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Cheryl Hughes: Essential Workers

Third-grade math is kicking my butt.  I have been trying to keep my granddaughter, Sabria, on track, while she figures the area and perimeter of polygons, and I am nearly blind from counting, measuring and figuring those little suckers on her computer screen.  It doesn’t seem to bother Sabria, who figures everything in her head.  I figure on paper in order to check her work—she occasionally adds two numbers together wrong.  I try to get her to use a pencil and paper, and she will for a little while, just to appease me.  I heard a celebrity say recently, after slogging through homework with his five kids, teachers should make 4 billion dollars a year.  I concur, after just helping one child.

 

                I’ve been trying to write a letter to Mom at least once weekly.  Sometimes, I print out a few pictures on my printer to include.  I write on notebook paper then fold the letter the way my teachers at Mt. Washington taught me to do.  (They also taught us how to write business letters, and the proper way to address and fold those.)  I’ve thought a lot about teachers during this time of social distancing.  Their patience, their encouragement, their care.  I’ve always said I couldn’t do their jobs, but I’ve had to with Sabria—her mom and stepdad are still working, Natalie in health care billing and coding, Scott a delivery guy for FedEx.  I find myself using teacher speak.  “Try again,” I say or “Maybe you miscounted” or “No, I didn’t know Saturn has seven main rings and thousands of smaller rings, now let’s focus, what’s your next math question?”  She’s one pupil.  How do you not lose your mind with thirty?  If you have children who are students at this time, you can be thankful that their teachers didn’t lose their minds, and they are a screen encounter away.

                Natalie has decided this week, she is going to help Sabria with her online classes.  She wants Garey and me to stay home where it’s safe.  I’m working on a design for a home-made hazmat suit, just in case one or both have meltdowns.  Natalie is an excellent mother, but she puts up with very little nonsense, i.e. a discussion on the rings of Saturn while figuring area and perimeter of polygons. 

“It doesn’t matter how many rings Saturn has, Sabria,” she might say, “We’re not figuring the perimeter of Saturn’s rings!”  To be fair, I’ve had practice dealing with children who live life with National Geographic documentaries rolling through their heads.  My daughter, Nikki, included a commentary on things like the teeth of a killer whale—forty to fifty-six—and the life span of the African dwarf frog—up to twenty years—when I helped her with her homework.  As Garey can attest, I have a bit of off-the-subject film reels running through my own head on a regular basis.

                When these days are done, and there is a return to normalcy, there will be children who have slipped through the cracks, simply because teachers couldn’t be there to save them.  A whole generation of children will be affected by a parent’s or parents’ inability or unwillingness to stand in the gap, a gap left by teachers who wanted to be there for those kids, but couldn’t.  It will be at that point in our history that we realize teachers are truly Essential Workers.

               

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