Listening to Los Retros (né Mauri Tapia), you’d never guess that he just finished high school. At age 20, this musical smart guy is turning out vintage tunes that sit somewhere between Queen and Jefferson Airplane, albeit in a lower vocal register. He records what the music press nonetheless calls “bedroom pop” in his room at his parents’ home in Oxnard, CA, and is presumably biding his time until he goes on a planned tour with fellow Mexican-American bedroom composer Cuco. Watch this kid, he’s on his way up.
Following the lives of rich people has become a new category of activity during Coronavirus. First, we watched them flood out of their “cramped” (read: incomparably spacious) city homes; then we watched them struggle without their personal staff; now, we watch them try to educate their children. Presumably, when second-homers peaced out of cities, they thought the distance arrangement would be temporary, remote learning and all. Now as the virus rages on, it’s clear that remote school is on some level here to stay. Instead of zooming into city classrooms from afar, people are just enrolling in school wherever their Corona home is. So far that’s making for a surge in enrollment in resort towns like Vail and Aspen. We wish their PTAs strength for an oncoming influx of enthusiasm.
Meanwhile, the tier of rich parents who still live in cities is also wondering how to make the remote learning thing work, and many are finding solace in pods. In a pod, a group of kids from the same school or class gets together to have their online learning facilitated by some sort of teacher surrogate, which could be a parent or a neighbor or nanny. This move implies that you have access to a person who you can afford to pay, or who doesn’t need to be paid to do the job of being with your kids all day. That means the pod-as-best-option leaves under-resourced kids in the dust, exacerbating a pre-existing learning gap and entrenching social segregation. If it weren’t so devastating, it would be comical that white parents with money so quickly default to reproducing the inequality they say they wish was absent from their school systems. But we do what’s best for ourselves, don’t we?
Read Clara Totenberg Green’s op-ed on this for more detail.
Then there are the places that insist on schooling in person; incidentally, some of those are also the places (TEXAS! FLORIDA!) that don’t believe in masks, per se. And as it turns out, the trade for parents’ peace of mind is teachers’. Panicked educators are rushing to make their wills before classes resume, in case of the entirely likely event that they’re killed by their jobs. And their employers seem to understand that likelihood, even if they won’t address it. In advance of the school year, one district in Utah is evidently circulating guidelines on how to communicate faculty deaths to the community; in a Tennessee district, a big virus mitigation tactic is to pray. Heads up: if your kid’s teacher dies, you’re definitely going to need someone to lead your pod. (Conveniently, there could be a publicly-funded option.)
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