Where did I leave my church? (And other questions from isolation)

Life continues to be rich and full in the Miser Family Household.  This week has been particularly rich in tricky questions.   Here are four of the questions I came across this week.

Question 1. Where did I leave my church?
That's one I asked myself last Sunday as I went up to my Command Center, and for a moment I couldn't find my laptop (which is how I was going to join in our Zoom-ed church service).  Nowadays, I'm joined in "church" by Prewash the dog, N-son, and I-daughter.  There is a lot more knitting and sewing going on during church these days than when we meet in the sanctuary (not to mention more dog hair).

Answer:  on the CD shelf.  (That is, fortunately, I managed to find my laptop in time for the opening prelude.)

Speaking of sewing during church, here's . . .

Question 2.  How do you make a unicorn face mask?
This is a question my sister asked me, when I told her I was making one for A-child.   Ironically, now that we're all at a distance from all people, distance seems to make less of a difference in who we talk to.  I've texted with my sisters more in the last few weeks than I've texted for months with them.  It's kinda nice connecting with them so much.

Answer:  I made the unicorn mask out of one of her favorite (and now too-small) shirts, which her mom carefully dropped off on my porch.

After I made the masks, my husband appreciated the excuse to get on his bike, and he delivered the completed masks back to K-daughter's doorstep.  

Who is that masked child?
Whoever she is, she's adorbs!

Question 3: How do deal with cheating on a midterm during a pandemic?
Ugh.  This was actually the thing that consumed much of my week.  This third question comes with a lot of subsidiary questions, like: What is my role in contributing to student stress by giving math tests while my students are freaked out by global events?  What kinds of mathematical concepts should I really hope my students ought to be able to learn when educational institutions everywhere are tossing content from courses like ballast from sinking hot air balloons?

I'd tried hard to set up as humane and comforting a way for students to take math tests as I could.  And yet a small but significant minority (a subset of those who had been struggling all semester) suddenly became the best students in the class with answers that looked suspiciously like ones you could pull from computational math sites.

So I spent a bunch of the week wrestling with how to deal with this situation with integrity (after all, the majority of my students obeyed the midterm rules), but also without dumping yet another stressor on students who were already obviously really stressed.

And now I'm working on developing a completely different kind of final exam, one where online algebraic computational software isn't a help.

Question 4:  What to do with our stimulus check?
I have no idea why we got one; frankly, I think we're far too rich for that.  And yet, as I sat down to my church (oops, I mean, my bank) tonight, I saw that we had that highly touted IRS deposit. 

All through this whole pandemic, I've felt unreasonably fortunate for many, many reasons, and so there's a way that getting this money just irked me.  My kids are grown so I don't have to homeschool them while trying to teach my own classes; I'm sitting on a basement of home-canned food; I'm healthy and have a secure job and a bunch of money saved up.  My biggest problem these days is dealing with whether or not my students are using the internet when they shouldn't have, and that's a pretty mild problem compared to the scariness that so many other people are facing.

Answer: Send it right back out to our local United Way's COVID-response fund.

And that's the news from our household, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  Here's hoping you're safe and sound, too, with or without your unicorn mask.