My friend Kimberly’s passion for kids and teaching always stokes the embers that remain from my years in the classroom. When she visited recently, I asked her how the year ahead looked after the initial week with her second graders. It happened that we had been engaged in a conversation about the challenges of getting kids with special needs the services they deserved, so it wasn’t surprising that her very first response to my question was to note that 35% of her class had IEPs, 504s or were in the pipeline for receiving them.
It’s often been the case that more “difficult” children were channeled to the classrooms of strong teachers capable of handling them, but she assured me that was not the case. The other second grade classroom had a similar percentage. “How do you account for these high numbers?” I asked. “These are the kids who missed almost two years of pre-K.” She didn’t need to elaborate. It’s clear to any educator or parent that those are critical years in which the foundations of social and cognitive development that constitute the grounding for future learning are laid down.
This conversation with Kimberly returned me to thinking about the unique losses inflicted during those dark years suffered by students at each age group. Our granddaughter Dalia’s Covid years corresponded to her time in the third and fourth grades. This is a period when kids are introduced to more complex concepts and skills in math and literacy. She was fortunate to have two educators at home and to be in a school district where the quality of the remote learning was high, so her losses in those areas were limited.
But, as always, the burden in these situations falls on the shoulders of already disadvantaged students. Those 3rd and 4th grade Covid kids are the ones who are now struggling academically and socially in middle school. With Dalia, we’ve also noticed a by-product of the all-day, every-day confined-to- home routine that received little attention in comparison the academic and social fallout. The limited physical activity added some weight to her frame. All of that melted away when she returned to school, but for kids whose health is already compromised, it’s a reasonable guess that this period of isolation exacted a toll on their bodies that might not be linked to Covid until years from now.
You can work your way up the age ladder and pinpoint the Covid damages specifically related to each developmental stage – the middle-schoolers and high school age students so oriented to their peers who were suddenly available only as ghosts on their home screens. All the much-anticipated rites of passage – proms, school clubs, budding romances – were lost to these groups. The resulting depression and anxiety grew exponentially, along with the anger of being deprived of the natural stages of growth was also true for college students, many of whom were paying huge tuition bills just to sit alone in front of their screens, when they should have been on the campus lawn tossing frisbees.
All you teachers who are reading this, I would ask youto work backwards to speculate on what was missing for them in their Covid years that could account for the patterns, both academic and social, that you’re seeing in your current students. I promise I’ll share your observations with the rest of my readers. We need a more sweeping and comprehensive analysis of what happened to students across grade levels pre-K through college during the Covid years to fully understand the toll that those dark times have exacted from us.
Much of what you’ve just read was written at a table on the porch of a friend’s house in South Haven, Michigan. The house sits on a high ridge overlooking Lake Michigan. To make a pilgrimage to the beach, you have to descend a steep stairway to the seemingly endless stretch of white sandy beach. We were there for the several nights following Labor Day. The roads were empty, as was the beach, with scant evidence of the hordes of people who had recently decamped and headed back to their “real” homes in the city.
It was a perfect place read, write, sleep and to contemplate our good fortune that we have so many “friends with benefits.” Strip that phrase of its original sexual connotations. Think instead of friends who have second homes that they are generous in sharing with their landless friends. We have been beneficiaries of these gifts many times over the years and have learned the art of landing lightly in the spaces that have been bestowed on us. We are good Boy and Girl Scouts who try to leave the campsite neater than it was when we arrived. Thank you, Rivkah and Terry, the latest addition to our list of friends with benefits.
