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My son in his living-room-classroom-ish setting, on Friday, wrapping up his first week of online kindergarten.
We had questions. So, so many questions.
None of them, incidentally, about how we would manage at-home learning for our soon-to-be kindergartner.
Our decision to do online-only learning for our 5-year-old in his very first semester in public school—fraught though it was with universally disappointing options—was, logistically at least, a no-brainer. Our family of three includes two parents who can work flexible schedules from home.
My questions were more about the actual thing of virtual kindergarten.
Having not attended kindergarten in four decades, his dad and I are relative "noobs," as my son says, to the entire process. We had no idea what time school started, how lunch works, or what classwork he'd do.
And now that he'd be doing this new thing online for the first nine weeks, we had questions on top of our first questions.
What would virtual learning look like? How does he get evaluated? Can he use a tablet (YES and I highly recommend it)? How much interaction would there be? How structured? How will they count attendance? How early does it start? How many assignments? What about P.E., music, art? Will my son figure out all the apps? How much screen time would he be getting each day?
(This last one admittedly, was slightly less scary given the amount of screen time he became, ahem, used to during the summer quarantine.)
I couldn't count on, thankfully, the horror stories I'd heard in the spring when school first went virtual because I knew in my gut that at least a few of the virtual-classroom kinks would be worked out by August.
Most students in Austin won't start online classes until Sept. 8 and may wind up doing an additional eight weeks after that. But we are in Pflugerville ISD, which means our son started his first day of kindergarten (milestone!) on Aug. 13.
Now that we've wrapped up our first official full week of online kindergarten, we have our answers. And we are relieved. They're not bad answers.
And I'm happy to show you my answers, if for no other benefit than to satisfy some level of your curiosity about what your own district might do.
This is how online kindergarten is playing out for us:
First contact
Our teacher called us on Friday, Aug. 6 to introduce herself, and by Monday night's virtual school and class orientations, we had email instructions with a schedule, Zoom codes and SeeSaw, the additional learning app we'd need ("right now," the teacher qualifies, hinting at more later).
The intro with his teacher and class was about a dozen kindergartners making faces into the camera, introducing themselves and giggling at each other. My son had a blast. By the first day of school on Thursday morning, we were set up with the apps and ready to learn. Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.
The technology
At the last minute, we decided to drop off our son at Grammy's house for a few days, so it fell to her to log him into the Zoom class and SeeSaw for the first two days of school. Grammy is smart and tough, but she still has a flip phone and can't make Facetime work. With us three hours away, Grammy got him logged in for every meeting and all his assignments done.
Now, after a week (and back home), my son can find Zoom and SeeSaw, turn in his assignments, use the art tools, drag and drop, play the videos, take pictures and record audio and video in SeeSaw, and manipulate Zoom like a pro. So for those worried about overly complicated technology, you got this. One thing that helped: The first week's assignments were designed mainly to help them practice the technology. Realize that the school will be forgiving with tech issues in the first few weeks. Don't panic.
The schedule
An hour on Zoom and very loose deadlines on assignments each day. In a nod to parents who can't be committed every hour, the schedule is mostly fluid. My son watches a 3-minute recorded morning video from his teacher and does a little "morning work" before his day starts with a Zoom class at 8:30 a.m. His class meets again at 11:30 each morning. On Fridays, there's an extra 50 minutes on Zoom for PE/Music/Art at 1 p.m. and another extra 30 minutes at 2 p.m. for science and social studies.
Collectively, it's less than seven Zoom hours per week. One thing I can say: This technology is not going to go away, so if he gets good at communicating with people and increasing his attention span on this type of platform, he can only benefit. There is already a vast improvement in these skills just in the first week.
The assignments
Make a picture out of the shapes (math)
Screenshot: Karen Brooks Harper
He has about six activities to turn in per day, with longer-term projects due each week. His activities are things like recording a show-and-tell video, or reading comprehension or making shapes on his iPad.
The assignments are uploaded throughout the day and we can do them at any point (we often do social studies and reading right before bed). He has P.E., music and art projects due on Fridays (uploaded). P.E. assignments come out three times a week, and this week included animal-inspired exercises, warm-ups on Go Noodle and health classes.
Each day he is also required to read for 10 minutes, write or draw in his journal, get 60 minutes of physical activity (which means we do, too, which is harder than we care to admit) and count to 20. Most of the assignments only take a few minutes, and he does them without our help. Usually.
Feedback and interaction
His attendance is counted through his Zoom meetings and assignments in SeeSaw, but they're flexible under extenuating circumstances. On every assignment, the teachers record personal feedback using his name. He loves it. Way better than a generic "way to go!" that she could do for everyone, and we'd never know it. In the meetings, the teacher will engage them: "Who can tell me how they're feeling today?" They raise their hands and get called on, just like they would in class.
Surprisingly, the kindergartners understand the dynamic and by the end of the first week, this type of interaction seemed normal to our son, too. Shocking, considering he's worse at Facetime than Grammy.
