Parenthood: Week 397 – Early Intervention, Part 2

 "Duck." 

Looking into Ethan's eyes, she brought her hand close to her face, made the sign for "duck," the pointer and middle finger opening and closing on the thumb like a mouth, and said again "duck." Swiftly she pulled a stuffed toy duck out of her bag and said, "quack." Then she once again brought her hand up to her mouth and signed and spoke the word "duck."  

Ethan was sixth months old when he started with this therapist. We had a different therapist for about two months, but she didn't really work well with Ethan and us. I told a parent of a student who had hearing loss that I taught about this, and the parent told me to request a new therapist. Early Intervention therapists come into homes to work with children. If the vibe is not right, something needs to change. We did just that, and the one we ended up with was amazing.  

Our first meeting with our Early Intervention case manager was on 1/5/18 when Ethan was two months.  

She was talking about getting him started with therapy at four months old. I had made peace at this point that Ethan did have special and was disabled. I was delighted at the idea that he would be able to get therapy at a young age but four months old seemed really young.  

Until we switched therapists at six months old, I didn't really believe that it made sense to do therapy this young.  

At six months old, Ethan was not sitting reliably like most kids his age, so he often sat in our laps during therapy. His attention span could not last the forty minutes of work time that therapy sessions lasted, but this didn't deter his new therapist at all.  

As soon as Ethan lost interest in the duck, she would pull a ball out of her bag, make the sign for "ball," and roll it towards him. She had so many different ways to assess and teach him. For example, she would distract him with a bright spinning toy and then press the button on a noisemaker behind her back to see if he would notice. It was amazing to watch. 

I have had the privilege to watch master teachers work with students, and it is one of the most inspiring and impressive things to witness. She was clearly a master teacher, and she could get this baby to work and really engage. It was a struggle often to keep him engaged, and After these sessions, Ethan would be exhausted and nap really well. In every session, Buffy would always be close by within a couple of feet of Ethan and the therapist, watching carefully to make sure things were okay.  

We started with this amazing therapist on 4/25/18. Sometimes the session would be every two weeks and at other times every week. I was able to make some of these sessions, but Diana did most of them.  

I'll never forget coming home from work a couple of months into therapy and Diana coming up to me so excited.  

"Ethan did great in therapy today!" She exclaimed,  

"Yeah? That's great."  

I replied. "Ethan learned the work, duck!!" 

After months of work, Ethan finally demonstrated to his therapist that he understood the spoken word and the sign for the word "duck." I went over to Ethan and gave him a big hug. I was so proud at that moment. He was really doing the work, and he was growing.  

This therapist guided us through every question we had about Ethan's disability, and through it all, through all of her work with Ethan, she never stopped believing in him. Ethan did nothing to earn this. She walked into that door during their first session, and she looked at him and spoke to him, believing he could learn, he could grow, and that he was worth her time, effort, and care. That is so special to find in a teacher and a human being.  

I don't know how many times she said the word duck, made quacking sounds, and signed "duck" for Ethan, but she never got frustrated, never gave up. Little did we know that this perseverance would be further displayed by a pandemic that would force the therapist of a child with hearing loss to do remote therapy.

Year 11– Week 10: The Pandemic, Part 4 - The Break

More than any year, summer break was just that a break. 

In previous years Summer break was the time between the end of the school year and the beginning of the next year. Yes, there was planning that I did in the spring for the upcoming fall, but there seemed to be a clean break, a sense of finality. That feeling wasn't there. Maybe it was because all of our closing events like graduation were a shadow of themselves on Zoom, or because I never got to say goodbye to most of my students. More than anything else, the uncertainty of fall is what never allowed me to feel like I could truly be done as summer break began.  

We ended school, not knowing what fall was going to be like. No one knew if we would be in-person, remote, or some hybrid of in-person and remote.  

There was a flurry of conversation and debate about schools opening in the late spring, and once that idea got quashed down, we just rode the school year out to the end, and no one seemed to be talking about the fall. There was very much sense of let's not worry about this until later, because someone else is going to figure it out.  

The problem is that we didn't have time. Schools needed every single second from the end of school until the school's opening in the fall to figure out what to do. No help came.  

