Last updated on November 26, 2023
We’re officially a homeschooling household. We notified the school district, in writing and via email, and we enrolled in a homeschooling curriculum.
The COVID-19 pandemic has meant that since March, we’ve been “homeschooling” anyway. The remote learning provided by our daughters’ school was the best they could do in an emergency, but it was not an experience we want to repeat.
The school district is offering a choice of on-campus or online learning. Neither meets our needs.
On-campus put our children and us at unreasonable risk. We live near Austin, Texas, where things are bad and likely to get worse. Children have been spreading the coronavirus at childcare facilities in Texas; they will spread the virus in schools, too.
My wife and I are high risk. Our children had difficult early years, putting them at higher risk, too.
If the school offered remote learning with physical books and paper, which would be homeschooling anyway, we might not have withdrawn for the year.
Not everything remote is bad. The youngest actually did fine with the computer-based reading program. Everything else she did was on paper, which we then scanned and sent to her teacher. There was a little technology, and a lot of traditional classwork.
The oldest, however, struggled and so did her teacher. In the end, it was busy work that didn’t help her gain new skills or even retain previous knowledge.
Yes, my wife and I are technically savvy. That includes knowing when technology isn’t the right solution to a challenge. In fact, technology can amplify challenges or even create new ones.
Our daughters need hands-on, face-to-face instruction. They need to develop the fine motor skills of writing and drawing on paper. They need to be monitored, too, because screens allow them to disconnect.
When a child (or adult) has ADHD, the stimuli on screen leads to an almost trance-like state. The colors, motions, and sounds become addictive. Because I also struggle with attention, reading, and language processing, I understand that for our daughters screen time is lost time.
There’s a reason I write on paper and then type into a word processor. Even with a “distraction-free” writing application, I’m soon doing three other things. I’m opening up my browser to search the web. Soon, I’m reading the news, too, and then I’m lost. Writing on a computer requires discipline I don’t have and certainly don’t expect our daughters to have.
What about watching lectures? Isn’t that just like YouTube?
Maybe for an adult able to pause and replay content, until the material is learned and understood, but our girls get distracted by everything in the video except the essential content.
The youngest watched videos about counting over and over again. Counting by twos, counting by tens. She knows the characters. She knows the songs, But, she cannot translate the actual information into knowledge or skills.
Educational games? The girls both just tap or click wildly until they “win” the games. They associate speed with winning, and miss the entire learning aspect of the games. Since few educational games penalize wrong answers (in my opinion, a pedagogical flaw), students realize that tapping or typing “wins” the right answer and its reward.
There are other reasons we dislike online learning for young children — and many adults.
I won’t be looking for employment. I will be focused on teaching our girls.
In the coming months, I’ll let readers know how well this experiment works. Plenty of parents homeschool with good results; we hope we achieve good results, too.