The Kids Will Be Fine

This week, a meme popped up several times that caught my attention. It was probably created last year during the height of at-home learning and I missed it until now. The message, written by a teacher, is addressed to parents during lockdown, and the heart of it reads: “I had a parent tell me this week, ‘I missed four years of school in Bosnia during the war. Four whole years with a war happening. I came to Australia at age 13 with no English and no schooling since I was 8. I’m 33 and I have a university degree and a very good career. The kids will be fine.’“

In these polarized times, I have often tried to make the case for ‘Both/And’. This can be tricky, but it is often the truth – even when it isn’t satisfying and doesn’t make you feel better. In a culture that loves believing that things are black and white, reality is hardly ever that simple. Doing school through Covid has been difficult for all and truly terrible for many. The stress and suffering is spread around between children, parents, and teachers. I have heard from many teaching colleagues that this might just be the end of their careers, that the stress is unsustainable. (More on that in another post.) For parents, especially of young, elementary children, juggling work and their kids’ schooling has sometimes been overwhelming. And while most schools have been in person during the Fall 2021 semester, when we almost felt as if things were getting a little more stable, Omicron is shaking things up again. These last few days in Chicago have been really tenuous as everyone wondered when school would resume, and in what form. Districts are revisiting when they might need to shift to hybrid learning, and kids and teachers are being sent home to quarantine as communities are swept up with new spikes in infection rates. And through it all, many of the activities that make school most enjoyable for kids are still not really back in place. All of this is true, and a thousand other things besides.

And yet… I would echo that Bosnian parent’s encouragement: Your children are going to be alright academically*. As hard and stressful as this has been for your kids, as sad and disappointing and real as the losses have been, the long dark cloud of these past two years will not result in the collapse of their futures. Some teachers are reporting that school administrations are in hyperdrive to somehow make up all of that lost academic ground. This additional stress being placed on teachers goes right down the chain, passed to the children and their parents, and it is the wrong thing to be doing. On top of everything else they’ve endured, kids do not need the additional stress of shifting into high gear triage classwork.

We need to take a breath. Or maybe several hundred per day, every few minutes. We need to remember that since the development of modern schooling (which really hasn’t been around all that long), children around the world have periodically suffered gaps in their formal schooling for a variety of reasons. It doesn’t mean that they are doomed. This fear comes up quite a lot in the world of education that I am moving toward – Self-Directed Learning. One of the main fears parents have is, What will happen if they miss something important? If kids are given the freedom to learn only the things they care about, what if they just never learn something they need later? These are totally reasonable questions and I’m happy to say that the answers are pretty straightforward: They will learn it when they need it. Just like all of us do all the time. I recently read a real-life example of how this works. A boy had never been good at math; he was bad enough that by high school, he had internalized this as part of his identity. He loved music, and by 16, thought he might want to go into audio production. He and his mentor discussed his dreams, and they found a community college music theory class that looked interesting. But, alas, it had a math prerequisite. That old nemesis had reared its ugly head. So I was the end of his audio production dreams, right? Of course not. He did what any of us would do: He found a way forward. He and his mentor found an online algebra class, he got a tutor, and in about 6 weeks, he aced a course that, in normal high schools, takes a full school year. In a subject he thought he couldn’t do. Why? Because: (1) he was authentically motivated, and (2) he had support.

Our kids will be okay academically. We just need to relax. We need to trust their natural ability to learn. We need to listen to folks like this Bosnian parent who went through so much and was able to catch up. Your kids will learn what they need to learn. Yes, Covid has caused enormous upheaval, which is especially difficult to cope with in a culture not accustomed to dealing well with upheavals. This has been so hard in countless ways. AND… our kids will be okay.

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* I should underscore, here, that this Bosnian parent was speaking about catching up academically. In no way am I diminishing the horrors of living through a war.