Humans of St. Norbert:

“My son’s name is Sam. He is six years old and he just finished online kindergarten so he’ll be going into first grade in the fall. [Online kindergarten] was interesting ... There were good things about it and bad things about it. I made the choice to keep him home because I could. It’s just one of the nice things about being faculty at a place like St. Norbert. There’s this work-life balance built into what we do and I’m really grateful for that flexibility.

“I did not expect to learn so much about learning from [the experience]. It was really interesting! On one hand it was an enormous amount of work trying to be “at work” and also teach him kindergarten at the same time. That was all very hard, but I got to see him in school and that’s not normally something you get to do as a parent with little kids. You don’t really know what’s going on in school besides on the big picture level. So I got to watch him in his Google Meets with his classmates and I was there helping him with his work. Mostly just making sure he was doing his work, but it was so cool and his teacher was just amazing! It was so inspiring to see her [teach] 20 five year olds. Watching her keep them engaged for 20 minutes at a time was really impressive. I wound up taking a lot of inspiration from her. It was really just surprising and fun to see how much overlap there is between humans teaching humans no matter what age. You wouldn’t think that something a kindergarten teacher was doing would be applicable to an upper-level college seminar, and some of it’s not, but a lot of it really was just because she was so good at the human connection piece.

“There were a lot of office hours and Zoom classes where Sam was just part of it and so was my dog! It was so heartening to see that happening with the students, too. It’s weird, but it made me feel like we were all going through this together and created this sense of cooperation. In a strange way, it got so that it felt like I knew my students in a different way because I was seeing them in their spaces.” – Carrie Ryan, associate professor of history