You can give a boy a desk, but you cannot make him do his freaking schoolwork

As you may know, we (as in everyone in the world with school-age kids) are homeschooling. Yes, our kids’ school is sending assignments, hosting online discussions, and providing great communication and support, but without the context of other kids moving in the same direction and doing the same work, the energy for learning is just not the same. While I may not be creating the lessons, I am trying to create the home school.

I have two kids. One—the girl and the oldest—is terribly self-sufficient. I’m barely allowed to know what she is working on and if I ask, I am met with rejection of my help (which I did not offer) and similarly tweeny don’t look at me/don’t talk to me reactions. Other moms in my daughter’s class talk about the big projects they are working on with their kids, and I don’t even know these things are assigned. I’m not sure if I should be pleased to have such a determined and resourceful kid—she gets good grades and never misses assignments—or sad that I am denied an opportunity to engage, and perhaps, clash with her over academics. Now that we are homeschooling, I don’t even get to talk with her in the car on the way to school. As long as she has WiFi, she is good to go.

The boy is another story. He is on the other end of the continuum or planet or Zoom call from her. For him, school is not a hands-on exploration of potential but an abstract concept in constraint that he fights.

It is not that he is incapable of the material. He was actually in a selective enrollment school last year—a school that has entrance exams—and he is fully prepared for all the material he is studying this year. He simply has no context in which to do it. There is no one around him showing him, through their behavior, how to get the work done. There is no herd. The energy to move him forward has to come from him and his energy goes forward in all directions at the same time. Forward all depends on which way one’s looking…and he is always looking at something no one else sees. Is he preternaturally observant or just distracted?

I read an article online today addressing the growing number of parents who are abandoning homeschooling as the school systems orchestrate it. They don’t have the resources (time, energy, patience) to manage their kids’ tasks as well as work their own jobs and manage their households. I am an educator: I know teaching is challenging, but when teachers are with kids in the classroom, that is all they have to do—they have one job. Teachers are not trying to teach their own kids and 30 other kids, while doing laundry, walking the dog, and playing breakfast/lunch/dinner lady (while trying to keep kids from snacking themselves into diabetes and you into bankruptcy) like parents are attempting. Teachers may be saying, now you know how we feel in the classroom. But I am saying, now teachers know how parents feel trying to teach outside of it. There is no one else moving in the same direction—no context to move us forward.

It is my understanding that students will not be able to fail this year—they will pass their classes regardless of performance. There is simply so much inequity in the system when it comes to home resources such as WiFi, parental support, personal time and space, that the school system cannot expect all students to be able to complete their work in a satisfactory manner outside of school. There are many students without access to full meals outside of the public schools much less a functioning computer and a quiet space in which to work.

To wit, I am considering the unconsiderable—taking the boy away from the lessons he cannot learn without school and really homeschooling him, or, as this article says, “home educating” him. Reading books with him, exploring math and science through cooking and growing plants and playing cards and dice. We can write and make iMovies and tell stories about our experience in the corona. Perhaps I can get him off the computer—which has to have at least as much educational value as 20 minutes in Khan Academy, right?