I’ve been reading four different nonfiction books all somewhat related in terms of time period at any rate. Three of them are Messner biographies:

• Disraeli by Manuel Komroff
• The Real Sherlock Holmes: Arthur Conan Doyle by Mary Hoehling
• Iron Chancellor: Otto van Bismarck by Alfred Apsler

The third book is one I’ve been reading off and on since January: Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War. This last book is fascinating, but rather dense, almost 1000 pages long. This book moves past the lives of Disraeli and Bismarck all the way into the early twentieth century, but it spends a great deal of time on the events and characters of the late nineteenth century

I’ve learned a few things:

• Disraeli was an interesting man, a Jewish convert to Christianity. He faced a lot of anti-semitic prejudice, but managed to succeed in politics in spite of the bigotry. Queen Victoria loved him, and so did a lot of the British populace. The press called him “Dizzy.” He was a conservative reformer, which seems to be a contradiction in terms, but isn’t. He was a compassionate conservative before the term was invented.
• Bismarck, on the other hand, was a piece of work. He comes across both in the biography by Apsler and in Dreadnought as a power hungry genius who managed young William I, Emperor of Germany, with adroit flattery and finesse, until he didn’t. And William fired him, or removed him from office.
• William I, Queen Victoria’s grandson, was also a mess, as far as I can judge. He seems to have had a difficult childhood, partly due to his mother’s expectations and the burdens of being the crown prince, and he grew up up to be a proud, impulsive, self-centered, and sometimes irrational emperor with a lot of power. That’s a dangerous combination. I hate to say it, but William’s personality and his decisions and statements reminded me of a certain president whose name begins with T. William I considered himself to be a stable genius who knew all that was important to know about anything worth knowing.
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle comes into the story of those times as a civilian, not a prince or a politician, but still a man who had political opinions and acted upon them. Doyle volunteered as a doctor during the Boer War and believed in the British cause during that war. As far as I could tell, the British were out of place, domineering, and downright cruel in that war and shouldn’t have been there in the first place. But Doyle couldn’t see that from his perspective, and he actually wrote a defense of the British actions in the Boer War that was published all over Europe and was quite influential in swinging public opinion to favor the British over their opponents, the Dutch-heritage Boers.

I learned a lot of other tidbits. Dizzy was a sharp and unconventional dresser. Doyle grew up poor and never managed to make a good living as a doctor. He made his fortune from his Sherlock Holmes stories. Bismarck (and his successors) stayed in power partly by threatening to resign and leave poor William with someone worse or less amenable. It seems a strange way to retain power, but because of the way the government was set up, it worked most of the time.

I recommend all four books, but Dreadnought is a slog. It’s worth it, if you’re interested in the history of Europe leading up to World War I. However, it takes some time and concentration to get through the book. Maybe check out one of the biographies first. Or try a biography of Queen Victoria or of other people from the time period.

I tried to find some articles today online on how the education system and the imparting of knowledge and wisdom to children and young adults might change for the better as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. I found lots of articles like this one extolling the virtues of technology and computer-delivery of education. Many subjects and skills do lend themselves well to online video education as venues such as Khan Academy and BrainPop and MIT Open Courseware have been demonstrating for quite a while. While I’m glad we have the resource of online classes and online educational plans and ebooks, I’m also hearing a lot of complaints from parents about the online lessons that are being provided and sometimes required by public and private schools. The parents and older students say these online classes are no substitute for in-person classes with a teacher. Some students and some subjects just aren’t ready or aren’t suited for computer-based classes. So, I say digital is not the complete solution to education in a corona world.

For example, my daughter teaches French at the university level. Without the ability to meet with her students in person both in class and during office hours, she feels she is unable to give them the individualized learning experience that she could give before the pandemic shutdown. Some of these students have little or no access to technology–computers, internet, recording and playback equipment, etc.–and even those who do have that access are struggling to learn a language without face-to-face contact with teacher and classmates. In person discussions are important in learning about literature and history and philosophy. Individual attention is vital to teaching young children to read and write and make music and art.

In the meantime, I read other educational and disease experts who say we will not be able to go back to “school as normal”, not in the fall and maybe not for a long time, if ever. They’re talking about classrooms with only ten or fifteen students (an improvement over class sizes of 30-40) and desks spaced six feet apart. They write of schools where the students stay in cohorts of 10 in one classroom all day, and the teachers move around to the different classrooms. Also, there are perhaps to be no visits to the playground, or the library, or the cafeteria (lunches served in the classroom), no team sports, no choirs, no large group activities, since social distancing in those communal spaces is almost impossible to maintain. And to get those smaller class sizes, maybe students will only be going to school two or three days a week, trading off school days with home days when they do assigned school work at home.

