Pandemic Homeschool Diary Day 3

My third day as a reluctant homeschooler was all about the digital resources. By then, many of my daughters’ teachers had figured out some strategies for connecting to students and reached out. Unfortunately, it was also the day I kind of hit a wall. Here’s how it played out.

A Bad Beginning

We were in Hong Kong when Frozen 2 came out, so we missed it. On Tuesday evening, we stayed up a little late to watch it and it was – not good. But it did at least present the valuable cliche of “doing the next right thing.” I tacked it on to my now-daily admonition that the girls need to ask themselves what would be useful and do it before interrupting my work.

Anyway, we stayed up late on Tuesday, so Wednesday started a bit slow. We decided the spoonful of sugar in the closed school medicine would be sleeping in anyway, so we established a new wake up time of 8:30 with school starting at 9, and this was the first time that was a challenge.

Self-Starting

The challenge was even greater because the girls had to do it themselves. I have a regular conference call at 8:30 on Wednesdays. I wrote up a schoolwork list for the kids on a dry erase board and left it on the kitchen table. They had to figure it out for themselves.

After my call, I had just enough time to change and set up for my first remote yoga class. The studio I’ve been going to for years, OmCulture, started streaming their regular class schedule on Zoom last weekend, so they had the kinks worked out by the time I joined in on Wednesday. The girls chose not to join me.

It wasn’t the same as going to the studio – my living room is barely big enough to do yoga without running into furniture, it was really hard for the kids not to interrupt me with questions, and all the people walking past my living room window made me self-conscious. But it was the most I’d moved since my last in-person yoga class on Wednesday, and was still a pretty good workout. So I plan to “go to yoga” again on Friday.

Home School High School

Chemistry and Computer Skills

While I was still in yoga, my daughter had a conference call with her chemistry class. She uses a school-issued laptop, which has Zoom blocked, so she had to download the app on her phone and move around the house to find a strong enough signal to stream the video call, but she figured it out almost entirely by herself. She got to check in with her chem teacher, got a little bit of an idea how chemistry would sort of struggle on, and got a new assignment to work on (up to now she had just reviewed for a cancelled test).

Time Management and Computer Skills

Thinking that I would try to replicate it at home, I asked her to print out her daily school schedule. I didn’t mean it to be a learning project, but it ended up being her first Excel spreadsheet. She learned how to create headers and change cell sizes instead of skipping columns.

Geometry

She spent about 45 minutes doing geometry worksheets. For English she read two more chapters from In the Time of the Butterflies, by Julia Alvarez and selected quotes for her “quote log.”

Home School Fifth Grade

Science

The fifth grader had a bit of trouble with science. Her teacher had emailed parents links to some of the Mystery Science video units they do in school. I had forwarded her the first one, which she had already done in school. When I had time, we watched it together and I realized that these are not really designed for kids to do completely solo. I made up a new assignment to basically repeat the outdoor portion of the project. Then I asked her to write up her guesses, google the answers, and find out if she was right. Next time, I’ll watch the video with her.

Writing

Her science teacher gives the kids weekly writing assignments, which they are supposed to self-grade using a rubric that parents are also supposed to use. I made her grade the assignment she did earlier in the week, but forgot to do so myself. I also had her practice cursive by rewriting the whole thing – it was supposed to be copying, but she got creative and made changes.

Social Studies

I saw that her teacher had included two maps of the U.S. in her packet. One had states and their capitals labeled, and one was blank. We decided to save the blank one for testing. I thought memorizing off the map would be boring, so I downloaded a U.S. geography quiz app for her to study with. Her sister decided to download it, too.

Home

All those cobra and locust poses on the living room floor inspired me to pull the couch out from the wall and clean under and behind the space where it usually sits. We cleaned the couch while it was out in the middle of the room and washed the window and window sills.

A metal rack next to couch contains board games and our electronics charging station, and next to that another rack holds shoes. We pulled those out to clean the floor underneath. Then we dusted them and their contents and put everything back neatly. It turned out to be a huge project. Our charging station had turned into a stockpile of obsolete handheld electronics. Sorting the recyclables from the resaleables and the still-in-use took ages. And we still ended up with a bin full of unsorted cables. But at least we fixed our entryway feng shui.

Free Time

Once again, the high schooler submerged herself in Switch (I think it’s the new play-in-place version of Pokemon Go that has her hooked) while the fifth grader played with the cat and the front yard swingset. While I wasn’t looking, she also managed to finish the book she brought home from school: Wish by Barbara O’Connor (reading level T). She started the next book on her school reading list, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo (one of my personal favorites, reading level U).

After dinner, we got nerdy with Morse Code again. This time we downloaded apps – one with quizzes to help you learn and another that flashes a light and makes the movie Morse Code sound when you press a button.

We also learned about the fallacy of broad generalization in Bad Arguments, our favorite Ada’s Technical Bookstore purchase.

After the kids went to bed, we snuck into the basement to watch an episode of Crash Landing on You, my new favorite K-drama on Netflix.

Freelance

My work productivity could be described as “fuck all” today. After my conference call, I never got back to work. By the time I did yoga, got the mystery science thing sorted, and cleaned the dead tech, I just could. not. even. So I didn’t.

Sometimes that happens. I don’t mean to be precious about my work, like writing web articles requires the muse. But some days the neurons don’t fire and work that normally would take me two hours takes six. I’ve learned to recognize those days, and now I don’t fight them. One of the primary advantages of freelancing is that as long as I make the deadline I can work when I can work. Usually, a steady 6-10 hours every day is the best way to meet deadlines. But sometimes you need to take a day off and work extra hard the next day.

I streamed an old Daniel Henney K-drama on my tablet, cleared blackberry from our overgrown former vegetable beds, read a few chapters of a cheesy romance novel and got caught up on reading some neglected publications. Tomorrow I’ll hustle.