Welcome to Educating: How to nail home-schooling after half term!
Reassurances from a teacher out of the game; exams, rote learning, desk time. Home-schooling is the most difficult thing you will encounter as the modern parent especially after the ‘holidays’. Tackling the task after half term with some tips from an ex-educator on how to get on track with your teaching with less stress.
I bet you’re feeling completely exhausted already with the idea of homework and trying to recall calculus and exactly how many types of adjectives there are. That’s right…there is more than one type of adjective, several types of noun, a multitude of words that you don’t know; generally every piece of information you were promised was the most important thing you would ever learn has slowly dripped out of your ear.
You vaguely remember ‘Romeo and Juliet’ because of Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes…and Gatsby bares a striking resemblance to Romeo…regardless of the couple of centuries difference. The French revolution was accompanied by a dramatic overture, full orchestra, several costume changes and lasted only 2 hours with a 20 minute interval to reinforce the barricade- curtain drop at 180 degrees angle at a speed to match the final crescendo and that is determined by the equation…wait-what?
Worry not intrepid, “untrained” educator! These are actually some pretty amazing platforms to begin lessons! I’m not going to recommend that you deviate entirely from curriculum but I am going to advise you to chill out. Seriously…chill out. Home-schooling is daunting but there are a few things you can do as a parent to keep yourself sane throughout the process.
First, lets acknowledge three things:
1. No teacher ever spends 100% of the time giving 100% of their attention to your little angel, and neither should you. So don’t feel so bad about not having eyeballs in the back of your head. You’re allowed to get frustrated, especially as you aren’t even being -paid- to do this! And you’re allowed to be bored of it. So, so super bored that even you are propping both sets of eyes eyes open with matchsticks.
2. Children are not learning avoidant; they are school avoidant. Because school, aside from play-time, is a boring exercise of opening your mouth and swallowing the spoon full of curriculum and regurgitating it onto paper. Kind of like being forced to eat the same soup over and over and over. Eventually, you lose your appetite.
3. No teacher, doctor, yoga instructor, carpenter, psychologist has ever made it through an entire day without either planning for certain questions to be asked, or holding off on answering questions in order to haul their butt to Google.
The government has handed out resources; online classes, interactive education time with the teacher, peer-to-peer networking through zoom and organised playtimes within bubbles. Fantastic!
The “new normal” only appears “new” unto the “old routine”. Teaching is taking a step back in time. There are likely to be many teething issues…and temptations to confiscate Fortnight/Animal Crossing for days, weeks, months (“UNTIL THE END OF TIME!”)
At the end of 2019, the common family routine for the average child was thus:
7:00 am: Breakfast
7:30 am: Teeth n dress
8:15am: Drive to school
8:30am: Drop off pending traffic
WORK WORK BREAK WORK LUNCH WORK (sung Rhianna style)
3:15pm: Pick up from school.
3:30 pm: Insert home routine of choice but usually dinner at 6:00 and bed by 8:30/9:00pm
2021 has given you something incredible; a moment to observe. You, as a parent, do know your child better than you have ever known them before. Typical scenario, you had a part in making their cells, otherwise you’ve imprinted all your little eccentricities and weirdness onto them. If you’re new to home-schooling, it’s likely they will surprise you with what they can do and what they can do. You will feel, at times, like the best parent and worst teacher; at others, the worst parent and the best teacher.
I bet you didn’t know they could name every dinosaur in alphabetical order. And I also bet you didn’t know they could nail a head shot with a pencil sharpener from 20 feet (several times in a row) but you do now!
If I have learned anything working across a multitude of settings, by the two-week post holiday mark, you’ll think you’ll have it nailed and then they will turn the tables on you and you’re going to be partially bald trying to force down that extra ladle of the alphabet.
You are not screwing up; family ethos and morals do not, in the slightest, line up with curriculum or statutory policy. Even if you’re paid to be objective, even if you’ve known the sticky fingered monster all your life; it is humanly impossible to make that child finish the plate every single time.
