As a qualified teacher and after having spent a lifetime in education I fully sympathize with parents who are struggling to successfully manage home schooling of their children. This article from Time magazine highlights and discusses what many parents are facing.
Frustration is mounting as more families across the U.S. enter their second or even third week of distance learning — and some overwhelmed parents say it will be their last.
Amid the barrage of learning apps, video meet-ups and e-mailed assignments that pass as pandemic home school, some frustrated and exhausted parents are choosing to disconnect entirely for the rest of the academic year. Others are cramming all their children’s school work into the weekend or taking days off work to help their kids with a week’s worth of assignments in one day.
“We tried to make it work the first week. We put together a schedule, and what we found is that forcing a child who is that young into a fake teaching situation is really, really hard,” said Alexandra Nicholson, whose son is in kindergarten in a town outside Boston.
That stress is only compounded for families with multiple children in different grades, or when parents work long hours outside the home. In some cases, older siblings must watch younger ones during the day, leaving no time for school work.
California high school teacher Susan Binder said the technology can be frustrating and imperfect. Many of the apps elementary schools must now rely on — with names like Seesaw, Epic and IXL — were only intended as a tool to enhance classroom learning or share students’ work with parents.
“This is a very crude bandage we’re putting on a very big wound. We’re just doing the best we can,” said Binder, who is using Zoom and Google classroom to teach economics, AP history and government at El Cerrito High School, near San Francisco.
Around the world, parents and schools are facing similar challenges. In Italy, the virus’ first epicenter in Europe, schools have tried to adapt to online learning with a spotty success rate. In some parts of Italy’s hard-hit north, many schools went weeks without assigning lessons, and one parent said her high school aged daughter went two months without a math lesson.
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