The 2019-2020 school year has finally come to an end and the last three months have especially been a doozy.

I’ve gained a new respect for teachers, not that I didn’t already respect them.  They deserve the utmost appreciation and huge raises.  With home school going on since mid-March, I’ve been able to see first hand exactly what they’re teaching students in grade eight these days.  I discovered it’s not much different from what I learned in grade eight thirty-five years ago.

Here are just a few snippets of things I learned from my 8th grader and her teachers this year:

I learned that a² + b² still = c²–even all these years later.

I learned who Rube Goldberg was and discovered that I’ve always thought his machines were neat.

Science teachers can talk for thirty minutes or more about nothing but the weather.  Who knew?

The Theory of Evolution is even more fascinating than I ever thought and it will forever be debated.

Food Inc., although an interesting and eye-opening documentary, is not really for people with queasy stomachs.  I also got the sense it’s someone’s indirect way of trying to make children become vegetarians.  It seemed kind of brain-washy to me in certain ways.

Bottle rockets are cool.  Even cooler are female STEM teachers.

At this time it’s unknown what the first year of high school will be like.  Our state’s only direction right now is to tell all the school districts to save their pennies for hand sanitizer and face masks.  We don’t know if students will physically be attending school, how often they will physically be attending school, how often they will be learning at home, if they will be learning at home, if they will be learning at school, we know nothing.  And it’s very frustrating.

But I know if I have to I’ll be digging back into my brain to my freshman year of high school to try to co-teach my own freshman into the start of her final tier.