Here we are in the dead of summer, which means school is about to start.
I shouldn’t have to complain, since as a grandparent, I don’t have to stress too much over the details. That’s what parents are for — choose a school, meet Miss Trunchbull, wrestle with schedules, go to PTA meetings, sign permission slips. Those of us at the grand level are happy to be available for the off-routine events, such as pitching in on sick days, getting videos of school plays and science presentations, and tailoring school uniforms (military training in sewing buttons comes in handy for that).
Recent years have upped the ante, though. You might remember a certain pandemic that kept local kids away from in-person learning. Family members pitched in to help students and it was just like home schooling, except that it wasn’t. I was delighted to have a first grader at the house where we could go over the assignments and we could tackle things together, like Common Core math.
Photo: Jon W. Sparks
My grounding in Common Core, unfortunately, was nonexistent. None of my college education, none of my military training, none of my world experience, none of my charm would work to figure out a new method of calculating how long it would take a train leaving Memphis and traveling south at 67 mph to pass a train leaving New Orleans going north at 53 mph.
Now it’s true that the first grader in my charge didn’t have to figure that out. For her, it was more like adding 17 and 14, which involved stacks of 10 or something like that. I was utterly baffled, but didn’t want her to see that, so I counseled her that a perfectly acceptable alternative was to stack the numbers, add 7 and 4, carry the 1 and then … “But Abuelo, we don’t carry the 1.”
I was not going to be defeated that easily. It was clear that I had to go high-tech, so I went immediately to the App Store and downloaded a nice program that was so simple, even a grandparent could work it. I still have it somewhere on my phone, practically unused. My granddaughter, clever enough to see that I was going to be of no use whatsoever, hunkered down and figured it out. Without carrying a single 1.
While she properly stacked her 10s and 1s, I let my mind wander to something I could handle: figuring out where those trains would pass each other. And typically, I got to thinking that the track between Memphis and New Orleans is a single track and they would be unlikely to pass each other without one of them stopping in McComb and if they were passenger trains, they’d have to pull over anyway for the freight trains that have priority, and …
Anyway, she worked it out and I nodded sagely.
I did manage to be useful when it came to dealing with my granddaughter’s school-issued tablet. I will put my ability to reboot it up against any other grandparent who doesn’t have a technical background. And I got to be really good at it because that kludgy device and its inelegant software was an ongoing mess.
But I couldn’t do a thing about the process when the teacher (who was infinitely patient), had to administer a test to her class. Keep in mind that her students were all over the place, in homes, or in study areas provided largely by nonprofits. Doing routine assignments as they could was not a big problem. But for testing, the drill was that she had to give it to all the kids at the same time, which is not such a big deal when all the little scholars are in a classroom together. However, she had to get a group of remote first-graders all seated and focused on the tablet. Which had to be working. And they had to be on the same page. And understand the instructions. And no talking, or eating, or goofing around. And no grandparents giving the answers. A 20-minute test could take a couple of hours just to complete.
At the time, few people were contemplating reading proficiency issues that would come when these first grade children would be getting mandated testing in the third grade. It didn’t cross my mind, but I also figured that every once in a while, we could put the tablet down, pick up a book, and dive right in. No glitches, no reboots, and snacks were perfectly all right, thank you very much.