The School at my Dining Room Table Sucks

[Sarcastically spinster]

I know I'm super late to this thread, but I also know there's a lot of places that have still been dealing with some kind of hybrid or online model through the end of last school year, and I don't know what things are going to look like for going into the next year.  Or what Delta's going to do.  Or how some of you may still be feeling about how things have gone the last 16 months.  

So some encouragement for those who may still be dealing with this stuff.  I'm a graduate of the SOTDRT, but from a quality version, not a cop-out version (I'm in an advanced degree medical profession, all my siblings who have completed college at this point have honors degrees from accredited schools).  

Homeschooling is a completely different learning structure from traditional classroom learning, in most cases.  There are some parents that mimic the classroom setup, but that's nearly impossible to do across multiple age ranges.  For successful homeschooling across multiple age groups, it requires a much stronger focus on independent learning.  When I was a little kid, my mom would sit down and go through some subjects with me, but that became less and less as I got older.  We used course materials that were designed for homeschooling.  A writing course with thought questions where my mom could go in and check my work every so often, but where I didn't need to sit down and talk through it with her - I wrote my answers out.  Saxon math, where you had lessons that started with an explanation, and then you had your problem set, and then every 4-5 lessons you had a test.  My dad would grade our tests.  On a 20 question test, we could miss up to three.  If we didn't score well enough, then that meant we didn't understand the material and we had to go back and review and re-attempt the test before we moved on.  If we got stuck, then my dad (who had a much stronger math background than my mom) would go over concepts with us.  It was approaches like that, where we were expected to be independent learners, but with accountability and with support when it was needed, that made homeschooling successful in a family with six kids.  

Our entire educational program was designed from the start to work us towards that.  By the time I was a teenager, I was basically independent, other than the accountability to make sure I was actually doing the work (and yes, I got behind on the regular, and my parents would catch me, and I'd have to catch up or lose privileges, etc.)  

With this huge disruption to the entire educational system, you've got a situation where either parents need to replicate a traditional classroom situation at home, or else kids need to adjust to a drastically different learning style.  None of that is going to happen smoothly, or quickly.  Some schools have tried to do both simultaneously and it's not worked.  

If your kids struggled, or are still struggling, with changes in the school environment and how they're learning, that doesn't mean you've failed.  It doesn't mean the fundies are better at this than you - even the ones doing the SOTDRT well have set up their lives to make it work, set up their educational plan for their kids from the start to make it work, etc.  They're not doing on-the-fly crisis management the way parents have had to through COVID.  You're doing fine, and looking at them is an apples to oranges comparison.  

Also, side note.  There's plenty of formal coursework that I have not retained.  I hardly remember any of my history from my college classes, for example.  But I've retained so much history from reading.  Reading biographies.  Reading historical fiction.  And so on.  I learned grammar and vocabulary and so much more from reading.  There's a meme I've seen go around on facebook that's something like "I told my kid I'd pay him a quarter for every chapter book he read this year.  He's over a hundred books and thinks he's taking advantage of me".  Does your kid love Harry Potter but hasn't read the books?  Your library probably has the books.  Does your high schooler love Les Mis?  Offer them the book (and maybe a reward for that one!)  My parents strongly encouraged reading, and it's been foundational to my academic success down the road.