Adventures in Quarantine

 Almost exactly 2 years after we shuttered our schools ( and my first blog post) , my school district went mask optional! We made the change on Monday, March 14th 2022. Now, there a LOT of different and perfectly valid emotions around this change. Here is me, feeling pretty excited about it on Monday: And here I sit Saturday morning, writing from my couch with a nasty head cold! (Not covid!) The governor of Vermont hinted at this change in mid February, and made the change official starting in March. School districts in Vermont would have the choice when it came to masking.  There were lots of feelings from teachers, parents, and community members. Our community positivity rate is still over 4%. There are still people dying of covid in Vermont. In addition, we have another new subvariant of Omicron making the rounds. Many parents feel like it isn't time, or that it isn't safe yet, and I want to be sensitive to those perspectives. Others feel like masks are an easy way to conti...

AU CANADA!!!! How we've missed you!! As a French teacher living so close to the border, I was accustomed to taking students to Canada twice a year, plus usually at least 1 personal trip a year, sometimes more. Naturally as a French speaker I always loved going to Quebec and having a chance to speak some French (plus the delicious chocolatine, tarte au sucre, and an abundance of international foods that we can't get in Vermont. Oh and the SPAS! The spas!!!). Suddenly being cut off from our neighbor to the North felt like such a loss to me.  And sure, a year ago I made it all the way to Maui, which is a lot farther away, and one could argue much more culturally different from Vermont than Quebec. But actually crossing an international border? This felt like a HUGE milestone.  There was bureaucracy to deal with: PCR tests within 72 hours of arrival, downloading of apps, uploading of vaccine cards, planning a quarantine location, etc. But the whole family tested negative, we got i...