In your case, I would agree that school is best. My comment was not to criticize, just to point out that homeschooling isn’t evil. It works well for some but certainly not all. Not all homeschoolers are religious or anti-vaxxer nuts either. If we had homeschooled all the way through, my daughter would still be vaccinated. As I said, when we went to homeschooling we were not a stable thriving family. For us, homeschooling provided that stability, public education was drowning me; I couldn’t keep up with it and my work schedule. My daughter is a high functioning autistic so that didn’t help. We were constantly skirting truancy laws due to tardiness and I was cracking and becoming resentful under the pressure of trying to not get fired because I kept getting called to pick her up from school. I lost out on at least two promotions, more if you count the ones they stopped considering me for because I had “issues".
We all have different familial needs to thrive and we’re not all at the same place in life with the same challenges. My best to you and yours.
The pandemic only marginally affected us educationally because we didn’t have to make any changes. We were already set to learn at home. I really feel for the burden crushing most mothers though. I’m hearing a lot and I truly sympathize with what you’re all going through. To be fair, what you’re experiencing is not home schooling. It’s remote learning
- that no one chose and no one was prepared for, it was foisted on you with zero time to prepare.
- being done by teachers who are not trained to teach in a remote setting, again with zero preparation/learning time.
- Using technology that not everyone has/had ready access to and were expected to master overnight.
- Using a video conferencing platform that was expected to scale FOR ALL SCHOOLS countrywide practically overnight.
- demanded adherence to attendance policies without making allowance for technical glitches or for quarantine restrictions that may have eliminated contact with caretaking helpers.
- made no allowance for parents struggling to figure out how to work from home too and may need to share tech equipment with kids or are left with trying to figure out how to do both work and school for multiple kids in different grades at the same time.
- Still must fill all those hours to get funding and hold kids’ attention while trying to do it rather than going to homeschooling requirements that require only 4 hours of daily instruction averaged.
- No option to take a gap year and you should make it seamless or you’re failing your children.
Honestly, its horrendous just thinking about. I couldn’t do it, I would lose my job and my child is a mostly self directed teen at this point. Trying to pull this off with a primary school aged child just doesn’t even bear mentioning. And yet, that is what has been dumped on mothers and they are drowning because of it. Moms should have said NO!
Add to all of that, the daily uncertainty and stress because it’s an on again off again situation based on Covid-19 infection rates. There’s also no way to know if jobs will still be there for moms when this all ends. It’s nuts and devastating, but it’s not homeschooling.
There’s an anti-homeschooling political movement gaining momentum. The rhetoric is usually tied to anti-vaxxers, regardless of the reality that there are many many homeschoolers who are not anti-vaxxers or religious nuts. I’m concerned that politically this pandemic experience will be used to garner support to outlaw homeschooling. That would be unfortunate because what you are experiencing is not the homeschooling experience and it would do little to solve the problems of isolationists.
I do hope this ends soon and your kids can get back to school and that you soon to be sister in law decides to parent without the aid of conspiracy induced quackery.
