January Blues: The pandemic home-schooling addition.
There’s a few things to bear in mind for sanity preservation during this challenging stint of home-schooling…
- It’s not supposed to be perfect
- There’s nothing remotely normal about this situation
- We’re all muddling along the best we can.
Whether you’re a working parent that is struggling to find time to focus on your own work, whether you’re on MAT leave with a new born and/or older children, whether you’re key workers sending your little ones into hub schools, whether you’re a teacher trying to provide live lessons and home-schooling your own children at the same time….it’s all pretty impossible from every angle!
To make it all seem a little more impossible, the timing is far less enjoyable than the long summer days that provided the silver lining last time around.
But, it’s important to keep perspective. Here are a few things to keep in mind with home-schooling:
1. You are not alone
It’s highly likely that everyone is having challenges and whilst they vary in severity – know you are not alone!
Reach out to those around you, there is no weakness in admitting you are struggling.
2. Teaching is tough for teachers
Teaching kids is tough even for the professionals. It requires skill, patience and a healthy bucket of psychology and pedagogical training thrown into the mix.
If teaching your kids is proving to be tough, don’t give yourself a hard time. Focus on building relationships and enjoying time together. Laugh about it and failing all else, BBC have come to the rescue with their educational shows. Pick your battles!
3. Communicate with school
If you are stressing about the excessive volume of work set from your school…please don’t. If you and your child are logging on daily, if you’re communicating in some way and attempting to do the majority of work set, this is all teachers want.
In most cases children should be following the school timetable. Once the hour is up, they should stop the task wherever they are, just as they would if they were in school.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, drop your school contact a message. Teachers are getting complaints regarding too much AND too little work set from parents with children in the same classes. It’s a no win situation and communication and patience is key from both sides.
4. Ignore the hysteria
Despite the hysteria that is being generated from various sources – try not worry about the need to ‘catch up’. The pandemic has caused mass disruption across the board.
If your child missed the ‘how to do quadratic equations’ topic… is this really life changing? People are quick to point out that you will never use ‘X,Y and Z’ in real life and for some things this is true. Unless of course you will need it for your degree course/job in which case you will be bright enough, mature enough and driven enough to ‘learn it’ at that later stage because you can read and therefore learn.
Exams and degrees prove an individual’s ability to learn. Covering less content in a year does not take away a child’s ability to learn.
Can you remember how to do quadratic equations from school?
There will be plenty of other very important life skills your children develop this year which no exam could ever replicate.
5.This is not supposed to be perfect
Remind yourself that we are in a pandemic, that this is a make do situation and give yourself, your children and your teachers a break. Everyone deserves a break right now!
Above all, the mental health of you and your child overrides everything. Pick battles wisely, try and laugh your way through it where possible and maybe one day we will look back through extremely rose tinted glasses and laugh at this period of family bonding through education!
