Yesterday was Day 3 of having my two kids (plus one additional) at home while trying to do some of my own work online. Fortunately for me, this is NDSU's spring break, so I had a bit of a reprieve from university work to adjust to this new reality in the time of Covid-19. Also, my kids are college-age, so they can do a lot of things for themselves, and the reality of their online work isn't here yet because their East Coast liberal arts colleges have two-week breaks before the real online work starts.
Nevertheless, the stress is real, as the tension in my neck and back were telling me. Therefore, for stress management, we, as a new household group, have put eating well and exercising as a top priority as we figure things out. I set up a chart on a large post-it for everyone to sign up for the daily tasks that will make our household run without me self-combusting.
My next task was to redirect the gravitational pull to the couch where Netflix and video games could lull their brains into mush faster than the virus in the pandemic movie Contagion. Doing some reading and writing right after dinner helped us make this shift from consuming media to being creative.
Here's how the after-dinner activity worked: each person found something from the bookshelves to read to the group. Enrico read an excerpt from Harper's magazine, Denali read the first couple of paragraphs of Louise Erdrich's new book The Night Watchman, Massimo read from his textbook on World Music, I read Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop for Death," and Alessandro read a chapter from Joyce's Dubliners. We then chose a line from what we read and wrote it at the top of a paper, adding our own line to create a poem or story. We passed these papers around, each person adding their own two lines until the papers had made it around. It was interesting to see how the Coronavirus theme popped up in our writing. We ended with everyone sharing, and then people were off on their own to read for awhile.
All parents are now in the same situation of supporting student learning, so the National Writing Project has forwarded some resources that might help (more coming):
Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle - Resources for supporting students in writing about their lives at this moment
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