10 Lessons from Homeschool
Here we are after 14 weeks. A logical question would be “What have the kids learned?” I will not be attempting to answer that question today because:
- It’s boring
- The answer is: Not much.
Rather, today I will be figuring out what we as parents have learned from this experiment.
Lesson # 1 – Homeschool each day is optional
It started Week 3. Weeks 1 and 2 sucked, sure. But my wife, Lauren, and I never really contemplated skipping portions of the assigned schoolwork.
Then Week 3 came and our kids, Liz (7) and Matt (5) were playing nicely together one morning. Lauren was about to interrupt them. I cut her off:
Me: Would you get up from a hot blackjack table?
Lauren: What? We need to start.
Me: They’re rolling. This is life experience – working well with others.
Lauren: You just want to go back to bed.
Me: Yes.
So we let them play all morning. Sure, it got violent as it often does. But after we cleaned their wounds, we sent them back out to the playing field.
Lesson # 2 – English is impossible
Magic E, Suffix ED, fizzle rule – all fine if there weren’t 20 exceptions to every rule. Oddly, this has no correlation to reading. Kids can read well long before they can spell.
Spelling though: 😱 In Week 2, Liz flipped out that I was wrong about the spelling of “Nation”. The poor kid just learned the SH sound and now those monsters were hitting her with “tion” making the “sh” sound. 1 <———- CLICK ON RED BOXES
And then there’s writing:
Look there is nothing PG about teaching your child how to write lowercase Ps and Gs. There’s a whole freaking box and even a dotted line in the middle. They couldn’t figure out a way to fit the lowercase P and G in there? It just had to go below into the section below?
Lesson # 3 – If they act weird, let it happen
It’s weird for all of us. So if your son wants to dress for homeschool like this let him:
If your daughter wants a chocolate chip sandwich for lunch, fine.
The wardrobe got especially inappropriate for homeschool as the weeks went on.
Lesson # 4 – Teachers and Administrators were just as clueless as us
At first, there wasn’t enough work. Then people complained and they adjusted but gave too much work. So they settled on giving some optional work to satisfy the parents who cared. 2
Also, no one seemed to read the room correctly:
Week 1, they had this welcome video every day. At the end of each video, there was this nice calm woman who did breathing and yoga with us. She said she would be with us to the end. Then Week 2 came and they booted her because – fuck that – no one was relaxing while the world was on fire.
Liz’s teacher also was kind of in la la land:
Lesson # 5 – Even on days you do the work, the schedule turns to shit
For example, Week 4:
10:30-11:15 – School
11:15-12:15 – Break
12:15-12:28 – School
12:28-12:38 – Meltdown
12:38-12:45 – Find melted down hiding child
12:45-2:00 – Brush teeth, Lunch
2:00-2:15 – Argue with spouse “We should do more with them”
2:15-2:30 – Apple with mound of peanut butter
2:30 until Bedtime – No idea but it happens
Actually, what really happened after 2:30 was Lauren would put earbuds in, listen to romance novels and picture Harry Styles naked, while I put on the news and watched our society crumbling.
The kids definitely did nothing after 2:30, yet they somehow managed to go to bed later and later every night.
Lesson. # 6 – There is nothing Spring-like or Break-like about Spring break during a pandemic
The absence of homeschool one week should have made life better. Oh, no sir. This is a lose-lose. You lose the workload, but you gain large chunks of day that you need to figure out what to do with them. Matt upped his usual daily “I don’t know what to do!” from 8 times to 22 times.
Halfway through, Lauren and I broke and audibled to “everyone fend for themselves”. When the seven days were up, time had passed but it was like a video on static for the whole time. I remember light and darkness. I went to the bottom of my driveway once. Or was that the week before Spring Break?
I do have a vivid memory of the kids and me consuming copious amounts of pistachios.
Lesson # 7 – Brainstorm different ideas to make your life easier
Liz read this box one morning during breakfast:
Another brilliant idea I brainstormed with Lauren:
Me: Maybe if we taught them different languages, they would get along better. Like only English for Liz and only Spanish for Matt.
Lauren: They already speak English.
Me: But if we only spoke Spanish to Matt from now on he would forget.
Lauren: When I agreed to marry you, your intelligence was a factor. I feel like you misled me.
So I settled on this: I would consider sabotaging Matt’s progress learning to read. If he learned, I could no longer continue to skip large chunks of books during bedtime stories.
Lesson # 8 – You will eventually take on your personality as a student
We started out strict with homeschool: me with Liz, Lauren with Matt. Slowly we evolved into ourselves as students. Lauren worked hard and she had Matt doing extra credit. I was a waste product in school and Liz eventually did the bare minimum with me.
Yes, Liz got the short end of the stick.
Lesson # 9 – After Day 50, everyone starts acting strange
First, we moved homeschool outside. Good choice: a little music on; some Vitamin D; homeschool was like 10% more tolerable.
I still struggled to concentrate though. In a google meet, the teacher asked Matt if he knew what a quilt was. He looked at me and I wasn’t paying attention so I just stayed silent. So his teacher then told us what a quilt was and I’m sure she now thinks I have a limited capacity.
Even teachers started acting weird. Liz’s teacher always posted teaching videos. As we got late in the year, though, she began whispering in the videos for some reason. We couldn’t figure it out. Did she just have a baby? She wasn’t pregnant back in March. Does her family not know she’s a teacher?
But she couldn’t out-strange me:
Then on Day 65, I just started crying to strangers on Twitter:
Lesson -# 10 – Give teachers ALL the money
All the stimulus money. All the unemployment money. All the PPP loans which I still don’t understand.3
Teachers are the only reason the next generation will succeed because, frankly, if this went on for much longer, us parents would go postal.
In closing:
Oh wait, sleepaway camp is cancelled.
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P.S.: All kidding aside, I’m proud of how my kids did amidst difficult circumstances. Matt is really smart yet temperamental. Liz struggles with spelling but reads a mile a minute. They have their strengths and weaknesses like every other kid. And sure, it’s fun to make fun of the whole experience because it was so unusual. Ultimately though, this time we had with them is something I think we’ll look back on fondly when they’re off in the world ignoring our text messages.
