Remote piano lesson

Last Saturday, we attended Aaron’s piano lesson in person and the teacher sat 6 feet away from him. Today, we did it remotely. In the photo the teacher is video-calling in from the iPad on the music stand. Aaron said it was good, but also very weird. I think it rattled him the way the grocery store rattled me.

Grocery shopping

Grocery shopping shook me up. Things are good there, everyone being extremely kind and responsible: it’s just the reality of it. A friendly staff member at the door doling out sanitizer. Another one busily disinfecting the carts. I was there at 8am on a Saturday, and it was not crowded; people kept a polite distance from each other as best they could, though some of the aisles are narrow, and many of the aisles were cluttered with boxes that staff were in the process of unpacking. They are working so hard… I am trying to think in terms of what is present on the shelves and celebrate what I find: Chicken! Cream! Garlic! But the absences are still notable: today it was whole wheat flour and dark chocolate. Well, next time. The staff member in the produce aisle asked me, “Are you finding everything you need?” and I answered “Yes, thank you” without thinking, and then tears welled up. May we all find everything we need.

There was a long well-spaced line for the cash register. If you brought your own bags, you had to bag your own groceries so the cashiers wouldn't have to touch your bags. When I left, there was a well-spaced line to enter the store (to reduce crowding).

Bread

I am teaching the kids to make bread. This is a yeasted semi-whole-wheat sandwich bread, the stuff Dale grew up on; I got the recipe from Dale’s cousin. It’s very easy (the kids are astonished at how easy it is), and when you’re home all day, it’s hardly any trouble. Also of course it’s extremely delicious.

If I were not working right now, I’d adopt a sourdough starter and learn that whole process. Maybe in a few weeks.

PE class

The kids need physical activity, ideally a whole lot of it: Jordan's at his best when he plays ultimate frisbee (e.g., runs like a dog) for 8-10 hours a week. Jordan knows this about himself and is very happy to have both physical games to play and physical tasks to do. He and Aaron are regularly outside for badminton. 

(Once I told someone about them playing badminton in the backyard, and the person looked at me like I was saying we lived on a country estate; but as you can see in the photo, we’ve just strung a rope strung from the deck to a garden pole.) We also have been known to go to public tennis courts for some socially distant pickleball.

In the physical tasks department, Dale had the brilliant idea of ordering a truckload of good dirt and a new wheelbarrow. Jordan helped build the wheelbarrow, and the boys spend multiple sessions of every day hauling dirt from the dirt-pile into our various garden beds. This is serious work and they just love it.

Daily plan

I was feeling very anxious about what the kids will do for the next six weeks or more (probably more), especially Jordan, who has zero school. We had a very good family meeting and agreed on this plan for now:

• Jordan wakes up at 8:30ish on weekdays, and engages in daily creative/learning activities including learning a programming language, drumming, and creating electronic music.
• He and Aaron get outside for “PE class” together at least half an hour a day.
• Parents can assign chores, like cleaning up the kitchen or folding the laundry, whatever needs doing that day.
• One or both kids will make dinner a couple times a week.
• Recreational screen time has some limitations – always a work in progress.
• We will have regular family meetings (every other day?) to continually check in and make adjustments.

I feel good about this. The best part was that it was a consensus process; we parents asked questions and gave the kids an enormous amount of agency, and they made good choices. It felt good to say yes to things, and know that we had their buy-in because it had been their suggestion in the first place. It also feels great to me that we will have regular family meetings to evolve the system as needed. Those family meetings, wow, what a great investment that turns out to have been.

Aaron at school

Aaron started online school this week. The first day was a little chaotic, getting all the tech figured out and learning what’s expected. But even just on Day Two, Aaron plunked down on the couch with me mid-morning and said, "This online school thing is growing on me." I said something like, "Oh yeah? It's going okay?" and he said, "That one day that the teachers took off to prepare for us to have school online? They must have worked very hard that day. Because things seem very well planned. I think this is really pretty good." I made sure to tell his teachers… who I am sure are working around the clock, not just that one day. Here he is at his desk having a Google Meet.

Nachos en Fuego

The first day the kids were home from school, I had five hours of back-to-back Zoom meetings. For lunch, they made nachos for themselves…but there was a miscommunication, and the nachos were in the broiler too long and caught fire. I came out of my meeting, removed the Nachos en Fuego from the oven, placed the pan out in the yard on the grass in the rain, and instructed the kids to pour water on it until the flames were completely out.

