The stay-at-home dad: A hopeful end to a strange school year

A hopeful end to a strange school year

As my 6-year-old son wraps up his final week of distance learning for kindergarten, I feel both sadness and relief.

I’m relieved to be getting a break from supervising his school work. I signed up to be a stay-at-home dad, which comes with all sorts of challenges and responsibilities, but those are very different from the challenges of a formal educator. Even after several weeks in a sorta-substitute role, I know that I’m definitely not qualified to be a kindergarten teacher.

I’m sad about the school year ending as well, in particular about the experiences my son has missed because of the shutdowns. Honestly, school doesn’t really get much better than kindergarten. You get to play with all sorts of cool “educational” toys most of the day, and more importantly, you learn the fundamentals of reading. The ability to read essentially opens the world for a young mind.

Normal kindergarten for him lasted through February, then everything changed. Young kids are pretty resilient, and the concept of “at-home school” actually went over pretty well in our household... for a while. It helped that our kids live with a hypochondriac (me) who warned them about the potential for COVID-related disruptions as early as January. But the longer those disruptions lasted, the more it weighed on them.

Many kids thrive learning alongside their peers. Kindergarten introduces children to the values and complexities of a community, and the concept of community is never more pure than it is in kindergarten. Nobody is old enough to understand the dynamics of American politics or human behavior, and so most of their conflicts are fairly benign. Even then, these kids learn the skills to live, work and often thrive alongside different-thinking human beings.

Outside of a few Zoom classroom meetings, that sense of community was largely absent from the last three months of the school year. Schools tried their best to provide relevant experiences via distance learning, and I’m in awe of the efforts by educators in this community to salvage the situation as best as possible.

Still, it’s been hard to see my kids miss out on so many of the typical social experiences this year. No basketball camp. No music concert. I’m even sad about losing the little day-to-day moments, like lining up for lunch or raising their hand to ask the teacher a question.

Of course, in the grand scheme of things, those small losses are nothing compared to the problems we’ve faced as a country in 2020. Our small sacrifices, in my opinion at least, were worthwhile so long as it meant preventing even one person from dying unnecessarily from the virus. And so that sadness doesn’t linger, because my family still has so much to be thankful for.

One of my son’s last assignments for school this year was writing a few sentences on his favorite memories from kindergarten. He wrote about playing with his two best friends at recess, about building marble roller coaster tracks in science and playing with the “parashoot” in gym class. He didn’t mention reading, writing or math, but I wasn’t expecting that from him anyway.

He also said he loved making videos and working on assignments alongside his older sister on the school’s online classroom platform. My third-grader daughter often helped me by sitting with my son and guiding him through the trickier parts of the online assignments. For him, some of it was really tricky, and I didn’t always have the best patience. I’m thankful my daughter helped to salvage that experience when I was feeling too overwhelmed to keep my cool.

Even more, the fact that he liked something specific to this strange, seemingly once-in-a-lifetime year makes me think that he still had a very successful year of kindergarten. Lessons were learned, and that temporary loss of one community helped to fortify another, albeit smaller one.