I am pretty sure I am not the only UAE parent who spent part of Sunday in a daze having read this article in Gulf News, which suggests we may have to continue homeschooling our little darlings in September.
For me, early July when term ends, and I can stop torturing my five year old through daily doses of maths, phonics, letter and sentence formation, rudimentary Arabic, and so forth, and just let her get on with the business of being a child again during our time together, ie playing, has been a like a beacon that I am sailing towards through rough waters. As I get closer to that beacon, I also get closer to hurling myself into a lifeboat as I develop a shorter and shorter fuse while she finds increasingly ingenious ways to delay doing her lessons. So the thought of having to start it all again in late August, in year one, after she has spent seven weeks busily forgetting all we have struggled together for her to learn, is not a cheery prospect.
I know, I know, without a vaccine, the coronavirus is so virulent that sending the little disease factories back to the breeding ground without some kind of restriction would be foolhardy. But I do despair slightly that the impact this enforced isolation is having on the kids seems to be of little interest to those making the decisions.
The thing that really made me stomach hit the floor about the article linked above is the mention of the usage, or not, of school buildings, and, I quote, "the extent of a student's need to sit in a classroom five days a week, school hours, and the extent of the students' need to study daily from 7am to 2pm".
Does anyone else find that quote somewhat sinister? Does it, to anyone else, imply that the government may not just be looking at how to manage education during the coronavirus crisis, but that they may be considering wholesale changes to its education system in general? I know there has been much talk of the positive impact the crisis has had on the environment, the way the air is cleaner, roads are relatively traffic free, we can hear birds singing and so on thanks to the reduction in air traffic, and supposedly some are busy rethinking the need to attend business meetings in other countries when simple Zoom call will do.
But does this also mean we could see the beginning of the end of our education system as we know it? Could it be the impetus governments want or need to divest themselves of the need to provide physical schools for education and simply move the entire system online?
Honestly, I am aware of the economic and environmental benefits of making schools virtual from here on, but I also cannot think of a more depressing prospect for my children. We as parents are continually castigated for allowing our small children too much time staring at a screen due to the negative impact and the addictive nature of devices on small brains. Therefore, forcing their entire education interactions onto a screen for any kind of extended period, just fills me with abject horror.
I know this is a giant example of worst case scenario doom mongering, but as the crisis continues, and the economic consequences pile up, and governments find themselves compelled to relax restrictions to save economies, not really knowing the potential impact or the number deaths they will cause by doing so, it is hard not to catastrophise. Maybe it is the case that DB1 and DB2 and their peers could after all be the last generation to be educated in a physical school environment, the virus may just be bringing the day when none of our children go to school forward.
The reduced costs are another benefit. We have not filled the car with petrol since movement restrictions came into place. There is also dispensing with the need to blearily prepare packed lunches the night before, and the disappearance of the stress of remembering PE kits, theatre club clothes, reading books and swimming kits on the right days.
From my part, being a massive nerd, I did not have a great time at school for large parts of it, and even though that is not a problem afflicting DB1 yet, as far as I can tell, I am also quietly pleased that she gets to enjoy an extended break from the fray.
But, but and indeed but, that does not mean that I want her to be out of school forever. And it does not mean I want her to undertake her education remotely even over the medium term. Digital learning may be he future, but it is not something I would choose for any five year old. A child this age is still learning about human interaction, so to take it away from them and expect to pick up what they need to know about how to build friendships with their peers via a screen does not seem a happy prospect.
Right now, in the UAE, we have had 203 deaths from coronavirus, and approaching 20000 cases in total, a drop in the ocean compared to my home country, the UK, but still significant. Restrictions have been relaxed to a degree, although we have twice broken the record for the highest number of daily cases in the space of the last week. There is still precious little to compensate kids for the lack of school and daily interactions with their friends and teachers. All "family entertainment" venues are closed, meaning those UAE summer staples, the soft play centres, cinemas and so on. Public parks and beaches are slated to reopen, but with midday temperatures topping 35C, they are of little use from now until around October or November.
DB1 has coped with it all pretty well, she is on the whole a well behaved child, and she is interested in school enough to make a good stab at a lot of her lessons at home, but I feel so sad that her first year at "big school" will end this way, with end of term sports days and fun days replaced by me desperately trying to compensate for what she is missing out on, and, that it seems likely that a substantial part of her second year at school could be the same.
Him Indoors and I were talking about how to get through the next months, or possibly years of this crisis, without going insane, and we came to the conclusion that we may as well write off 2020 in terms of any kind of progress, and that just maintaining as much normality as possible, particularly for the kids, will be a win. We also resolved not to sit every evening, once the kids are asleep and there is a moment to think, discussing "the situation" and how we will move forward, because it is futile, as things seem to change daily. We just need to get through it and avoid agonising about it while sloshing back wine every evening, tempting as that may be.
