Sashes and Safety

Day one of virtual school for my son nearly did me in. I thought getting him enrolled was the hard part. After all, I had to dig through every file cabinet, junk drawer, and possibly even the dark corners of my soul just to find all the paperwork they needed. Birth certificate? Check. Proof of residence? Check. Immunizations? Check. At one point I was convinced they were going to ask for a kidney too, just to make sure he was properly verified.

Finally, enrollment was finished and I thought the hard part was over. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.

The first day of class arrived, and with my coffee in hand, I confidently logged him into his new school life. Except there was one tiny hiccup. They had not finalized his Zoom login for most of his classes. So while his classmates dove into their schedules, my child had the pleasure of attending… drumroll please… World History. That was it. His grand introduction to virtual school was a single, lonely subject.

Now, I consider myself fairly tech savvy. I can navigate forums, troubleshoot software, and even impress my parents with the mystical art of turning it off and back on again. But this school platform? It felt like I was hacking into NASA. There were links buried inside links, forms hidden behind other forms, and an entire maze of instructions that read more like riddles than actual directions.

And here is the kicker…teaching is something I actually know how to do. It’s in my background… I have training in this field! So the fact that virtual school left me stumped on day one was truly humbling. If I struggled, I can only imagine how overwhelming it feels for parents who do not have any teaching experience at all.

Meanwhile, my son sat beside me watching me wage war with the login page like it was a boss battle in a video game. The kids who can breeze through this process? Absolute geniuses. I say we skip the charade and just hand them their diplomas already. Clearly, they have mastered life.

But here is the good news. Days two and three went a lot smoother. Once the logins were squared away and I figured out which buttons actually worked, school started to feel less like a hostage negotiation with technology and more like, well, school.

Day one taught me three things:

Virtual school is not for the faint of heart. Even teachers are no match for a poorly designed platform. I should probably keep both kidneys under lock and key, just in case enrollment for semester two requires one.

Here is hoping the rest of the year follows the path of days two and three and not the circus of day one.