Learning Pods Show Their Cracks
It turns out that organizing and operating an independent one-room schoolhouse from your backyard is … a lot of work.
This past summer, Emily Brady thought she had solved the puzzle of remote learning. Rather than send her 5-year-old to virtual kindergarten, she would set up a Spanish immersion forest school for a few children, hire a teacher and run the idyllic program from the cottage behind her house in Oakland, Calif.
“The parents needed to work, and we figured the easiest thing would be to pay and hire somebody to be the teacher,” said Ms. Brady, a writer who set the plan in motion with a cousin who also had school-aged children. “Oh my God, it all just sounds so naïve now.”
It turns out that organizing and operating an independent one-room schoolhouse from your backyard is a lot of work. To get the program running, Ms. Brady drafted Covid-19 guidelines and interviewed potential teachers, settling on a woman with a warm personality, but no teaching experience.
Ms. Brady recruited other families. One mother had so many questions before the school year started that Ms. Brady suggested she find a different pod. Her cousin dropped out after the first week, leaving the remaining two families scrambling to find two replacements to cover the cost of a teacher’s salary. The school year had barely started when an extreme wildfire season exposed one crucial shortcoming of a curriculum centered around outdoor learning: It’s hard to run a forest school when you can’t go to the forest.
“This whole experience, the whole year, has been like driving in the dark with your fog lights on,” Ms. Brady said.
If the summer was the season to fawn over learning pods as a pandemic panacea, the fall and winter have brought rude reminders that they are not so simple.
Learning pods, a newly popular term for families who band together and hire teachers to either replace or augment virtual CONTINUE READING: The Cons of Learning Pods - The New York Times
