Trigonometry

Through a free program called Running Start, 11th graders in Seattle public schools have the option to take classes at community college, earning both high school and college credit. It’s a terrific program. Jordan will do half-time at North Seattle College (science and math), and take the other half of his classes at his high school. (The logistics are significantly easier with everything online… if it weren’t for the pandemic, he’d need transportation.)

Back in June, we made our way through the byzantine application, including a math placement test. Jordan was both delighted and tantalized by his results: He almost qualified to go straight into calculus in the fall (effectively skipping a year). But not quite! He asked if he could do the remaining material over the summer, and of course my answer was HECK YES. Are you kidding me? With every other organized summer activity cancelled? We signed him up that minute. 

The missing material is trigonometry. It is a fully online, asynchronous course, and keeping up takes him an hour or two of work most days. It’s going great! He enjoys it, and I love that he has something worthwhile to do every day. 

After the first couple weeks he recognized that there’s no use trying to work alone in his room: he gets distracted and nothing gets done. So now he works at the dining room table, at a time when I’m also free, and asks for my backup. I love this so much. First of all, when your sixteen-year-old son invites you to do essentially anything with him, the answer is YES YES YES. And I’m the only one in the house who’s fluent in trig, so it has to be me. (Dale learned trig once but doesn’t use it.) But also, it’s fun! With me there, Jordan talks through what he’s doing, has me check his answers, enjoys my semi-socratic prompts, and generally wolfs down his new understanding like a happy dog. Some of the benefit is just my presence: the fact that I am there and I care what he's doing keeps him on task. Some of it is me helping him parse the odd grammar of math problems (“From a point on the ground 47 feet from the foot of a tree, the angle of elevation of the top of the tree is 35º. Find the height of the tree to the nearest foot”) and trace errors in copying numbers from one place to another/into the calculator (191 turns to 919, etc.); this is dyslexia/dysgraphia support. And some of it is the two of us enjoying the material together, him learning and me reflecting or re-learning. It’s been a delightful part of the summer. I'm so glad I have the flexibility to do this with him.

Here is a picture of us at work, in front of a large pile of kale that Dale brought in from the garden. I know he doesn’t look happy, but I promise, that’s just about having his picture taken.

Pandemic boychoir

Heartbreakingly, one of the most unsafe activities these days is singing together with other people. Yet somehow the choirs go on! Boychoir has been particularly successful, at least from Aaron's point of view; their twice-weekly zoom rehearsals are consistently fun, rewarding, and invigorating for him. The director meets with 5-7 of them at a time and they do a lot of one-on-one work: sight reading, ear training, and vocal work. They have regular recording homework, too; the director assembles their recordings into beautiful "virtual choir" videos. These get a lot of attention on social media and for good reason. Here are three: 

Jordan also meets weekly with Vocalpoint and has occasional recording sessions, but they record in small ensembles, and he has not appeared in one yet.

Pandemic music

All three of Dale’s bands are finding ways to continue to make music, at least a little bit, even though performance opportunities are, er, limited. The swing band plays every other week or so in the backyard, or in the carport.

The rock band has played in the yard just once: they are all older and appropriately very cautious, but our yard is pretty darn good for socially distant music making, since everyone can be 10 or more feet apart. The street band has twice now gotten together and played in a local park. Social distancing is terrible for tips, but they have fun.

And sometimes the kids just pull out the guitar and ukulele.

Pandemic birthdays

Birthday parties cannot be the way they once were, so, we have to try new things. For Aaron’s birthday, we invited a small number of friends to hang out outdoors, masked; we figured they could play badminton and just hang out. No birthday cake would be shared... can you believe we used to blow on cake and then pass it around? will we ever do that again? Sigh. Aaron doesn't care for cupcakes, but loves donuts, so we had individually-packaged donuts for everyone, and sparkling water. It felt extremely strange to have such spartan offerings. But here we are.

Then we learned that it would rain. Ugh. So we cleared out the carport and decorated it with colored lights and balloons. It could be worse?

