It's Not Usually Like This

Life is Strange Right Now 
Life is strange right now and I think there will probably be a number of long-term effects of this weird quarantined time. Maybe more people will work from home and more meetings will just be emails in the future! Will teachers be paid more, or schools be funded better? Will many people change careers, having realized either the brutal fact that they are essential (and that their whole family is therefore subjected to greater risk) or non-essential (and that they've lost their job)? Will more people become more self-sufficient and plant gardens? Will we appreciate and patronize the arts more? When things speed back up again, will we go a little slower than we used to, having experienced how it feels to be less on-the-go? In a spring with no Little League or birthday parties, while going to the grocery store is a big scary outing, life is so different right now for everyone.

I've noticed the word "homeschool" being used a lot more often now. But I've started to cringe a little when I hear both the positive and negative takes on homeschooling. Talking with more and more friends with kids and soaking in the reality of their situations, I know that most families are not in fact experiencing what homeschoolers usually experience. So many families are figuring out day-to-day a new version of school at home, working while supervising school assignments. Regular working parents are feeling guilty as they try to do their own work and worry that kids are getting too much screen time (in the typical ways but also to access their school work), that their kids are ignored much of the day, that their kids don't have enough work from school to do, or that they as parents don't fully understand the goals/expectations of the learning that needs to happen. And the teachers I've talked with are figuring out how to fill their new roles day-to-day as well; none of them decided to be an elementary school teacher with "distance learning" on their radar...and most of them are struggling to work from home while supervising their own kids, too.  

I bet it's nearly impossible to do your own work and help your kid at the same time. But even so I think parents maybe need to take the reins a little more and see themselves as their kids' teacher for a couple of months. You know your kid best and you are qualified to do that, and entitled to because of this situation. Maybe it takes a shuffling of the schedule, changing when you work if you can so you can have an hour or two a day to focus on them and then maybe not worrying too much about how productive they are when you need to be focused on your own work. Maybe weekends, when parents are more available, become school days and the kids get two weekdays completely off while you work. I think maybe the way to survive this without going crazy is to worry less about figuring out what the teacher wants/expects, and more about taking the chance to understand your kid as a learner and helping them focus on individual ways they can grow. I know there aren't ever enough hours in a day as a parent but right now might be the best chance for you to really see what it is about math that they are good at and what is a struggle. Their teacher simply can't be as on top of their progress now. Maybe kids' former teachers, with their abundance of resources and experience, can be viewed more as consultants. I'm not saying kids shouldn't do their work from school. But the buck stops at the parent now. Homeschool has a lot less wasted/transition time, so it's not surprising if they are "done" with the concrete assignments sent from school long before the school day is over. If you're feeling the school isn't giving them enough work or it doesn't feel authentic or challenging, assign them other things to do based on what you know they need to work on. Or now could be the time to push kids a little to delve into their own interests, do their own research, set and pursue individual, not necessarily school-work-related, goals for themselves for the day or the week. If you're worried you don't know the academic expectations, go to your school district site and click around to try to find out a little about their curricula in different areas. Or you can look up the Common Core Standards online so you at least have a gist of the types of expectations at their grade level, such as what are they supposed to be able to do as a reader besides just to read for x minutes a day (but don't get bogged down by individual standards because that could be overwhelming). And because teachers are a little lost right now too and just wanting to be helpful, I don't think parents should hesitate to email the teacher and ask what the goal is in a certain area, or ask them to give you an outline of where the math work (or other area in question) is headed for the year. I think it's incredible how people have just adjusted with no prep time to a whole new normal. I've heard that some families are struggling and I think people should know that they're not alone. It's hard to be a homeschool parent with a blindfold on and parents shouldn't have to be. 

Life is different for homeschoolers, too. 
I am no expert on homeschooling, having done it less than one year. But I also wish parents could hear this: sheltering in place/quarantine homeschool that we're all living now is not normal homeschool life. Homeschooling when it's a choice can be anything you want it to be and in my experience, it is amazing. We've lead a full and varied life this year, full of serious schoolwork and also sports and activities and lessons and outdoor adventures and making new friends and connecting with old ones and volunteering. We see concerts and plays and go to museum events and homeschool classes and we've even toured a furniture factory. We had some really exciting outings planned for this spring that I thought would really bring to life some of the learning we've done. But that's all been cancelled, of course. We're still learning at home. I understand what the learning goals are for my kids and am not having to take the lead from a remote educator. But in every other way, for homeschoolers, too, life is very different now. Our lives are so much quieter, so much more isolated, than it has been all year up until now. I feel like now we are for the first time living up to some cliches about homeschoolers-- like wearing sweatpants all day because now we in fact never leave the house. If you were considering homeschooling in your future, please don't make that decision based on this very strange time we are living in right now! 

Our experience two weeks in
We just finished week two of being at home all the time. The kids have not left the house. I personally have left once for groceries. The first week of this I was just feeling so grateful with how relatively unaffected our family is. We're okay. My husband can work from home. I was already homeschooling. There are lots of new routines and dynamics to work out, but it's working out. During week two I started to feel a little off-kilter sometimes. I'll say here that we are a family of introverts. We like being home, and having downtime. But, there were days in this past week that I felt so tired for no good reason, when I just felt sort of blah all day. The number of children I was homeschooling had doubled from one to two, but that wasn't the sole reason I felt a little less patient that usual, a little more easily frazzled without knowing why. I really like being with my kids, so I felt badly feeling this way. I think it was because I was going one pace all the time shuffling around the house-- never trying to get out the door on a timeline, not having the car rides to preschool and various outings to break up the day, not having things like dance class to go to where I didn't have to be "on," but got to just observe. What parent has downtime anyway? And I chose to homeschool. But I realized that even as a homeschool parent I used to have more built-in breaks or at least changes of pace that kept my energy up. What I felt lately made me think of the odd exhaustion that slowly wandering around a museum can cause.

