I’ve been reading a ton of excellent and also very disheartening writing about experiences home schooling kids. For me, it’s completely exhausting even though my level of effort towards my twelve year old getting logged into a Google Classroom on the days when he’s with me is minimal. It’s the other stuff like figuring out how to feed everyone lunch while remembering that I need to eat lunch too that compounds the fatigue. I also don’t spend much time doing technical support for distance learning either. Maybe my kid has just absorbed some basic IT troubleshooting by osmosis? He did fashion a cover for his webcam out of masking tape and a bottle cap.
Working from home and schooling from home is a reality that everyone I know has been dealing with at varying levels of success for the better part of a year now and it does completely suck at least in terms of overall happiness. Apart from the utter lack of boundaries between work and real life which for me mostly stem from home life intruding into my workday, there are all kinds of pressures to seem more present when remote. I’ve heard more than a few horror stories about teachers demanding that webcams remain on while they’re teaching and empathize with that as I’ve heard the equivalent demands from my work while in an all hands meeting where over a hundred people were attending.
It seems like school and all of the parental requirements that come along with it that often require you to be somewhere that isn’t work at unreasonable times like 4 PM on a weekday is the way we’re manifesting our misery. Everything changed for most people because the moron in charge decided that he didn’t want to spook the stock market so here we are. Maybe it’s slightly better because we are talking less about the survivability of this year and perhaps spending less time recreating old timey Antarctic survival food out of sheer boredom and desperation.
