Pandemic Schooling

Pandemic Schooling

In 2020, this website had a section on Pandemic Schooling – a wide-spread situation that arose when COVID-19 descended on the country. Pandemic schooling is now a thing of the past, and although consequences remain, it no longer is a critical alternative learning method worth discussing. So, I am posting this information for historical integrity but removing the Pandemic Schooling page from my website.

What is Pandemic Schooling

In the spring of 2020, COVID-19 forced many schools to close. Parents were home with their children, often trying to work a full-time job and help schoolteachers online teach their children.  As a mom who homeschooled her children, I'm here to argue that the "schooling" my two granddaughters were doing each day at home because they couldn't attend the brick-and-mortar building, WAS NOT HOMESCHOOLING. In an effort to preserve an unpolluted idea of what homeschooling is or might be, I suggest we refer to what has happened in our homes in the spring of 2020 as something we might call Pandemic Schooling, not homeschooling. Below, three moms in my study talk about pandemic schooling.

Nina expresses her ideas about it:

The thing that I have found interesting is that the people who know that we homeschool, who do not homeschool, have caught themselves when they start complaining about their kids having to be home doing school. They hesitate, then say, “Oh, but you homeschool.” And I’m insisting, “But it’s not the same thing. You are not offending me, because it’s not the same thing, at all. At all!! You would enjoy homeschooling, I think, if you were actually homeschooling. But you’re not. You’re trying to hold down a full-time job and do what the school is telling you to do. It’s completely different.

My sister is an attorney with a very demanding schedule. Her kids are my kids ages, and she was complaining about all this busy work the kids are doing all day. They have to do PDF worksheets. I’m thinking do you hear yourself? That’s crazy. There’s no reason those kids have to do that. There’s no reason they should be scanning and submitting busy work. That’s insane. It’s only stressful because of the format. You could be working from home on your briefs and have them learning independently and it wouldn’t be stressful.

Janna also talked about life during the pandemic:

I hated them not getting to do the things they wanted to do.

Our family of four has homeschooled for both boys’ entire lives. The boys turned fourteen and seventeen this summer. Our day-to-day lives had been very busy outside our home before the pandemic, so the effects of sheltering-in-place have felt very restrictive. There were some really positive family things happening – music recording, big laughter, and not ever having to rush off somewhere because cool things were happening here. And I’m so thankful that the boys have each other.

Both boys had attended a lot of live music events and participated in a variety of group music, lessons, and recordings. The lock-down allowed for listening to and playing music at home, but not attending live music events will probably take a long time to recover from.

Eva had something to say as well:

Honestly my message to parents about Pandemic Schooling was why don’t you just let your children off the hook. They could go for these last three months of the year not learning any of this stuff and still be fine. Why are you torturing them and yourself? All these parents are having this horrible experience trying to force their kids to do this stuff. People were creating this hell for themselves and complaining about it. Honestly if I was a parent with a child in school, I think I would have felt inclined to tell the teacher we couldn’t do online school.  I just felt really bad for everyone. Everyone was so locked into the idea that school is so important and whatever is on this curriculum you’ve lost three months; it can’t be let go. To me that was just insane.