Fairyland Mushrooms

One the games we play when we hike is to imagine where the fairies live and what they use different parts of the forest for.  This spot was declared a cafe and then a playground for little fairies.  What are your thoughts?

Its funny how we cycle through phases of looking back at different parts of my life.  As a high school teacher, I often found myself comparing my high school experiences to the ones of my students.  This past year, I took on teaching a much younger grade and found myself remembering that part of my school.  It was probably not my favourite year of my childhood.  It was my first year in a new school and the older kids in our class weren't always kind.  My most recalled experience from this part of my education was having our teacher send me and another student into the dusty book room to practice our spelling with banned spellers in the era of the common curriculum and failing a multiplication test that was otherwise perfect, except that my 5's looked a bit like the letter s.  To this day, I find this a draconian outcome.

Now, I find myself trying to puzzle how this pandemic will make my children's childhood's even more different than mine.    I'm trying to prepare them for the reality of school next year by constantly reminding them about not touching their face, washing their hands, and practicing social distancing, but I worry that we'll end up with a generation of kids who feel anxious when they are closer to someone than 6 feet.   Its a weird time in this world.  Some days I want to ignore it, since years living in the north makes some of it less weird, we rarely left our house except for work and groceries.  I feel like there will be lots to examine when all of this is done.  Or hopefully, when it is done.  I hope that it will make us a better world, but some days it seems to be making us worse.  I guess we'll just have to wait and see.  Probably we'll be worse in some ways and better in others.  So, until then, I guess we can only do our own bests and like everyone else, figure out what that actually means.