The first day of school this year was most likely a historical one. With a large part of the country turning to a virtual school year (at least in part) this year, things looked very different than the first day of school from years passed. Loudoun County is 100% distance learning at this point, so Lyla’s first day of 7th grade and Nina’s first day of 9th grade were virtual this year.
Virtual learning certainly has it’s pros and cons in this day of COVID awareness, and while I’m hoping all kids get to return in-person to school at some point this year, we’re focusing now on making the best of virutal school. The pros so far seem to be a more relaxed pace to the day, getting to go to school every day in sweat pants, walking downstairs for lunch (and for me, NOT PACKING LUNCHES!!!), the obvious minimal COVID exposure, and having Cayenne as your school-time buddy.
The cons so far seem to be the obvious lack of friend/people interaction, the experience of actually starting high school in person (for Nina), being able to get instruction in the physical classroom from teachers, decreased physical movement throughout the day, and having to spend most of the school day on a laptop.
So, while this may not be the way we envisioned the start of the school year in 2020, we’re committed to doing our best to keep the morale up in the Simpson house while this stretch of virtual learning lasts. We don’t know when things will return back to “normal”, so for now we’ll focus on the present and identify what’s working well with virtual and what’s not working well, and count our blessings that we do have all we need to make this work effectively. So many other families are in a truely difficult place with virtual school, so recognizing that this is more of an “inconvenience” or “unfortunate situation” for us rather than something dire, helps keep the perspective that we’re thankful to be healthy and managing to do alright in this unprecedented time!
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