Notes From 3rd Grade by Tilda Wilson This morning, after 20 minutes on hold, I spoke to a woman in the Cornell financial aid office named Karen. Had she used a different name, our conversation would not have felt so much like a foregone conclusion. A “Susan” or even a “Sharon” might have lulled me into wistful imaginings of the kind of old lady who just wants me to get a good education and has power over Cornell’s grant allocations. “I just got my financial aid decision, and it’s for less than half of what it was during my last two years of school…” I said, allowing my words to trail off and hoping to be interrupted with a hasty explanation of how it was all a grand mistake/hilarious prank/“well, yeah, obviously, because you won 200 million dollars in the lottery over the summer, did you not know that?” There was a long silence. Eventually, Karen looked up my account, and confirmed my previous statement. “I’m in a hotel in Nebraska on the drive to Ithaca right now,” I told her, as if this fact would somehow shift the algorithms that got us here. “I don’t know, should I just turn around and go home?” “Well…” “I want to speak to your manager!” I thought about yelling into the phone. I decided against it. It’s been a tough year for Karens. ~~~ I’m moving to Portland now. I need to figure out this financial aid stuff, and Mom’s friend knows a family looking to hire someone to help their kid with online school. I’m not sure how much I can help, given my lackluster arithmetic skills and inability to get myself to pay attention in online school, but it seems like the obvious job to be doing at the moment. ~~~ This morning I went to meet Finn, the 3rd grader I’ll be helping with school for the next couple months. He seemed completely disinterested in me. He sat on the couch holding a giant wriggling hornworm caterpillar and singing “caterpillar caterpillar caterpillar.” 30 • zooming out
When we talked on the phone last week, Finn’s mom informed me that her son is very smart, but has some behavioral problems related to schoolwork and socialization. He’s at a new school this year for the kids who scored highest on a placement test, so his mom is worried about him catching up to and interacting with the kids who have been there for longer. Mostly, Finn seems to exist in his own world, which, from what I could tell from the hour I’ve been around him so far, seems populated with caterpillars, facts about natural disasters, and no other people. ~~~ School for Finn consists of two half hour long classes in Google Meet in the morning, then another half hour class later in the day with a smaller group of kids. In between those, he’s supposed to work on assignments that the teacher gives him in a program called Seesaw. Half of the kids are clearly playing games on other websites during their meetings, and some of them just leave their computers behind completely so that we just get a live feed of a random room in their house. The teacher, Mr. Reed, ends up spending most of class time trying to show the kids how to get to, and do, the assignments he put in Seesaw. Yesterday, he asked “does anyone know how to open a blank document?” and the class turned into a pandemonium of kids unmuting themselves to say things like “what’s a document?” or “I already know how to use excel” or “my mom uses google documents her name is Carrie her birthday is on Tuesday.” At one point he said, perhaps to nobody in particular, “I actually majored in journalism in college. I wanted to be a reporter.” ~~~ Finn abruptly left the room ten minutes into class this morning. I thought about trying to stop him and get him to sit back down, but he left with such purpose that I could tell he had something to do. A minute later, he returned with a fitted sheet. Carefully, he placed his computer on the floor, zooming out • 25
