2020 Learning: Elementary Kids
There’s so much to complain about right now, both personally and globally. But when I can, I like to focus on goodness, too. We all know online schooling is far less than ideal. There’s no getting around it. Even my friends with cleaner mouths than mine consistently use the word “shitshow” to describe every option for education we currently have as Americans. Let your kids go to school, and you’re an irresponsible monster who is putting both kids and teachers at risk. Keep them home, and the kids will just be staring at screens all day with no social interaction. Plus the working parents can’t work, and the whole economy is going to tank because you are paranoid about a glorified flu. Any hybrid version of learning…what’s the point? We’re all screwed anyway, and everything sucks!
Did I sum that up well?
In our home/school district/city, school started back up this week, and it’s all virtual for the foreseeable future. We’ve been told it will stay this way “for at least the first month.” I’m assuming it’ll be more like January before anything changes. Whatever the case, we’re rolling with it for now. I’ve told both the kids that we’ll give it a try, see what the school has to offer and how that feels and works for us. If it’s a total failure and/or the kids are miserable, I’m open to homeschooling. (My only concern with that is taking away funding from the public schools, so I’d have to figure out how to work around that.)
If you back up a few months in our story, you’ll know that we were planning to homeschool this year anyway, while we traveled. And then COVID screwed up our travel plans but also threw us into a sort of insta-homeschooling kind of situation earlier than we’d planned. While I didn’t love that forced pivot, it did give me a lot of insight and practice into what I could expect from trying to actually teach our kids. (Or, let’s face it, teach the one kid. The big kid has already surpassed me in math and technology so there wasn’t a whole lot I was helping him with.)
Anyway, the spring was nutso. I truly think our elementary school did an amazing job with the (no) time and tools they had. The middle school was not quite as impressive, but I think middle school is the most ridiculous time of life and learning anyway, so whatevs. They did a good job in an impossible situation, too.
I was picturing fall looking a lot like the spring, but it’s very different. I think the pros and cons of virtual middle school learning deserves its own post, so for now I’ll focus on Story’s experiences in week one. And I’m narrowing that down even further to focus on the good things I’ve seen, because we all know how terrible and crazy the underlying structure of online school is.
So. I’ve explained to our kids that I am okay with this being a somewhat throwaway year for academics. I don’t mean I don’t care about what they do. I want them to try. I want them to keep up. I want them to learn the basics. But my instincts told me that they will be learning so much about the world, viruses, technology, the economy, politics, and countless other parts of life this year that I’m not going to fret over them waiting another year to really grasp the Pythagorean Theorem or “i before e except after c” or whatever. They’ll get to all that eventually. In the meantime, their brains are soaking up a lot. All of ours are. And look at how hard it is on us grownups, right? Our brains are full, like that old Far Side cartoon.
It turns out that my instincts were right, and watching Days 1-3 of this virtual school year proved it. There’s the obvious learning curve with the technology alone. Story begins each school day with a live video stream of her principal doing the morning announcements. I wake her up 15 minutes before this, and she eats breakfast while she watches. (Side note: I don’t like to judge other parents, but those of you getting your kids up at 7am for an 8:15 day that starts inside your house are CRAZY. Unless you have to leave for work or something, in which case you do whatcha gotta!)
After that, she logs into her classroom chat meeting and joins her teacher and classmates. Just like in the real classroom, they talk about their days, sing Happy Birthday to anyone who is celebrating theirs (and ohmygod is that the worst sounding thing ever), and try to connect in any ways they can.
Story’s “school” for virtual learning.
Story’s teacher is so great. I hear her reminding the kids throughout the day that we all need to be patient with each other and ourselves, that we’ll get through this, and that we’re all learning together. She also seems to have the same basic idea about not wanting the specific academics to be an additional stressor on the kids for now. She encourages activities that are as much about practicing with the software program as they are about math or writing. I don’t sit right next to Story all day or anything, but I’m around enough to hear how things are going. I love that she takes this approach. Yes, some of the activities are also math- or writing-based exercises, but she’s not yet pressuring the kids to finish every problem on the page. (I do have to tamp down my nerdiness on this and listen to her, because I really, really want all the unfinished items to be finished! But she’s right, and also I’m not the 3rd grader so I need to CTFD on that.)
I do have to listen to the poor teacher say the 2020 quote of the year about 50 times a day. “Could you all please mute yourselves?” And there are a few little boys who cannot resist un-muting themselves to sneak in a big fart sound here and there. But overall, here’s the thing that I’ve noticed above all else: these kids are learning PATIENCE.
I’ve now had two 3rd graders to raise. I know a lot of 3rd graders. I’ve volunteered in the classrooms for years. Seven and eight year olds are wiggly, wild, interrupting machines with all the interest in themselves and very little in what others have to say. And now we have kids who are required to stay muted until called on, then un-mute when it’s their turn, and (in our case) count to 5 in their heads before the un-muting actually happens. Then they get their chance to speak, and then it’s back to listening quietly.
The teacher has to do this too. On day one, nobody had figured out there was a delay on the mute/un-mute function. So there was a lot of “Bueller? Bueller?” kind of questioning at first. But by the afternoon, the teacher had started to ask, pause, hear the answer, repeat.
And the kids are doing it! They’re listening. They’re paying attention. They’re taking turns and being PATIENT. Not all of them, all the time. But most of them, most of the time.
I am so proud of them! They are these fun little creatures who are missing their friends and having to navigate the shitshow with zero control over the situation, and they’re doing it!
Am I happy this is the way things need to be for them? Of course not. But to see the way they are adapting, to see the way they are learning this new form of communication, and to see the respect and patience they have to develop to succeed at this…it’s really something special to discover. And, for better or worse, I’m fascinated to see how this shapes who they are as they grow up. I mean, did any of us Americans ever picture our kids wishing so badly that they could go to school? That always seemed like a third world country mentality that our kids would never understand.
Quarantine won’t be forever, but this time and these experiences will be a part of all of us from here on out.
This post turned out to be much longer than I’d intended, but I really want our educators and kids to know that we see how hard you’re working, and we love you, and we’re proud of you. No doubt there will still be many days of failures, frustrations, and tears. And we all hope this is over soon. But in the meantime, keep growing and learning without worrying about the specifics of what you’re learning. We’ll get there when we can.
