There’s no question that I’m an introvert and prefer staying home, but none of us want to feel “trapped” here for months. We have done well at being on top of each other ever. single. day. We have learned a few things along the way…
10. We can handle about a month of a Stay At Home Order, then we start to lose focus, “tease” each other a little too hard, and stuff starts getting broke.
For example, after a few hours of teasing each other, one locked the other out of the house. Then that second one decided to climb in through a window. Ultimately the window was broken…
Another great example is that they were “sharing” a pencil, grabbing it from each other. Somehow a cup of tea got spilled onto a laptop…
9. This is the Spring of snow and rain. We consider it a fantastic week, weatherwise if we have two days of sun in a seven day period. We don’t even care if the sunny days fall midweek or on the weekend, it doesn’t really matter…Some sunny weather could really boost morale, at the very least if it could stop snowing!
8. Thank goodness for my washing machine. While it is nice to go to a laundrymat and get a week’s worth of laundry completed in two hours, it is so much nicer to have one at home again. Now if the weather could cooperate so I could dry the laundry every couple of days, we would really be flying high. (You should have seen the crazy combo of boards, chairs, and a dirt bike that I used to drape clothes by the woodstove yesterday for drying. Somehow my indoor clothesline was broken and I haven’t fixed it yet.)
7. There is an end in sight to the school year. Three high schoolers are done in two weeks, the middle schooler and I go about five more weeks. Still by the end of June, we shall all be done school, and feeling slightly less stressed.
6. We are not mentally prepared for distance learning this fall. We understand that younger children need the classroom time more than older children, but really, most of them need it. We also need our family members to be away from us a little through the week. We love each other but every little thing has become a huge feeling. Little annoyances are awful.
5. Without a dishwasher, I would be lost. I already feel like I spend half my time cleaning up the kitchen, if I actually had to wash all the dishes I might just be insane.
4. I completely rely on phones. My phone entertains me, connects me, and let’s me work in bed. After my husband leaves for work a little after 5 am, and the animals are fed and watered I slip back into bed and work on blogging tasks for an hour or so. Unlike working on a laptop, I can be snuggled right under the covers and network, promote, and respond to comments. Same truth at night when I want to be going to sleep but can’t quite shut my brain down.
3. Thank goodness for pets. When the other humans annoy the crap out of us, pets can soothe us. We have a cat in particular that keeps me sane. He cuddles, he follows, he settles nearby and just hangs out.
2. We love each other, but damn we need to be able to split up from each other for a couple days. Being around other people would be nice, too.
1. Teachers are absolutely essential for my children’s learning. Some of my children have no understanding how to seek out learning on their own unless they are led to the answers. This makes distance learning really tough – especially with slow internet. It’s not just my children, this is a trend across public schools today, students don’t know how to find information – or even what to ask. They could have all the resources in the world, but they wouldn’t know how to use them without explicit directions of what to look for, where to find it, and what to answer. This is a terrifying reality in classrooms today, and I abhor seeing it in my own children. This may be the side benefit of this learning at home – I tend not to give answers, I ask them questions to help them ask questions. I also don’t tell them when they find the right answer sometimes, with the same tone and inflection, as I ask them the same things when they are wrong or right until they find me evidence. Sometimes I don’t have time for that. I have had students in the past that hated this technique, but soon learned to really find out when they knew something, needed to prove something, or needed more information.
Oh no! Did the laptop survive the tea spill? I think you are right though – changes in the way we are taught mean that we are not prepared to have to be more self- reliant in our learning. I wonder if this experience will lead to amy long-term changes.
It would be really awesome if students came out of this experience with a more independent, self-learning style. I’m sitting beside my daughter as she does her physics exam, and she is using great logic to figure out questions right now. If we can change the mindset of our learners to use what they already know, hypothesize, and then find information to support their ideas or search out answers rather than being handed all the information – that would be a HUGE success of this situation.
Thank you for your comment!
Such a strange time with so much uncertainty. Especially with schools. It is interesting to read someone else’s experience
Other perspectives are interesting!
I am also more of an introvert by nature, but it is no fun to feel trapped! Even though I am an introvert, I’m a pretty adventurous one. I love trying and experiencing new things. All this monotony has got me feeling restless! I’ve been able to combat it a little by learning some new skills online, and trying to cook some new recipes. But only a little.
We’ve done new recipes too, I love it (althoughI don’t love all we’ve tried).
Covid-19 is hard to deal with in so many ways, I hope the children won’t lose out too much
That is a very fair wish. So many people talk about how resilient they are, but they’re plenty stressed, too.