Back To School

It's official, the school year has begun.

On Tuesday, I began my twenty-third year of teaching. Schools seem to be back to "normal" this year. Most people are maskless. Children can sit next to each other. We can have classroom meetings and lessons on the carpet again, and things feel like the good old days. I am ecstatic about this. It is so wonderful to see kids being kids again. Heck, it's so wonderful to see people being people again.

That's the good news. The bad news is that many of our children now suffer the shutdown's repercussions. In fact, this week, the State Education Department released an article stating that the average test scores in reading and math for fourth graders are the lowest they've been in twenty years. For example, reading has dropped 5 points since 2020!!!

I have witnessed first-hand how Covid has negatively impacted our children's education. In all honesty, it's not so pretty. It seems the children who were most affected are the ones who were in the primary grades during the 2020 shutdown. This is because these are the school years when children learn how to read and do math. That learning was lost. And the following year, when kids returned to school, not only were many children hybrid, but teachers didn't have the time to reteach everything they lost the previous year. It's not that they didn't want to, Trust me, they did; they had their curriculum to teach.