If an apartment building burns down and the residents have to temporarily live in tents, we don’t say, “Everyone’s camping now!” like it’s some fun, novel activity. The word “homeschooling” is already problematic enough without becoming entangled with the crisis version of online schooling many parents and students are suddenly facing. This compulsory activity of online assignments is mostly adding stress to our culture in this difficult moment.
Online school-at-home is a miniscule subset of the homeschooling world. It is an approach that very few families find sustainable over time. In fact, I have been running North Star since 1996 because I am certain that a local community center is the essential resource needed to support families to use homeschooling as a viable and inspiring alternative to standard schooling. If I had any confidence in online-schooling, I would have done something very different with my life the past two decades.
Online school-at-home is the worst of everything:
• Students don’t get to be with their friends
• Students face many boring, confusing, or irrelevant assignments
• The electives and extra-curricular activities that make school worthwhile
don’t exist for the most part
• Teachers and students have fewer personal moments and important
interactions
• Parents are expected to make sure their children do this work – the
homework conflict expands to fill the day as well as the night.
This external curriculum with assignments, deadlines, and grades is the world I chose to leave behind, and it has nothing to do with North Star and our larger world of self- directed learning. One current meme circulating on social media reads:
A lot of people are joking that everyone’s homeschooling now. Here’s your friendly reminder that homeschoolers get way more social interaction than this! I feel like this is going to reinforce the common misconception that homeschoolers are isolated and never see their friends. In an ordinary homeschooling model, there are lots of meet ups and collaboration and library visits and playground days with friends in the sunshine.
So just know that regular homeschoolers are also feeling cut off and isolated right now because this is not how we usually do things!
I empathize with parents who find themselves caught with their children’s school expecting them to make their kids do the school’s assignments. One Israeli mother vented her frustration in this video. Another parent shared her resistance in this New York Times article, I Refuse to Run a Coronavirus Homeschool!
A local superintendent asked me for my response to this resistance. I replied that I agreed with the parents. I sympathized with the position of the superintendent, but I proposed that the school declare all of the online assignments to be optional. The students do need the school and teachers to offer some opportunities through online learning platforms, and a range of video book groups, demonstrations, discussions, and other presentations would be valuable. Some platforms allow for socializing as well. It is the school’s role to offer connection and opportunity to its students.
I told the superintendent that the most helpful thing she could say to parents would be: “When this crisis is over, we will welcome back all of our students to our school with no doubts about placement or credits. We offer the schoolwork during the closure as an effort to be helpful and interesting. We will not hold parents or students accountable for the completion of this work.” There are dozens of reasons why schools can’t fairly assign credit to these online assignments, such as computer availability, learning differences, and parental support, just to name a few. I believe parents and teens would breathe a giant sigh of relief if we released this tension.
Furthermore, I suggested the superintendent ask students to send her messages telling her one interesting thing they did that day. The superintendent might create a website or social media page to share the responses. The school can be a vital hub to supporting its students in this difficult time.
We have enough stress right now. We are in uncharted territory, with no timelines to guide us. We don’t know how things will proceed in the near future. Schools can support parents by offering helpful and interesting activities for their children. We all need to help align children and parents to be on the same team of making it through each day, each week, and likely each month together with as much health and joy as possible. If we can achieve that for now, our children will learn plenty. We’ll figure out next week and next month soon enough.