One of the goals I've had since before our kids were born was to travel together as a family when they hit a certain sweet spot (able to handle intercontinental air travel; not yet adolescents). Now that we are in the window period, I've had to reconsider how to accomplish the same goals without leaving home.
On the up side, sheltering in place gives us a great deal of time together to spend as a family.
On the down side, sheltering in place gives us a great deal of time together to spend as a family. You can have too much of a good thing.
My imperfections are magnified under the current circumstances:
- My patience is less than what it should be. My fuse can be short and I am quicker to anger.
- I can be resentful of intrusions on what used to be my personal time.
- A sense of apprehension about inadvertently becoming a liability to my family, bringing illness to them, hangs over everything.
Despite these shortcomings, my family needs me more than ever - to teach.
The kids, whose teachers are struggling to adapt to the realities of remote education, find themselves attending online courses 3-6 hours per week, leaving them bored and restless for the balance of that time. So we supplement their school work over their objections, they resist, and we grow frustrated. We're physicians, and while our profession can at times incorporate an element of teaching, this is not our innate strength.
We often act and feel in a contradictory manner that reflects our ambivalence. We want them to become internally driven, yet we push from without when that does not happen.
My wife and I are proud products of public education who paid a premium to live in an area with highly regarded public schools, yet we have never felt more frustrated at how poorly those public schools are responding to this epidemic. Private schools in the area have risen to the occasion by creating 6 hour per day curricula for their students - understandably, since dropping a large sum for online instruction is hard to justify unless you are receiving premium service.
The public schools, in contrast, have displayed wide variability. On one end of the spectrum, standout teachers are recording supplemental video lectures, taking attendance, giving quizzes, providing office hours and continuing classwork at the same pace as before. On the other end, more than one teacher has repeatedly been a no show for 20 kids gathered for a scheduled zoom class.
I realize that mastery of online teaching is an entirely different beast than most teachers have trained for, but with two months to adapt, outright absenteeism cannot be attributed entirely to a dearth of online skills. A few teachers do not have class on Mondays or Fridays, creating three day weekends where non previously existed.
Adding insult to injury, the principal has written parents to inform them that they should expect students to be learning at 1/3 to 1/2 the pace of the material they'd been learning previously. Perhaps I'm missing something, but I'd be embarrassed to publicly announce that children entrusted to my care would be intentionally taught less material, at a slower rate than their peers.
My mom spent her career teaching in public schools. I started out as a public school champion. But perhaps some variant of Gasem's home schooling plan might be in our future.
What I'd attributed to the schools all along might very well have been a function of the students. Get enough driven students from advantaged backgrounds with parents who are involved in their kids' education collected in a single district, and the schools will shine.
The experience has left me feeling mugged by reality (with apologies to Irving Kristol, who coined the phrase with a very different meaning).