From March 2020 until May 2023 the world experienced something that hadn’t really happened in over 100 years. It caused a lot of panic and stress and hate. It created a whole new way of life for many people. And, having four young children to enjoy this experience with made it so much more … everything.
The media was beginning to spark some public panic at the beginning of March. We were preparing for an annual winter vacation – a getaway from the winter. The last few days leading up to our vacation were met with many questions about whether or not we would go and how worried we were about this new flu virus that everyone had been talking about. Well, since I had spent more than 20 years avoiding the News at this point after a suggestion from a counsellor in my youth, I had no idea what everyone was talking about. So, I asked my good friend Google to enlighten me about Coronavirus. Apparently, Google was not yet alerted to the dangers of this new virus and only had information about the milder more common Coronavirus. My friend, Google, informed me that if I had ever had a flu virus in the past that I likely had Coronavirus. So, not being a scientist or someone who watches the news, I decided that whatever this new mutation of Coronavirus was, it was a mutation of a virus my body had already dealt with and my body would be prepared, at least in part, for this one should I ever be exposed to it. So, my level of panic at this time would have been non-existent and I couldn’t really understand all the people who were getting so worried about something that hadn’t even come into our province yet and was also something that had been around for some time.
So, we took our vacation. We went to the sun. We had about two or three days before the world seemed to end. We ended up spending much of our vacation watching news broadcasts of what was happening around the world. We watched, with a bit more anxiety now, as things started shutting down. We spent a lot of time trying to come up with fun activities for the kids to do while we were on vacation and all the places we had planned to visit were now closed and we couldn’t even use the pool. The last few days of our vacation were spent trying to figure out how we would get home as airports closed and flights were cancelled. But, we made it home, hours before new restrictions would be put in place that would have meant isolating in the area we entered the country – which was no longer able to be our province. So, after our vacation in the sun we returned home to schools being closed and were told we had to isolate for two weeks. Luckily, my wonderful parents were able to bring us groceries since we had no food in our home and were now not able to go to the store. They did a few deliveries of groceries for us over our two weeks of isolation and even brought some things to help keep the kids entertained in that time.
The kids wouldn’t get to go back to school or preschool that year. The government tried to set up at-home learning for the children in school but it only lasted for about a month after which they decided that the school year would be over and all students would pass regardless of what they were capable of at the end of the year. That was good because the at home learning was essentially non-existent, for my children anyway. However, with my children being immersed in a second language at school, one of my children had just started school that year and another would start the following year also learning in a second language. The only way an immersion class works is if the children are actually being immersed in the language all day at school. Even when we returned to school in September of 2020, there was no way to continue with the immersion through school closures. So, my two children were being asked to work and learn in a second language that they would get to hear for about an hour or less each day. When concerns were brought to the teachers, the principals, the school board, the education minister, it was always met the same way – “all of the children in this grade are having the same struggles.” Of course they were! I didn’t want to know that everyone was struggling, I wanted to know how we were going to get past it – how was my child going to go into the second grade after two years of interrupted schooling and be able to learn what they were going to teach him? And, if they were just going to shrug and say this is where everyone in that grade is because of all the school closures what would that mean in the future, at what point were they going to see that a lot of these kids just were not going to be able to catch up because no one was going back to teach them what they missed? All the while, I was watching the education minister in news broadcasts assure the voting population that the children were, in fact, not falling behind at all and that anyone who suggested they might be was simply wrong. I was infuriated. I was sending emails to anyone who should be doing something about it and getting responses from no one. There was no extra supports being put into schools for these children and the supports that were in place from before the pandemic were stretched so thin and then were being used to cover teacher absences so any child who was falling behind would just be left behind to feel as though they were drowning, while watching the lifeguards on the shore, who were smiling and telling them to just stop drowning.
The 2022-2023 school year was both the last school year of the pandemic as well as the first uninterrupted school year for our children during the pandemic. In theory, this should have been a much better experience for everyone because routines would not be constantly changing. However, in reality, what happened was that the children didn’t really know how to cope with going to school without the extended closures. They were very tired and had a hard time keeping focused. Everyone could feel the strain this was putting on them. No one really seemed too concerned about how that change would affect the children after three years. There were three grades of children who had never gone to school without any interruptions or attempts at at-home learning. Those children didn’t know how to cope with the new normal and two of my children were in that group. It was a struggle. They spent everyday looking ahead to the next break that they had come to expect more frequently. I took it upon myself to give my children mental health days during the school year to let them recharge a bit, one at a time, which was really nice because they don’t often get a lot of time with me.
Now, we focus on helping our boys achieve their academic goals in school. For one of them that meant switching from learning a second language. He was not sure he wanted to change classes but now that he is learning in English and is able to understand what is going on we are seeing a lot of progress. For the other that means watching his progress to see how he improves over time. He was fortunate enough to be given extra support from school that hadn’t been available for his brother and is now getting closer to the academic goals for his grade level. I will forever look back on this time as the time I realized that the government truly does not care about our children – I always had an inkling but it was confirmed as I watched them deny the negative effects of the pandemic on children’s learning and consistently insist that there was no need for any additional supports in our schools.