COVID quarantine felt a lot like my childhood summers. I never got to go away to fancy camps or travel very much or very far, so I spent a lot of time with my mom and dad and got shuffled around to other family members when my parents might have had to go work a job that I couldn’t also go to. Books were my friends, and I did a ton of reading.
You see, it seems that very few people in my family ever really had traditional 9-5 office jobs. My mom cleaned houses for years, so I could go with her and read and watch TV in these gorgeous houses that seemed like mansions to me. Or, my dad worked with my uncle, who owned (actually still does own) a TV repair shop — with televisions and broken technology stacked to the ceilings — though my dad worked on electronic educational gadgets in the back building, so I would spend my time making a mess with shipping peanuts and loading up boxes or helping with the filing, or staring at the guts of an enormous television as my uncle would pull off the back and investigate what went wrong. Or I would go visit with Mr. Zamatella and his accordion in his shoe repair shop that was next door with my cold glass bottle of Coca-Cola from the old vending machine and breathe in the smell of oiled leather while the noise of the monstrous machinery echoed off the concrete floor. On random days, mom and I would cut grass or go visit my aunts with their ceramics shops or porcelain doll shops, and we would paint and be creative with glazes and pouring slip into molds. Or we’d just make some sandwiches and see what kind of picnic mischief we could get into next to a river or at the big library in the big city of Birmingham. When I would go visit with my grandmothers, they were often quilting or cutting perfect quilting pieces that I would no doubt mess up if I were left to trim around patterns with fancy (and heavy) sewing scissors. So I would do those word search puzzles, which was the closest thing I could accomplish that was like my dad working through his crossword puzzles in pen. Or I would read and read and read some more. Which meant my mom and I spent a lot of time at the little local library, switching out one stack of books for another. The time back then seemed wonderfully fluid and unscheduled, so when the world shut down suddenly in March, I went into nostalgia mode. I spent time sketching and coloring. I plucked around on my little ukulele and sang badly. I read and read and read some more. I wrote and wrote and wrote. (And I dug around in the news to figure out everything I could about the coronavirus, because my journalism brain never really shuts off.) Fortunately (but really unfortunately) my oven died on the second day of quarantine, so I didn’t get to bake any bread — or biscuits — but that probably saved me from gaining a few pounds… I am also really lucky to have a lot of musician friends who were suddenly without gigs, so my social media feeds were full of daily acoustic sessions from their living rooms, and my poet friends launched online open mics and writing groups, so I even had a daily writing group of women that I met with at noon, and we processed our feelings about the pandemic and the state of the world by just pouring onto paper as many words as we could. Some of the women were on their lunch breaks, but we were all stuck in our homes and wanting to connect with other people and ourselves and our pain. I wrote 24,000 words in April. Poetic processing at its most usefulness. Because the standardized testing world shut down immediately — the March SAT was cancelled the night before the test for a lot of my students — I didn’t have much work stuff to do. The subsequent tests were also cancelled, and our summer session essay program wasn’t slated to start until late June, so the business phone wasn’t ringing. Thank goodness I had my Johns Hopkins class to give me specific writing things to accomplish, but I quickly found my mind wanting to be enlightened by everything, hungry for the random knowledge adventures of my childhood. And as a (somewhat) wannabe hermit, I didn’t really miss the people or the interactions that I had always found awkward and exhausting. And I embraced not wearing makeup and living in my yoga pants, and I still even like wearing a mask and sunglasses out in the world, because I can finally almost completely hide in plain sight…but that’s a different discussion for a different day, I believe… The whole world was living my dream, but everyone else basically hated it. Ha! As we settled in for the long haul of it, there were a few students who needed some help, one even from a family friend in Alabama, since the long distance didn’t really matter anymore. So, my husband and I started figuring out the best ways to use the technology and still have our annual workshops for the college essays and admissions process. We ended up doing 10 online workshops, and one of those had 30 Zoom families on it! We adjusted the curriculum and practiced Zoom techniques until we found the best practices for our curriculum. We started getting calls, and we started teaching full days again. Once certain businesses could open up, we had all the work we could handle, seemingly immediately, and we would meet with some students in one of our two centers, with social distancing and masks in place. The summer launched for us so suddenly. We went from no work for almost 3 months to SO MUCH WORK! My voice would run dry after 8 hours of Zoom classes in a day — 4 students with 2-hour sessions each. Normally, I would have been driving all over creation, but now I didn’t have to schedule time to drive and eat, so we just packed as many classes as we could into a day. My husband had a few weeks toward the end of the summer where he had 55-60 teaching hours — it was bonkers! And we figured out a lot of things as we went, but there’s still so much out there to figure out! And now we’re somewhat on the back side of this first COVID summer, and though New Jersey has much better looking numbers than most of the country, we’re still playing it pretty cautious, and we are making adjustments in case the test prep industry can’t pivot quickly enough over the next year to contain the damage it has sustained in 2020, though “test-optional” doesn’t actually mean that, and I rattle on and on about that to parents constantly. The collegiate impact is still uncertain — and who knows how all of this will actually shake out — but online learning is not going away anytime soon. But, as I had the opportunity to help students write about their COVID experiences for the Common App, I got to dig into their feelings and help them think about what they learned about themselves, about society, about their parents, and about each other, and it was really amazing — and helpful for them, I think — to figure out the best way to talk about their quarantines. So many of them now appreciate their parents and grandparents more. They had time away from their busy sports and activities schedules to play some ukulele and to code some apps and start making jewelry. They went on long walks and explored the woods and other natural places. They got to read and enjoy a bit of writing. They got to make their own sleep schedules and just be kids. They got to live in my childhood for a little while, and I think it will make for great stories in the future, even if students don’t realize it yet. But I personally hope they take that slow-down mentality and appreciate how many lovely ways there are to pass the time that goes so very fast.
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