There was no massive influx of funds, no meaningful guidance from the federal government, and people behaved with complete ignorance of how their choices in spreading the pandemic further would affect schools' possibilities of opening in person.  

I needed to feel like I was doing something to help. I couldn't just sit back and not have a voice, so I volunteered to be on my school's Return to Campus Coordinating Committee. We met on the week of 6/14 a couple of times and talked about ideas and opening in the fall.  

This was followed by a couple of announcements that mirrored the messaging in the spring of how our school closed in the uncertainty.  

June 15th

Our administration explained that they were looking into different possibilities for the fall. No specifics were given at this time. Working on the committee at the time, I felt hopeful that we could find a better way to do remote learning, and I was intrigued by the idea of being in-person.  

 

June 26th  

We received another email saying that plans were in development. At this point, I was convinced that there was no way we would be in-person in the fall, except for maybe the younger grades. It didn't seem right, and it felt far too dangerous.  

 

July 10th

Our administration proudly announcements that all students JK-12 were going to return to campus. I was shocked by this email. It felt like the school was making this promise to differentiate itself from other schools, which at this point were already making announcements that school would not be in person. My more cynical part of my brain thought this was just about money, though part of me understood how, especially for our younger students, we had to make in-person happen.  

 

July 31st

With August coming quickly, the school announced that is Illinois was in stage 4, the 9-12 grade students would be remote, and JK-8 would be in-person. So much of what we were doing was hinging on these stages the governor set, and it was hard knowing that other people would so influence my job in the fall. At this point, I had a full on "freak-out" about being in person. I could not see how this was going to work.  

August 6th 

I was excited to have this meeting with all of the faculty and a leading expert in infectious diseases. I initially left this meeting, not feeling very good about teaching in person because her advice went to go against my fears. When she talked about how unlikely it would be for us to get COVID-19 with certain precautions, I didn't believe her. Later, most of what she said proved to be right, but at the time, I wanted to believe the worst of the possibilities of teaching in-person. I was resentful of not being treated well as a teacher, and it like by extenuated the worst-case scenario. I wanted to be a victim at that time. The problem was that my viewpoint wasn't right, and it didn't reflect the science.  

 

August 12th 

The administration announced that the 9-12 graders were going to be remote. In a way, this was a relief. It meant that getting the JK-8 students in the building would be more feasible. I was happy that my high school teacher colleagues didn't have to be in the building while I was still not feeling good about teaching in-person.  

 

 

Plans started slowly coming together at this point. We found out that students had the option to be remote, but teaches did not. Schedules less than a month before school was to open were still not solidified. I didn't know until the week before school started my schedule and what grades I would teach. While not having a teaching schedule and teaching assignment earlier was stressful and felt unreasonable at the time. 

 

In retrospect, the actual negative effects of this uncertainty were not that big a deal. No matter what, I was going to have to plan week by week. Knowing my schedule earlier wouldn't have really changed that.  

I was proud that I focused my frustration on helping out. I spent hours in the evening and one Saturday morning on the beach, working out schedule issues. While my children played in the Lake Michigan water, I was furiously writing out emails on my phone, trying to make pieces fit.  

 

At that point, I had moved on to the mindset of making things work. I gave up thinking about whether or not we should be in-person and instead focused on doing all that I could to make in-person work. People I trusted in the school felt like we could make this happen. In 12 years, they had the school had never let me down. Once again, I was going to give them the benefit of the doubt.  

 

While the chaos in my brain settled down and I began to focus on what I needed to do to make this work, the opening days of school would bring to light a new tension, one I did not expect and that felt like it could to pull apart our school community.

Parenthood: Week 396 – 11/7/20, The Moment We Knew For Sure

Driving into the Chicago Botanic Gardens, I was relieved. 

I had missed the freeway exit that led to the gardens and had to spend almost twenty minutes trying to figure out how to U-turn and make our way back to the gardens. After getting up early in the morning, Ethan fell asleep in his car seat, allowing us all a respite from his liveliness and energy.  

As I drove toward the parking lot, the Circle Round podcast's calming sound played in the car bringing in a story from a culture not of my own but feeling familiar and comforting.  