While we were waiting for friends to come, I was feeling pretty low. Aaron was supposed to have a beautiful bar mitzvah celebration, and instead he's stuck in the carport in the rain. Aaron felt it too, for sure: he started out saying this was "the most ghetto birthday ever," and I cannot disagree. However! Once some friends showed up, it was worth it. They enjoyed each other's company, they gorged on donuts, and the sun even came out for a while.

For a family celebration, Aaron asked for the classics: waffles for breakfast, his favorite sushi for dinner, and a traditional birthday cake. Done.

Jordan did not prefer to have any form of birthday party. He asked for sourdough waffles for breakfast, Indian food for dinner, and happily agreed for me to make him a salty pretzel peanut ice cream cake for dessert. Here he is photographing it to show his friends. It was delish.



While I had the sourdough awake I made my first-ever sourdough bread. Pretty darn good!

And finally, there were birthday haircuts. Haircuts are a rarity in these times, but we have someone who can come and do me and the boys quickly and outdoors. We are grateful!

Distant happy birthday

An adult friend of ours would have had a big bash for a milestone birthday this year, but no. So we passed by her house and celebrated her from the curb. You can’t say we didn’t put our heart into it! And we have the best instruments.

Sock puppet covenant renewal

Another zoomified ceremony from the spring was the Temple Beth Am 10th grade covenant renewal, normally a huge deal in which each 10th grader makes a statement about what being Jewish means to them. This typically follows the class trip to New York, an extremely formative experience of Jewish America; but that trip would have been in early April, and perhaps you remember what New York was like in April 2020, so, no. May it be next year. Meanwhile, the Temple reimagined the covenant renewal service with recorded contributions. Jordan and Ian put together this sock puppet skit, starring "I-ock" and "Joppet." Jordan said, "The script by itself would have been boring, but the sock puppets really elevate it," and I couldn't agree more. 

That's the trimmed version, which we sent to the temple for sharing. Below is the "uncut" version, which has my favorite part -- they are talking beforehand just as themselves ("From the top?"), but Ian is still talking through the sock puppet! Love it so much.

Bohemian Rhapsody

Aaron continues to have piano lessons and is now perfectly used to having them on zoom. I assume it’s pesky for his teacher not to be able to see his fingers or work with him physically, but it still seems very productive. For his spring recital, Aaron learned all of Bohemian Rhapsody. It’s pretty incredible.

The recital was of course a YouTube production; we sat together as a family and watched all of the students’ recorded videos. Even though it was weird not to be in person, it was fun being completely free to make comments!

Unemployment fraud

Back in May, I got a letter from the Washington State Employment Security Department suggesting that I had filed for unemployment, but I had not done so. Uh oh! Sadly, I was part of a very widespread fraud problem, in which the criminals used SSNs obtained in earlier data breaches and exploited the government’s efforts to pay claims quickly in the pandemic. We now know that by the last week of April, the Washington State ESD was averaging 2,000 fraudulent claims a day. Eventually it added up to over 80,000 claims; $576 million was paid out to crooks. Really shameful.

Fortunately, there was no direct harm to me, other than spending a couple hours reporting and locking things down. I reported the fraud to the Employment Security Department, the police, and my employer. I froze my credit and activated a credit fraud alert. I set up an account with the IRS (so that no one else would be able to do that), locked my SSN, and reported to identitytheft.gov. It was all very educational and thank goodness, nothing else was wrong: my bank accounts were as they should be, my credit was clean (no fraudulent accounts were created), and the IRS website knew me as my real self and showed no fraudulent activity. That was a big relief.

I kept careful records of everything I did and diligently filed every acknowledgement I received. Nothing else has happened. I have been assured that if I need to apply for unemployment benefits, I still can… but let’s hope that need does not arise.

22 weeks

Today is 22 weeks since the kids were sent home from school. Things are much the same as they were at 10 weeks: we are still basically fine, our daily schedule is much the same, all of the kids' organized summer activities remained cancelled as expected. And just like at 10 weeks, I feel I ought to be recording more of this historic time in our family. I kind of don't want to...but I will anyway. I have a few days off this week and this is part of what I will do. Because there are things! There have been pandemic birthdays, pandemic haircuts, and pandemic camping trips. We have found ways to make music, learn math, and manage a tiny bit of careful travel. So here we go.