A year of zooming went by fast and yet was excruciatingly slow. If you are feeling tired, then you are not alone. Though tired, you got up every day, turned on your device, and logged into school. You showed up and that’s your success this school year.
2021 was supposed to be a year of hope and yet the sadness of lost ones surrounds them. Every day, gratitude becomes the reason we move forward. Vaccines are now available for 12 years and above. The questions stay but we don’t see any other options so with continued apprehension, we slowly take the first step to get ourselves and our loved ones vaccinated.
2020-2021, will be an excellent school year. We the grown ups, don’t know much, but here’s what we know:
You woke up and did your thing… with resilience and respect. That “thing” was different for all of us, which is okay. As long as you took a step forward every day, you did well. So before you think of the last year as a waste, think about how YOU, showed resilience and weathered a year unlike any other.
Today, you are excited about the possibility of playing in the park with your friends, and we the parents worry about learning loss. Learning loss, you ask quizzically? And you are right. No one knows what this learning loss looks like. For some students, it’ll be missing out on learning pre-algebra, for some it will be the loss of words, for some the loss of muscle strength and for many it will be the loss of social and emotional skills.
Dear Student, talk to your parents, remind them that your brain needs to breathe again. It needs to learn to walk again, run again, talk again, and go crazy again.. once the brain learns to redo these, the academics will come again.
Remind your parents, the best way to reset a device is to shut it down, let it rest, and then turn it on. This summer make the choice to get bored, make pillow forts, hang out with grandma, bake cookies and make a mess, run in the park wild or go for a picnic in the park.
The academic learning loss is an easy fix, the social-emotional grid takes a long time to fix, so this summer, make it about your mental well-being with academics sprinkled in between.