While those don’t sound like schools where I would want to send my children, many people will have no choice. In families where both parents must work as well as single parent families, children must be in school for the family to survive economically. In other cases, the parents just are not prepared emotionally or physically to homeschool their children.

However, wouldn’t it take some of the pressure off of the public schools if those parents who can and who want to homeschool were encouraged to do so? Instead of seeing homeschooling as a threat to public and private schools, maybe it should be seen a true and even noble alternative. If many parents choose to give up time, energy, and extra income to educate their own children at home while still paying the same property taxes to support public schools for the benefit of the entire community, wouldn’t that relieve some of the pressure on class sizes and individual attention and give teachers and administrators a bit of breathing room and time to focus on those students who need public schools the most?

Instead of telling parents that they are not qualified to teach their own children, what if we came alongside and helped them to see how they can, if they have the desire, be effective educators, give individual attention, and help their own children to thrive in a home atmosphere free of worry about spreading disease or social distance? What if those parents who have enjoyed the somewhat constrained and limited introduction to homeschooling that they have experienced in the last month or two were encouraged to continue to homeschool, for real this time, in the fall? What if we quit instilling fear about children “falling behind” (behind what?) and “falling through the cracks” and instead assured parents that their children will learn and can learn if only they are given the opportunity to do so–at school or at home or at some combination of the two?

What if public schools re-thought their purpose and became resources for the entire community, both the in-schoolers and the homeschoolers? Maybe teachers with expertise in specific subjects could teach their small 10-student cohorts in the mornings and could then be available in the afternoons to meet one-on-one or two or three at a time with students who are being homeschooled but who need extra tutoring once a week. Or maybe those libraries and playgrounds could be available for all the children to come to, a few at a time on a sign-up basis. Or the libraries and the cafeterias could do curbside service as some are already doing. We can all work together to spread the feast of learning before our young people, and this crisis can become a catalyst for change.

Some good ideas are in these articles as well as some I don’t agree with, but let’s start talking about how homeschooling can be part of the solution instead of its being a problem or a threat.

Homeschool goes digital during coronavirus outbreak. The title to this one is deceptive. It starts out as pro-digital education, then quickly veers to something I’m much more interested in: unschooling or freedom to learn. “With all these new ways of schooling available, families will be able to choose the kind of learning environment and education that works best for their kids when the pandemic is finally over—whether that’s in a conventional school or not.”

Education Won’t Be the Same After the Pandemic Passes.

The World’s Homeschooling Moment. “While the virus has caused illness and hardship for many, keeping children out of school is not a global calamity. It is worth remembering that children can be educated without being schooled. They may even be better educated.”

Fraise: Coronavirus Has Turned Families Into Unwitting Homeschoolers. Some Suggestions for How They Can Treat It Like an Opportunity.

A few books that might be helpful in rethinking our approach to education as individuals and as a society (disclaimer: I haven’t read all of these):

• The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan.
• Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child’s Education by Susan Wise Bauer.
• Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler’s Guide to Unshakeable Peace by Sarah MacKenzie.
• A Charlotte Mason Education by Catherine Levinson.
• For the Children’s Sake: Foundations of Education for Home and School by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay.

I’ve been reading Emily Dickinson’s poetry all month, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of her poems, both in quantity and in depth of quality. She wrote more than 1700 poems that were found after her death. Some of them are rather like riddles; others are short epigrams. Still others are about nature and Emily’s observations thereof—or about love or death. She wrote a lot about death.

Here are few brief quotations that I collected from her poems and from her letters as quoted in the biographies I read:

• “To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.”
• “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?
• “A Letter is a joy of earth—/It is denied the gods—“
• “A letter always feels to me like Immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend. Indebted in our talk to attitude and accent, there seems a spectral power in thought that walks alone.”
• “My heart grows light so fast that I could mount a grasshopper and gallop around the world, and not fatigue him any!”
• “The only commandment I ever obeyed — ‘consider the lilies’.”

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise.
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

The last two are my favorite Emily Dickinson poems, although I can hardly be said to have tasted of her poetry since I’ve read maybe forty poems out of the 1700. But I plan to go on tasting.

