plan z
Chicken is in first grade. He and I have been butting heads about his school work, which is now “required” that he complete. I pull up the spreadsheet from his teacher and say, “Okay, this morning we’re going to read a book about snails, and then you’ll write down two questions about snails.”
This is how we read the book:
I log into the main app.
I click into his classroom.
I click into online resources.
I scroll down.
I click the reading app.
I log into the reading app.
I click assignments.
I scroll down.
I find the snail book.
I click “read.”
He looks at the pdf on the screen, a cover of a book about snails. He picks up his pencil.
He writes, in comically sloppy handwriting:
Why are snails?
“Chicken, please do your best work and this’ll be quick.”
I hand him a fresh sheet of paper.
I start to read the book.
He writes his next question:
Are any snails named Mr. Panties?
“Chicken.”
“What? I really want to know!”
“You need to pick a different question.”
“But you said write two questions and I wrote TWO QUESTIONS!”
“I SAID WRITE TWO REAL QUESTIONS, NOT ONE EXISTENTIAL UNIVERSE QUESTION AND ONE POTTY TALK QUESTION.”
“MR. PANTIES IS NOT POTTY TALK IT’S JUST HILARIOUS.”
Yeah, we were locked into this spicy little cell block tango:
I give him the assignment
He intentionally does crap work on his assignment in order to be hilarious
I tell him he has to re-do the assignment
He does it crappily but in a different way
I tell him he has to re-do the assignment again
He pitches a massive tantrum
I wait him out like Pepe Le Pew, or maybe more accurately, like Pepe Le Pew’s Mom
I explain why he has to do his best work for school
He goes “UUUUUUNGH”
I tell him I want to learn about snails with him
He goes “MOOOOOOOOOM”
I tell him no TV until it’s done
He does it
I stare into the sink and for the first time in my life relate to a carrot shaving
After about a week of THAT, I said “NOPE,” and took him for a walk. Not the LONG WALK, Jeez, don’t look at me like that. We just needed to get out of the house.
I told him I hated fighting with him about school stuff. He said he did too.
I said, “Look, I’m gonna read you in on this whole homeschooling thing. There’s a reason I’m not a teacher. And there’s a reason your teacher IS ONE. She’s a trained and experienced educator. I’m your mom and I love you. Those are two very different things. That’s like if you went to your favorite restaurant and ordered spaghetti and meatballs, and they brought out a big bowl of confetti and Nerf balls. Both great! NOT THE SAME.
There’s a reason we enrolled you in school, instead of doing homeschool all the time. We think you learn better in school. We love all the opportunities you have to make friends, know other adults, and learn things like coding and music, things we can’t teach you.
We chose all these things - whether or not to be a teacher, whether or not to homeschool - and then Plan A went straight out the window, into the bed of a passing truck, that drove over a cliff, into a wormhole, and emerged in Venezuela at the top of Angel Falls, where it plunged 3,230 feet into the Rio Kerepacupai Meru, which, for some reason, was suddenly filled with dirty diapers and piranhas with fricking laser beams attached to their foreheads.
Plan A is gone. I miss it every day. But it’s not here anymore.”
“Yeah,” he said, kicking a fence. “It feels like we’re on PLAN Z now.”
“It really, really does,” I said.
It’s Plan Z.
It’s Plan Z for everybody. It’s Plan Z for parents who have to learn all the new apps and websites for school, and set our kids up for Zoom calls with their classes, and do all that while we’re working from home and cooking and cleaning more than we ever have because this is our ONLY PLACE, PEOPLE. If it’s trashed, well then shit, Sharon, I guess we live in trash now.
It’s Plan Z for kiddos who miss their friends, teachers, babysitters, and grandparents, and school-provided routines, meals, sports, and clubs. They should be at baseball practice or coding or the Children’s Museum. Not making the day’s most exciting transition from “TV on the couch” to “TV in Mom’s Room” when Mommy needed to hop on a call.
It’s Plan Z for Buster, who will never get to say good-bye to the preschool he loved, and who will be starting Kindergarten next year after six months of summer.
It’s extra Plan Z for older kiddos who are graduating this year and don’t get to celebrate their hard work the way they always imagined they would.
And it’s Plan Z for our teachers. Because I promise you, teachers did not become teachers because of their deep and committed love of Zoom calls. The best part of our teachers’ work? It’s the kids who are, right now, in the next room fighting over a single LEGO piece from the bin of ten thousand LEGO pieces. We are sick of their faces almost as much as we love their butts. Their teachers miss them so much.
My frustrations about the umpteen clicks and scrolls it takes to “read a book” and the sudden, crushing pressure I feel to safeguard my kids’ educations, in addition to their physical, emotional, and social health? Valid.
My kid’s frustrations about Mommy having zero sense of humor when it comes to admittedly hilarious snail names? Valid.
Our teacher’s frustrations about missing their students and learning a BRAND-NEW JOB in a matter of weeks, one that everyone will hate, one that we all know will be far less effective and rewarding than Plan A, but that must exist anyway? So valid.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Just because I have heart space for all the people caught in this foul turdwhirl of a home school twister doesn’t mean I’m Mary Sunshine about the whole thing. I have cursed schools, teachers, education as a construct, the internet, and yes, even books, just all books, as I’ve “navigated” this process with my kids. I do it in the airless void of my mind, where no one can hear me carpet-bombing the concept of preschool with f-bombs, because I’m a lady, but hoo boy, it’s been rough in there.
Plan Z is a clusterfuck shitshow. Every day, I feel like I’m holding up a book in front of my children whose cover reads “MOMMY HAS GOT THIS, GUYS,” and the book itself just says “No, you don’t, you fucking don’t, you really fucking don’t, WHAT ARE YOU DOING, DON’T GET OUT THE PAINT, JUST SURVIVE,” over and over for 365 pages. One for every day of the year.
But at some point I realized, Plan Z isn’t so different from Plan A, really. I’ve been carrying around that same book with its confident cover belying daily panicked telegrams from the edge of the apocalypse, since the day my oldest son was born. And no matter how airtight the daily routine, how organized the meal plan, how meticulously crafted the sports schedule, Plan A was always in the bed of that truck, heading toward the cliff. We just hadn’t fallen off yet.
So okay, we’re in Plan Z.
Perhaps… we’ve always been there…
Point is, nobody chose any of this. So we’re gonna do the best we can with what we’ve got: a spiffy new eye twitch, books that are only twelve clicks and three passwords away, Zoom calls with teachers who are somehow, miraculously connecting with young children through a screen, walks through the neighborhood to bring the realness to a 7-year-old, and cake.
Sorry, didn’t I mention that I bought a cake yesterday?
Yeah, we have cake. I give it four stars. Highly recommend the cake.
xoxo
Katie
If you like this blog, please follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter! Those free clicks help my little blog grow, and I’m notoriously unspammy, so I promise I’ll only fill your feed with funnies and salties.
If you liked this post and you have a couple bucks to spare, please send them to your local food bank.
26 million Americans are out of work and as much as I appreciate your support, I’d appreciate it even more if you took that $5 and used it to feed 50 people.
Yes — Feeding America estimates that every dollar they receive in donations translates to 10 meals, prepared and distributed! Dang, right?