The Glass Is Half-Full
When I’m asked how North Star is coming along this fall, I struggle with starting with whether “the glass is half-full” or the “the glass is half-empty.” We have a lot of redeeming and inspiring moments each week, and I think we are making the best of a difficult situation. In fact, I can enthusiastically report that a solid number of North Star members are very involved with our program and having an interesting year so far. At the same time, there are a number of teens who find taking classes online to be a challenge, and who are only marginally involved with our activities. We have a number of current members choosing to suspend their memberships this year because they don’t see themselves interacting with others in our online programs. Meanwhile, our two days per week of in-person activities this fall are superb for morale and socializing, though we expect them to end for the most part at the end of October due to the weather..
The average member has a routine that might include the following activities:
- 1-3 self-chosen classes online per day with North Star or another center in our Liberated Learners network. The North Star classes include courses named The Great Matters, Harm and Punishment, Election 2020, Books Without Bounds, History of Rock and Roll, Bread-Making, and Systems of Oppression, among many others.
- 1-4 one-on-one online tutorials per week, such as Spanish, Guitar, Hi Set Prep, Algebra, Geography, or Graphic Design.
- 1-2 half-days in-person at North Star, with classes such as Earth Science, Art Projects, Lawn Games, Geocaching, Hiking, and much more.
- A weekly advisory meeting with a staff member to discuss projects, goals, and current personal news.
- A weekly online community meeting with North Star members and staff.
- Individual academic projects such as reading literature, working on math, or exploring topics of interest.
- Other activities in the community such as volunteering, working, or engaged with other organizations.
This sort of schedule and routine provides responsibility, freedom, and serious possibilities for our members. My weekly conversations with each of my advisees are inspiring and hopeful.
For example, one member, Alyssa, just started her first job at a major retailer, is actively and joyfully learning to drive, has maintained a vegetable garden, recently built her mother a stand-up desk at home, and is generally cheerful going about her days. She has a math tutorial with North Star prepping for her Hi Set exam, and she attends a North Star online class called Sex is a Funny Word. I miss seeing her in person, but she’s actually quite content with her current life. She’s not unique: plenty of our members are cobbling together some semblance of a routine even as they miss spending large amounts of time with each other in-person. Many of our teens and families are demonstrating resilience, creativity, and curiosity as they adjust to life in the pandemic.
The Glass is Half-Empty
Well, I don’t want to get too carried away. This outdoor-only, social-distancing lifestyle supplemented by Zoom doesn’t appeal to everyone. There are at least a dozen teens who are taking a year off from North Star due to COVID-19. These are teens who feel unable or unwilling to engage with our online offerings, and find our limited and short-term in-person gatherings to be insufficient. They have promised to rejoin North Star when we re-open in-person.
Our current activities have their limits. Gathering in-person in the yard at North Star is delightful, but the combination of facemasks, social distancing, and loud trucks driving by our building make some conversations and classes difficult. Our online classes sometimes work out beautifully, but sometimes there are technological glitches. Also, I am still learning how to encourage and sustain discussion in my classes on Zoom, as the pacing, eye-contact, and other non-verbal cues that I depend on to manage a group in-person are absent. North Star is definitely intended to be an in-person community center, and our long-term vision led me to purchase our building earlier this year. (I am very excited to share the improvements and renovations that have been completed, and also happy to announce that we will have solar panels installed on the roof in October!)
We all look forward to gathering again indoors and having daily face-to-face relationships as soon as safely possible. (Alas, as I write this essay, the University of Massachusetts has announced a cluster of 25 new COVID-19 cases just down the road from North Star in Amherst.)
In summary, things are going well for many of our members, and I feel very good about our own efforts and creativity, but we are still feeling our way into some long-term rhythms. I’ll update more in a few months.
Offering Immediate Help
However, my mixed emotions evaporate when I receive phone calls from worried parents about their children’s experience with school this past month, and read about the state of online schooling for many children in our country.
Many young people in our communities are in serious distress due to what is now the “regular online-COVID-19-schooling.” The system is too rigid, too long, and too boring for many children to engage with it fully every day. Children are under a lot of pressure to be visible and participate online for hours at a time, and we are hearing about children suffering.
Everyone reading this blog knows that we can coach such children and families to file homeschooling papers and use an independent homeschooling approach until their schools resume in-person. I am not here to recruit or convert anyone to homeschooling or North Star as a long-term lifestyle. I am here to share our understanding and knowledge that homeschooling can be used as a very simple and immediate method to escape this online schooling regimen. We can support any miserable child to be out of their school system tomorrow, knowing that they may plan to homeschool only temporarily.
I find it hard to watch needless pain and suffering. I am concerned and angry that so many young people now dread schooling more than ever, and that the emotional toll is impacting many families in serious ways. The pandemic is stressful enough on its own, but now we are actually making things even worse for a lot of people.
I encourage all of us to help our neighbors and friends understand that independent homeschooling might be a short-term solution to their COVID-19 predicament. You are welcome to have your friends and neighbors contact North Star for advice, though many of you may know your local homeschooling requirements and resources quite well.
We can’t solve the pandemic, and we can’t make decisions for public or private schools.
What we have now is a crisis, a crisis in which we are especially well-equipped to assist others. We have a simple, available, immediate, inexpensive, and short-term solution that we can share. Let’s do that. Please feel free to ask me to help.