The last normals

A year ago yesterday I took the kids to Stockholm for a day. That trip had a few of our last pre-pandemic “normals” - our last time going to a movie theater (Emma at the lovely, kinda old-timey Biograf Saga), last time eating inside a restaurant (vegetarian buffet at the Grön Hermitage), last time going inside museums, last time traveling with lots of people on the big ferry boat. I had a vague sense of normalcy slipping through my fingers at the time - I remember using hand sanitizer more than usual and not letting the kids explore the boat like we usually do. When we got home from Stockholm, we had exactly one month of rapidly dwindling normalcy before schools and society shut down.

I’ve been simultaneously waiting for this one-year mark to come, and bracing for it. And now that this first “last normal” anniversary has passed, I find myself staring March 2021 in the face. The problem is, I am not at all done processing March 2020!

Something that is helping me process March 2020, though, is some research interviews I’m conducting. Earlier this week, I interviewed someone who was student teaching at an elementary school in March 2020 in the days before everything closed. The principal of the school announced on a Monday night that Tuesday would be the last day of in-person school and then the school would shut down and move classes online. And this student teacher naturally wanted to spend that last day - Tuesday - getting his class of third-graders set up with all the logins, apps, instructions, and technical knowledge they needed to cope with online school.

But the head classroom teacher decided to instead spend the day reading books together with the kids and doing all the in-person things they were going to miss out on over the next two months.

It’s like some terrible Pandemic Martha/Mary situation and I can see how the student teacher was frustrated that the practical issues weren’t being addressed. But my heart absolutely melts when I think of that classroom teacher sitting and reading books with the kids as a last act of normalcy before everything changed. Just absolutely melts.

I think my trip to Stockholm with the kids was my way of sitting down with them and reading books in-person for that one last day. “Let’s eat indoors and watch a movie in the theater and touch all the interpretive exhibits at all the museums, for one last time.”

I had to believe there would be time for all the logins and apps and technical stuff. And indeed there was. Lots and lots of it. About a year now.