I noticed the kaleidoscope of light showered us as light streamed in through the changing fall leaves as I turned into the parking lot. I was looking forward to a good morning with my family. This had been a difficult week, but the weather had remained unseasonably warm, and the changing of fall leaves brought evolving beauty to the world.  

And then Diana, in hushed excitement, told me, "Joe won, it's confirmed." 

Diana had been reminding me all week that the mainstream media narrative was not giving the full picture of what was happening. It seemed like Biden was losing after Tuesday night, but he wasn't. The fact is that the mail-in ballots were going to swing towards Biden. The hope that Biden was going to win became fact on Friday even before major news outlets called it. By Friday, I accepted that the news organizations' final call was going to be a matter of time, and by Saturday, I was at peace with waiting. So when it happened, it didn't feel like a great moment or victory. It felt more like a relief.  

After exploring the orchards in the gardens and getting some lunch, we ended up in the Nature Play Garden.

Only a couple of other people were there as our boys ran around the open grassy field and the gently sloping hills. We reclined on the hills, felt the warmth of the sun, and let the children explore the space. 

Lucas, who is just one month shy of a year old, got very determined to climb one of the hills. He had climbed up some of the smaller ones and, at one point, adorably lost his balance and rolled down the hill giggling as he landed in the soft grass. As he started climbing this larger hill, I reflected on his life. He has no idea who the president is or who the president will be. His world is his family, and with every place he goes, there is something new to experience, something new to see. The hill in front of him was enormous for him to climb for his size, but he was undeterred.  Lucas saw something that he wanted to explore, and he was willing to persevere to get to the top. 

 

When he almost got the top, he lost balance and fell on his side. He screamed out, and I rushed over to him, picked him up, and told him, "everything is going to be okay." As I put him down and watched him make it to the top, it felt like, for the first time in what felt like forever, that things were really going to be okay.

Year 11 – Week 9: Quarantine On Election Day

For weeks I had been thinking about what the election would mean to me as a teacher. Four years ago, I was on an outdoor education retreat during the election. The results came in sitting in a lounge area with some great educators, and the next morning, we told the student the results and kept moving on the activities that we had planned. This was one of the most important moments in my teaching career. It kicked started a journey into diversity work and helped see the real importance of my work as a teacher to instill in my student the perspectives, and the skills to make a better America. 

This year would be different. Because of the pandemic, our retreat was canceled, and after going through the last election away from our families, we made sure to schedule it on a different week even before the pandemic hit. I thought about what I would say to my students if the election was decided Tuesday night or a later date. I tried to figure out what I would say if Vice President Biden won and how I would handle my own emotions in front of my students if trump won.  

I was concerned that my students had the space to process their feelings, and at the same time, I wanted to make sure that teachers didn’t bring up the election in every class and overdue discussions about the election. Most importantly, I wanted to make sure whatever I did around the election was for my students and not for me.  

Monday felt as normal as Mondays have felt teaching a new schedule wearing a mask, and doing lessons about music without singing and playing wind instruments. It ended up being a good day, and I came to school Tuesday, planning to focus on creative, fun lessons for my students. The election was on my mind, and I still wasn’t sure what I would do, if anything, about the election in my music class.  

Around 11 am, my student teacher and I walked to the 8th-grade classroom that we were going to teach our next class in. As I peeked my head in, the teacher in the room gave me a telling look and told me that she would talk to me in the hall. We waited outside for a minute, and she came out and told us that a student in 8th grade had tested positive for COVID-19 and to see when we last taught the class that included this student. I was pretty sure we had taught this student late last week, but I wasn’t sure, so I quickly sat on the ground and double-checked my schedule.  

Yes, we had taught this student. I was going home. 

While no COVID-19 cases have been spread at my school, students had gotten COVID-19 outside the school, come to school when they were asymptomatic, gotten tested, and been found to be positive. When this happens, all the other students in the pod and all teachers who taught that pod have to be quarantined and switch to remote learning and remote teaching.  

We went down to the middle school office, and a group of teachers was gathered there, talking about what was going on. The students in the pod and the teachers who taught this student in a specific time period were going home immediately. I knew that quarantine was a possibility from the moment I started teaching in-person, but all of the ramifications were just now coming down onto me like an avalanche of boulders. It took all I had to keep moving forward as I felt beaten down upon by the possibility of what could be. We went back to the music office, and I stood there looking at my student teacher in silence for a couple of seconds. I asked her if she was okay, and at that moment, looking in her eyes, I realized that I was not okay.  

