PP got grandson’s ‘schedule’ yesterday… It’s a ‘blended’ schedule for school. This is K-5th grade…
The problem is, granddaughter is supposed to be going to her pre-K from 0900-1200…
So, either grandson or granddaughter gets to miss ‘school’ two days a week. Dunno how parents are going to cope with this with pre-teen kids. Especially if they have a lousy internet connection, and have to be logging back in every 30 minutes.
So it looks like the teachers are only working 2 days a week in school, the rest of the week from home or wherever.
Update- And PP has also apparently been given the ‘option’ of homeschooling him, but that’s yet ANOTHER program… Sigh… And it’s run by the state, so no ‘freelance’ home schooling!
Remote teaching is pretty tough. My wife is a teacher of 35 years (junior high literature / English) and the changes last spring going 100% remote were hard. Most of the emails she received were past 8-5, ensuring she would spend at least 4 hours on her own responding to the requests, when they bothered with any response at all.
This fall, she is looking at going back. Teachers will have no way to having substitutes for their absence, so no school hour appointments will be allowed (unless death certificates are involved :^). She almost decided to retire for good – she is already eligible for 100% checks – but she wanted to give just a little more.
All 50 states have an allowance for parents to freelance homeschool! Contact the homeschool legal defense group at https://hslda.org/.
I normally just lurk, but this one is too important!
Minimize your government footprint!
This level of insanity is just letting parents know how bad modern public schooling really is.
We home-schooled both offspring, and never looked back. Our state (Alaska) offers money for all supplies including books, computers and ‘net connections, along with tutors by Skype (at the time). Parents can choose their own curriculum, and the kids are tested every so often to ensure progress. Both girls got regular HS diplomas, and finished early. They did the schoolwork while we were at our jobs, and then we checked the work – and taught history & math – in the early evenings.
We are starting full online rather than blended. Splitting the six classes the kids would normally take into two quarters of three classes. It is my intent to go to school every day and work from my classroom. I am not convinced that I can be organized and focused while trying to work from my home office. I did that in the spring and it was a bit of a nightmare, especially when added to the constantly changing requirements from the State and the Administration.
MC: Not sure how this reflects poorly on public schooling. Although I agree that PS aren’t particularly great, it isn’t like we are being given many choices. Much of this is dictated by politicians. Given my druthers, I’d be in the classroom doing what I normally do.
Rev, I’d say you have good kids. I see a lot of kids who just aren’t good students and who, left to their own devices, would never get the work done. I know that some of that is also parenting, but there are people who just don’t self motivate well. It is also too late to go back and instill that in the kids now at age 15 or 16.
Lots of info on Home Schooling on line. Thousands of bloggers whose site are all about that, how they got started, how to handled in home, where to get supplies etc.. Look up your state requirement and go from there. My grandson home-schooled himself for the last three years and passed all finals with flying colors. Entered college the same year as all his peers.
All- Thanks for the comments. jrg- Kudos to your wife for putting up with the BS! Hereso- And to you sir, you’re a better man than I!
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I concur on the ‘Homeschool your kids’ movement. A lot of children can get a ‘normal’ school day’s worth of work done in just a couple hours. And with a parent helping, it can be a learning experience for both.
We have discovered, during this Covidiocracy, just how little many actual teachers do in school. If you can break down a regular teacher’s time to only 2 days a week of ‘instruction’ then what exactly are they doing in the classes?
And why are we paying them (well, actually paying a huge overage of administrators) so much? Why does our education system cost so much for so little work? It’s almost like the education unions are featherbedding, which, if you consider the US steel and auto industries, are what almost killed off said industries.
Makes one wonder.
And, yes, they can’t tell you you can’t homeschool. They can make it hard, especially in an urban area, but stand up to the bullies and ‘Get ‘er done!’
Social interactions can occur on the playground or at church or organized sports (if those are allowed anymore.)
When did we become a national socialist state?
Daughter just got the schedule for her second grader’s online learning. No problem, she gets a fifteen minute break every couple of hours to attend to her toddler. We’re trying to figure out whether she should (a) tie the baby up in the closet the rest of the time, (b) count on the seven year old to stay on task without supervision, or (c) just run around screaming with her havíř on fire. Maybe the educational experts who came up with this plan can suggest a way to implement it.
Meanwhile, a friend who is a working mother is going into debt for daycare for her eight year old (somehow putting kids together in a room for paid daycare is safe although putting them in a room to learn something is a death sentence) and two other parents in the neighborhood have just discovered that the school has forgotten the existence of their children and they have to restart the enrollment process.
