With most of the country’s kids out of school due to the coronavirus, you might be wondering what to expect from your first swing at homeschooling. Well...it might look a little something like this:
6:50: Your child who’s never up before 7:30 on a regular day is ready for “school”. You are not yet wearing pants. You encourage your kids to get dressed, enjoy their Aldi Toaster Tarts, and binge-watch early episodes of The Simpsons while you get your shit together.
9:00: Time for math. You display a visual timer app that lets them know when this 30-minute block of learning will be over. Your kids still ask you “how much longer?” every 90 seconds.
9:15: Your third grader attempts to mansplain perimeter vs. area to you with total confidence, even though he’s dead wrong about it.
9:20: Your first and third graders repeatedly challenge your knowledge of basic addition and multiplication. You repeatedly remind them that you somehow made it all the way through grad school. Your multiple degrees mean nothing to them. They know you couldn’t operate the Nintendo Switch with a gun to your head. That officially makes you a moron, as far as they’re concerned.
9:25: You remind your third grader to show his work on his fraction word problems. He nearly stabs you with his pencil and tells you he doesn’t need to (even though his answers are NOT right).
9:27: Your first grader gets in a fight with his math app because it’s making him physically wind a virtual clock from 2 pm to 12 am using only the second hand. You laugh inside at the tedious nature of this task.
9:30: You create a Jeopardy game to practice math facts at the end of each math lesson. Your kids love it and look forward to it, but after the first 3 days, it becomes a battle to the death that ends in tears and butt-hurt all around. This is why you can’t have nice things.
9:45: You let the kids loose in the yard for 15 minutes and tell them they can't come back inside until they've collected 10 pine cones.
10:00: Time for reading. Your first grader raises all kinds of hell because he can’t access his school’s reading app. You sign up for a free trial and tell him the problem is solved. The next day, he whines about it again, totally forgetting everyyyything you told him yesterday. You use hand-over-hand to help him physically open the link that’s directly in front of his face.
10:45: Your husband (who is working from home) institutes a “family walk” through the neighborhood once a day. The kids act like this is child abuse, then instantly forget what they were pissed about the second they take off down the greenway on their scooters.
11:15: Time for writing. Your third grader insists he can’t do his bi-weekly journal entries because he left his journal at school. You reacquaint him with loose leaf paper and tell him to move the fuck on. Your first grader makes his arm go limp and moans like it’s infected with gangrene because you asked him to write five whole sentences with his spelling words.
12:00: You encourage your kids to make their own peanut butter sandwiches at lunch time. You set up their materials and watch them go to work. The end result is a hot mess with more peanut butter on the counter than there is between the bread slices. You praise your kids for their work—but you now understand what your mom meant when she described things as looking like “a dog’s dinner”.
Also at lunch time, you encourage your kids to cut the tops off their own strawberries. The success of this exercise gives you false confidence. You prematurely advance them to cutting their own apple slices next. Your third grader nearly gives himself stigmata trying to drive a butter knife through his palm.
12:30: Your husband begins offering a weekly music appreciation class during lunch. He plays Beatles and Rolling Stones records for the kids and talks to them about the British Invasion. The third grader gets it. The first grader passes the time tearing off pieces of his fingernails and stowing them in his sock.
1:00: PE becomes a daily “core subject” to which most of the afternoon is dedicated. This course is self-led-learning that consists of 3 main activities: (1) pushing each other on the trampoline (2) repeatedly launching balls and frisbees over the fence into a neighbor’s yard and (3) something called “crab soccer”. This is where your kids literally drag their asses through the pine straw while “crabwalking” and kick each other in the bits under the pretense of trying to reach the soccer ball. This sport eventually evolves into “froccer”, which is, essentially, soccer with a frisbee. You watch from the kitchen window, storing up your sanity.
2:30: You offer “specials” in the afternoon to keep the kids off the IPad when they’re sick of PE. Courses include painting with frayed brushes leftover from their preschool years (aka, “Art”), showing them how to break a string when tuning a guitar that hasn’t been touched in 20 years (aka, “Music”), and “Foreign Language”--which is basically everything you say, since it takes them several repetitions to process any directions you give them.
3:30: You serve up snack, marking the official end of your loosely defined school day. You strongly encourage outside play instead of device time until dinner—but no longer give a fuck at this point if they listen or not.
4:00: Emotional volatility is high. Your first grader cries projectile tears like you just brutally murdered Santa when you ask him to put his socks away. Your third grader has been informed that “why” questions in the form of a complaint (ex: Whyyyyy do I haaaave to set the table???) will no longer be acknowledged. You lose your shit on the regular. Your reaction to back-talk goes from zero to rage with no intermediate levels. You decide to plot each other’s “freak-outs” on a bar graph as tomorrow's math activity, hoping to generate some self-awareness regarding how ridiculously irrational everyone’s behavior has become.
4:59: Dinner is served. Because why the fuck not.
5:30: You hang out and enjoy each other's company--or stay out of each other's way until bedtime.
Fridays: These are the 21st-century version of “movie day” after Teacher’s Night Out for Margarita Thursday. This means straight-up online learning apps and no attempt at direct instruction. "School" for the day lasts roughly...45 minutes. After that it’s just a countdown to Beer:30, wine o’clock, or whatever you might be looking forward to as a reward for keeping your kids reasonably occupied and engaged for one whole week. Good thing they’re going back to school soon…
PSYCH!!! This is only the beginning.
Happy Homeschooling, Everyone!
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