Que Sara Sara

I sent this as an email to the director and ast director of special ed for the school dept I work in, a few other need to know people, and the superintendent. Please let me know what you think:

Evening all, I was thinking the other morning, then forgot to create the email about school/life after the diagnosis of covid and how the covid brain fog plays a huge role at being a sometimes insurmountable barrier. I didn’t think of it before, because until two Sundays ago, I hadn’t had covid. 

The amount of memory fog, word retrieval, and even some fine motor skills, can all be temporarily (and sometimes permanently) affect our students ability to learn upon returning to school. 

That is exponentially expounded by students that have disabilities that have these barriers already in place, such as those with ADHD and those that are autistic. I’m sure others do, but I’m working from my personal experience/diagnosises. 

Once my fever went away and I came back to school last Tuesday (5/31), I could feel that my brain was in a fog, despite having taken my medication to help me work around/regulate that. I couldn’t get out of it. I often have a slower processing time with some things, questions asked of me that I have to think of the answer, for example. My processing time was 3x as long. Word retrieval was just not happening. I couldn’t remember the word Freeport, and I’d just read it. I knew it began with an F, that LL Bean was there, and that still didn’t trigger the lock. It was incredibly frustrating. The other part I noticed was my handwriting (fine motor) was lacking. I was able to write in print, but to write in cursive was incredibly hard, messy, and time consuming because I had to think of how to spell the word, what letters came where, how to form each letter, and make it legible. That’s a lot of steps and brain power. I took a break for about 5 minutes and finished a bit better than when I paused, but it was excruciating. 

My difficulties made me thing of how this virus is affecting our bodies and our children’s ability to learn and function. With time things will get better. By the end of the week things were a bit better, but lack of good sleep threw me off too, also from covid recovery. I think we need to really acknowledge these difficulties in our students and though school is set and rigorous, they really need to be given more time, more breaks, as well as the care we give. 

Thank you for listening to my TED talk! Haha. I hope you all enjoy the rest of your weekend.