We went to the school nurse, and she broke down the specifics of what we should when we would get tested and how to handle our specific familial situations. My two older sons would have to say home until I got a negative COVID-19 test, and the circumstances and timing of my teaching the pod with that students meant the chances that I would have gotten COVID-19 were very low.  

I grabbed all I could think to take out of my office and found the two teachers of the two remaining classes I had that day. I figured I could get home to teach one of them remotely and one I couldn’t, so I canceled one class and told the other one that I would teach remotely. I mixed up the schedule, and at the last second, I sent an email with a list of activities and told the other teacher that I could not get home in time to teach the class remotely.  

The next hour I sat in my car trying to schedule a COVID-19 test. It was a frustrating process, but I finally got a test scheduled (both rapid and PCR) and headed home.  

Wednesday, my children stayed home from school, and I got tested. The rapid test result came back quickly, and it was negative, to my relief, and my children were cleared to return to school on Thursday. I’ve been so used to coming up with new lessons and unique teaching situations that switching to teaching all my classes remotely didn’t feel that out of the ordinary. Like so many lessons this year, my first remote lessons were not good, but they got better as the rest of the week progressed. By the end of the week, I felt like I had an idea of handling teaching while quarantined at time.  

Tuesday night, I had no emotional energy to react strongly to the election results. I fell asleep in front of the television, and for the rest of the week, focused so much on my family’s health, the election had little emotional effect on me. I didn’t think to bring it up in my music classes. I had to focus on just making them work, and I was successful at that by the end of the week. 

I can’t imagine going through this past week, well this whole school year, without my student teacher. Each twist and turn, she was right with me, and her support and hard work helped keep my focus. In helping her grow as a teacher, I had helped myself grow and re-thinking what and how of what I do. In this difficult time, having someone share the experience with you makes the challenges feel that much more doable because I haven’t had to face any of them alone.  

I’m more okay than I was on Tuesday, but I’m not really okay. No one is right now. Even having the slightest possibility that I could have contracted COVID-19 from my job was scary, and this week, this part of my life felt more important than the election. I’m not angry at my school for putting me in this situation. I may have felt very different about this if I did contact COVID-19 from that student. Right now, in my mental exhaustion, I am proud of how I handled this week, and I am proud of the way my student teacher and my colleagues handled this difficult situation.  

In a school year full of hard days, Tuesday was the hardest day I’ve had this school year.  The difference from four years ago is that instead of feeling dread, I have hope in my heart.  With this feeling of Joe Biden having my back, I can do hard things.   

Parenthood: Week 395 – 11/2/20, The Night Before

Dear my sons, 

The past four years have had some of the most beautiful moments in my life. 

Ollie, I watched you grow from a toddler into a school-aged child. We danced together, sang together, and explored the world together.  You learned to read, write, and manipulate numbers. More importantly, you have learned how to be more empathetic, to show love, and know what it means to be loved. 

Ethan, you came to us full of determination and love. Your early life was full of the new challenges of understanding how to best serve you as parents with your hearing loss. In those moments of feeling lost, our hearts filled with more love for you. Watching you grow up into a toddler, full of love, passion, and joy has enriched our lives in ways that we never imagined, taught me to be a better human.  

Lucas, every single time I check on you before I go to sleep at night, you take my breath away. I reach down and touch your little hand, and then I play with the curl of your hair. I hold my hands to my chest as I gaze at you, barely being able to handle the wonder that is you. Your giggles, your curiosity, and your smiles always warm my heart. It's impossible to have a bad day with you in my life. 

In the past four years, your mom and I have been blessed with meaningful work. Our work in education reflects our values, has brought challenges that have helped us grow as professionals, and given us the flexibility to be present in your lives. While there are always challenges in balance our work/life schedule, our jobs have allowed us to be there for the critical points in your lives and when you needed us the most.  

We have had an incredibly blessed and privileged life these past four years. You, as part of our family, have brought challenges that made our life meaningful. We have overcome all of these tribulations with our friends and family's support and with you as our inspiration never to give up.  

