Today marked a year and a day since my last work event outside home. It also brought our daughter’s first day at school–meaning in school–since last March.

What a long, strange, painful trip around the sun it’s been. The headlines in Arlington and across the region–not to mention the nation–have documented how dismally distance learning has failed in practice. It’s just hard for kids to pay attention and ask for help through a screen. And while it’s been difficult for everybody to spend a year mostly cut off from people, that’s especially harsh for kids who have had a large fraction of their childhoods stolen from them by this pandemic.

I don’t blame any of that on the teachers who have also had their worlds upended and have since been working harder than ever to do their jobs. I mean, I struggle to stay tuned into virtual events, and I’m a 50-year-old man with a college degree and decades of taking notes while staring at screens. Just how well should a 10-year-old be expected to tackle this problem?

Were my wife and I both people of full-time leisure, this might not have been that bad. We could have fielded our daughter’s questions, worked through problems with her, tried to cheer her up whenever necessary, and in essence acted like semi-competent substitute teachers. But this mortgage and these property taxes won’t pay themselves, so we have been reduced to doubling as incompetent, distracted substitute teachers.

The remote-learning technology involved hasn’t helped. I know a lot more about our schools’ software stack than I used to, and much of it has made me angry–such as the layer of mobile-device-management software that made updating iPad apps a Windows XP-esque experience, and the classroom-management app that seems designed against the idea of showing students or their parents a simple list of what work is due and overdue.

School isn’t back in a full-time sense for us; IRL classes are still only two days a week to keep class sizes unusually small (backed up by extra ventilation in classrooms), with the other three on the same dreadful virtual basis. But that’s two days a week our kid can have something of a normal 10-year-old’s life, just with a lot more masks. When so many people I know are still waiting for even a partial restoration of their kids’ lives, I’ll take that.