School

The Finnish PM announced last week that schools here will reopen for the last two weeks of the school year, on 14 May! We are counting down the days. In the meantime, here are a few thoughts about how schools (and we) have been coping in this time of coronavirus.

Student teachers! When schools were closed on 18 March, it was smack dab in the middle of the months-long student teaching period for 2nd-year education students. I wondered if, under such extraordinary circumstances, the school would end the student teaching period early and give control back to the main classroom teachers.

But they didn’t! I don’t know any of the background drama but the end result was that those student teachers ran a brand-new, hastily implemented, from-scratch distance learning program for the first two weeks of lockdown. It was truly remarkable. And in those two weeks, the main classroom teachers (presumably) had time to catch their breath so that when the teaching baton was handed back to them, they had an existing framework they could tweak and everything went that much smoother.

School lunches! A few weeks ago, the girls’ school started offering school lunches for pickup. They are the same dishes that would be served hot in the cafeteria, but for pickup they are cold and packed into containers. These lunches have saved us. The kids now have better food to eat for lunch than whatever any of us could scrape together in the middle of the day, and it also helps us extend the time between trips to the grocery store.

Päivän ohjelma! This is the word for “daily program” at preschool and this has been one of the hardest things to replicate at home for Sterling. We just don’t have a rich preschool environment in our living room (or in my brain, ha)! We kept up on a morning routine, like choosing a greeting to enter the “classroom” and talking about the date and weather. He also Zoomed into a few preschool sessions with his teacher and some other distanced-classmates, but it was hard for him. I think the best days have been when Magdalena’s school doesn’t start until 10.15, because on those days, Magdalena is in charge of preschool and they do crafts and all kinds of things. God bless 11-year-olds.

Sterling’s English reading skills (and probably English in general) have gotten stronger during lockdown, but I have been worrying about his academic, school-level Finnish. He starts first grade in the fall and he needs every bit of a boost he can get to be on par with his Finnish classmates, linguistically. A two-month break from a Finnish immersion environment has been the opposite of that. I am glad he’ll get a last burst of preparation in before the summer.

The things that didn’t happen. It has been sad to mark all the special events that the kids missed this spring. Miriam missed her Work Experience Week (8th-graders spend a week shadowing workers at a local business). Magdalena missed her big 6th-grade field trip. Sterling is missing a few 1st-grade prep events. It’s not clear right now which are just cancelled outright and which will get made up.

Remember how 1816 was remembered as The Year Without a Summer? I keep thinking about that, and how 2020 might be another Year Without a Summer. Just in a different way. Things will be quieter and sadder and smaller.