1. . . .
2. I swear I had some thoughts yesterday when my brain served up this "idea". But facing the blank screen, nothing is rising up to the front of my memory. (Can something rise to the front, though? Shouldn't it either be move to the front or rise to the top? And why do I insist on using movement metaphors for the imperfect firing of my neurons?
3. There . . . maybe that will shake something loose?
*** Many, many work-related hours later ***
4. Turns out . . . that didn't really being anything particularly exciting to mind. Which is just as well because I had lots of other things to occupy my mind today with work.
5. One thing that I am thinking about right now as I type this is the ongoing struggle (relative term) to maintain digital schooling for these last weeks of the 2020 academic year. Yesterday, Gov. DeWine announced that schools would not reconvene before the scheduled end of the year. Classes and assignments and education will only proceed through the digital channels that we have started using during the first 38 days of this state quarantine.
6. Grace--God bless her, is doing her own thing and is handling her school independently as she always has. Sarah is in a different category, being a college student and in charge of her own process--unless she wants help? But Hannah is still getting the ropes of Middle School in her routine and needs some more targeted oversight. (But here is where I must say that Hannah--for all the supposed negativity that you might detect from me--is largely doing extremely well in school and when you press her on it, you can tell that she truly cares.) But for all of that, she is still young and if given the choice will choose NOT to set aside hours of her at-home time to attend school in a manner that can appear more theoretical than actual.
So, all of that word salad means that I had some school-related realizations today due to the fact that interim grade reports started coming in on the Powerschool app while I sat and worked throughout the day. And I realized that while I have found a good footing with Hannah on her core classwork in the last few weeks--Language Arts, Social Studies, Math, Science--the elective/special classes have been overlooked by me. For instance, how do you evaluate Physical Education in this online setting? I can get Hannah active and prevent her from being sedentary every day. But what are the criteria? Is there any assignments from the school? I haven't seen them, so that likely means Hannah doesn't have them in the forefront of her mind. The same goes for her "Career Literacy" class. What are the expectations for the rest of this year? Darned if I know.
Band is less confusing than these other two, because her teacher has been sending emails regularly with assignment prompts. And because Hannah takes a private weekly lesson I feel good about her continued learning in that vein.
But . . . well, we've got almost another scheduled month of this to go before the year officially ends. I am confident that Hannah won't lose ground in any meaningful academic sense. But it is a reminder to me that I need to stay vigilant on the bureaucracy and the management side of the modern educational system to ensure that her paper trail matches up with the expectations.
7. Whatever else, I'll be happy to see this year of schooling officially done in four-ish weeks.
8. 
9. Go cast your continuing votes here: https://forms.gle/1jXdy1MxghTbCaEJ7 We officially narrow the field down to only TWO CHOICES in about 10 days.
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