Children are neither a liability to be feared nor a gift to be wasted. They are a trust, to be handled with care. The education of our children is, in all honesty, our responsibility and not the state’s. For so long, we have let the ‘experts’ teach our children. Now it is our turn. No one is here to tell you it will be easy, or that it will be fun or that it will be a happy filial affair. But I will tell you that in the end, it will all be worth it. As an educational consultant, I have parents reaching out to me daily with questions about homeschooling as over 45 million students nationwide must look elsewhere for their daily education.
Two weeks ago, alternative education, was a minority fringe of American families taking education of their children as their personal responsibility. The lockdown and closure of the entire educational infrastructure due to novel corona virus has completely flipped the paradigm where millions of families are now required to homeschool – in one form or another.
For California’s Bay Area, Gov. Gavin Newsom mandated a shelter-in-place order that forced any open schools to shut down as well. This week as families started to settle in and accept a lengthy spring break, the cancellation of mandatory state testing, Gov. Newsom made another jaw-dropping statement, ‘California's schools will likely stay closed for the rest of the academic year over coronavirus concerns’. Educators, parents and officials alike are stunned and trying to cope with this prediction that may very likely become reality.
While families are traversing their new realities, and adapting to different and unusual ways of working from home, teaching their children and living twenty-four hours in the confines of the 4 walls of their homes, the fact remains that this is something most people were unprepared for. Most families had not considered homeschooling and were quite content with the way schools were teaching their children. Of course, the complaints on test scores, the amount of homework, the bullying, the lack of rigor, the culture of ‘school’ and more are fine when one is a backseat teacher, but when put at the forefront of their own children’s education, the rules change. Now, parents are signing petitions to raise teacher salaries, sending thank you emails to their children’s teachers and creating memes and videos that show how grateful they are to the teachers who take their children in five days of the week!
Google searches on homeschooling, virtual schools, online learning and distance learning have spiked since last week, and almost every educational organization and learning space is trying to convert itself into an online version of itself. Colleges and universities have gone solely online causing the Pearson website to crash on the first day of shelter-in-place, due to heavy traffic and Zoom CEO made a statement offering free Zoom access to all K-12 schools. Khan Academy even came up with a homeschool schedule to deal with kids at home.
As a bay area mom who has homeschooled four kids, and consulted with hundreds of families globally on how to homeschool, below are some suggestions to not just survive, but thrive homeschooling. Let us start with the basics.
You are not a teacher and your home is not a school. So, don’t try to pretend it is. The school is a system- you are a person.
o Don’t try to teach all the subjects and train the athlete and create the art projects and preach the religious studies and be the nurse and the cafeteria lady and the janitor too.
o Don’t go around re-arranging furniture to mimic a school house and create spaces for each member to be plugged into a different device with headsets and microphones.
o Don’t worry about your children falling behind during these times or getting ahead to blow the rest of the competition out of the water.
o Don’t focus on the million websites that confuse you on what to teach when and how and print a billion pages of printables for your child and bookmark every website that you read is educational.
o Don’t do a 180 degree turn and go from all in-person to all online classes because that is what everyone is doing.
o Don’t give up on all learning because it is online and run to the hills or the forests either.
o Don’t fret over the lack of socialization and friend time right now.
o Don’t worry that you haven’t done enough or covered everything. Remember, what takes the school 8 hours to do, you can accomplish in 4.
The one main advice I give parents considering homeschooling is not to let fear drive your decisions. You have an extraordinary opportunity to ‘try it before you buy it’ with homeschooling this year! You get to spend time as a family and truly get to know your children. Before you can homeschool your child, you must de-school them. This is the de-schooling phase right now. The focus should be on family, health and collective sanity.
Before you know it, it will all be over and the schools will re-open and life will resume back to normalcy. But this extended spring break may never happen again. If you are healthy and together but constantly worried, you will never make any pleasant memories to remember this time by. The key to thriving, not just surviving this event, is balance. Be balanced in your approach, in your time and in your expectations. This pandemic is here for a reason – perhaps it is to bring balance back into our lives and our world. Perhaps when the unpolluted air above China, the cleaner canals of Venice and the reconnected families of California all look back at this event, we will look back with gratitude. Gratitude for all that we gained and that things did not worsen.
For now, teach your children to be better than they were when all this started.