Distance learning with my first grader is giving me anxiety.
Sunday afternoon, as I worked with him to finish up the work due at school the next day, I became someone I never wanted to be – one of my parents. I was even scared of myself for a moment, so I shouldn’t be surprised by the gaping mouths and wide-eyed looks I got from my husband and child.
When it comes to Dean, I am the parent who has the most patience. However, when your child is purposely trying to draw out the misery of completing math worksheets by pretending he has no idea what he is doing, you tend to lose your cool. My kid isn’t a dummy, despite his effort to make me think he is, and regardless of his efforts, I am not going to do the work myself.
Dean is exceptional at math. That is a good thing because, with the exception of basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, I’m pretty incompetent with numbers. Accounting, yes. Algebra, no.
Learning has gotten so fancy since I was a child. All these new ways to decipher a math problem is mind blowing, and well, phonics is like learning a foreign language. I don’t consider myself to be that old, but learning is very different than it was when I was in elementary school.
I am great a memorization. Give me information, I will learn it. Trying to formulate how to get a square peg in a round hole successfully? I leave that to the experts (who are obviously current first graders, by the way).
With schools closed for the rest of the academic year, parents have gained a greater appreciation for all those kind souls teaching our children without having daily meltdowns over counting hash marks or using the crayon color specified in the instructions. After my brief stint as a homeschool teacher, I can’t imagine how a teacher can put up with my one child much less 20 to 25 of them in the same room.
Just think of the time and effort put into distance-learning lesson plans and take home packets for each student. A local administrator told me school seemed harder closed than it did when students were in session. I can believe it!
And parents, remember the appreciation you feel for teachers right now or as you assist your high schooler with Punnit squares in Biology class or coefficients in Algebra (don’t even ask me to explain what that is now). We should never forget the immense jobs teachers have even when things return to normal.
Thank you, teachers!
