Get Your Learn On: No not that Much!

Let’s begin by collectively stating learning from home sucks. We could find another word for sucks, but it’s early and we don’t have time for that. If you are enjoying your time learning at home with your kid(s), good for you, now go get behind Wilson’s fence and do your Home Improvement projects every day and brag about it. The rest of us, will be over here just trying to hang on. This week is April vacation week, it turns out vacation week is not very vacationy, but my husband says Thai food can fix most anything and we used that to solve the issue last night. Remember when you did whole 30?? Remember when you read that food is deeply intertwined with emotion and you shouldn’t eat your feelings? Aint nobody got time for that shit anymore. We are all over here eating our feelings aren’t we? I’m over here eating Lisa’s Legit, A1 Diner, Liberal Cup. They are literally helping me through. Whoops sorry, huge digression there. So Yes, remote schooling, backwoods learning, electronic brain enhancement, whatever you want to call it. The image that is attached to this blog is an image of my son when he was three or four (we stopped scrapbooking by then whoopsies) and if it invokes feelings of unsettledness it should, because this was him last Friday and this was me last Friday and this was you last fill in the blank. It is not us everyday, but it was us last Friday. We are very similar him and I. Well we are similar when he is being funny, snarky and intelligent, he is similar to his father when he is acting like this picture.

Genetics aside, we started out Friday like any normal day. I woke up with that devil of a puppy we have whining and barking. I threw open the door like Belle in Beauty and the Beast, sung Bonjour to my neighbor, who flipped me off from her ill lit window and there we have it, the day was off. What a good start huh? Then I made myself a black coffee (I closed my eyes and pretended it was a chai tea latte). I did some writing to sooth my soul and did a Joel Freeman workout. At about 8:30ish I opened my son’s door. Now mind you, it is 8:30. These kids used to get up at 6:00 and get on the bus by 7:45. So already I am giving both my kids at gift. But at 8:30 I kindly open the door and I say in a soft and gentle voice it’s time to wake up. He proceeds to turn his back on me and loudly snore. I go back I do more black coffee, more friendly neighbor interaction, more never ending dishes and by this time, I am waking him up like Mrs. Hannigan, complete with crazy eyes. You might ask where my daughter is at this time. She is up in the alert sense, in that she is sprawled out on the couch , eating a bag of stale pretzels, watching Christley Knows Best, and ignoring the puppy pissing all over the floor right next to her. World what have I become? This is my morning routine now? This? It just can’t be.

I finally get both the kids awake and breakfasted and cerealed, and by now it is 10 am. It is now time one and all for binders to commence. Some schools use packets. Some use binders. Some use google classrooms. I don’t care what your kid is using. When they don’t want to do. They just don’t want to do. In both of my children’s defense, they work fairly willingly most days to get their work done. Some days it takes longer and some days it takes a shorter time. But this morning, they both observed those binders like they were Josie Grosie, crying on her front porch, waiting for whosie whatsie to pick them up. Not Impressed. I did all the right things, I turned on my pandora instrumental station, I poured more discusting black coffee, I opened the window for fresh quarantine air, I turned on my favorite lemon Scentsy. My daughter opened her binder and took one look at simplifying fractions, pushed it towards me like I was her tax auditor. I did what all Moms do, even us teachers, googled Khans academy for a seven minute tutorial. In which time, she publicly, in front of the kitchen and the dogs and the dishes, told me I didn’t know anything and who needs a seven minute video to figure out fractions. She then turned to us and said she couldn’t possibly sit with us any longer, went into her room and slammed the door. She then began to launder money into offshore accounts and phone her contact through the drug cartel (sorry I”m on season three of Ozark).

My son opened his binder and looked at his schedule. To be transparent, his teacher is amazing. She is so organized, we have check off boxes, we have categories, we have online resources attached to paper resources. For whatever reason on Friday, my son could have used that all as toilet paper. “I’m not doing this”, he told me frankly. He looked so dejected when he said it, like I was taking his favorite animal to slaughter, like I had just run over his bike. I used everything in my tool box to cajole him, I listened, I prompted, I waited, then I turned to my inner tool box and I bribed, screamed and sobbed. During this entire time, I was trying to connect my own classroom parents onto a website that they could use remotely. I have connected my twenty kids to about 238375983758437 different free resources and sometimes it gets a little overwhelming. During peak yelling, I connected two of the same kids to the same account and while I was trying to unconnect, and get my son to start something, anything, he looked at me with this odd expression, it was the same expression he looks at me with when he is hurt, or anxious, or worried that he can’t make said things happen. I looked at him and I closed that binder, snapped it right shut, people what are we doing here? We had all in this house clearly hit a wall, and me yelling , and her drug dealing (haha) and him lashing out is not what school feels like. Not one iotta. He and I both gave each other time outs and had a come to Jesus meeting after, where I took some screen time for rudeness and he told me he needs to talk while he works (of course he does), he sits at GROUP tables at school and works on everything collaboratively. I told him I would give him time in the am, just him and I (not him and I and my classroom, not him and I parent emails), just him and I and we would make that binder happen the best way we know how and if he needed to sing Old Town Road when he was working, if he needs to scribble on the side of this paper while he was thinking, if he needed to read out loud to understand better than have it .

I write this to you this morning, because I know you have made that face that my son makes in this picture. I know maybe you have more than one child making that face at the same time. Maybe you are a Grammy and helping children to do their packets or their binders, maybe you are a single mom working as a nurse during the day and trying to do this with your kids at night, maybe you can barely get food on the table and so you are lucky to get two worksheets from the binder done all week long. Maybe your son or daughter has special needs and you are at odds as to how to help them because all of their people are not allowed in your learning space. It is okay to shut the binder for a minute, it is okay to time out, pause and reset. Kids can’t learn while that stressed, parents can’t support while that stressed and we need to take each day as it comes and just do the best we can. Your child is smart, capable and trying and sometimes this whole remote learning thing does not match up to their expectations, and it doesn’t make them a bad kid or you a bad parent, it just makes this a giant hill to climb. So my advice, stop shrieking from the bottom of the hill for them to get to the top. Pack up that red wagon, cooler, bike basket and hoof it up next to them. Take time away from your job, even if only in little chunks to take strides besides them. They don’t work alone at school and they can’t at home either. Also- for the love of God stop preaching perfection every day on social media. We know you posted a picture of your kids baking muffins and put home economics class and then went into the pantry and poured a vodka and soda sans lime. Post the upbeat pictures some days, but post the real pictures other days, post your struggles, reach out, and others will reach back.