For many people worldwide, these past four years have been some of the most challenging times in their lives. The Presidency of trump has caused needless and gratuitous immeasurable pain and trauma. The COVID-19 pandemic only heightened this. Even though we have provided you a warm and loving household during this time, the threats to our family's safety and trump' and his supporters questioning our family's right to exist have put a shadow over these past four years.  

Your mom and I engaged in this election because of the threats to our family and others' pain. We are all connected, and we all have to give more and do better for each other. This what makes us good. This is what brings meaning to our life. This is love. 

It's that love that makes us fight for a better future and imagine a world where our leaders also demonstrate kindness in your hearts.  

It has been a tough couple of years, and these past couples of months have been challenging. Your love and spirit have sustained us. I will forever be grateful for how you have made these four years beautiful and meaningful during this difficult time in our country.  

I am so proud of all of you. I am proud to be your father, and at this moment, thinking about all of the amazing people who fought for a better tomorrow these past four years, I am proud to be an American.

- Dad

Let them say of me,
I was one who believed.
In sharing the blessings I received,
Let me know in my heart.
When my days are through,
America, America I gave my best to you.

Year 11 – Week 8: The Pandemic, Part 3 - The Battle Lines

The end of the school year felt like a battlefield, empty and scared by explosions.  It was quiet, but panic, trauma, and violence hung in the air.  

All of the year ending rituals were on Zoom. At their best, they were a shadow of they were replacing, and at the worst, they were a painful exercise of technology failing to meet expectations and the needs of our community.  

Everything was hard when we went remote, and everything was overwhelming. Each week, each day had a new challenge. We were blessed with resources at our schools, but no amount of money could make up for the insecurity of doing things for the first time with students without adequate planning time.  

Most teachers teach with a combination of tried and true lessons and new units in their curriculum. Last spring, so many of us had to develop new units because what we had done in the past didn't work. I teach the middle school concert band.  

You can't do the middle school concert band over Zoom. So, the curriculum changed into small group lessons. I didn't know how to teach my 5th graders the music of the middle ages that they normally performed at the end of the year. Virtual choir is a lot harder and more expensive than it looks, and teaching almost sixty students how to sing a song over Zoom was a challenge I could not overcome. 

I had a lot of new material in my curriculum and lesson that I taught before from years past; I had to teach differently in a way I never taught before. Everything was new, and teaching last spring felt like being a first-year teacher.  

Teachers all across America were scrambling like I was because the schools were not ready to be remote. The transitions for most schools were sudden, rushed, and felt like a violent earthquake.  

Guardians panicked and struggled with remote learning. I was privileged to be a remote teacher while my child was in remote learning. Many adults were not so lucky. Some were able to work remotely. Schools' critical role in childcare for millions of children in America was taken away to little to no notice. Some parents' solutions included compromising their quarantine while others had to quit jobs to make distance learning work. The vast majority of the people who quit jobs were women.  

While I struggled with Google Classroom and Zooms, other teachers struggled with so much more. Some communities didn't have the privilege of access to fast internet. Teachers resorted to using WIFI from stores and churches sitting in their cars in parking lots.  

Many schools did not have enough devices for students, so siblings had to share, and some families had to go without. This led to teachers delivering packets of materials door to door and teaching over phone landlines to make things work.  

Many schools all across America weren't even focused on teaching when schools closed. They were trying to get food to children. 29.6 million children every day in America get free or reduced-price lunches from schools while 11.9 million get breakfast. For many children, this is the only meal they get that day. Administrators and teachers had no guidance or support from the federal government, and many only had little help from local governments. Communities came together in amazing ways to make sure food got to children. There were many bumps in the road to make this happen, but school came through in amazing ways during this tough time.  

As we are struggling to make this work, people are dying at alarming rates. Stressed, scared, overworked, and exhausted teachers yearning for a message of empathy and needing financial support instead get a president urging schools to open up before the school year ends. 

Even though it's an absurd idea, and it feels like a punch in the gut, a callous disregard for children and teachers' safety. In response, the battle lines are drawn, and teachers and parents fight to keep schools closed. Science and reasons prevail, and schools in America stayed closed for the end of the 2019-2020 school year, but the conflict is not over.  As teachers close the school year and walk away from school year shell-shocked, not knowing how or when they would have to return to battle.  

