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My favorite teacher was my mom.
She taught elementary school in working-class and low-income areas of Los Angeles. Sometimes it was rough, but she was crazy committed to her classrooms, so much so that a lot of her former students came to her funeral and a lot of them cried—probably more than me.
My mother’s passion was teaching through art. After she died, I was organizing the stuff she brought with her to palliative care. I found that she had left behind a bunch of half-completed pieces of other people’s art. In her final days, she was teaching the nursing staff at the OHSU cancer ward how to process trauma by creating mandala art.
My point is that going back to school is so much more fraught than it ought to be. ut, parents, keep this in your pocket: Good teachers make it all worth the effort.
Especially considering crisscrossing pandemics, which my guest Rachel Saslow wrote a guide to surviving. She suggests ways to navigate the virus your kid will probably bring home at some point. (Step one: Get that booster.) We’ll discuss Rachel’s COVID pro tips on this week’s episode of the Dive.