About Anjuli
My name is Anjuli مَريَم(Maryam). I have both an Indian and an Arab name, though I am neither, but I love both of them, and even use both of them. I use Anjuli in English, and Maryam when I speak in Arabic (the very small amount I know).
I have always lived in Atlanta, always been homeschooled, and always been an oldest. And I love all of those things. My hobb
ies
(though I don’t really think of the first as a hobby) are reading and braiding hair. I happily read anything and everything, but my favorite genres are fantasy and science fiction. I almost always read digitally now, on an app on my phone. It has great perks, like being able to hold twenty big books in one tiny rectangle. My other hobby, braiding, is a very recent one. I like to braid (or knit) while I read books, especially school books, so that I have something to do with my hands. I can do 2, 3, 4, and 5 strand braids pretty easily. More are hard, but I love playing with what I can do.
Another important thing about me: I use sarcasm frequently, always meaning well. I love to laugh, and find many reasons to do so. And I frequently quote (often unconsciously) random things, especially by Terry Pratchett. That mostly make me laugh.
I have not decided what I will do after college, in college, or very much at all. My current goal is to finish my last year and a half of high school and my dual enrollment classes successfully, and to learn the skills necessary to be a responsible, productive adult.
Before lockdown
My siblings and I piled out of the car when we got to the house, and eagerly looked around for any other cars that had already gotten there. We were glad the annual reunion hadn’t been canceled due to the new virus that was just stepping into the spotlight. We were excited for a fun vacation to relax and have fun with friends. Only two families had beaten us there. We unloaded as quickly as possible, wanting to explore the house we would be staying in for the next three days. Before we were finished another car pulled up, and everyone helped them lug their stuff inside too. Eventually, the cars stopped coming, and we were let loose to swarm the house. So many bedrooms to look at, so many stairs to run up and down, and, outside, such a big lake, and wonder of wonders, two kayaks! But they wouldn’t be pulled out today, so we reluctantly drifted off to pick rooms, investigate who had brought which board games, and try our hands at the table tennis in the corner.
The days went by far too quickly. We went on hikes, played lots of board games, and ate lots of junk food. Sometimes I just sat and listened to the adults. With Covid-19 just starting to demand the world’s attention, that took up a significant part of their conversation. Were masks useful? Was the impending lockdown a good idea? How much caution was necessary? I listened, wondered what would come of it, and left life to carry on as it would.
One night I and the other two oldest children started a game of poker. We set up after supper, and started to play. I, as Big Blind, put two chips into the center. Jane put in one for Little Blind and one for the rest of the bet, and Mark, as Dealer, put down two and turned over a card. So it began. While we played we talked and joked. Mark laughed that we were so bad at shuffling, we laughed back. We made mistakes, and dissolved into giggles. We were far too tired to take things seriously, and the hilarity mounted with every minute. Quite soon we were falling over with laughter at nothing. The adults, talking quietly in the next room, started laughing just listening to us.
It was a wonderful night, full of laughter and companionship. It was an island of calm between worrying, a dose of people to smooth the weeks of lockdown ahead.
I had known about Covid-19 long before the lockdown. I heard plenty of arguments for and against whether it would spread from China, how fast it would spread, and whether there were any measures that were actually likely to contain it. But while it has not been a fun time, I never really started to worry, before or later, and I consider that a blessing.
People or not?
I, as an introvert, found the idea of two weeks of not going anywhere quite appealing. When the government put the whole country in lockdown I was rather excited. All of my friends were bored and done after the first week, and really, I just didn’t understand. As a homeschooler (and in one of those weird homeschooler families that actually didn’t do much outside the house) I didn’t have to move online for school. I got to just be at home, do my normal school, and never had to think, “Oh yeah, we have to go to such-and-such place today.” As an added bonus, my (adored) aunt had to stay in our basement the whole time because she couldn’t get back to her home in China after the whole country shut down while she was traveling for Chinese New Year. It was fun having her there for so long. She retaught me how to knit, and I would go down to sit and knit with her while we watched things or just talked. It was one of my favorite parts of the year.
But not going anywhere did (eventually) affect me, because, for all of you reading this in a hundred years, outside interactions are important. I was in a big house, with seven other people, so there were people around if I needed a hug, and there were places to escape to when my siblings got too noisy. But I started to miss outside interactions, though I didn’t really realize it till we started going back to church a while later. Even walking into a big sanctuary that only had twenty other people in it, I could feel the difference between worshiping separately and worshiping together. I think Covid has made me actually appreciate the social interactions that before I had just taken for granted.
