The Crushing Reality of Zoom School

“Are you muted?”

The first thing my five-year-old learned in kindergarten, set up at a tiny desk in the corner of our dining room, is to always stay muted. It’s probably the wrong thing to teach a child, but not everyone remembers, and then life bleeds in. Zoom school becomes a portal into worlds you never see as a parent making awkward smalltalk at pickup.

You can hear a mom working a job doing collections for medical billing. Call after call.

A dad who calls his sister on speakerphone. They fight most days.

Grandparents asking how long it’s going to take. There are babies wailing.

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“Zoom school,” the author writes, “becomes a portal into worlds you never see as parent making awkward smalltalk at pickup.”

A student and his mom share the kitchen table. TVs, so many TVs, an endless buzz of TVs. The weather. The news. Game shows and talk shows.

Are you muted?

Of course Zoom school is a nightmare—with the lack of time to properly plan and the lack of funds to make anything work, how was it going to be anything else?—but every school option right now is. Depending on where you live, school has started as an endless navigation of web logins, unmutes, and dropped connections at home; attempts at confusing part-time hybrid schedules that help only the calendar industry; or the fuck it approach that has already lead to sick kids and teachers, with many more to come.