Hello.
November and December were super, super hard for us—the most difficult stretch since April, and it wasn’t close. We had to quarantine (awful) while waiting out a close loved one’s totally unexpected COVID diagnosis and recovery (VERY awful) while maintaining a full load of work tasks and pretending all was well while doing them (dystopian failed state shit).
We crawled, bedraggled, into the holidays, and I was faintly dreading them—I missed the usual festivities of December really badly—but found a surprising amount of peace in a much-scaled-back Christmas this year, and spent a lot of time trying to process everything that’s happened.
I’m not sure that I have any grand takeaways yet (can anybody?). I know that I feel a lot more progressive, a lot more driven toward radical change, and a lot more cynical about the systems that drive our society. I feel like this year laid bare how little we are encouraged to see and care for each other’s humanity, how little support is really in place, how badly families and children have been failed. I’ve been trying to learn more about mutual aid and community care—learning to involve myself, and my kids. I would love to share more about that as I go.
I am really uneasy and really hoping for peace and safety for everyone tomorrow. See you next Tuesday.
If you like reading Extra Credit, would you consider sharing it somewhere, or with someone? Parenting can be hard and isolating even in non-pandemic times, and lately…..well, you know. It helps to connect!
Ask A Teacher
Here are a couple things I’ve written for Slate in the past few weeks:
I wrote one more edition of Care & Feeding: My 10-Year-Old Is Really Into TikTok. What Should I Do?
I answered a letter from a parent who thought the problem was their kid’s school when it was actually their kid’s grandma.
Finally: will our school counselor help me correct my kindergartener’s teacher? (No.)
Recommendations
I read Marcella Pixley’s middle grade novel Trowbridge Road on a whim because it was available from the library and it was on the long list for a National Book Award in November. Other books might have been better, craft-wise—Trowbridge Road has such strong echoes of Bridge to Terabithia you might fairly call it a bit derivative—but this is the one that made me cathartic-cry for ten minutes in the shower after I finished it.
The Atlantic’s short profile of Jamie Raskin, a Maryland congressman grappling with losing his 25-year-old son to suicide and living through the insurrection at the Capitol within two weeks, really moved me.
“…there is so much pain and so much love, and it’s all mixed together,” he said. “But every day we’re able to disentangle them more, so that we can experience the love more purely and the pain more purely, and it doesn’t hurt to love him.”
Given that this thread is nearing 800,000 likes you have probably already seen it, but how could I not:
Behold some EXQUISITE ART:
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