Along with all the other inherent stresses imbued in a global pandemic, parents right now are finding themselves thrust into a scenario they never wished upon themselves or their children – schooling their kids at home. It’s not for the feint of heart, taking responsibility for the education of your kids, but then neither is parenting. Having kids is probably not what you ever thought it was gonna be: it’s way harder and way better.
About twenty years ago, Rick and I made the decision that we would willingly take on schooling our kids at home. There was no virus threatening our safety, just three little boys testing our sanity. It’s actually a little amusing to me right now that the government is telling parents they need to do this, because it wasn’t always a sanctioned choice. I never was a vigilante-homeschooling mom, insisting that everyone should do it. But I did always maintain that it was an option, like public school or private school were other schooling choices out there. And for us, at the time, it was the right one.
That’s the way you have to look at parenting in retrospect, whether giving grace to yourself or your parents: you do your best with what you know at the time.
I admit that I’m relieved that my kids are graduated and responsible for whatever the heck they want to learn now. And COVID-19, with all it’s social distancing challenges, has really put parents schooling their children at home to the test: no playgrounds at “recess”, no fraternizing in the hallways except with your enemies (oops, I mean siblings), no sports, no clubs, not a lot of anything to let off steam except screens and backyards.
It was a different time and a different place, but for what it’s worth, here’s what I learned while homeschooling my boys – with the perspective of being past it all.
One of the best things I heard at a homeschooling conference once was that educating your kids was like creating a hammock for them. You need to make sure they have the basics to support them – through the next level, through regular life – but there’s always gonna be a lot of holes. If kids only get the basics – like the original trifecta of Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, that’s a pretty good hammock. It will hold up. And there’s no way you can ever fill all the holes anyways.
Secondly, what you “routinize” is what your kids will get used to and what they will also do, for better or for worse. Whether it’s schooling at home or working remotely, you get more done if you stick to a routine. Plus, more beds get made, teeth get brushed, fish get fed and books get read. It takes a lot of muscle to build a habit but then after awhile, it just becomes the new normal.
Thirdly, you can’t predict what your kids will remember. While I went off the deep end teaching my boys lots of history and reading them great stories, they don’t remember a lot of the specifics. Frankly, neither do I. It’s pretty scattershot, really. But we did give them learning “hooks”, meaning that if they encounter an idea or some history or a person that we learned about in school, they have a place to hang that knowledge and build upon it. You can’t always remember stuff from first encounters. And now that they are in their twenties with their own Google machines in their hands all the time, they can look it up. (So can I.)
Fourthly, they will remember what was fun and unusual, and mostly, that’s the stuff that families are made of, not school. There were lots of things my boys do remember because we enjoyed them: nature hikes, reading all the Harry Potter books as a family, theatre performances, road trips, music lessons (well, maybe not the lessons, but the knowing how to play afterwards), holiday traditions, sleepovers at Gramma’s house, backyard hockey rinks and road hockey in the summer, crazy youth group events, house renovations. (Oh, wait, maybe that last one was just fun for Rick and me.) And if you think about it, what you remember about school when you were a kid was probably less about what you learned and more about what you did and who you did it with and especially if you had fun.
I’m willing to bet that the COVID-19 classes of 2020 won’t remember a heck a lot of what they learned “in school” this year. Which is not to say that it’s a futile exercise: schoolwork teaches your kids how to learn and it builds their repertoire and frankly, it just keeps them a little busy. But it’s pretty much a guarantee that they will remember all the weirdness, and hopefully a little bit of the wonderfulness, that a quarantine can offer. I mean, you’re in it now: might as well make lemonade out of them lemons. And while you’re at it, your kids can learn math and experiment with taste buds and have (lemonade) drinking contests and then they can wash the damn dishes. Which is also a good skill they probably won’t learn in regular school.
Home, after all, is where they first learned to walk and talk and cut their own hair somehow with child-safe scissors. Maybe they can cut yours now until we get our hair salons back. It could be fun. Just sayin.