Trust the experts.
Sad.
Yeah, my feeling ranges between “homeschooling has good ROI, if you care what happens to your kids” and “public school needs salting and burning, leave no stone on another, make the rubble bounce”.
In all charity, there are ‘family’ environments that public schools are an improvement over, and the harmful effects on society might be tolerable if fifty percent or less were graduates of public school.
If you aren’t actively or passively hostile to your kids, homeschool should be at least comparable with public school.
All- Thanks for the comments! Cannot disagree with anyone. And yes, MUCH of the funding goes to ‘administrative’ costs… Fought that battle years ago in SC, lost because it “Benefitted the children”… How the F does a $1M ADMINISTRATION building benefit the kids??? @#%#@!!!!!
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Yes this is hard all around and I do not even pretend to understand or have a solution. Sat through an Almost 3 hour Zoom meeting with the school administrators and parents last night and it was rough. As always most are just bitching without any solutions. We were told we have to have my first grader online every morning from 0800-0830 for “attendance” as they even while being at home cannot miss more than 10 days in the school year. Umm ok! And Monday/Wednesday/Friday they are to be online top of the hour and every 30 min for elementary and middle school is every 30 min on bottom of the hour with Tuesday’s and Thursday’s for group work and independent work. Kaya is supposed be in preschool (they are open?!?) Wednesday and Friday’s from 0900-1200 and it’s 30 min from my house in the mountains. Which I have to pay $200 a month for her to go. There would be no service there and back and son is not able to stay at home and work independently at 6! So now I am going to have to chose which kid is going to get an education this year. Basically the school board said if parents work daycare should somehow be responsible for having up to 14 (my precious daycare limit) kids online! If that couldn’t happen then we should just homeschool and sign a contract that I am responsible for teaching and compiling a curriculum for my son, who cannot read: so in essence I would be responsible for giving him all the basics. So parents and teachers are at a huge step behind as no one solution is going to work. Oh and one lovely person question was could our kids have a gap year which we told was a resounding NO as they are “required” by law to attend school. I feel for all the parents out there who are going to have to quit jobs as all daycares are full and what are teachers supposed to do with their own children as most are being required (I could be wrong) to be at the school to teach. A friends older child 17 is having to mange all her online studies for her senior year and also help/watch her 10 year old sister all day who also must be online all day. While both parents are working outside of the house. There is no right answer and many are going to struggle for the next year or more in my opinion.
PP- Gonna be interesting… sigh
It seems to me that many public schools are doing their best to force parents into finding other means of education for their children. Do you suppose they have considered the long term consequences of this? Or will the collapse of the public education system be “unexpected?”
Margaret- Don’t disagree at all… sigh And it’s just a matter of time, when the parents finally get fed up with the indoctrination the kids are getting, THAT will be the day.
I’ll add to the homeschooling pile… I was homeschooled, up until high school when Mom got afraid of my math and put me in a Tiny School where I was the only graduating senior during my year, so it might as well have been homeschool.
For the very young kids, most of the day does not have to be ‘structured learning’ you can teach and allow play to happen, which with a little guidance can be learning as well.
The big problem, which I am hugely sympathetic to, having been a working single mother, is how to deal with school at home (with either homeschool or online PS) and making a living. I’m lucky enough to have one high schooler this year, so homeschool with me not physically present does work (we chat through the day on Discord and he has a journal in the cloud he updates and I monitor). But with younger grades? You need someone there. I’m wondering if doing clusters with other parents would work, and trading off days ‘teaching’ so they can still work. It would require a lot of flexibility from employers, so that won’t work, either.
There is no good answer for everyone. It’s a terrible situation.
Q: “what exactly are they doing in the classes?”
A: Dealing with twenty to thirty kids of varying levels of motivation and ability which means that two hours of work for the motivated and advanced kid takes all day.
PP, that is exactly the issue everywhere. How do you coordinate all that learning when you are one parent (no longer able to go to work) rather than three or four teachers, each of whom has one of your kids? We haven’t figured that out at our level either and have pretty much apparently punted it to the parents. We have a teaching schedule for the high school students (my AOR) but it is on parents to figure out the rest. I also don’t have a solution, given that we have been told not to reopen and have no say on that issue.
All- Thanks for the comments. Hereso, nice to see the ‘other side’… Thanks!
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One room school. All ages and subjects.
You could make it work if the x families involved can reasonably supervise the teacher.