We spent a lot of time at the pool that summer. It was easy to forget everything happening while I was there, because I was used to there not being many people there, so spending the afternoon with the pool completely to ourselves felt normal. For a little while, I could just relax under the water, floating, in the calm silence. I loved to just lay there, limp and peaceful for as long as I could hold my breath, then stick my head up for a breath of air and go back down. The quiet was my favorite part. With four younger siblings that’s a bit of a commodity.
When I was cold I would swim around fast to warm up, or play games with my siblings. Often, when I was done drifting, I would swim down as fast as I could, then push myself off the bottom to
T
S
R
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out of the water.
Approaching the future
2021 was both better and worse than 2020. I was starting to feel fed up with all of the abnormalities to my life that Covid brought, and the anger that everyone had towards everyone. However, life was creeping back towards normal, and in the spring of 2021 I made an exciting discovery that made everything feel better – there were so many ways to braid! I think braiding may have changed the way I face the world more than anything else that happened during the pandemic. It gave me something to care about and get excited about and it gave me something to be confident in. It was a creative outlet in something I was both good at and loved doing.
In the fall I started dual enrolling during Covid rules. It hasn’t been easy – it’s hard to understand people wearing masks, and I hate not knowing what anybody’s face really looks like. That being said, it has been an overall fun experience, getting a glimpse of what college is like and discovering for myself that homeschooling really hasn’t put me at any disadvantage.
Maybe, when I look back at the hardships and the good things of this time, I will be able to have a better understanding of the world and how people are. And if I wish things had been different, Terry Pratchett can keep me looking at the future:
“You can’t say ‘if this didn’t happen then that would have happened’ because you don’t know everything that might have happened. You might think something’d be good, but for all you know it could have turned out horrible. You can’t say ‘If only I’d…’ because you could be wishing for anything. The point is, you’ll never know. You’ve gone past. So there’s no use thinking about it.” ― Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
Home by choice or by force (More edited than Tuesday, but not quite finished draft)
For a long time, only a small percentage of Americans homeschooled. Then, with the arrival of COVID-19 in 2020 and the whole country locking down in consequence, everyone got a chance to live a similar lifestyle for a couple of months. But while normal homeschooling families certainly found the lockdown hard, regular students and their families had a far more difficult time with the changes. Homeschoolers continued in their normal life with little interruption, while the rest of the country struggled through a completely different environment without any of the familiarity of their old schedules. With the stark contrast between the semi-orderly life of homeschoolers and the crazy mayhem of families who had never had to learn this way of life, homeschoolers went from confusing, rarely encountered oddities to sought-out advisers. The pictures below show the difference between families that are used to being constantly together and families still trying to figure out how to manage the craziness.
In this classic homeschool family, five children sit peacefully around a dining room table, no parent in sight. One older sister helps a younger one with her reading. Another paints at the end of the table. Two boys sit close to us. One is looking through a microscope, while the other works in his geology textbook. Afternoon sunlight filters through an out-of-sight window onto the wooden furniture. An open box of dominoes sits on the table between the boys, along with cups of water easily accessible all around, and a solitary black candlestick decorates the center.
The picture uses Pathos to make you feel drawn in. An urge develops to go sit with them in the silent companionship, to talk to the boys about what they’re studying, see what the older girl is drawing, sit and listen to the little girl read. It is very relatable to a homeschooler – a lazy afternoon, doing your own thing at the school table, but with everyone else.
In contrast to the peacefulness of Figure 1, Figure 2 shows a frustrated mother trying to focus in the midst of her stir-crazy children. A mess of (toys lies abandoned on the floor, given up in favor of the far more entertaining task of bothering mummy. The little boy wriggles around on the table the mother is working at, while her daughter chats companionably on the seat across from her. Morning light floods into the room from a big window filling the background, implying that this mother has a long day left ahead of her. Cleaned up and quiet, this could be a bright, cheery room. Instead, the light adds harshness to the already grating scene.
Pathos is, again, the main form of argument, but this time it gives a feeling of overwhelmingness rather than of peace. Again at a table, but this time a cacophony of unheard noise and untidiness and too bright light. Just one person trying to work now, the rest only unwanted distractions.
How did homeschoolers manage to keep their serenity in the same circumstances of spending so much time at home? Before the spring of 2020 introduced a mass lockdown, that wasn’t a relevant question. It obviously wasn’t that hard, if people chose to do it. But with the lockdown, people realized it wasn’t as easy as it looked after all, and started to seek solutions from experienced homeschoolers.
Figure 3 shows two contrasting pictures. In the top one, a group of awkward young adults is meeting conspiratorially. All wear tin-foil hats, blocking any mind-reading radio waves a government might be spying on them with. The second picture shows a father and daughter smiling at each other, both dressed as superheroes. The first picture has text reading “How homeschoolers were perceived before 2020” while the second reads “How homeschoolers are perceived now”. The pictures compare the misunderstandings and general assumptions that homeschoolers are socially incompetent, uninformed, and mostly crazy conspiracists, with the newer understanding that they are just good at a different kind of life.