When I homeschooled for the past six months with just my fourth grader while my preschooler was in preschool, we allowed plenty of interruptions for fun enriching things, but we mostly followed a pretty academic schedule. We had converted our loft to a classroom of sorts where we did most of our work and kept all our materials. Schedules and external structures help my son and it worked for us. It's funny because not long ago, before all these changes, I had on my to-do list to look into what homeschooling multiple kids could look like and to decide what was best for both my kids next year. I hadn't gotten all that figured out yet (and I like to plan things like that before leaping in) but I was suddenly trying it out, ready or not.

Our nice little physical homeschool space has been taken over by my husband and his computer and multiple monitors. We now store academics by subject in piles at one end of the kitchen table, or wherever we used them last. We have a more flexible schedule right now, out of necessity. Our schedule is less of a schedule and more of a developing routine now. I do some things together with both kids, some planned and some spontaneous like when we had to go out the other morning to build a snowman in the fresh March snow we'd just gotten overnight. I have some one-on-one time with each kid, and my older has to be a little more independent because there's only so long my 5-year-old can be. I have some goals for each kid but I never know exactly how it will go or what will happen when-- it unfolds a little more organically now. Our day doesn't fit into neat boxes any more. That's probably a good thing, although sometimes I miss our previous homeschool life and I'm still getting used to this new one.

I thought attending (actual) preschool was important socially, and I can't replicate the community she had in preschool, but having my preschooler home now, it's easy to be a little more intentional with my time with her at home in thinking of the things she is ready to learn. Just the other day, she wanted to play with her cash register in the morning with me while her brother was at work in the other room. I started talking about the different coins in the drawer and then I mentioned the heads side and the tails side. We started flipping the coins and soon we were playing a game she was really into where one of us was heads and the other tails and we counted who got more.

I give my fourth grader a list of priorities for each morning, his more independent time. I like that he has taken ownership of his work. He stretches, wanders away between each task, and it's neat to see him find his own rhythm. He'll take breaks by working on an intricate dot-to-dot page for a while or repositioning his current Lego scenes, or playing with his sister. He'll strategize about which academics to do first and why and that is a type of thinking that our previous schedule didn't really foster. One day recently he was delighted that he'd gotten his list checked off early and had extra time to just play. He has seemed more grown up, more self-driven, more able to manage his own focus with this increased leeway and options to navigate. I enjoy seeing him choose to lie on the floor or sit on the couch or at the table, near the rest of us or in another room, with or without headphones, depending on the task and time of day and mood, and then getting to see the logical result of how his decisions worked out for him.

On the plus side
While life is so different and more challenging right now, there are silver linings.

Life right now is certainly simpler. There are no busy weekends and no deliberating about what to do or not to do each weekend. We stay home, bake bread, do puzzles, play games, read books. There are no backpacks or packed lunches. We have no plans and are not in a position to make any. I don't need to strategize on which nights to plan the quicker dinners. No day is any busier than any other. Every day is a blank slate, if a bit stir-crazy at times.

Also, thank goodness for Facetime and Zoom and other amazing technology that connects us. We have gotten together with friends and family online often over the last few days. We've had nice face to face chats with grandparents and friends and their young kids. In some cases were are not just maintaining connections but making some that we wouldn't have if life was normal. We Facetimed with an uncle yesterday and got a tour of his southern backyard and garden, and also with a cousin in D.C. We love those guys but they just aren't family we typically call up on the phone. We have plans to call them again, show them the progress of our melting northern backyard. Just last night after we got the kids to bed, we met up through Zoom with seven other couples we are lucky enough to be friends with and played a really fun drawing game online with them (Drawful) and then we just chatted for a couple hours. It was a great Saturday night.

I've learned big changes can be healthy. Any huge change creates the space for so many new things that you didn't plan or expect. This happened for me when we made the enormous switch to homeschooling. I think, if we allow ourselves to see it, this is happening to many of us now. I had one friend share that they are working their way through all the Marvel movies with their kids at night since they'd done away with bed times and wake up times. What a special memory those kids will have of this time I bet. At breakfast over a week ago I pulled out a set of cards we have but have never really used that each show a famous painting and give some interesting information about the artist or artwork on the back. I asked the kids what they noticed in one of the paintings in the set, what it looked like to them, and we read all the information on the back about when it was painted and where. We've found ourselves pulling out a new painting card in the same way each morning since, and quizzing them on the growing stack. In the past, breakfast was sometimes rushed, and this just wasn't something we would have done before, but it's a new family routine that we are all enjoying now.

I think the most important silver lining in this is to remember the kid perspective. I am sure a lot of kids are super sad about not seeing their friends and no sports. But amid all the stress, frustration, anxiety that no school (or no work) may cause adults, don't assume the kids see this "stay home" time that way too. I vaguely mentioned to W that I'd been thinking about how different right now is from how our school year had been like so far, and I asked him what things he could think of that were different right now. There were all sorts of things I thought he might mention that I knew he must be disappointed about. But his entire response was, "Well, Daddy's home now for every meal and he's always on time and everything just feels complete with all of us here." I was so glad I asked because I realized, the bottom line to him is, this is a cozy time where his home just feels complete in a way it hadn't before. So there you go. If you are grieving or annoyed at all the ways life is not normal now or you find yourself a little lost, your kids may see and remember this period of time very differently.