In conclusion
Now that we've seen how hard they work to make it interesting, and how well (enough) it seems to be working for our son, we are far less worried about the next nine weeks.
Will he learn as much as he might have in person? Perhaps not. Are we lucky that we can be there to guide him through this? Absolutely, and probably luckier than most in that regard.
Will there be any permanent damage to his social skills and schooling? Nah. It's all temporary damage, I think.
There is enough structure to drive us through the day, yet not so much that it's stifling. It beats the heck out of the directionless days we dealt with over the summer. And something else helps my perspective on this disappointing year: We are getting a very rare inside look at what our son is doing at school every day. It's like we're sitting in the back of his class. And that may never happen again after this semester.
It's a gift, truly. A consolation prize, perhaps, more than a silver lining.
But we'll take it.
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(Pexels)
Our 15-year-old granddaughter and her sister, 12, have spent summer weeks with us, usually separately so that we could better get to know each individually. In visits focused on Austin and Port Aransas, the girls seemed to be developing an affection for Texas.
Houston and Dallas are two great American cities, the 4th and 9th largest, each loaded with cultural treasures, each standing in glittering and starchy contrast to Austin’s more louche, T-shirts and shorts ways.
Three hours up I-35, Dallas loomed before us as a set of gray skyscrapers in a filmy haze, accessed only through a concrete mixmaster of freeways, ramps and exits. I drove with false confidence. Be calm, I said to myself, it will all end in 10 minutes under the hotel entrance canopy. And it did.
The pool at the Crescent Court Hotel in Dallas. (Crescent Court Hotel)
We stayed three nights at the Crescent Court Hotel ($622 a night for two queens), a high-end hotel in Uptown, patronized by women in white blazers, business people in suits, and tall, lean professional athletes, their shiny Escalades and Corvettes darting in and out, and other celebrities like Bill Barr, the former attorney general who shoe-horned his ample self into a Toyota.
Each morning as I walked to Whole Foods for a cappuccino, a fellow identified by a bellman as Billy the Oilman arrived in his Rolls Royce Phantom. Where does he park? “Wherever he wants to. He likes the Starbucks here.”
We garaged our more modest set of wheels for the visit. We were chauffeured for tips by Matt Cooney and Alfonza “The Rev” Scott in the hotel’s black Audi sedan. They drove us to museums, restaurants and past the enclaves of the rich and famous. In Highland Park, The Rev pointed out the homes of the Dallas Cowboys' Jerry Jones and Troy Aikman along with the family compound of the Hunts, oil and gas tycoons.
The Dallas Museum of Art’s “Cartier and Islam” exhibit (until Sept. 18) attracted an older crowd; the nearby Perot Museum of Nature and Science was a powerful whirlpool of kids’ groups ricocheting from the Tyrannosaurus Rex to the oil fracking exhibit. Watch your shins.
A Geogia O'Keeffe oil painting called "Ranchos Church, New Mexico" at the Amon Carter Museum of Modern Art. (Rich Oppel)
For us, the best museum was the Amon Carter Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth, a 50-minute, madcap drive away via a 75 mph toll lane along I-30. Don’t try it during rush hour. The Carter has an exquisite collection of Remington paintings and sculptures and an excellent array of 19th and 20th-century paintings as well. Pick one museum? The Amon Carter. Peaceful, beautiful, uncrowded, free admission and small enough to manage in two hours.
The Fort Worth Stockyards, a place of history (with a dab of schmaltz), fun and good shopping, filled one of our mornings. The 98 acres brand the city as Cowboy Town, with a rodeo and a twice-daily (11:30 a.m. and 4 p.m.) cattle drive. We shopped for boots, drank coffee and watched the “herd” of 18 longhorns. So languid was their progress that if this were a real market drive the beef would have been very tough and leathery before it hit the steakhouse dinner plate.
The cattle drive at the Fort Worth Stockyards. (Rich Oppel)
But we could identify: the temperature was 97. “I saw a dog chasing a cat today,” said the emcee, deploying a very old joke. “It was so hot that both were walking.”
With limited time, we chose three very different restaurants:
- Nobu, in the Crescent Court Hotel; Jia, a modern Chinese restaurant in Highland Park; and Joe T. Garcia’s in Fort Worth. Nobu’s exotic Japanese menu set us back $480, with tip, for four (we had a guest), but it was worth it.
- Jia was an ordinary suburban strip mall restaurant, but with good food and a reasonable tab of $110 for four.
- Joe T.’s is an 85-year-old Fort Worth institution (think Matt’s El Rancho but larger), a fine Mexican restaurant where a meal with two drinks was $115.
Sushi at high-end restaurant Nobu. (Crescent Hotel)
It was all a splurge for a grandchild’s visit. Now we will get back to our ordinary road trips of Hampton Inns, where a room rate is closer to the Crescent Court’s overnight parking rate of $52. And to corner cafes in small towns.
Did Dallas change our 15-year-old’s view of Texas? “Yes. I think it’s a lot cooler than I did. The fashion, the food.” So, not only Austin is cool. Take Texas as a whole. It’s a big, complex, diverse and wonderful state.
