17 votes

Here’s what one week of online school is like for my seven- and five-year-old kids, explained in a comic

2 comments

  1. acdw
    Link
    Wow -- this is nightmarish. I'm barely holding it together just going to work and coming home and going back to work. I'd absolutely lose it if I had kids.

    Wow -- this is nightmarish. I'm barely holding it together just going to work and coming home and going back to work. I'd absolutely lose it if I had kids.

    4 votes
  2. kfwyre
    Link
    My heart goes out to you, parents. You are in an impossible situation. I'm lucky that I work with kids who are developmentally at a place where they can function mostly independently. They know...

    My heart goes out to you, parents. You are in an impossible situation.

    I'm lucky that I work with kids who are developmentally at a place where they can function mostly independently. They know how to work a computer; they can read instructions; they don't need their parents' constant assistance and redirects. Remote learning can "work" as best as it can for them, but the lower you go below this age the more nightmarish it gets. Young kids simply do not have the executive functioning skills to be able to allow them to go through school in the manner being asked of them, and parents are having to scramble to fill that insurmountable gap.

    There is a lot of pressure towards the reopening of schools because it gives parents relief, and believe me when I say that I want it to happen too -- provided it's safe. Unfortunately, the issues that have hampered our responses to COVID at every level are playing out once again in school districts. I asked (again) about our plan for the winter in a meeting last week, and one of my administrators sardonically and defeatedly said: "the plan right now is to have kids on buses with all the windows open when it's ten degrees outside". This administrator is as frustrated as I am with the transparently broken plans being handed down from above them.

    2 votes