The Tale of Twenty-Twenty-One

It's a lot more complicated than it seems.

Because, let's face it, most people doing crisis learning or distance learning or whatever they're calling it this week did not have a great time.

Where I had trouble with some of my fellow parents and community members (some who don't even have school-age children!) is in their endless quest for someone to blame for this mess.

For a few people, the person to blame seemed to be a given student's teacher, but most of the blame-slingers chose to go up the chain to the school principal or the superintendent or the school board members; I can only assume that this is due to the relative facelessness of these people. If you don't see them at your kid's Zoom meetings every day, it's easier to blame them for things not going exactly as you expect in life.

These are actually the more reasonable ones.

Then there are the ones who seem to think that they will be allowed to call all the shots - even for the day-to-day minutiae of educational life - while their children are attending public schools. Not private schools, not charter schools, not homeschooling... just standard public schools. Mind you, these people aren't trained and can't be bothered to do any of the work; they just want to tell the actual experts what to do, how to do it, and try to get them fired if it's not done in the way they want it done. Or they are blaming - for various reasons they won't closely examine - the "current social climate" for setting a bad example. Some of these shining examples of humanity will make things up out of whole cloth, wrap it in an American flag, clutch their pearls, and shriek, "What about the children!?" at every opportunity... and are now running for school board.

And there are people who believe them.

I do not grok* this behavior. (*grok - to understand completely. For more details, click the link. This single word has its own Wikipedia article.)

For the record, I'm not talking about your average concerned parent in these examples. The average concerned parent folks know their kids, will tell the teachers how their kids are likely to respond to any given stimulus, and walk that fine line between "my child can do no wrong" and "I've got your back, kiddo." These are the folks who make an effort to know their kids, not just to give them their perception of The Perfect School Experience. I strive to be that kind of parent. Sometimes I even succeed at it.

So, no, distance learning was not a great fit for my kids, either. Abby managed to graduate from high school with respectable grades, but some of them would have been higher if we had been in person for the whole school year. In fact, it was really impressive how much they came up once she got into the building in April. Because let's face it, choir and ASL and theater classes are not super easy over Zoom. And Liz - who has challenges with school anyway - really didn't do great, although she passed all her classes with a C average (except that B in Math, go Lizzy).

My point is, I didn't blame the teachers, or the principal, or the school board, or the superintendent, or even Lizzy herself. Or me.

Because there was no one to blame. I mean, you could blame the pandemic, but that can be a slippery, racially charged, government-fearing, conspiracy theory-laden slope. Why not just say, "Hey. The 2020-2021 school year sucked large," and leave it at that?

Evidently, that's too easy for some people and doesn't afford them the nice, self-righteous, justified feeling they get from Blaming People.

I Blame People too, obviously. But I blame them for Actual Things They Are Doing, not for specious nonsense made up to make you feel better about yourself.