Inside the Pandemic, Day 1 2020

 Thursday, March 26

Today marks day four of working from home, and I have to say it’s not all bad. For one thing, I get to have a lunch hour, something I haven’t had in 13 years! When I worked in industry, an hour for lunch was the understood norm. Wonder how many employees get to have an entire hour for lunch? Actually, law states that employees are only granted 30 minutes for lunch if they work at least five hours. (US Dept. of Labor, 2020). It’s not that I don’t get lunch at school, but I often have students coming or going, work to copy, things to grade, and so on. This makes my 25 minute lunch period go by very quickly. Before I became a teacher, I didn’t really understand what teachers were talking about when they complained about their lunch hour. Now I get it--it’s not an hour. Why do schools force you to slam down food? It’s not good for kids or adults, but I guess it’s not worth adding an extra 30 minutes to the day just to “socialize” or “digest”. In fact, a study from Japan (bias alert--it studied 1,700 young women only) found that eating more slowly made you feel fuller sooner, which meant that you ate fewer calories overall.  (Zelman)

At any rate, we (and by we, I mean me) do tend to get caught up in the small things, when in fact there is a huge, enormous, world-shaking event happening right now. I think, though, if we focused on the big stuff, we’d get easily overwhelmed and then would be good for nothing. The event is the Novel-Corona Virus, or COVID-19. It has other names as well, but corona viruses are not new. SARS was a corona virus. This one is called “novel” because it’s new to humankind. Unfortunately. That’s the trouble, you see. There’s no cure and we didn’t know anything about the virus back in December of 2019 (thus the “19” on the end of the name) when it first popped up in Wuhan, China. 

Big things, like the Corona virus, are hard to deal with, moreso because there are new announcements, addendendums, notices and laws coming out hourly. If you have the news on, it’s always about the virus, but things are changing so fast that it’s hard to keep up! So, sometimes I don’t. I’ll go out and take the dog on a walk, or lift weights, or read a book or take a bath. Sometimes it’s easier to do something familiar for a while and shut the world out.