That is easy to say as it is hard to keep the feelings of stress and frustration at bay. And the general sense of doom about the possibility of remote learning continuing was not helped by the fact that yesterday was not a good day at the coal face. DB1's school, a fairly aspirational and well established British curriculum school favoured by the offspring of the staff of a certain large airline, has done a corking job providing as much of the curriculum as they can online.
But school is not meant to be like this - me desperately trying to summon the requisite playful enthusiasm needed to teach a five year old and get some foundation stage phonics into her head, and pretending that brief online interactions with her teachers are just as good as having them on hand to help her with lessons.
I think it's safe to say she hit the wall yesterday, although she seems a bit happier today having had a one on one webex chat with her teachers. By the end of yesterday, I had to go and hide in the office and read some relaxing coronavirus statistics for my blog, if you will excuse that glib mention of this very serious situation. She is sick of my stupid face, I am not a school teacher by any stretch of the imagination, and believe me, being from a teaching family I am painfully aware of how lacking I am on that score.
As we lurch towards the end of our eighth week of me playing school teacher, we had both had enough. No matter how much the school says do not worry too much about the kids engaging with home learning, the fact remains that school life is rumbling on in the virtual sphere, and at some point, whether it is now or through hefty amounts of catching up within the next year, the work will have to be done. Yesterday finished, as many have, with me bellowing about how we could have finished the work and be doing something else by now if she would just bloomin' well get on with it. Believe me, that is not something I am proud of. I think the most difficult thing about it is the way remote learning changes your relationship with your child, adding a stressful new dimension to your daily interactions that neither of you, in all honesty, particularly want.
Again, there are upsides to learning this way. I am fairly sure sure she gets a lot more one to one attention from the teacher, even if the teacher is a woefully unqualified me. And I have enjoyed seeing her progress, as her reading and writing improve, that she is actually pretty good at maths, and finding out what she else she actually gets up to at school. Usually, the most I get out of her during the school run home is that school was "fine" and she "can't remember" what she did during the day.
What I also have not mentioned so far, in this endless screed, is that although we do know all of three families for whom the father is taking the homeschooling lead, this responsibility inevitably falls for the most part to the mothers. And there does not seem to be any discussions about the extra burden this places on stay at home mums, particularly those who have several kids at school, or how working mothers are still supposed to continue to work while shouldering the bulk of the responsibility of educating their kids at home. How are we supposed to magically fit in teaching around work? The ridiculous stereotype about women being multitaskers and being able to do it all is rife at the moment. And I worry that women will be expected to simply absorb the stress of it all, unrewarded and unpaid of course, unless the path we are on changes some time soon.
For me, early July when term ends, and I can stop torturing my five year old through daily doses of maths, phonics, letter and sentence formation, rudimentary Arabic, and so forth, and just let her get on with the business of being a child again during our time together, ie playing, has been a like a beacon that I am sailing towards through rough waters. As I get closer to that beacon, I also get closer to hurling myself into a lifeboat as I develop a shorter and shorter fuse while she finds increasingly ingenious ways to delay doing her lessons. So the thought of having to start it all again in late August, in year one, after she has spent seven weeks busily forgetting all we have struggled together for her to learn, is not a cheery prospect.
 |
| Mimi and Catkin. |
I know, I know, without a vaccine, the coronavirus is so virulent that sending the little disease factories back to the breeding ground without some kind of restriction would be foolhardy. But I do despair slightly that the impact this enforced isolation is having on the kids seems to be of little interest to those making the decisions.
The thing that really made me stomach hit the floor about the article linked above is the mention of the usage, or not, of school buildings, and, I quote, "the extent of a student's need to sit in a classroom five days a week, school hours, and the extent of the students' need to study daily from 7am to 2pm".
Does anyone else find that quote somewhat sinister? Does it, to anyone else, imply that the government may not just be looking at how to manage education during the coronavirus crisis, but that they may be considering wholesale changes to its education system in general? I know there has been much talk of the positive impact the crisis has had on the environment, the way the air is cleaner, roads are relatively traffic free, we can hear birds singing and so on thanks to the reduction in air traffic, and supposedly some are busy rethinking the need to attend business meetings in other countries when simple Zoom call will do.
 |
| Germinating seeds for online STEM day. |
Honestly, I am aware of the economic and environmental benefits of making schools virtual from here on, but I also cannot think of a more depressing prospect for my children. We as parents are continually castigated for allowing our small children too much time staring at a screen due to the negative impact and the addictive nature of devices on small brains. Therefore, forcing their entire education interactions onto a screen for any kind of extended period, just fills me with abject horror.
I know this is a giant example of worst case scenario doom mongering, but as the crisis continues, and the economic consequences pile up, and governments find themselves compelled to relax restrictions to save economies, not really knowing the potential impact or the number deaths they will cause by doing so, it is hard not to catastrophise. Maybe it is the case that DB1 and DB2 and their peers could after all be the last generation to be educated in a physical school environment, the virus may just be bringing the day when none of our children go to school forward.
 |
| Phonics. |
To slow down the doom mongering a little, it is true that there are upsides to DB1 not having to go to school. Foremost, is the fact that I get more time with her. Then, the days of the mad scramble of the school run and "discussions" such as this are temporarily over: "You need to eat more than one spoonful of cereal every 10 minutes if you want to finish it before we leave" and "No, I do not have time to read you a chapter of Dogman before driving you to school," and of course, the classic: "For the love of suffering f***, will you for s***'s sake put on your f***ing shoes, we were meant to have left 10 minutes ago if we are to have a chance of not going in the late book". I paraphrase, I do not really talk to her like that. Not very often, anyway.
