I finished fourth grade on Friday.
I hadn't meant to attend elementary school. I mean, I already graduated from fourth grade about a billion years ago, when I was a kid in Northridge.
But for the past three months, like a lot of other parents and guardians across America, I've been sharing my workspace with a student. That has meant that when her 90-minute Zoom class began every weekday at 8:30 a.m., like it or not, I've been back in school.
The fourth-grade class taught by Andrea Johnson at Westminster Elementary School in Venice has 21 students, and every day during the Zoom era, at least 15 of them would show up for class. Mine attended every day via her laptop, although sometimes I would look up and see her surreptitiously holding the iPad in her lap, watching TikTok videos.
I am not going to name any of the children here because I was technically eavesdropping. But it was such a privilege to be a fly on the wall of a Los Angeles public school fourth-grade classroom with an excellent teacher, even during a moment of maximum disruption and stress. At this age, kids are on the cusp of adolescence but not so self-conscious that they can't be themselves. I was getting a glimpse of a delightful, frustrating and strange new world.
It all seemed daunting at first. Days after schools closed in mid-March, Ms. Johnson had to master a new technology. The children had to get used to seeing her only onscreen, and to turning in their work by photographing it and posting it on Class Dojo, the app she used to communicate with students and parents. Parents had to find a way not to lose their minds.
Almost every morning began as a herding exercise:
Ms. Johnson: "Please stop that! Please stop that! This is a classroom. You can't just get up and walk away. When I call on you, you need to be there. Unmute yourself! Do not leave the class. Do. Not. Leave. The. Class."
Student: "Ms. Johnson, I can barely hear you because someone in the background is unmuted and their parents are talking!"
Most kids soon realized they could change their screen names. One called himself "Midas the Gucci Touch." My child was "Wolf Queen."
"Who is Chicken McNuggets?" Ms. Johnson asked one day.
The class wise guy changed his name to "Connecting..."
"Oh my God," said Ms. Johnson one day in exasperation, "am I losing my mind?"
