Ditch the desk, ignore the clock and more advice on helping your kids learn -- from a teacher and former homeschooler - The Washington Post

Ditch the desk, ignore the clock and more advice on helping your kids learn -- from a teacher and former homeschooler - The Washington Post

Ditch the desk, ignore the clock and more advice on helping your kids learn — from a teacher and former homeschooler

There is plenty of advice on the Internet for parents who are suddenly at home with their children because of the coronavirus crisis, trying to be good stewards of their education but not really knowing how.

And as usual with advice, you can find some that fits your own perceived ideas about how to be an impromptu teacher. Keep the kids on a strict schedule? You can find that. Don’t keep kids on a strict schedule? You can find that too. Insist your children do every assignment right away? Or don’t? It’s all there.

So what do people who have been on both sides of this — a classroom teacher and a parent who taught their children out of the classroom — actually say to do?

Here is some advice from Paula Prosper, a math teacher at Cooper Middle School in McLean, Va. She is also a mother of two children, one a high school senior and another a college sophomore. She home-schooled her children for three years when her family lived and traveled on a sail boat. From August 2016 through June 2018, her daughter was in grades 6-8 and her son was in grades 8-10.

By Paula Prosper

School at home is a new and daunting world for many of us, but a shift in perspective and expectations can help. I’m a veteran public school math teacher, but I’ve also been a home-schooler, teaching my two kids during some of their middle and high school years while we lived on our small sailboat. The coronavirus quarantine has thrown teachers and families alike into roles they were not prepared for, and many are reeling. This new learning structure is clearly not ideal. But it actually offers some ways to improve our kids’ educational experience if we adjust our thinking about it.

It’s important to differentiate between home schooling and distance learning. Those of you who sent your kids off to school each day did not sign up to be a home-school parent, so there should be no CONTINUE READING: Ditch the desk, ignore the clock and more advice on helping your kids learn -- from a teacher and former homeschooler - The Washington Post