Today will be the first day that students and teachers at The Little Middle School have had the option of attending school mask-free since March 13, 2020.

I expected to feel excited about that, but instead, I feel a sense of peace and calm. I know that there may be mask-required days in our future, and I am emotionally prepared for that.

For now, life feels a tiny bit easier.

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It’s winter and there isn’t very good news.

The pandemic rages on — why is that such a normal sentence to write? Why does it feel like I’ve heard it or written it a hundred times? — and here in the United States, the vaccine distribution is slow. There is political unrest to boot.

I miss my family and the bustle of restaurants and coffee shops. I fret over the well-being of my students, my friends, my finances. I long to get on an airplane.

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My goal, in most assignments, is to get my students to think.

This runs counter to the goal that most of them have, which is to complete their work as quickly and easily as possible, without thinking.

It can’t blame them for this habit. Many of the assignments they’ve had over their school years don’t require any thinking. You do the work to prove that you were in class, paying attention, and that’s it.

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I started rowing due to peer pressure.

The only people I knew in my new city were rowers, so I took up rowing. That was fine with me — I love early mornings, being on the water, and working as part of a team.

I didn’t love rowing, though. Not at first. It was confusing, physically demanding, and even a little bit painful (blisters upon blisters). And if I messed up particularly badly, I might unwittingly toss a half dozen people into the sea.

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When my siblings and I were little, my parents didn’t have special “kid dishes.” They served us scrambled eggs on bread plates.

Sometimes, the bread plates would run out, and they’d serve scrambled eggs on a saucer. Like all annoying kids, we might complain about it once we ate enough eggs to discover the indentation where the teacup was supposed to go.

My dad, undaunted, tricked us into believing we had won something special. He had a special song, like a fanfare: “The secret ring! You’ve found the secret ring!” Mollified or perhaps even pleased, the secret-ring-haver would would go back to eating their eggs.

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