I remember fondly the days hen I used to tell the kids they could only interrupt me for one of the “four B’s”: bleeding, burning, broken, or barf. This might be the first time we actually invoked one of the B’s!

Inventory

We have a lot of food in the house, but we didn’t feel clear on what we had, so we did an inventory. Aaron assisted and also played the bass. We learned that we had a dozen jars of pasta sauce but very little pasta, that kind of thing. We also found some treasures, such as a bag of homemade frozen cherry-almond hamentaschen waiting to be baked for a slightly late Purim feast. Now the freezer and the shelves are well-organized. Not all the gaps are easy to fill; for example, there are no dried beans in the grocery store these days, not so much as a lentil. But we’re fine.

It does affect my cooking. Normally I can let my food imagination roam very freely: Which world cuisine shall we sample today? Which health ideals shall we embody? Now I need to cook with what we’ve got – which is plenty, but no lentils.

Restaurants and cafes are all closed by state order, but are open for takeout, and we are strongly encouraged to patronize them to help them stay afloat. Our county executive said, “If this pandemic is symbolized by the medical mask, then perhaps our resilience is going to be represented by the take-out box.” We’ll try to do our part.

School at home

On Monday, March 9 (the same day that I taught my first online class), Billings closed for just one

day to give the teachers time to prepare for possible distance learning. Aaron was back in school for two days, and then on Wednesday, March 11, all the schools announced at least two weeks of closure starting that day, public and private. A few days later this was updated to six weeks, through April 24. I expect it to be longer.

Billings has a comprehensive educational plan for the students: Aaron will have a full school day at home, with an 8:30am Google meet to start every day, and one or two more synchronous meetings each day, so that each class meets live a couple times a week. There is a regular schedule of independent work in between, with work assigned for each class every day. Aaron is currently extremely irritated at this, but I am thrilled. He will continue to be educated, and I don’t have to be the one to make it happen.

Jordan, meanwhile, has literally nothing. The Seattle public school system cannot provide equitable access to distance learning, so although the teachers might send home some options, they are strictly optional. I am fairly stressed about this. I am afraid Jordan will spend every day sleeping til noon and consuming nothing but screen garbage and tortilla chips. We need to create a plan, and an accountability system, and I already have a job. (Which just got a lot harder, by the way.)

Here are some of my current ideas for the school-less time:

• Daily obligations such as 30 min of reading, 30 min outdoor exercise, 30 min music practice, etc.
• A project that takes a week or more, with a deliverable. Examples: writing and performing and producing a piece of electronic music; coding a program with a demonstrable result; baking a different quick bread every day to master the form.
• Regularly making dinner for the family, maybe 3x/week.
• A big yard project, like if we had a giant pile of dirt delivered the boys could move it from the driveway into the garden.
• Household chores assigned each day: kitchen, laundry, disinfect surfaces, etc.

Teaching online

The same Friday that we were coping with the bar mitzvah news (March 6), UW announced that

starting that Monday, March 9, classes would no longer meet in person. I had three days to figure out how to hold class online on that Monday. Since it was the last week of class, I didn’t really have to do anything sustainable – just hang in there for two class sessions and a final exam.

I think it was not half bad! I felt very pleased with myself. For context, my usual lecture style is to intersperse my own presentation with frequent think-pair-share questions (using ABCD cards for voting) and collaborative problem-solving on whiteboards, in small groups. For the online version I tried to recreate similar activities on Zoom, using screen sharing, status updates, breakout rooms, and polls; my peer facilitators monitored the chat. Overall it felt like a for-real interactive lecture — we got some actual physics accomplished, and I think the students felt reasonably good about the session.

Some details I enjoy recalling: At the start of class I played the Vietnamese coronavirus PSA. I was hoping to be able to see all 60+ of my students' faces, but many chose to turn off their video (or did not have a working camera). When students had their video off I felt completely cut off from them, like I was lecturing to an empty room in the dark. Of the students who had their video on, many were in various mildly-distracting environments. Two were together in a coffee shop, one had a big dog, one was in bed, one was lying on his side on the floor, one did some bicep curls, one took his computer out on the porch and sat in a rocking chair smoking. When I reviewed the chat later, it was an amusing mix of logistical help, physics questions, and goofball student stuff. (I learned some new slang… pogchamp?) I think we have a lot to work out about norms for online instruction, but on that particular day, I enjoyed this little peek into their lives.