So, what’s been happening on the coronavirus/Covid-19 front?

Well, our county judge, who seems to have a lot of unilateral power or at least think she does, has mandated that all people who leave the house in Harris County (Houston) must wear masks. There are some exceptions, and the police say they don’t have the time or the manpower to enforce such an order, but some people are all upset about it anyway. In fact, Judge Hidalgo is being sued by Republican activist Stephen Hotze, who says the mandate is unconstitutional.

“In Judge Hidalgo’s Harris County, the heavy hand of local government will fine individuals who refuse to wear a mask, fail to wash their hands, get within six feet of another, or inadvertently touch their face.”

I am ambivalent about it. I tried on a mask today that a friend made for me, and I don’t think I could wear it for longer than five minutes without ripping it off and running screaming down the street. Maybe not that long. And I’m not sure one government official should or does have the power to unilaterally decide that all four million people in Harris County have to wear mask to leave the house.

On the other hand, maybe the masks will help everybody to calm down and feel better about getting outside? And maybe they will help protect people from the ‘Rona? I don’t know. (And you don’t either.) And the prior two sentences have become the mantra that goes through my head every time anyone makes any assertion about this virus and our response to it. Too much uncertainty. Too many unknowns. And too many people pretending to know things that they can’t possibly know.

It’s a bit frustrating, and I go back to the idea of giving one another grace. We’re all trying to make what could be life or death decisions without the proper information to inform those decisions. We’re all trying not to rip it all off and go screaming down the street. Wear your mask or don’t wear your mask. Stay home or go to work. Keep your distance. Wash your hands. Make the decisions that make the most sense to you. And allow others the freedom to do the same. Oh, and try not to scream too loudly.

People are arguing right and left about when, how, and why to reopen the economy and advise people to go back to work and to living their public and social lives. You can read this opinion, Coronavirus Lessons by William Bennett and Seth Leibsohn. Or you can read this response in National Review, The Absurd Case Against the Coronavirus Lockdown by Rich Lowry.

 I am arguing for neither immediate opening up of our social and economic lives nor for continued near-complete lockdown, but it seems to me that the arguments people are using for either action are extremely flawed. First of all, if I understand the actions we have taken as a society so far, we have prevented some unknowable number of deaths by staying home and not overwhelming unprepared hospitals with massive numbers of covid patients all at the same time. We have “flattened the curve” to some extent and prevented the escalation of new cases that would overwhelm the health care system and cause people to die without treatment of not only covid but also other diseases and injuries that are a normal part of life and might get “crowded out” in a crisis situation. There is really no way to know how many lives have been saved by the lockdown and other measures to date.

However, as far as deaths due to Covid-19, we have only postponed many of those deaths. We have not saved the lives of those who will continue to be infected and have very bad outcomes. If you “flatten the curve” you don’t change the overall numbers. You just stretch those numbers out over time, right? (Unless a vaccine or more effective treatments come along, pronto.) So we have saved lives by allowing hospitals to be supplied and to be less crowded, but many of those who haven’t been infected with covid will still become infected in the future when the lockdown is ended, and some of those will still die. And we still don’t have a good handle on what that death rate will be, how many deaths per number of people infected. There is some evidence that the death rate itself is very low because the number of people actually infected is much higher than we have been able to test and confirm, maybe as much as 50 or even 100 times as many people infected and recovered as have been tested and confirmed to have the virus.

We can’t wait forever to allow people to go back to work (and worship and even play), so when will the risk of complete societal and economic collapse outweigh the risk of massive infection and death from covid? I don’t know, and neither do you. I think all of the governors and mayors and even the president and vice-president are trying to figure that out the best they know how. And we need to to decide as individuals and as a society how much risk we can tolerate and how long we can survive in shutdown mode. Different states and different individuals will come to different decisions concerning this issue. Some will consider others’ decisions to be imprudent, foolish, or even cowardly.

We need to give each other grace. Trust yourself, your neighbors, and even your governing authorities to make the best decisions they can. Pray and make the best decisions you can for yourself and your own family. And quit sniping at each other for disagreeing. Yes, these are important issues, even matters of life and death. But it won’t help to make them into issues of partisan hatred and name-calling.

