School

A week of school from home has ended and I'm at a loss to fully explain why I seem to be so unscathed by the experience. I was really quite frightened Sunday evening because the memory of last time will never be expunged. It probably sounds like I'm playing it up in some grotesque vein of middle aged Bridget Jones / Mamamia type fuckery. But no. It really broke me. It wasn't Lenny that was challenging, he has been absolutely perfect in his approach to pandemic life, charting the best possible course between flexible adaptation to weird times and necessary childish pushback against weird atmospheres. It was the overwhelmingness of the unstructured, choose your own adventure quality to the learning materials, the overload of navigating his devices and a flood of new passwords and logins and tech not working quite how it's meant to, the switching of attention from my work to Lenny's and the cumulative sense of not having understood what was happening. I'm not having any of that this time. 

It's been done quite differently from the school end but that can't be the whole reason, because in its own way their new strategy is just as unsettling. He starts the day with a 20 minute video call with about 15 kids and the teacher who keeps the roll for that segment of the class (which is large, about 60 kids). Then he has two or three more 20 minute video calls every day. I sort of gather a token attempt at education is made in these sessions, like in Reading the teacher screenshared a video of someone from a subscription service reading out a picture book about turtles. In between these sessions he's meant to do a bit of work (I gather) and there's a lengthy document with a menu of things to do that week, they don't have to do them all (or any? not sure). They can publish some of their work on the class blog, which is a bit Tumblresque. I know he's meant to be doing a STEM research project across four weeks and this week (or last week??)  he should've developed a research question. He was given instructions for how to come up with a research topic and I could assist with this of course. But it's slipped through the cracks, and I could get him going over the weekend but he's off to his dad's next week, assuming the covid test I had today gets the all clear (as I fully expect it to, since I'm perfectly well and didn't get close to the poor colleague whose partner was since diagnosed with the disease.) 

Many things about the remote learning setup really bother me; the big one is simply how bloody awful it is for all these children to be kept away from each other all this time. It is truly, truly saddening. I wouldn't exactly say I care much about 'the learning' being missed out on, as children cannot be prevented from learning provided they're kept from spending all their time watching youtube videos of gits talking about minecraft, but they're missing the social experience of education. Whatever your schooling was like (mine traversed boring to offensive) it got you out and into a social world away from your place as a child at home locked into a familial role. Melbourne kids haven't really been to school since March. I also find disturbing the sloppy and slow-chaotic video calls, although I imagine that any video meeting one isn't a participant in oneself might look like a boring and dumb waste of time. 

One thing he has somewhat successfully done this week is his writing task (or one of them?? there might've been others. I'm not sure). The task is to keep a journal and put something in it every day. I listened to the lesson with the writing teacher, who is a sad sack millennial with a 90s goatee and bob, where journalling was explained to the children. In classic Mr G fashion the teacher read out some of his own journal to the children. It was extremely Livejournal, and I say that conscious that I've written this blog for fifteen years and done it very miserably much of the time too. Well, anyway, Lenny was invited to write about his feelings and shown that the way to write about your feelings is to write about how things are hard and you are struggling. But what he's actually written is about, subversively, feeling happy, eating, playing with animals, being bored, and looking forward with pleasure to things like seeing his best friend again.