They take respite in the silence, many not realizing that there is something even more challenging up ahead. 

This is what I wrote about the possibility of going back to in-person learning on 5/8/20 from this blog post. 

Can American schools open in the fall with the current trends? No. The way that we think about schools, asking educator to make magic happen with limited resources, as opposed to asking them what they need to be successful and providing what they ask for is not setting us up for success in this crisis. By sheer force of will and hard work, a teacher can make an out of date history book work in a classroom, force of will cannot provide sanitation supplies and smaller class sizes.  

In the past week there have been a flurry of articles talking about plans for opening schools next year. Most of them completely lack an understanding of child development. Having first graders sit six feet apart, not move from classroom from classroom, eat lunch at their desks, and have no recess is not developmentally appropriate. Is it worse than having students stay at home? For some children yes, for others no. This makes things complicated. And articles that respond to these concerns that state that children are “resilient,” should be immediately disregarded, as this pop psychology myth of childhood resilience is completely false and misguided.  

If schools continue to have to make choices in the fall like they have this past spring with little financial support, meaningful leadership, and plans that are both educationally and psychologically sound, the only safe choice will be to start the year with distance learning that will last until at least until the new year.

Parenthood: Week 394 – Early Intervention, Part 1

I felt lost. 

In that first month of Ethan's life, we lived with the possibility that he did not have the ability to hear in one ear. He failed the initial hearing tests in his right ear, and all we had in front of us was another test the day after Thanksgiving to confirm what we knew was likely, our child had a disability. When it was confirmed that he had conductive non-sensorineural unilateral hearing loss in the right ear a couple of weeks later in December, it was a relief.  

We finally had a name for this thing that we had been worried about every single day of his life. While this felt like an affirmation of our concerns, it left more worries and anxiety in its wake. There were so many questions in my mind. Would we have to learn sign language? Can this be fixed with surgery? How do we raise a child who can only functionally hear out of one ear?  What do we have to do to help this baby love himself and know that he is loved with this disability?  

Soon after we got the results from Ethan's hearing test, we got a letter in the mail about how Ethan qualified for Early Intervention. This government program gave us hope, forever changed our lives, and dramatically affected the development of Ethan's hearing and speech abilities that forever changed the trajectory of his life for the better.  

When the program was first laid out to us in our first meeting with our Early Intervention case worker when Ethan was two months old, I was skeptical. They were going to send a therapist to come to our house and do sessions?  How good could this be?  

I thought at the time, "if the service in the DMV is any indicator, this is not going to go well."  

I was wrong, so wrong.

People like to complain about how things run by the government are mediocre. We've all heard people talk about how the lines are too long at the Post Office and how the Department of Motor Vehicles is the worst.  I literally laughed out loud when I watched this scene for the first time.  

 

I wonder though, how this makes people feel who work hard at the DMV to make the roads safer.  This depiction isn't fair.  

Some rant about how public schools are horrible and how the welfare system is mismanaged.  Many of these complaints reflect real, systemic issues in our society like the racism at the foundation of our police force, which leads to murders of Black and brown Americans regularly.  

Other complaints reflect a level of privilege and/or a lack of perspective. People are willing to wait in the grocery store to check out but, for some reason, feel like they shouldn't have to wait at the post office. Yes, there are horrible public schools, but there are great public schools out there too. On rare occasions, people exploit the welfare system, but far more rely on this program, albeit flawed, on getting through each day.  

There are government programs and agencies that fail and need to do better, and many do a great job. The myth that anything run by the government is bad is destructive, wrong, and needs to be privatized is racist. Just think about how our jail system's privatization continues to put Black and brown people in jail at an alarming rate.  

I'm a critic of our government as all citizens should be, and the solution to solving the problems I see is to make the government better, not smaller. Because there is so much good in what our government does that should be built upon and kept whole.  

I believe this more than ever now that we are on the other side of Early Intervention. This program showed us the way, gave us the tools to move forward, and changed how I thought about the government, myself as a parent, and my son Ethan. 

Though it didn't start off great with that first therapist...