2022-09-17
24 分钟This is in conversation from Apple News.
I'm Shemitah Basu.
Today how the US politicized pandemic school closures and failed to put children first.
In the spring of 2020, when the pandemic first hit and schools around the country closed, four year old Serena had nowhere to go.
Her kindergarten was now online and her mom, a single parent, couldn't stay home to supervise her learning.
So she brought Serena with her to work cleaning hotel rooms.
Serena was commuting with her mother an hour each way by bus to the hotel and her experience of kindergarten was on her mother's smart.
While her mother was cleaning the rooms.
That's Anya Kamenetz.
She's a journalist who's been covering education for two decades.
As her mother explained to me, with a lot of kind of self recrimination, she couldn't get her onto the math lesson because the math lesson was when her mother had to strip the beds and get the laundry down to the laundry room.
And so she wasn't there to make sure that she paid attention.
Serena's teacher was also struggling to keep the kids engaged.
She poured her heart and soul into trying to translate the kindergarten experience online.
And what that ended up being like was like a small Mr.
Rogers production out of her home, like singing She's Got Props.
But it wasn't working.
It just didn't work.
This is the story of the unworkable, unthinkable 2020 school year that became the unworkable 2021 school year and, and in some places still a pretty rough start to 2022.
Anya writes about the ripple effects of school closures in America in her new book, the Stolen How Covid Changed Children's Lives and Where We Go now.