“It’s the end of a long first week of homemaking, with two major outside WHEELS obligations and the emotional dregs of a visit from my parents to deal with as well. All told, it went OK, til last night when I just lost patience at bedtime. Legos and not-listening.”

January 11 2020

“Legos and not-listening” remains a pretty accurate summary of the emotional experience of this mid-January week. I notice in this particular section of calendar the mixture of calm, nerdy indoor activity and petulant, chaotic rebellion. Not only are both kids engaging in an echo of the above, but so are the grown-ups. (S being, as ever, a graceful exception).

Included in that balance of calm and chaos are grandparents–paternal ones in the quoted passage, maternal ones in the present moment. Of course, living with the latter leads to an omnipresence that we deal with as best we can. It also leads to more petulance than productivity when it comes to indoor activity. Sometimes there is just nothing to do and nowhere to go.

A piece in yesterday’s Times got to the psychological dangers of pandemic boredom for older kids. (Content Note: This story is about teen suicide). One of a few questions I have about digital privacy and student writing comes from these paragraphs:

By July, after the sixth suicide since March, the district invested in a program, the GoGuardian Beacon alert system, to send reports of mild to severe suicide risk. The system, which scans student writings on district-issued iPads, generated more than 3,100 alerts from June to October, indicating behavior such as suicide research, self-harm, written comments, or just the need for help or support.

By November, the deluge forced the district to upgrade its contract to include 24-hour monitoring and a service that would sort out the most severe cases, like students who were in “active planning,” meaning they had identified a methodology and were ready to act.

“Surge of Student Suicides Pushes Las Vegas Schools to Reopen,” Erika L. Green, New York Times, January 24, 2021

I recognize the legal and moral need for schools to monitor their students for health and safety. Still, this seems like a procedure that could lead to abuse and misinterpretation. What changes for a student when they get “tagged” in a system as a suicide risk? Does a passing state, one that writing could get them through as a way of coping or even healing, become a permanent identity?

Obviously, self-harm is a far cry from not-listening. But the root of both are in unhappiness, and a lot of unhappiness right now is related to conditions caused by the pandemic and the botched response to it by various levels of government.

The closer analogue might be writing and Legos. That is, both offer an outlet in the form of an activity. It’s this means of using imagination and know-how and collaboration to deal with feelings and absences that pandemic restrictions make impossible or change in such a way that they’re no longer fun.

And to the quoted passage–I do worry about the digitization of moments that would be passing impressions. Once data points are in storage somewhere are they permanent? Is this, as one writer put it, an end to forgetting? (This will bother me. Was it Clay Shirky? Or Sherry Turkle? Or am I channelling Kate Eichhorn, who I have not read?) Even if the information is private, do the actions taken upon it ripple out?

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