Desperate parents need help as coronavirus upends our lives
We’re all exhausted, some of us are going hungry, and more and more of us are getting sick
As an education reporter, I’ve watched hundreds of teachers lead classrooms and I’ve learned that their job is one of the hardest in the world. The best teachers seem to have endless supplies of energy, patience and creativity. They manage to inspire both love and awe, keeping kids simultaneously inspired and on task.
It’s a job I know I could never do myself. And yet here I am. Here we all are.
My 4-year-old and 6-year-old attend public school in New York City, which closed schools Monday, March 15, to slow the virulent spread of the coronavirus here. During the first week, our school sent home a handful of worksheets and some links to educational software and shows. I made a color-coded schedule accounting for every hour of the day that usually fell apart by 10am.
A week later, we were hit with a flurry of instructions about how to set up remote schooling on laptops and iPads in our homes (parents who needed devices were instructed to apply for them online, of all things). The Google Classroom page for my first grader included multiple assignments from multiple teachers, plus instructions on how to teach her to type in a pdf.
That first day seems like years ago. I feel exhausted and frayed by this new expectation that I add homeschooling to the already CONTINUE READING: Desperate parents need help as coronavirus forces us into homeschooling