You Were Your Child’s First Teacher — You Can Do It Again
Teaching in the Covid-19 Era Isn’t What You Think
We’ve been sheltering-in-place for about a month now. How’s it going? Mixed in with all that lovely family time, are you also battling tears, tantrums, and slammed doors while you watch your kids melt down over their schoolwork?
This online thing is a struggle for a lot of families. A shift in perspective could help.
Kids are being put into situations that range from untenable to useless to actually detrimental. Distance learning can work, but it has to be designed well. We weren’t ready for this, and so we have a hot mess:
High schoolers with online schedules that mirror their school day - 6 hours of mind-numbing video calls
Middle schoolers in poorly facilitated classes online, plus way too much homework
Elementary students with chaos online and/or massive packets coming home via email
heck, even 4 year old Pre-Kers have packets being sent home
and I know Preschoolers who are ‘meeting’ online.
In this upended time of coronavirus shelter-in-place what we need is a sharp refocus on how kids learn and what they need. (Spoiler alert: not worksheets)
Here’s the tl;dr — it’s ok to opt out.
I want to help parents see that in this time of crisis, you do not have to accept what your kids are being asked to do. It’s ok to opt out.
If that seems too extreme — there’s a longer, softer version. Hear me out.
(A note about where I’m coming from: I hold a PhD in Learning Science, taught children’s cognitive development at SJSU, am a parent, & have been in education for 20+ years)
Our kids need something different from us right now
I invite you to let go of turning your life and your children’s lives upside down, trying to meet the requirements being placed on them by a schooling system that 1) was not designed for this and 2) had no time to prepare it thoughtfully. It is not serving your children.
I want to encourage you to consider that — as their parent — you have the right to choose what they need, especially during a time of crisis.
We now know that some version of shelter-in-place will be with us for a long time. Sometime in the next few weeks, schools are going to have to face the fact that in our forced rush to online schooling, we have created an inequity of enormous scale. Children don’t all have equal access to school-like resources at home, or even the same amount of physical space to do their work.
I believe schools are going to have to pivot big time, to deal with the fact that they can’t issue grades based on horrendously inequitable home conditions. Many universities have already announced that they will move to pass-fail rather than letter grade. K-12 schools will have to follow suit.
So if you have young children —
it’s ok to just stop struggling to meet school requirements. Your children’s health and sanity are far more valuable than any supposed educational benefit from worksheets at home. This is especially true for kids 7 and under, but frankly it holds right through elementary school. [Sure — if your kid is loving their new schoolwork, by all means continue. But if your household is a mess from trying to get your kids to do their work, stop and ask yourself if you really have to continue. Because the answer — the true answer — is no.]
With older kids and teens —
don’t take responsibility for making your child do their school work.
This may sound insane, or impossible, but it’s still true. There is very little that kids will actually be learning academically under the high stress of schooling at home in a crisis. If they buckle down, they might be able to pass their tests, but actually remembering any of the work? Very little is likely to be retained.
And anyway, look — this isn’t your classroom. You may be able to teach your kid their calculus (if so, congratulations, very few of us are). But that’s not actually your job.
Your job is to love your children and prepare them for life.
The two skills they need to be building
No matter how old your kids are, your job is to love your children and prepare them for life. Kids need two critical skills — and that’s what we should be teaching them during this crisis.
1. Learning how to find and make use of the resources they need
2. Learning how to entertain themselves in healthy ways
Rather than teaching your child their schoolwork while sheltering-in-place, teaching kids these life goals is a better use of our time, and theirs. Kids need to develop these critical capacities. More to the point, they need to learn how to develop them.
Finishing this week’s homework (or not) isn’t going to make a dent in those life goals. If your child is stressed out, if you and your family are being ripped apart over distance learning schoolwork, it’s ok not to do it.
That means letting go of trying to cajole your child to get all of their work done. It also means letting go of worrying about what this will do to their grades, their grade point average, or their chances of getting into college. It’s not that none of that matters. It’s that there is too much that matters more.
Because more than ever, we have to focus on our highest priorities — health, well-being, and a deep sense of connection. Because it’s from that connection that children’s learning really flourishes.
Life will change because of covid-19. We know that, instinctively, but we have no way yet of knowing what that will look like. Losing a few months of school — when everyone else in their class/grade/school/state/country is also losing that school time, will not ruin your child’s future.
If you can’t let go of it altogether, at least find this shift — become your child’s advisor on schooling, rather than feeling pressured to teach them. Help them learn how to direct and support their own learning.
That calculus homework? ‘here, let me google that for you’
Music practice? there’s a youtube video or thousand on that
Social studies report? there’s no end of trusted, reliable sources out there
And always, always a fail-safe option? Email the teacher. (That teacher, who by the way just like you, is also working from home, in a new environment, likely with kids of their own. That teacher who is doing their darnedest to still serve their students, with no preparation, no training for teaching online, and little idea of how much is coming at your kids.)