Bar Mitzvah postponement

Jessica sent this note to our bar mitzvah guests on March 6.

Dear family and friends,

As recommendations against larger public gatherings continue to mount here in Seattle, we’ve made the difficult and highly disappointing decision to postpone Adam and Aaron's Bar Mitzvah and accompanying events. A Bar Mitzvah is a welcome to the Jewish community and hosting it with a just small fraction of that community present doesn’t seem in the spirit of the simcha. And, of course, the priority always needs to be with keeping our loved ones safe and healthy.

With that, we *are* pleased to share that, thanks to extraordinary accommodations by our synagogue and reception venue, we have a NEW DATE for the ceremony and evening party: Saturday, July 25, 2020. We anticipate the schedule and all locations to remain exactly the same – just four months down the road. We will be sending a new invitation next week.

We do want to sincerely thank everyone for the plans you’ve made. It means the world to us and we truly hope you can join us in July (and completely understand if you can’t). This was a dramatic turn of events that we couldn’t have anticipated even a week ago and we’re very sad not to be gathering in the coming days. Until July though, wash your hands, cough into your elbow and dream of our beautiful Seattle summers.

All our love,

-- The Scherr-Hailey and Graybill families

Coronavirus chronicles

I first started taking COVID-19 seriously on February 29. I was in Denver at a small professional meeting, about 100 people, all domestic. People were not really talking about coronavirus; there was a cruise ship full of sick people stuck in Yokohama, but that didn't feel close to me. Feb 29 was a Saturday, and I was out to dinner with friends (Stephanie, Eleanor, and Hunter) when we got the word that the APS had cancelled the March meeting, for which my small meeting was a pre-conference. We were absolutely shocked. The March meeting is huge, 10,000 people; we were not thinking about coronavirus all that much, and we certainly had never thought of such a gigantic event being cancelled. 

Then on Sunday the first COVID-19 death in the US was reported… in Seattle (actually Kirkland). That distressed me. But no one at the conference was talking about it. On the flight home, I tried not to touch things unnecessarily and washed my hands more often, and that was it.

The first week of March, things moved very fast. More cases were identified in the Seattle area. Schools started to teach about the virus. Workplaces and community organizations started telling you to wash your hands a lot and stay home if you were sick. Aaron taught me proper handwashing technique; I can hardly believe how perfunctory my old way of washing my hands was in comparison. At UW, it was the 9th week of class and we met as usual. However, people did start to get serious about the danger to vulnerable groups. On Monday of that week (March 2), Fred and Linda and Michael let me know with heavy hearts that they were cancelling their plans to attend Aaron’s bar mitzvah, which was going to be on March 14. At that point they still needed reasons… Fred is especially elderly, and Michael lives with Dave, who is immunosuppressed. We were completely heartbroken, especially about Michael, and I admit that I thought they were being little bit hysterical. Jes and Deena and Alan were all perfectly determined to come.

On Thursday, March 5, Aaron and Adam had their first official rehearsal at the temple. We discussed with Rabbi Ruth what would happen if we had to cancel, but we were not planning to do that. The boys were both wonderfully well-prepared and it was delightful to see them on the bimah. I sent videos to Jes and Deena. Aaron stumbled in his second aliyah and was overcome with stress, not only from the pressure of the event, but from the fact that some loved ones were not coming and others might be endangered by attending. It took a long time for him to calm down… but he did (with a lot of rabbi support), and he finished his rehearsal, and we went to lunch at a sushi place.



That night, Jess and Jules and Dale and I had a long phone call to discuss what to do. At that point, it seemed possible to have the ceremony and lunch (the caterer was going to plate the food instead of serving family-style); but the party was starting to feel irresponsible, as was asking relatives to fly. We talked about having a private ceremony now and the party later, but that felt wrong; for us, the whole point is to be welcomed by your community. (Later Aaron said, “I would never do that.”) We decided we had to cancel (meaning postpone for a long time). I got off the phone and burst into tears. Aaron was devastated, although he also agreed it was the right thing to do. I spent the next day making phone calls, telling Jes and Deena and Alan not to come, which felt absolutely awful. Fortunately, within 24 hours we had found a new date 4.5 months in the future – a date that works for both families, the Temple, and the party venue. Having that on the calendar made me feel much better, even though we actually have no idea what the future holds.