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At some point in the past nine months, I heard a teacher on Zoom say the name of one of my teenage twin boys during class attendance, but I did not hear my son respond. As I walked past him, I suggested that he should let the teacher know he was there.
“Mom!” my son said, perhaps a little more loudly than a mother would like. “I know how to do attendance!” I can’t exactly recall the mind has a way of forgetting but he might have also suggested that I exit the room. Immediately. I do know there was a moment of silence, and then the sound of his teacher’s voice. “Hello, Mrs. Burdick,” he said (using my son’s last name). “How are you? Thanks for joining us today.”
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On Aug. 11, Sarah, a cheerleader at Hickman High School in Columbia, Mo., turned 16 and passed her driving test. Triumphant, she arrived home to a Happy Birthday sign in the front yard, a treat of beignets from a Creole restaurant and the news that her 17-year-old brother did not have pinkeye, as their mother initially suspected, but Covid-19. They all did, it turned out: Sarah, who asked to be identified by her middle name to protect her privacy; her brother; their 85-year-old grandfather; and their mother, a nurse practitioner who started having trouble breathing two days after her son tested positive. Sarah had thought she would first take advantage of her license to drive herself to cheerleading practice; instead, she used it to take her mother to get a coronavirus test, when her mother realized she was already too weak to drive herself. Then, a week later, Sa