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(Karen Brooks Harper/Austonia)
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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Bruce McCandless II's untethered spacewalk made history in 1984. The red stripes above his knees were the only way that NASA could determine which astronaut was Bruce and which was his fellow spacewalker, Bob Stewart. (NASA)
'Wonders All Around' is a new book by Austinite Bruce McCandless III about his dad, the astronaut Bruce McCandless II. (Bruce McCandless III)
I met McCandless III, who lives in Austin with his wife Pati, for a coffee a few months ago, thanks to the introduction from a mutual friend. As we talked about losing our dads, being writers and parents and living in Austin while still dealing with COVID, his dad's famous flight didn't come up, but the process of writing such an epic biography of a complex, only recently passed man was something worth unpacking over coffee.
I hadn't read the book yet, but over the next few weeks, I got to know the McCandless family in such a sweet way that I wanted to write a little about the book here to perhaps inspire you to seek out a copy of "Wonders All Around."
As much as this is a book about space, it's also a book about grief. And persistence. And stoicism. And masculinity and maternality.
The elder McCandless died in 2017, just a few years after losing his wife, Bernice, to cancer.
This passing of the torch from father to son left the younger McCandless inspired to take on this decades-long narrative. McCandless III sets the tone for the book with a memory of the family sitting around the dinner table at their home outside Johnson Space Center near Houston in the mid 1970s, when his dad, who joined NASA in 1966 at the age of 28, wasn't sure he'd ever actually make it to space.
"Our dinners were somber affairs. We ate around a rectangular Formica table in the breakfast nook. Tracy and I sat on benches padded with orange vinyl cushions. Mom and Dad occupied faux-Spanish style chairs with green felt upholstery. Despite the informal, Howard Johnson's-at-the-airport feel of the furnishings, there was a tension in the air that set in right around the time the frozen string beans started steaming. I had the feeling that my sister and I had forgotten to do something important, though I couldn't figure out what it was, or that judgment had been rendered on us and we'd been found guilty of … something — again, it was unclear what. Horseplay was prohibited. The TV and all sources of music or other frivolity were turned off, and singing was strictly forbidden. The only sound came from the aquarium pump. My father had a 100-gallon tank along the wall behind his chair. Sometimes the big plecostomus would attach itself by its mouth to the glass facing us, and I imagined it sucking all the oxygen out of the room."
Imagining what it must have been like to require oxygen to survive, not in outer space but in the living room with your family, sets up the story of the McCandless ancestors, including a guy who was killed by Wild Bill Hickok and the author's grandfather, who was an admiral in the U.S. Navy.
No pressure, Bruce.
It was fascinating to read about the 18 years that Bruce McCandless II worked for NASA before he finally had his first flight, which debuted the Manned Maneuvering Unit, a jet-fueled backpack that he and Ed Whitsett Jr. spent so many years developing. (That's the joystick-controlled machine he's wearing in that mind-bending poster that hung on millions of Americans' walls over the following decade.)
The author McCandless has the unenviable task of trying to put into words what that flight must have felt like. His dad flew 150 feet away from the shuttle Challenger, which would, of course, break into a million little pieces just a few years later.
When President Reagan called the shuttle to congratulate the astronauts that day in 1984, the command center set up a demonstration space walk to give the president a live view of McCandless through the shuttle window.
Bruce McCandless II, trains with Kathy Sullivan, right, in preparation to launch the Hubble Space Telescope. (NASA)
The only problem was, there wasn't much fuel left. McCandless went out anyway, trying to stay within 10-15 feet of the spacecraft. He got into position and turned off the unit to preserve propellant. After the president said a few words and the video switched off, McCandless turned on the unit and "looked for the closest piece of the orbiter, pointed at it, put the hand controller in +X (and) got a sort of sighing noise as it accelerated in that direction." He ran out of fuel just as he grabbed onto a rail on the orbiter. Hand over hand, he brought himself back to the donning station.
It's that kind of suspense that made this book so thrilling to read.
There's space tension like when McCandless is operating as CAPCOM, the only person talking to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin while they are walking on the surface of the moon, and his commander wants him to break protocol and call them back early, even though there are no signs of distress.
The book is also so touching. I cried while reading about the declining health of Bernice, who survived so many astronaut wife struggles over the years and at the end of her life remained a loving partner and mother.
Bruce McCandless was a Navy pilot who was picked to join NASA in 1966. His first space flight wasn't until 1984. (NASA)
It's easy to forget that McCandless II had an entirely other memorable historic moment—launching the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990—and this one seems to have struck an even deeper chord with McCandless III.
The Hubble launch was McCandless' second and final flight. He was 52 and had worked at NASA for 24 years.
McCandless II spends the last chapters of the book making a compelling case that his dad's work to fix and update the Hubble are among the greatest achievements to science. He continued to work on Hubble for another two decades after retiring from NASA through his work at Lockheed Martin.
Bruce McCandless, left, and the flight crew that launched the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990. He was 52 years old. (NASA)
He was the "nuts, bolts, screws, and wires guy," the auto mechanic rather than the scientist, who kept the telescope going 340 miles above Earth for more than twice its life expectancy. The Hubble has been cited in more than 18,000 scientific papers and has revealed countless secrets and unsolved mysteries from around the universe and beyond.
"The size, shape, and sheer spectral weirdness of the images boggle the imagination and make prophets and dreamers of us all," McCandless writes toward the end of "Wonders All Around. "Some of us pay therapists to tell us we're important and unique. Then we check in with Hubble so the satellite can inform us just how galactically marginal we all are. The truth is somewhere in the middle."
What a beautiful reminder.
