the end times: girl reading beneath a tree. I am vicariously sad and lonely for her, my social butterfly. So much of her world gone down. Her wings clipped. I grieve, and I wonder if she is, too. Little green car in constant use has been in our driveway now for close to a week. When I say, ordinarily she is never here, you can legitimately ask “Sophie who?” Now I know she lives here because someone keeps eating all the red pepper hummus.

When I propose we get out of the house, take a drive, try to find a park that’s open, her response takes me by surprise. A week ago we gave both girls the “quarantine not congregate” speech after our schools, church and every extra-curricular activity shut down. Thinking Sophie especially would want to make use of all this found time out in the world. One half-hearted trip out with a friend early on (and they came flying home!), Ellie’s boyfriend self-quarantined at his parents’ wishes, and so that was the end of social life at the Burks. Our speech was unnecessary. More so, Sophie has already seized a silver lining: “I’m good,” says she. “I want to try to do this as long as I can…you know? Stay here.” What?! Where is my child and what have you done to her? How on earth did “home” move up her queue so quickly and so high? I ask if she is afraid or worried about the virus and that is why she doesn’t want to go out. “No,” she replies, “Not really. But I know that I’ll never have another chance for the rest of my life to be this still. To be here. I would never do that. I want to see how it is.” There’s my purist, my analyst, my ‘It-was-there-so-I-climbed-it’. Pre-pandemic she was rising at 4:25 each day (school day!) to drive to a friend’s house and hitch a ride to a “Navy Seals” fitness team that runs and trains all over riverfront Richmond in the pre-dawn. Her test of self? Try as I might, I could not convince her she passed. Prior to this her phone was in constant use, the car too, keeping connected a girl who, if truth were spelled with a capital “T” was slowing coming apart. Classic case of modern teen. Hooked up in every way and falling to pieces.

College girl, Ellie, is extended break girl. Mid-extension, mid-family-movie, in fact, the email comes down from George Mason. A “Family Flash” I get every other day and now actually read: “Dear Mason Patriots”… “extraordinary”… ”unprecedented times” …  “difficult decision” … “Virtual learning will extend through the end of the semester.” Whaaaat??! I am devastated, like something has died. And it has. The happiness, sufficiency, and freedom–the daily self-making she enjoys away at school. Now she is inserted back into her old bedroom. It’s only been two years, so it’s not as though I made the room into a study or a sewing room. It’s still hers. But the ‘her’ is so changed she barely seems to fit in the space. Who is this stranger in my shrine to childhood? I pass by her room with my “goodnight” rounds and she is working away on her laptop. Does she know? Did she read the email? She has been helpful, thoughtful, flexible, kind, compassionate, understanding and cheerful beyond measure since she came through the door two weeks ago. Tonight she looks up from her studies with the saddest eyes. She does know. We make eye contact across her new reality and she mouths without speaking the words already in my heart: “I… don’t… want… to be here.”

I know, my girl. I know.

She wears old, left-behind clothes from a bottom drawer and a soft smile. Always. As in days of old, she is easily located from any room in the house because you can hear her singing. She does have piles of schoolwork to keep her busy, even in her “extended break,” as two professors seem not to have a read the memo. Not to mention, like other colleges and universities in this current crisis, the policies and “here’s how we’re going to do this” are changing daily. She left so happily, on such a high note at a time when—what?—schedules, relations, teen hormones, life’s intensity–was fit to bust the roof off here. So the high note made still higher by its necessity. She could not have left at a better time. Now, standing at the kitchen sink and watching her spray paint lawn furniture in the backyard, borrowed clothing on and yes, singing, I think: she could not have come home at a better time. Do we, my wearies, really get a second chance at family?

I am glad for the learn at home packet. Printed out, it would drain my ink and my reserves of printer paper, so I allow boy to do as much online as possible and the other half in a lined notebook. So old school. They say this work is “review” and “will not be graded,” which in our educational climate translates to “doesn’t count.” I’d like to hug the curriculum artist who put this thing together and then strangle her for that. Look, people. If you expect your student to climb down out of a hammock on the first day of spring, a little bliss nest that he has loaded with a book, a water bottle, his “vintage” cassette tape deck and yes, a peanut butter sandwich—and come inside to sit at the kitchen table to look at a Civics power point, then it better “count.” And IF you succeed in getting him to sit long enough, and care long enough to work diligently through math problems, I tell you what. IT COUNTS. For he has learned what is in him. He has learned that he can, and that he will, without some cheery teacher or meddling mom. He has learned that this is his responsibility, and that the day is a gift of time to make good on. Is that a little smile of self-knowing I see in his “I’m miserable” face? A little bit of self-pride? A+, my boy.

And if you have a senior slung up in a hammock the backyard reading Hemingway, her phone nowhere to be found, the spring birds her only playlist, well then, people: IT COUNTS. For she has learned what she is made of. And this one, too: when you find your world-weary teen in her bed with a Bible and a notebook, her phone nowhere to be found, well then. She has learned that she is made, and even more so, that she is made of something real. It feels like life remediation going on a little around here. Not like we are playing board games or taking up cross-stitch. But there are puzzles! And family movies, which had gotten impossible for all the radical individualism going on ‘round here. We’re up to a week’s worth of “family dinner” every night which, averaged over those thin years of old helps us reach some recommended quota. Somewhere. I watch my young adults watch the news and absorb all that is happening in their world and what it will mean for them. And all of us. I study them, keepers of humanity, and how they are going through this–a mother’s watch on a child’s heart, a mother’s worry and prayers for their well-being, but I am also a receiver of their grace.

For once in our careers here our learning will come in complete sentences, instead of all chopped and parsed and pressed till the life runs out of it. Not to be cynical, but we’ve had “virtual” learning here for years. Looks good, sounds good, definitely working, but there’s nothing there. Their abilities to think, reason, create, and synthesize so deadened by the way things are taught and by an insidious assessment pandemic. Is that too strong? When’s the last time you helped a child study for an SOL? Deadly. Absolutely deadly.

Today I look out the sunny backyard at the life lessons in progress: Boy is 40 feet in the air in his ENO reading and listening to 80’s music on a Walkman prototype (c. 1985). Remains of his gym class litter the yard: badminton, baseball bounce-back net, BB gun (for squirrels in the feeder he just refilled for me). Sophie is installed at saner heights reading for her English class. Since she was little she has always reacted to these first warm weather days of Spring as if they were a personal gift to her. Just her. Summer shorts and gleeful smiles that have been in hibernation come out as suddenly and boldly as the sun. Today she wraps the thick warmth around her, the radiant afternoon sun as inescapable as our woes and climbs, content like a sunning cat into her hammock.

Ellie is making the best of borrowed clothing (her life, remember, back at school?). When she left GMU for spring break, she took with her only a small carry-on suitcase to get to Grandma’s and back. And minimalist girl is a minimalist traveler. To say the least. But I don’t think her singing or her industry is borrowed. I believe it is her way of processing the situation. She is sanding and painting cheap plastic lawn chairs that Will almost made a casualty of in the firepit. Restoration. Healing. Hoping. This may only be the first of many seasons of our quarantine. I do not know what days 3, 14, 21, or even Day 99 will bring. But my curriculum is in place and it is sound.