Nine year old Ryan Hart may have “a name that a lot of boys have” and she’s not so excited about the new (old) house that she and her family are moving into, but Ryan is a girl who knows how to make the best of the situation and find some joy wherever she goes. Ways to Make Sunshine is acclaimed YA author Renee Watson’s “own version of Ramona Quimby, one starring a Black girl and her family.” Ryan is a little more bland and blame-shifting than Ramona, but not too bratty so as to make the book unendurable. (I don’t like bratty protagonists like Eloise and Judy Moody. I do like childlike characters like Ramona and Clementine who err out of innocence and curiosity rather than pure selfishness.)

The scenes in the book are set up to showcase the particular joys and problems of growing up Black, but the story should be enjoyable for all kids, person of color or not. And Ryan is growing up in Portland, Oregon, just like Ramona Quimby, only about 50+ years later. It’s fun to see a different view of essentially the same setting.

At one point in the ARC I read, Ryan’s dad criticizes Ryan’s mixed race friend for living in a “white” neighborhood, a criticism that I thought was jarring and unnecessary. Maybe that minor bobble will get edited out of the final version. Otherwise, there’s a lot of wisdom in the book coming from Ryan’s parents and extended family, and even Ryan herself learns a few things over the course of the story and drops a few nuggets of wisdom.

Grandma turns me around to face her. ‘Baby girl, you are beautiful. Not just your hair or your clothes. But who you are. Your kindness makes you beautiful and the way you’re always willing to offer help makes you beautiful,’ Grandma tells me. ‘And how creative you are with your recipes. That’s what makes you a beautiful girl.’ Grandma turns me back to face the mirror. We both look into the glass, staring at my brown skin, my round face, my long straight hair. ‘How you wear your hair is your choice and no matter what you choose, it’s not going to determine if you’re beautiful or not. The only thing that will determine that is how you treat others. If you are mean to people, if you act ugly toward them, that’s what takes your beauty away.’

Ways to Make Sunshine, p. 59

Children ages seven to ten who enjoy Beverly Cleary, Carolyn Haywood, and Sara Pennypacker will now have a new series to read with a slightly different point of view. I’m adding this one to my library, and I recommend it. Coming April 28, 2020.

So Governor Abbott of Texas laid out a kinda, sorta plan today for Texas to return to the land of the living. He says the first steps will be for hospitals to resume other procedures and surgeries, for the state parks to re-open with social distancing and face masks, and for all businesses to be allowed to sell stuff via curbside deliveries and home deliveries. He also said that all of the schools will remain closed through the end of the school year. Then he made some very, very tentative suggestions about further “opening” up in May or even June, if all goes well between now and then.

I am interested to see how this all works out, but the guidelines and tentative plans don’t even begin to answer my personal burning questions, nor those of many others I know and love. I honestly don’t much care about state parks and curbside deliveries (that were already happening anyway). My questions are, again, more personal and harder to answer. When can I feel relatively safe about having my rather large family come to visit? When can I hug my grandchildren? And can I convince my adult children at some point that I’m willing, at age 62, to run the risk of contracting the virus? And if I am willing to run that risk, is my husband, who is 67 years old and has Parkinson’s? If my three adult children who live with me are called back to work, will/should they go–since the main reason they have stayed home is to protect me and Engineer Husband? Are the elderly (not that I usually apply that term to myself) and the immunocompromised expected to stay home until there’s a vaccine, which may very well be a year or more from now? Do we have any idea even now what the actual death rate among different age groups is for this “novel” virus? What percentage death rate is an acceptable risk, and what is unacceptable? These are questions that we are going to have to answer each one for ourselves. No president or governor will be able to make these decisions for us. And I am not looking forward to trying to decide these things for myself and to some extent for other people.

In other news, I have spent some of the time of coronavirus social distancing, like almost everyone else, watching television. I watched the series The English Game and thoroughly enjoyed it. If I told you it was about the history of competitive soccer in Britain, I feel that would sell the story short. So, instead I’ll say it’s a period piece by Julian Fellowes, the same producer who gave us Downton Abbey. And The English Game, although it’s no Downton Abbey, is a credit to the Fellowes brand. It tells a great story about working class players who began in the late nineteenth century to break into the game of football (soccer) which had been a game for the wealthy elite young men of Eton and Harrow and other British “public schools”.

I’m not sure how to end today’s coronavirus musings. I daresay you all have thought about these questions, too, as they relate to your own family and family situation. And I daresay you’ve spent some time watching TV or reading or doing something else to take your mind off the questions that really don’t have definitive answers right now—but must be answered eventually nevertheless.

