There were weeks in 2020 when one of my children, just a few years into elementary school, would fall asleep crying almost every night, listing all the things they’d lost and the months, which then turned into a year, they’d never get back. (I’m not being specific about which child; if this ever embarrasses them they can each say it was the other.)

Sometimes my kid, who’d been joyful before the pandemic, would say, “I wish I wasn’t alive.” That was usually when the bedtime lament turned to Zoom school, which made my child sob harder than anything else.

My children are luckier than most, but privilege isn’t a bulwark against mourning. As we emerge from the worst year of our lives, I care a lot more about their lost happiness than their lost learning.

So I was apoplectic, perhaps unreasonably so, when the New York City Department of Education announced on Tuesday that it was replacing snow days with “remote learning” days for the coming school year. It seems like callousness bordering on cruelty to scrap one of childhood’s greatest pleasures in favor of a rehash of pandemic life.

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