Camping out with relatives this week provided us with some very interesting conversations. I found out a whole lot about my husband's back story (oops, soap opera term, I mean family history) and a whole lot about growing tomatoes in an apartment (really!)
One of the most interesting conversations, though, was a proposal to devote the next week of school to a multidisciplinary exploration of the hurricane, from the math and science of how and why it hit to the history of natural disasters here and elsewhere to the art generated by the kids' seeing things they'd never seen before to them writing about how the pieces of the situation affected them and their families.
Such an exploration is unlikely to happen. With five lost school days, it will be all the schools can do just to catch up with their scheduled work. Given that my kids all go to schools that draw from wide geographic areas, though, I imagine they will get a great deal of education from their fellow students, from those relatively unaffected to those who evacuated by choice or not by choice to those whose lives might be affected for a long time.
I know that once school resumes, we will get caught back up in the everyday chaos of plain old daily life, but I have hope that, even if we never get around to talking about the science or the math or the history, we will take the time to process what happened, both the downed trees and deep water and darkness parts--and the kindness of relatives part.
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