March 2020 is finally ending

[thanate]

For the first time in 18 months, I walked my child up the hills to school this morning; she is super excited to be back in a roomfull of 3rd graders, mask mandate notwithstanding, and I am hoping that prioritizing mental health over Delta infection risk is not sending her to her Doom. I'm pretty sure we're the last, waiting not only for Labor day, but also Rosh Hashanah; we've heard about school systems that reopened mid-July. Our schools appear to be doing... the best they can when running on the assumption that stuffing everyone back into the classrooms is their best option. I am still furious at the FDA for deciding that the cautious path of action is to spend another 3 months double-checking their testing for elementary school aged children; my father talked about how the hippocratic oath inclines people to avoid an action with a small chance of risk rather than evaluating it against the harm inherent in *not* taking that risk. Which is even clearer at a population-wide level; run your numbers: How many children might have issues from the vaccine? How many children *will* die and/or be permanently disabled from 3 months of intensive viral spread? Act accordingly.

Anyway. Today the Megatherium is happy, and reteaching her how to write is someone else's problem for this week. (We went thru a 2nd grade review workbook over the summer, so she's not nearly as writing-averse as she was before that, but half her numbers still regularly come out backwards, & a bad habit of attempting to spell words without vowels.) We'll see how long any of it lasts, and how much of the next couple weeks I spend curled up in corners shaking with reaction.

Some day I might even have a writing brain again, although that seems kind of optimistic.

Comments

[jazzfish]

Oof, I do not envy the parents of any schoolchildren this year.

Vaccine certification feels like the Trolley Problem writ large: "but *I* didn't do anything to kill those kids!" Or maybe it's just fear of American litigiousness. Bah. If ever there were a reason for "qualified immunity," certifying a vaccine in a pandemic should count.

It's good to hear from you.

[thanate]

I mean, they were giving it to adults before final certifications. Yeah.

(I remain not dead!)

[sartorias]

Sounds like a leftie! (At least, I remember getting crabbed at for making my letters backwards when they looked fine to me. Daughter same, brother same, all three of us lefties.)

[thanate]

This is just that she stopped writing by hand around the time she was finally getting this stuff sorted out and regressed. At least half the kids her age are having the same problem, sadly. (I hope someone out there is studying e-school induced educational lapses...)

[sartorias]

Ah! That makes sense. And, definitely. In the long run I'm sure they'll do just fine, but it would be great if educators can make the smoothing out process as stress free as possible.