Item

School Bells and Silence

Title (Dublin Core)

School Bells and Silence

Description (Dublin Core)

In late March, families in Portland, OR were told to prepare themselves for children to finish their school year from home. While my husband and I don’t have kids, we live across the street from an elementary school and enjoy hearing the children play as we go about our life at home. I loved hearing their laughter and giggles as they lined up outside of their classroom doors or the screeches that filled the air as they tore out of the doors for some much needed recess time on the playground. Then, on April 13, 2020, the laughter, the hollering, the clangs of playground equipment stopped. Up until that point, I could set my personal schedule by the sounds of that playground and now those sounds were gone. The quietness that remained behind was made even more eerie by the daily bells that rang from the school’s outdoor intercom system to signify the start of the day, end of recess, etc.. The tones that were barely audible on a normal day due to all of the commotion on the playground were suddenly a very loud, and real reminder that the world was different. It took the school nearly two months to turn off those alarms and every single day for those two months, at 8:25, 11:45, 12:15, and 2:25, those bells echoed throughout the neighborhood reminding everyone how much our world had truly changed. The alarm bells are now off and have been for nearly 6 months. It’s very quiet at the school. While we’ve all gotten used to the silence, every so often a family will head to the playground and, for a minute as the sounds of a child’s laughter drifts through the windows of my house, I remember what it was like before COVID and am suddenly slammed back into the reality of what our day to day lives have become. I can’t wait to hear those happy voices again - it will mean our lives are back to whatever new normal is on the other side of this pandemic.

Date (Dublin Core)

April 13, 2020

Creator (Dublin Core)

Patty Berend

Contributor (Dublin Core)

Patty Berend

Event Identifier (Dublin Core)

HST643

Partner (Dublin Core)

Arizona State University

Type (Dublin Core)

Text Story

Controlled Vocabulary (Dublin Core)

English Education--K12
English Home & Family Life
English Neighborhoods
English Social Distance

Curator's Tags (Omeka Classic)

quiet
sensory history
school
children
bell
distance learning

Contributor's Tags (a true folksonomy) (Friend of a Friend)

sensory history
remote schooling
remote education
quiet

Collection (Dublin Core)

Children
K-12

Linked Data (Dublin Core)

Sensory history submissions and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Date Submitted (Dublin Core)

1/15/2021

Date Modified (Dublin Core)

1/20/2021
5/9/21

Item sets

Covid 19
Arizona State University

This item was submitted on January 15, 2021 by Patty Berend using the form “Share Your Story” on the site “A Journal of the Plague Year”: https://covid-19archive.org/s/archive

Click here to view the collected data.

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