Your urge to fulfil the curriculum is constantly met with 6 major obsticals:
1. Your individual mood
2. Their individual mood
3. Your mood towards them
4. Their mood towards you
5. Your perspective on what you’re teaching
6. Their perspective on what they’re learning
In the ideal word, a teacher wouldn’t sacrifice any of the above for the sake of a test score. I don’t think I’m alone when I say, as an educator, how much I cannot stand standardized testing. I hate exams, I hate strict curriculum and, my top personal loathing, children asking permission to use the toilet. Let’s be honest, I know I only went to the toilet a handful of the times I asked and, I’m pretty sure every single one of my teachers thought I had chronic cystisis!
I’m going to harken to a time long past when war was with guns and an entire village was destroyed. Reggio Emillia, long standing Italian community, was a bombed-out wreck and the first thing the community did was rebuild the school building. With a dramatic decrease in resources (and teachers), the village was forced to pull together and teach as one society. Children learned practical, useful skills while gaining confidence in their community, and in themselves. Cooking, firefighting, carpentry, knitting, agriculture, prctical mathematics.
This was using something I call TAC. TRUST in AUTONOMY and CONFIDENCE. And It relies so much on that very first word which, for a parent who subconciously trusts in spoon feeding, or a child who is used to being spoon-fed, is not the easiest thing to grasp. Trust. In the safe environment of a school, and in this case, your home, it generally doesn’t matter a toot where your child is going to do whatever it is they want to do as long as they say “I will be back in 10 minutes”.
Unless you live in Disney World, the chances are that your child will return, ready to learn more. Children are only human which means, sometimes, they will want to do the child derivative of making a cup of tea to avoid things that they find boring or annoying. Including looking at your face (I’m sure you’re beautiful, too).
You, as a now home-schooling parent, are in the fortuitous position of trusting them to do so without a SENCO, a headteacher or the janitor reporting a rogue child. You won’t be hauled into head office for not tackling them and ramming a protractor down their throat.
So here are a few tips for home-schooling:
1. Build a routine that works for all of you; regardless of what classes are scheduled that day and when. These are not “normal times” or “normal days”. But most importantly, there is no such thing as a “normal family”. If you are all terrible at getting up early, start at 10:30am. If you naturally make your way to bed at 10:30pm, form your day around the natural life of your family. Routine is vital to child development; but relative to when you are all prepared to learn and prepared for a break.
2. If you’re bored and are struggling to manage teaching without falling asleep, imagine how bored your child is. Take your attention span and quarter it and then add impatience. So change it up! Look at your child and consider that you could be doing the writing on the sheet while they tell you the answers. You could be narrating a story to build their vocabulary but they have to write it down for you. Reverse roles, change it up and throw out the old ideas of what teaching was.
3. Use your own hobbies, your own space and your own resources to be more inventive with learning. The best classroom is no classroom at all, 4 walls and a roof are limiting! Create safe-spaces, inspiring places for free and open learning.
4. Trust your older child! Here’s some history for you! There was once an entire educational school founded by a dude named Maxwell based on this: Children actually learn better from their more knowledgeable peers than they do adults. It’s called the Zone of Proximal Development (or ZPD). Not all the time. If you have a spare 10 year old, take advantage of that; delegate! The great philosopher Willy Wonka once said ““I don’t want a grown-up person at all. A grown-up won’t listen to me; he won’t learn. He will try to do things his own way and not mine. So I have to have a child.”
5. Use your community! When you think broadly, the things we are taught in school are information without context; strike that and reverse it and you can begin giving a child the ability to apply practical knowledge while learning. Children under the age of 18 are not formally required to shield (though I thoroughly recommend the highest safety measures of a mask, hand washing and limited travel) as so contact a green thumbed neighbour, your baking buddy, your arty friend, and see if they are willing to share an hour to engage in a practical class!
6. Learning can be fun nearly 100% of the time. It’s perseverance that tends to be the thing children struggle with. If you, as their teacher, take care of your mental, physical and emotional well-being and teach what you understand to be important, or teach what they believe to be important, there is far less resistance to learning.
Parents have the great fortune to teach their children in a way that we old fossils in education never could. It is a golden age for learning and understanding your child. Forget the exams and focus on enjoyment in teaching, and your children will focus on learning for enjoyment!
