End of the School Year (Year 3)

I reread my end of year notes from last year, and I couldn’t help but think how foolish I was to think that 2020 was as strange and bad a year as it could get. 2021 was definitely more disjointed and strange. We started the year with two short bouts of lockdown and ended in-person school just a couple of weeks into Term 3. The plus? I know exactly where my kids are academically. The minuses? I know exactly where my kids are academically, and I’m feeling completely inadequate as a teacher.

My son, in Year 3, has transitioned from the “learning to read” to “reading to learn” phase of life. There is a much bigger focus on critical thinking and logic, and it’s very interesting to see his mind at work. Recently he was tasked with watching a video that poses a fascinating moral question: if a company pollutes a lake, who is to blame: the company, the “puppet master” who paid scientists to create a report that makes the pollution look benign, the government officials who knowingly turned a blind eye, or the voters who kept the politicians in power? The follow up was to write an explanation ranking the responsibility of each of those parties and detailing how he came to his conclusions. I was thrilled that this type of real world scenario is introduced at such a young age because these types of questions will come up throughout his life.

He can multiply, divide, do fractions work, and is starting to branch out into more complex forms of geometry. He’s tinkered with surprisingly complex statistics work and has made his first foray into creating spreadsheets. But he can’t spell. Without the constant supervision of a teacher guiding him with spelling, it’s a weak spot. I’m hopeful that with more targeted work on this next year, he’ll catch up. Right now I’m nervous, though.

My daughter in Year 2 has had a rougher time. Her first two years of school have been full of lockdown disruptions, and it shows. She’s the youngest in her year, and quite frankly I’m very tempted to have her repeat Year 2 next year and become the oldest in her cohort. We’ve decided to delay that decision until we see how the start of Year 3 goes, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how easy it will be to hold her back if we decide to. The school is very supportive and open to the idea and will make it easy if we decide to make a switch - even if it is mid-year. The flexibility within schools is something that I very much appreciate and think is different from the US system.

While I’m hopeful that next year will be better, I’m not assuming that will be the case like I did last year. I think the 2022 school year will start out strong, but a combination of opening borders (in January, February, and April) and delayed kid vaccines (hopefully starting around the end of January/February next year but without details on how it will be rolled out which makes me wary) makes me feel that we are inevitably heading for problems after a short time of open schools next year. I hope I’m wrong.