I have Facebook friends in New York and Detroit who are posting about the devastation that this virus has brought to their cities, friends, and families. They know health care workers who are infected or who are living away from their families and haven’t seen them in over a month. They know people who have died from the effects of the virus. They have church families who have lost loved ones or who are still fighting the virus.

I live in Houston, TX. Major suburbia. In Harris County, the county that is Houston, we’ve had 3700 some odd confirmed cases and 46 deaths. That’s out of a population of 4.7 million. I know of one family in Kansas (they moved from here) and one family nearby who very probably had the virus in early March, but neither was tested because tests weren’t available at the time unless you were hospitalized. I know of no one who is hospitalized for Covid-19 nor do I know anyone who is having Covid symptoms and staying at home. I think most people here are like me. Despite my concern for people in other places, it is hard to grasp that the numbers mean death and suffering for real people. And that it could come here eventually.

And so in the rest of the country, the not-so-infected (yet), the natives are getting restless. There was a protest gathering in the state capital, Austin, yesterday where people were yelling for Governor Abbott to rescind the stay at home orders and let Texans go back to work. On the one hand, we see the pictures and read the news reports, but until it happens to us, to someone we know, it’s just not Real. Many people here in Texas are still saying it’s overblown, too many restrictions, crazy government overreach. Then, others say they won’t be leaving the house until there’s a vaccine. I fear that there is no good way to emerge from this crisis and that our political and regional differences will be exacerbated rather than healed because the suffering really isn’t “shared” in the sense of every region and people group suffering the same effects.

I wish I had been writing here daily about my own impressions, adventures, and thoughts in this Time of the Plague. Not that I have anything definitive to add to the conversation, but nevertheless, it would be good to have a record.

A record of March 15th, the last time we went to church before everything shut down. Our children didn’t want us to go, but we observed social distancing and worshipped together with our church community at Trinity Fellowship in Friendswood. I’m glad we did.

A record of the day, about March 16th or sometime that week, when I put out the free books for people to take and enjoy. Unfortunately, I’ve had only a few takers.

There’s a record on Facebook of the music my son and daughter-in-law shared with us, but it doesn’t transfer to this blog where I control the content.

And the poems I shared and the helpful or funny memes are all on Facebook. I’d rather have them here.

As a family we started out Zooming, then switched to Google Hangouts, and now we’re mostly leaving each other video messages on Marco Polo. I like the Marco Polo messages the best. Video plus convenience.

The feelings have gone from peace to frustration to claustrophobia to resignation to joy and thankfulness that we are all healthy and able to keep in touch via phones and computers and even snail mail.

My eight adult children are all home, socially distancing. Some of them have lost their jobs entirely. Others are furloughed indefinitely. One is working from home, and another is going in to work at the clothing store she manages, filling mail orders.

The three youngest are here with us, and the young people do all of the necessary errands. They don’t want me or Engineer Husband to leave the house. Said Husband misses his almost-daily trips to Home Depot. I miss people coming over to borrow books from my library, but I am still lending. Porch pick-up.

We’ve completed one and a half jigsaw puzzles. My youngest is working on an embroidery kit. The next youngest has been painting every day: pictures, bookmarks, and other lovely artwork. You can see some of her work at her instagram account, @analemmacreations.

Today we mark the beginning of the second half of April. It’s already been a long month. But again, we are healthy and solvent. Praise the Lord.

I’m posting this message again and again on Facebook and here because I’m seeing a lot of unnecessary anguish and anxiety surrounding school at home. You don’t have to duplicate what your child would be doing in school. Dare I say it: you DON’T have to do all the work the public school is sending you for your child to complete.

Just read books, listen to books, play games, make music and art, enjoy being a family. Education will happen if you spend the time doing things that educate and enrich you and your children. Not worksheets. Not computer quizzes. Just read good books. This quarantine can be the best time of your family’s lives together. Don’t let the stress of trying to keep up with the Jones School plan ruin it for you.

Some links that might help you think about this time of crisis schooling (not more stuff for you to do):

AmblesideOnline Helping Hand Emergency Learning Plan

Exploring Homeschool Facebook Group with Allison Morrow.

Biblioguides: Heartwarming Stories to Read Aloud.

Coronavirus Turned Us Into Homeschoolers: Now What?

The Literary Life Podcast: Reading in a Time of Crisis

Read Aloud Revival Podcast