I realize ‘becoming an advisor’ is easier to say than do. We need to change our mindset, and we need practice. It can be challenging to know how much direction to give, and when to back off. The hardest part is often just giving them the space to build that capacity, zipping our lip while they figure it out, because they are not always going to do the fastest, most efficient thing. I promise you that any steps you can take to help your children foster the ability to find and use resources independently will be well worth the effort — now in their schooling, and throughout their career and life.
What to do instead? Prepare them for life
So if kids aren’t working on schoolwork, what am I suggesting they do all day while you work?
As a parent, your job is to maintain enough structure that your children can manage their job — which is to learn to be independently able to manage their lives. That definitely won’t look like ‘quietly occupied until lunch’ in a single step, and if you have littles, your high bar is probably an hour of happy preoccupation. But it is possible to build, and the reason for letting go of the school work is so that you can devote their learning time to it.
And you’ve got this. You already were your child’s first teacher, and it didn’t require worksheets, gold stars, or mining Pinterest for perfect activities. You didn’t even have to know what you were doing, because you didn’t think of it as teaching. Kids come into the world wired to listen to us and to connect with us — that’s the basis for learning our language(s) and how to interact with the world. You’ve already taught them before. You can do it again now.
Let’s start with what structures will serve kids in this time of upheaval, stress and change. It comes down to the basics:
• Routine — require that kids have some anchor points to their day
• Movement — everybody needs to move, every day
• Connection — make sure your kids have time to be heard and feel close
• Curiosity — let them pursue things of their own interest
Let these four drive the way you help your kids fill their time during shelter-at-home. Health and safety have to come first, which is precisely why that last one — curiosity — can’t be fulfilled solely by playing on digital devices. You will need to set up some family limits on screen time gaming and videos.
Ok. So if not just screens all day, then what?
You probably know the old saying Give a man a fish, he can eat for a day; Teach a man to fish and he can eat for a lifetime.The coronavirus version is
You can try to entertain your child; or you can teach your child to entertain themselves
It helps to remember that a generation ago, parents didn’t worry about entertaining their kids. You don’t have to either. But that probably means you will have to teach them how to entertain themselves.
This is the single best use of your time, and the one that will prepare kids for return to life after covid-19 shutdowns
Kids gravitate to things that interest them. Human beings are driven to learn. From our very first days of learning to talk and walk, we pursue what we are curious about. The only reason to limit digital tech is that its powerful interaction design can overcome our innate drive to learn.
Ask what your kids are interested in. If they’re stuck on getting started, take on that role of advisor and suggest a couple of directions. Help them get set up with a space to learn what they’re curious about. Depending on your child’s age, you’ll likely have go in bursts between check ins to see what they are finding/doing/creating/building. Start to stretch those out each day. You’ll probably have to experiment with how much/little supervision they need. But if you start now, by the end of shelter-in-place your kids can have built a new capacity for occupying themselves, safely and productively.
What to do now that we’re in this mess for the long haul?
To get your family going on building those two skills, here are some starters.
1. Talk to your kids. And I mean really talk. Hear what they are thinking. Hear what they are worried about. Share what you want this time to be for you family. Do this whether your child is 5 or 11 or 19. Children will rise (or fall) to the level of our expectations. Make what you want clear, and work with your kids to figure out a way to make that happen. If they aren’t being forced to do useless schoolwork, you may be surprised to discover how motivated they are to find things that interest them while you have to work.
2. Make a list of things you value and want to see your child do each day. Here are a couple of my favorites for the grown ups and older teens. For younger kids a simpler list is more effective. There are many out there. The best one is actually one that you make for yourself.
3. Celebrate the positive. Find any and every reason to notice and comment on good things. It might feel phony. It might feel over the top. It’s not. The research is clear that since we overfocus on the negative, we need at least a 3:1 ratio of good:bad just to overcome it. There is more than enough on the dark side right now, and we can not overdo an appreciation for the great and small moments that come our way.
4. Reach out to help. The best way to step outside of your own worries is to exert yourself to help others. Work with your kids to find something they care about and then to identify some actions they can take. Even for those of us under shelter-in-place rules, this can look like so many things –
• video chatting with older relatives to keep them company
• drawing a picture for a friend and mailing it to them (or text a photo of it)
•ordering food from a local business to support them, then posting a review with a thank you note
• donating to a favorite cause or organization
• adding people into daily prayers
We are living through an extraordinary global challenge. We’re accustomed to thinking that school is important to life success, and that our kids will fall behind if we let up. This unprecedented time in human history — pandemic in the age of internet connectivity — is giving us a chance to examine that belief. I believe we will come to see that what matters more is securing our children’s sanity and instilling their ability to navigate their time and their life.
So yeah, that tl;dr? Opt out now and beat the rush! Don’t worry so much about the packets, or the busywork, or the barrage of online classes. Start to move your child into self-directed learning. Help them learn to find worthwhile ways to entertain and engage themselves. And have fun with it.
