Parenting & Teaching Right Now is HARD
My Classroom
Online with my first graders at home in my bedroom/office, while five of my children 3rd-11th grade are online with their teachers in the living room.
I know we need to have grace for ourselves, but there is a reason I didn’t go to school to do web design or computer technology. Some people like to do everything on technology because they find it easier. Others prefer to do everything in person to have the ongoing feedback of facial expressions to gauge others’ reactions and correct misinterpretations right away. I kind of see tech people and in-person or real-time communicators like introverts and extroverts, opposites. Of course, we’re all on a different place on the spectrum with our abilities and personalities.
Technology is not my passion, and it does not come easily for me. I’m always saying, “Can you show me?” Learning to manipulate technology from home is hard because you have to learn the technology to show someone what you’re stuck on from home, and you have to know what to ask.
As a teacher, I’m having to figure out new platforms and how to make clickable pages and assignments so that it is approachable and easy for my student and their parents. I have a bazillion emails as I’m collaborating and sharing work between my first-grade teachers more than ever and receiving updates from our school district. As my own children’s teachers are figuring out new platforms and delivery, I’m getting a million emails and directions from them too. It is dizzying.
As I figure out how to use Seesaw for giving and receiving work as a teacher, my own children actually missed THREE individual meetings with their teachers online this week because I didn’t know that in Seesaw, you have to click the SMS box in settings if you want the messages to come as texts. The messages about the meetings were buried in my email that I have not been able to keep up with. I have five children in 3rd-11th grade with 13 teachers right now. They are all sending emails and trying to make sure my kids know what to do and are accessing their assignments. If you are a parent doing remote learning at home, you know what I’m talking about! On behalf of teachers, I’m sorry. We’re just trying to figure out what we’re doing.
While I am teaching from home I go into school twice a week to collaborate with the other teachers and get weekly packets ready to send home for my students. This week my foster girls missed their online counseling sessions while I was at school when they forgot how to get on zoom. My life is usually busy, but before COVID, my kids went to school and their teachers taught them and I went to school and taught in the style and system that I had developed over the course of my 15 year career. I feel like all the little parts of my children’s and my work life have all been shaken loose from their organized place and thrown at me to fall where they may and it’s my job to figure out a way to organize them. Thursday, I hit the wall. It was too much.
Long ago, I used to like scrapbooking and making family videos, so at some point, I’m hoping for a tipping point where a new routine will be established and all this technology will get more comfortable. It should become more intuitive to me at some point. Maybe then it will become fun like lesson planning and preparing for teaching used to be.
While staring at the screen on zoom in one-on-one sessions all day is exhausting, it’s the closest thing I have to normal right now with my job. I love getting to see my students and have them read to me. When they tell stories about their cat and what they did yesterday, it is a slice of familiar. It feels like the times students came into the classroom each morning, eager to share their stories with me. They are so animated! The upside of everyone being home is that I’m getting to actually see the cat and the other things in my students’ stories. It feels good to get to know my students’ parents again. I used to know all of the parents when I taught in a mile long isolated village. Those are stories for another day.
Parenting and teaching right now is so different.
And, so HARD!
But it will get easier.
We will adjust.
Thank you to the teachers and parents who choose to be positive even when we are frustrated with all these uncomfortable changes.
Our children need to see that we are resilient and that we can all learn new things, just like we expect them to do each day at school. We can do it without complaining and arguing just like we are teaching them to do.
As a foster mom, I’ve learned the importance of allowing children to take a break to run hard or bounce on the trampoline to release a little of that anger and frustration. I’ve also learned the importance of allowing children to have an angry cry, a frustrated cry, or a cry to release their loss. Maybe as adults, we might need to allow ourselves one of these releases too. When the time comes, a hard run or cry is a lot healthier than many other bandaids. As I once told a child, “Just let all those yucky feelings out, you don’t want to keep them inside. They’ll make you sick.”