The reactionary measures to the world pandemic continue to increase. More businesses are closing. Now we can no longer gather at all. Everyone is ordered to stay home. Fines are being levied for blatant disregard of the orders. Schools have been closed for at least another month in Ontario, but in other parts of Canada and the world they are closed until September.
I am finally on the mend. After almost a month my body has fought off the virus within me. As a family we have fully embraced the self-isolation. James is the only one who has left the house, and it is just to bring in food once a week.
We haven't missed connection too much. Zoom is an online video chat app that has taken off. Everyone is using Zoom, FaceTime, Google Hangouts and the like to connect with family. My mom, dad, and sisters have a very active Facebook messenger chat, which helps with the time change to Australia. Although my mom called weekly, and Jennifer and I would text now and then, we know post to the chat many times a day. We share what the kids are doing, how our health is, how life is changing, funny memes and pictures, and just general chat. In a time where people are talking about disconnection, I have found the opposite. Our family is pulling together.
This week we got Juliette on Messenger Kids. This safe online video chat/texting app is helping her connect with her cousins and her friends. I didn't realize how much she was missing her social outlet until this week. She has been having regular tantrums as she finds the older boys playing together and herself left out. We have heard a lot of "I wish I had a sister" this week. And watching my sister Jennifer's girls play, and remembering what it was like growing up with 2 sisters, I know what she means. So instead she will spend and hour or two a day calling everyone, chatting, sharing, laughing. We have seen a lot of improvement in her.
With school being out for another month, we as teachers are all now shifting to "distance learning." This past week has been a crash course in thinking how we can teach and assess online. Every school board in Ontario is running things slightly differently, and I have found ours to be extra challenging. In a time when we have to move online, they seem to be overly cautious about security. Apps and websites we have been using all year are suddenly banned and all my plans are suddenly changing. I'm going to get my students going first on Duolingo. Core French isn't the focus right now - language and math, with a little science and social studies for older students. I am responsible to get students short activities to participate in weekly.
We are spending our time during the days puttering about. I have done a little organizing. I am baking a lot of homemade bread and buns, experimenting with different recipes. The piano is going almost 8 hours a day - Ben, Juliette and Caleb alternate between online programs and actually accessing their mother (a piano teacher for 20+ years). We have campfires out back. We go for daily walks around the neighbourhood, and when we come across the occasional neighbour one of us crosses the road to maintain social distancing. We play board games: Balderdash, Code names, Risk, Monopoly, Clue and Labyrinth are the favourites. We have pulled out a puzzle or two and I'm averaging a book or two a week. We tuned up the bikes and the kids run out now and then to do a neighbourhood loop. Meals have shifted by an hour or two - dinner used to be at 5pm every day, but we often aren't finishing until closer to 7pm.
Next week will start to be a little different as school starts up. The three younger kids will be doing daily online live video classes with their teacher, and then assigned homework to submit each afternoon. It looks completely different from what our school board is doing. Honestly, I'm a little stressed. I've homeschooled before, and I'm a teacher, but it's stressing me out. I am afraid the education community is going to overdo this and scare everyone off. I have had the luxury of watching other teachers around the world plan, prepare and start to deliver distance learning. I started off thinking about grand plans, but as I've reflected on it I have pulled back and back. I am thinking kids and parents will find this stressful, and the more stressful and difficult the less likely they are to engage. We will see, but since we cannot actually evaluate any of this work (it doesn't count toward any report card, and with good reason), I can see parents just opting out of the whole thing.
I'm grateful that they didn't lay us all off as teachers. There was a week where we worried that if they closed schools they would just lay us all off for the rest of the year. I'll gladly help in providing learning opportunities to parents if we get to keep our jobs. But I keep trying to remember that this is not homeschooling, this is a traumatic worldwide event during which we are trying to provide help to students. They are two very different scenarios.
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