From my part, being a massive nerd, I did not have a great time at school for large parts of it, and even though that is not a problem afflicting DB1 yet, as far as I can tell, I am also quietly pleased that she gets to enjoy an extended break from the fray.
But, but and indeed but, that does not mean that I want her to be out of school forever. And it does not mean I want her to undertake her education remotely even over the medium term. Digital learning may be he future, but it is not something I would choose for any five year old. A child this age is still learning about human interaction, so to take it away from them and expect to pick up what they need to know about how to build friendships with their peers via a screen does not seem a happy prospect.
Right now, in the UAE, we have had 203 deaths from coronavirus, and approaching 20000 cases in total, a drop in the ocean compared to my home country, the UK, but still significant. Restrictions have been relaxed to a degree, although we have twice broken the record for the highest number of daily cases in the space of the last week. There is still precious little to compensate kids for the lack of school and daily interactions with their friends and teachers. All "family entertainment" venues are closed, meaning those UAE summer staples, the soft play centres, cinemas and so on. Public parks and beaches are slated to reopen, but with midday temperatures topping 35C, they are of little use from now until around October or November.
DB1 has coped with it all pretty well, she is on the whole a well behaved child, and she is interested in school enough to make a good stab at a lot of her lessons at home, but I feel so sad that her first year at "big school" will end this way, with end of term sports days and fun days replaced by me desperately trying to compensate for what she is missing out on, and, that it seems likely that a substantial part of her second year at school could be the same.
Him Indoors and I were talking about how to get through the next months, or possibly years of this crisis, without going insane, and we came to the conclusion that we may as well write off 2020 in terms of any kind of progress, and that just maintaining as much normality as possible, particularly for the kids, will be a win. We also resolved not to sit every evening, once the kids are asleep and there is a moment to think, discussing "the situation" and how we will move forward, because it is futile, as things seem to change daily. We just need to get through it and avoid agonising about it while sloshing back wine every evening, tempting as that may be.
That is easy to say as it is hard to keep the feelings of stress and frustration at bay. And the general sense of doom about the possibility of remote learning continuing was not helped by the fact that yesterday was not a good day at the coal face. DB1's school, a fairly aspirational and well established British curriculum school favoured by the offspring of the staff of a certain large airline, has done a corking job providing as much of the curriculum as they can online.
 |
| If you are in any doubt how much effort DB1's school are putting in, this is one of the teaching assistants as Princess Leia for a Star Wars themed "dough disco" where they show the kids how to use play doh to improve their fine motor skills. |
I think it's safe to say she hit the wall yesterday, although she seems a bit happier today having had a one on one webex chat with her teachers. By the end of yesterday, I had to go and hide in the office and read some relaxing coronavirus statistics for my blog, if you will excuse that glib mention of this very serious situation. She is sick of my stupid face, I am not a school teacher by any stretch of the imagination, and believe me, being from a teaching family I am painfully aware of how lacking I am on that score.
As we lurch towards the end of our eighth week of me playing school teacher, we had both had enough. No matter how much the school says do not worry too much about the kids engaging with home learning, the fact remains that school life is rumbling on in the virtual sphere, and at some point, whether it is now or through hefty amounts of catching up within the next year, the work will have to be done. Yesterday finished, as many have, with me bellowing about how we could have finished the work and be doing something else by now if she would just bloomin' well get on with it. Believe me, that is not something I am proud of. I think the most difficult thing about it is the way remote learning changes your relationship with your child, adding a stressful new dimension to your daily interactions that neither of you, in all honesty, particularly want.
Again, there are upsides to learning this way. I am fairly sure sure she gets a lot more one to one attention from the teacher, even if the teacher is a woefully unqualified me. And I have enjoyed seeing her progress, as her reading and writing improve, that she is actually pretty good at maths, and finding out what she else she actually gets up to at school. Usually, the most I get out of her during the school run home is that school was "fine" and she "can't remember" what she did during the day.
What I also have not mentioned so far, in this endless screed, is that although we do know all of three families for whom the father is taking the homeschooling lead, this responsibility inevitably falls for the most part to the mothers. And there does not seem to be any discussions about the extra burden this places on stay at home mums, particularly those who have several kids at school, or how working mothers are still supposed to continue to work while shouldering the bulk of the responsibility of educating their kids at home. How are we supposed to magically fit in teaching around work? The ridiculous stereotype about women being multitaskers and being able to do it all is rife at the moment. And I worry that women will be expected to simply absorb the stress of it all, unrewarded and unpaid of course, unless the path we are on changes some time soon.