A sudden change in environment took away many peoples productivity substantially. Students had to learn how to navigate online classes, work through the distractions of family around them, and adjust to having their whole rhythm messed up. Homeschoolers, on the other hand, while still struggling, had all of the materials they needed at hand, could continue to use the same schedule as before, and were used to working in the surroundings of their home. They had far less to adjust to, and were able to give pointers to the uninitiated, some of whom, as they managed to adjust, discovered that there were benefits to the different way of learning/working. Parents trying to work with little children in the house weren’t going to enjoy the experience, but maybe some discovered that they would rather be a full time parent with no distracting work, or just that a more flexible schedule was very convenient. Some parents discovered their children worked better in a different environment. Many people realized that if the craziness of being cooped up at home had the edge taken off, it was relaxing to not be rushing around.
Works Cited
Hess Un-Academy How homeschoolers were perceived before 2020 vs how homeschoolers are perceived now
https://hessunacademy.com/homeschool-quotes/
Accessed February 28
Homeschool Legal Defense “The Romeike family studies around a table at home.” Association.https://www.wired.it/play/cultura/2017/02/28/lhomeschooling-istruzione-domiciliare-scuola/
Accessed February 28
Kohei_Hara
Accessed February 28
Blog 8 My story
I, as an introvert, found the idea of two weeks of not going anywhere quite appealing. When America went into lockdown I was rather excited. All of my friends were bored and done after the first week, and really, I just didn’t understand. Nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to see. A wonderful life. But as the time stretched on I realized it was not such a good way to live, and I gradually grew to hate the name of ‘Covid-19’.
I did have a better experience than many others, though. I had been homeschooled all my life, and did not have much deviation from my normal schedule when the lockdown started. The kids who were unexpectedly dropped into it, though, were in for a nasty ride. Lots of things homeschoolers take for granted were unavailable to the new home-bound students. The most obvious difference was that it was a completely new experience for most of them, with new systems to figure out, a different schedule, and less accountability. For another difference, they had less access to teachers, and less help, rather than a caring teacher available all day at almost any time. They also often lacked personal desks or even a dedicated school area, which is unimaginable to me as an experienced homeschooler. Being able to move is a great aspect of homeschooling, but you need a home base to do your primary work at.
So I had many of the things that they lacked. Most of my life did stay the same. I was used to spending most of the week in the same house, and to being surrounded all day by my noisy siblings. But the few outside interactions that did have to get canceled were hard to adjust to. Trapped in the complete monotony of daily life, the days began to blur together. I became much less productive, struggling to complete anything in a reasonable amount of time.
Never really finishing my school affected the way I spent my free time. Most people started to read more during the Covid-19 lockdown, because they had more time, but I had the opposite reaction. I had been a huge reader before the pandemic, but throughout the spring and summer of the lockdown, I picked up almost no books. The days sped by too fast for me to take the time to find a good book, so it just did not happen.
But I did not feel upset about that at the time. As I said, it all blurred by. It was only later, after we were back to doing all of our normal activities that I really felt upset about the change Covid-19 had brought. Most of all, the disagreements. I remember a conversation between my dad and a Chinese friend before America was doing anything. COVID-19 had just made an entrance in her country, and China was starting to lock down. She was worried and my dad was trying to convince her that it was not as bad as all that. Lots of references to ‘the data’ were made, but both sides could use them to push their point, and neither trusted the other’s use. In the end, no one changed opinions, and everyone was less happy. Over the course of the next couple years there were many more arguments of the same nature with similar results.
That is what I most disliked about what Covid-19 brought. Disagreements, disagreements, disagreements. No one knew very much. Everyone read the same events differently. Everyone was tense, and uncertain, and worried. And whenever anyone talked with anyone else, all they could think of was COVID-19. It did not take long before I was done with listening to all the depressing, and sometimes angry, discussions.
I still feel upset about some of the changes the lockdown caused. Some of the immediate effects have gone away. I am back to reading more books (though still not as many as I would like!). But I am still a slower worker than before. And other things hurt more now. We had to stop seeing family we had been close to, they have since moved away, so we can not go back to how it was before. Friendships grew further apart because we could do less together. The hardest part is still listening to the arguments. I wish people would learn to get along. Sure, we all have different viewpoints. We won’t necessarily agree. But if more people were willing to argue in a more reasonable manner, without the certainess that the other side has no solid arguments, everyone would probably get along much better.