“Remote learning” as it is called, has been a mixed bag for us so far. Our daughter is twelve and much more interested in her friends and gaming than her schoolwork. However she seemed to be on top of it. Every time I asked if she had completed all her assigned work for the day, she answered in the affirmative.
In her mind, that meant she’d done all the work that she’d been able to do. She failed to mention that she was having trouble accessing many of the assignments from many of her classes.
Teachers and school districts are doing their best, but most are relying on a hodgepodge of tools provided (often for free) by private corporations: Google Classroom, Google Drive, instructional videos on YouTube, Zoom for meetings and lectures, etc. It’s great that these tools are available, but using them to assign and complete schoolwork produces a steep learning curve for teachers, students, and parents.
In our case, we ended up near the end of the school year with our daughter on a trajectory to receive no credit for most of her classes. Enter crunch week (which we’re still in): a massive push to wrangle and complete her missing school work.
Implementing a Work From Home Strategy
Kia and I overestimated how easily our daughter would be able to track, schedule, and complete her own work. At first I was frustrated with what I perceived to be her laziness, but then I remembered how difficult it was for me to transition from a job to a freelance career. It took me a solid year before I was able to effectively manage my own time working from home (and I was thirty, not twelve).
We realized we needed to teach her new habits in order to succeed.
Step 1: Share a workspace
This was actually our daughter’s suggestion. She felt she would be able to concentrate better either working in my home office or my wife’s home office. Working in her room at her desk, it was too easy to get distracted by whatever her friends were doing (via the iPad).
So I set up a card table with the family laptop, and she got to work.
Step 2: Batch your questions
I wanted to be available to help, but I also had my own work to complete. So I set a few rules: no music, no chewing ice, and try to save up your questions for me instead of peppering me every two minutes. Most of the time, delaying a question resulted in her being able to find the answer herself, so this reduced interruptions considerably.
Step 3: Frequent check-ins
Kids are easily distracted. So are most adults, including myself. So every half hour or so I would ask her 1) what she was doing, 2) if she was stuck, and 3) if I could help. I also asked myself the same questions. Often we can get stuck without really realizing it, which can lead to a vortex of self-distraction. It’s more effective to take a step back, notice when we’re stuck, and try to address the stuckness. Either with a break, temporarily switching to another task, or getting outside input.
Step 4: Movement breaks
Long stretches of focused work are important for productivity, but so is taking care of your body. We both take short exercise breaks during our work days, mostly walks and calisthenics.
Step 5: Frequent small rewards and a few big rewards
I don’t miss the sixth grade. A lot of the assigned work at that age is tedious drudgery. But tedious drudgery is part of life: we all have to deal with doing the dishes, folding the laundry, and doing our taxes (or the trade-offs of having someone do those tasks for you).
The key is to get through those boring tasks quickly and efficiently. Sometimes it helps to motivate yourself with a small reward, even for completing as little as twenty minutes of boring work. The reward might be a break, a snack, watching a fun video, or talking to a friend.
And big rewards matter too, especially for the adolescent brain, which is wired for big drama, big decisions, and big changes. Our daughter has been desperately wanting a phone upgrade (I guess “Droid!” is an insult these days among middle-schoolers, though personally you couldn’t pay me to use an iPhone). If she receives full credit for all of her classes, she gets a big contribution from her parents towards a new phone (she has to earn the rest with work over the summer).
Home Stretch
We’re not quite there yet — we have another week of focused work to go. But it’s been good for me to dig into the details of her schoolwork with her. I should have done so sooner, but I’m dealing with my own remote learning curve.
For those of you who are parenting school-age children, what has your home school/remote learning experience been like? Do you feel like you child’s teachers and school district are stepping up to the task? Overall I feel OUSD is doing a decently good job.
Stephen Mann
With my two boys, 7th and 8th grade middle school Albany USD, the school work load has been more excessive than we expected. Spurts of catching up on late work with days that are 8 hours of school work has become the norm. The 8th grader has mostly recovered from his backlog but the 7th grader still struggles with prioritization. I had a daily spreadsheet going for him to rank his priority of work each morning, which helped but only when we did it. Once I backed off that he wasn’t able to keep it going on his own. He can do the work, he’s just not motivated. Distractions and focus are a challenge for both but we’re finding our way.
Different platforms and different processes for each teacher is part of the struggle for my 7th grader. And having one teacher change their platform of choice for a third time in as many months doesn’t help a disorganized mind.
The principal, teachers and counselors have been responsive and trying to help as best they can. It’s their first time in this as well. When comparing work load of our Albany Middle School boys to others in the Bay and nation wide, it feels like our boys work load is by far the most of anyone we speak with to compare. When we made a plea to the principal to reduce work load, she said for every parent that wants reduced work there is another parent asking for more work. And I wasn’t really surprised to hear that. It’s a tiny, but strong, school district. It’s why we moved one mile into Albany in 2012.
We find out about their summer camp on June 1. For their own social development, we’re truly hoping camp is NOT canceled, even if heavily modified for distancing and meals, etc. They’ve been getting along better than expected but they’re brothers and still have their moments. They need time apart. They’re both showing signs of mild depression, in my opinion.
We’ve had wonderful family moments during this lockdown. I am aware and grateful. At the same time, we need our space soon. The balance is _off_.
J.D. Moyer
Thanks for the comment Stephen. It sounds your middle school is assigning even more work than ours, but I can relate to the difficulty of each teacher having a different system. I guess it’s like an evolutionary explosion of methods, and we’ll see which ones survive and replicate.
The housebound discomfort is real — it will be great for everyone when we can hang out and work in person again. Hang in there!
Amy
This is a great reflection on your experience and you are providing very good advice for struggling parents. I plan to share this with some friends, coworkers, and parents. I donât have kids; I am one of the teachers. I work with K-5 students and I can tell you that the experience for the older studentsâ parents has been the same as yours; the kids say that they have completed everything and then the parents are surprised and angered to hear from the teacher that assignments, in fact, arenât being turned in. It has been a huge adjustment for everyone involved and I commend you and other parents who are trying to set up new protocols for the kids. You all as parents also have the right- as individuals or as a collective group of taxpayers- to ask them to decrease the dificulty, which my district had decided to do early on, because most students just donât have the skill set necessary for maintaining the same level of rigor online as in the classroom with a live teacher. In addition, not all parents have the parenting skillset to accomplish what you have done, or the time. They might be working themselves or struggling to find a job. Hang in there. It sounds like you’re doing a great job and if we do need to continue this strange situation in the fall, everyone will be better prepared for it the next time around. Itâs hard to manage this huge change in our society and even harder to maintain family stability during it. Thank you for your dedication!
J.D. Moyer
Thanks for the comment Amy. I’m learning from a few sources that many other teachers, students, and parents are in the same boat. I think many teachers are experiencing a tidal wave of late homework assignments this weekend!
Jonathan Crosby
Great insights, JD. We have had some of these issues with both of our kids (7 and 15). I think teachers were so taken off guard that they threw every resource they could put their hand on at their kids and left it to the kids (read: parents) to unravel. With hope, over the summer they will have a moment to breath, reevaluate and to settle on one platform for all their assignments and schedules… Not holding my breath.
J.D. Moyer
We’re all making it up as we go along! I’m hoping we can resume in the Fall with some idea of what best practices are, for teachers, students, and parents. I know we’ll be keeping up the “shared home office” strategy — I think that may be helping me stay focused as well.