The biggest hurdle we've personally faced with home-learning has been getting our eldest engaged in the work set by his school; there's been teething problems but they now regularly put out work which is quite challenging, diverse and (I find) fairly interesting But it's clear that the work is significantly stripped down without that classroom context, which makes keeping him on track and working through challenges a greater time-commitment than I have available for him. If we weren't supported by family I have no doubt that he would have entirely disconnected from his education. In the UK we're looking at reopening in March, and there's even talk of having students repeat a year which I feel is going too far in the wrong direction. There's been a significant loss in learning but the answer to that won't be to hold students back but rather, I feel, push them forward. Edit: More relevant is discussion around continuing education digitally which is interesting to me, we've seen instructions now from the school on how to access the Google Classroom from games consoles. It feels like if we're at that point -- then it should be clear we do not have the infrastructure to do this long-term in place -- yet. I'm also keeping an eye on the safeguarding impact as that has been wildly out of control without the schools being able to students each day, have those informal discussions and just -- listen -- to the kids.
Our kid's school went hybrid back in like October. If you wanted to send your kid, you did. If you didn't, you didn't. This basically meant that all the parents who had to work sent their kids to school. Fundamentally, it meant that the disruptors who couldn't handle distance learning weren't distance-learning anymore and it's been a total win for my kid. But we're super-privileged. I ran my kid through the nerd test at the school district to see if we wanna go back to public and the dumpster fire of our school's IT implementation is a cigarette in a dixie cup compared to the landfill fire that is the public school district. I can see this being a massive leg up my kid has on everyone else and while I feel guilty, I also feel extraordinarily thankful. On the one hand, the kids aren't really getting sick. On the other hand, the kids are a total vector for everyone else to get sick. And on the one hand, our clinic is half-vaccinated already. And on the other hand, if my kid brings a new strain home we're losing about 80 patient visits a week, for two weeks. Nobody wants to talk about the fact that prior to 1940, one in five kids even went to high school. The fact that we're doing this hook-or-by-crook halfass approach pretty much gives lie to how vital it all is anyway - yeah, basic education is important but what we emphasize is more political than scientific. I dunno. I'm a cloistered elitist and so's my kid. At least she's empathetic. I didn't start this fuckin' fire and I"m doing what I can for everybody else but fuckin' LOLbrooks and his "remember how we all marched for black lives matter" take is about as quintessential as they come.
