2031

I noticed that one of the students was taking an inordinately long time to go to the restroom, so I told my co-teachers I was going to check on the situation. I strode purposefully to the door of the boys' bathroom and called his name. "Are you in there?"

There was a pause, and then he answered, "Just wiping."

I know I rolled my eyes. "Well, hurry up!" I replied. "You are missing the whole class!"

If it sounds like I wasn't surprised by such unexpected behavior, you are reading correctly, because anecdotally? I find this class of sixth graders to be more immature than any other in recent memory, but perhaps it is understandably so. 

As we get further and further from the pandemic, the impact it has had on kids as students have become less predictable, although the trends make sense.

The first kids to come back full-time are in 8th grade now, and their eagerness to return coupled with the newness of middle school made them a willing group. With the exception of a few students entrenched in the I'll just turn my camera off and pretend I didn't hear you approach, most of those kids were easy to guide in terms of behavior and expectations.

The next year, the class was a bit squirrely, a trait I attribute to the fact that their elementary schools cut them a lot of slack as they returned, now the oldest kids in the school. We saw it happen in our school, too, the year before. The eighth graders came back with their own ideas about how and when they would learn, and they were comfortable enough in our school to push back on restrictions. Likewise, staff had a lot of sympathy for them as they transitioned from learning alone to learning as part of a school, and so they were a little wild. Even so, our sixth graders last year were in a new enough situation that they were open to adapting to the culture we created for them.

This year the students we have were in second grade when we went out for COVID, and they learned at home for up to a year and a half. They were too young to do so independently, however, and so this group probably had a lot of parent involvement in their education, and only a couple of years to grow beyond that level of support.

And what will the next class of kids offer? Not sure, but I did recently have a conversation with a colleague where I pointed out to him that in the fall of 2027 the students who enter sixth grade will not have been affected academically at all by this pandemic, and his response was, "What year will it be when we get the first kids who weren't even born yet?"