As the time approached for the 2020-21 school year to begin, I remember reading about parents of means turning to “learning pods” as an option for creating a sort of one-room schoolhouse experience for a small group of children. Also referred to as “pandemic pods,” the idea is to provide a means for social interaction and face-to-face instruction to supplement the less-desirable online instruction that these children might otherwise be facing during the pandemic.
There are even freshly-created entities such as this one, Learning Pods (a New York- and San Francisco-school “collaboration” that can apparently somehow process contributions from foundations), willing to facilitate a learning pod experience for preschool or K-5 children. Interested in pricing? Use this handy pricing calculator to learn that the estimated cost for a K-5 student who is involved five days a week (where a “day” is 9AM – 2PM for K-5) in a pod of 4 students is $3,320 a month. The cheapest appears to be $893 a month for a preschool pod of 6 kids meeting 3 days a week for under three house a day (9AM – 11:45AM). (Financial aid is available; one can apply for private school financial aid using this application that costs $51 to submit.)
If you have the means and live in SF or NY and have the pod membership all lined up but have no teacher, and Learning Pods has no teacher for your pod, you can fill out this “teacher not found form pod” form, and we’ll see what happens. The form includes the question of who is pod captain, whether the pod is indeed complete (minimum of 3 kids), whether pod has a location, whether pod includes children with “learning differences or CONTINUE READING: Learning Pods: Quite the Lesson for Adults | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog