Pandemic Homeschooling Dal Segno

I complain about not being able to find the gifs I want often enough that I should probably learn how to make them. Lately, as I try to navigate pandemic homeschooling, I’ve wished for a gif of Rosencrantz telling Guildenstern (or was it the other way around?), “We’ve been here before.” The sense of circling back on topics already covered has been growing on me the longer pandemic homeschooling drags on. Lately, it seems that we’ve been homeschooling dal segno.

Curriculum Dal Segno

In musical notation, dal segno means to return to the point in the score marked with “the sign” and begin playing again from there up to the coda or all the way to the end. If I’ve counted correctly, the week that started May 4 was the eighth week since the schools closed and the seventh week of home-based instruction. 

My daughter’s elementary school had been preparing for a possible two-week closure before the district suddenly shut down, so she came home with a packet of work to get us started right away. My sophomore attends a newly opened high school with a one to one computer program. So even though the rest of the district had a delay based on access to technology, her teachers were already used to a certain level of digitization in schoolwork.

Then, two weeks after the schools closed, the district made ongoing education mandatory instead of optional. Both sets of teachers ended up reassigning a lot of the same work during the next two weeks so that everyone who didn’t do schoolwork at first could catch up.

Over the next few weeks, the teachers got better at video editing their lessons and coordinating due dates. Last week, the district began to dictate certain lessons to provide more standardization. My fifth grader’s Literacy class had just finished up a unit on persuasive writing and was set to start a new unit. But the first district-wide, required literacy lesson was on – persuasive writing.

Other Repeated Motifs

Both sets of teachers obviously worked hard over spring break. They came back ready to manage recurring Zoom meetings with consistent links – until the district mandated Microsoft Teams. 

My daughter’s math teacher is responsible for teaching three grade levels of math. He’s been making great videos since the very beginning, alternating between fourth and fifth grade concepts. My daughter says the review has been helpful because she forgot a lot of stuff from past years. But before the pandemic, she was learning sixth grade math. Now she only does 6^th grade in Khan Academy on the days there aren’t new math videos – usually two days a week.  

After using a dry erase board to set up a daily plan proved exhausting, at the end of the first week of homeschooling, I spent a day developing a weekly calendar. When we came back from spring break, the teachers had coordinated due dates, which they sent out every Monday. I had to rework the calendar system to fit the new assignment rhythm. Last week the teachers introduced a yet another pacing calendar based on the district’s new standards.

Privileged Whining

This may sound like I’m complaining about the district. But I understand why they’ve made all these decisions, and why they can’t act as quickly as I or my students’ teachers can. They have to serve tens of thousands of kids in a city with some of the most extreme racial and economic disparities in the country. In their position, I would probably make the same choices.

Fortunately, I don’t have the unenviable job of figuring out how to educate nearly 54,000 kids. I only have to worry about two of them. I know that frustration with school curriculum always being two steps behind is only a problem because we are so incredibly privileged. We live in a neighborhood with good schools and really skilled teachers. We have access to technology, and kids without special needs who can work diligently, unsupervised for most of the day. We are not distracted by worries about how we’re going to feed and house our kids because we still have our jobs. Those jobs let us work from home while directing schoolwork, instead of requiring us to be physically present or even to isolate from our kids when we’re at home (as many healthcare workers must do).  

But it’s still my responsibility to make sure my two kids learn as much as possible. So the question becomes one of balance. How much attention do we pay to the assignments from school? When is it better to just strike out on your own? Most real homeschoolers have a parent dedicated to the task – how do you find the time to develop your own curriculum when you both still have to work? Do you just accept the slower pace of academics and focus on different types of learning? I feel like the answer may have something to do with projects instead of daily lessons, but I’m still not sure what that would look like. In the meantime, another week of pandemic homeschool has flown by. But that’s okay, I’m sure we’ll circle back around to the question soon.

Covid Count

On Saturday May 9, the Seattle Times reported 6,863 confirmed pandemic cases in King County, with 487 deaths.