Learning curves

Oh, there are so many learning curves! Can I call them learning curve balls?

We have had another short, sharp lockdown. They are becoming routine, and through a public health lens they seem to work. On a very small scale though, we in our household have yet to iron out the wrinkles. I have just erased the very first note I wrote on our whiteboard when we learned we were back to home schooling: make a sustainable routine. We didn’t do that. Once again we tried, and once again we failed. We muddled through, and fell short in many ways. I felt both glad and rueful in erasing that note.

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I have all the mathematics skills I need for daily life, but the other day I had to ask YouTube how to solve a child’s maths puzzle. I’m glad to say we both understood it in the end, although I suspect my own grasp is merely temporary. This is not a big problem, just another wrinkle in the day. There have been many events on a similar scale in the past few years, such as cleaning a dishwasher after a crayon has gone through a wash cycle. I can’t remember exactly the solutions I found to any of them, but here we all are on the other side.

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I grew up here in Aotearoa New Zealand, sometimes known as the Shaky Isles. I know what an earthquake feels like, and I know what a tsunami warning is. Yet somehow the distraction of tsunami warnings almost everywhere the other day threw me a little. We were near to two evacuation areas, but not in either of them. It was strange, looking across our calm waters to Great Barrier Island, which in the end was the last place to have its tsunami warning lifted. It felt like a bit of a metaphor, living somehow sheltered from greater forces, watchful and aware, and slightly discombobulated.

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I attended a workshop via zoom this week. The workshop itself was enormously useful. It was interesting and encouraging, and I learned heaps. But it was just my second ever zoom call, and when we split into small groups I found I couldn’t see everybody at one time. The conversation happened, but it was hard to know who else was there. I’ve since learned how to change my view, so I’ll chalk that one up to experience and do better next time. I was an early adopter of so much technology; now I feel I am running to catch up with the world. It feels right, though, to keep running. Here we go, into a new week: I wish you all well.