You have school age children who can no longer go to school due to the Covid-19 closings. You still have your job and need to continue working to pay the bills. The school district has only come up with a half thought out plan for home learning. You are worried that your children are not progressing with their learning AND that you are not at home to keep an eye on them. This is an unprecedented problem. What help or suggestions are there?
This is a real head scratcher. These are the times when you have to think outside the box, get creative or sink into depression and anger. On the other hand, you might decide to make lemonade out of bitter fruit. You might think outside the box and get creative, and still fail, but if you don’t make the effort the bad consequences will most surely come to pass. Nothing beats a failure like a try. The important thing is not to worry about ‘THE ANSWER’. No one can guarantee success. What you can do, and what you do have control over is to TRY, and I daresay, never stop trying. Never ever say, it can’t be done. So, let’s come up with ideas that (1), you never thought of before, or (2) you previously dismissed as impossible. Again, there is no such thing as impossible. The first thing you can consider is that you have the ability, and the power to help yourself. If you want to survive you cannot rely on the way things ‘have always been’. Yearning to ‘return to normal’ is no longer an option. Normal no longer exists. If normal is no longer there to fall back on what is there? It is the power to look deep within yourself to do things that you never have done before. If you fail to do that you will be miserable, hate yourself, everyone around you, and emotionally perish, either slowly or quickly.
Do I have an answer to closed down schools? No. Do I have ideas what to do? Yes. Are they practical? Probably not, as these are new ideas. Something new is probably never practical, because it has never been tried, and we don’t ‘know’ if it will work. Will it solve the problem? New ideas seldom are the ‘answer’ right off the bat. It always takes time, trial and error before it solves a problem. When the Wright brothers took off from Kitty Hawk, was flying practical? It took World War I, to find a real use for airplanes, and took the acceleration of technological development of World War II before commercial passenger aviation became practical.
Other than pinning one’s hope on a vaccine that will magically appear at ‘warp speed’ and transform life back to ‘normal’, here are some impractical ideas that will require a rejiggering of how you and society sees itself. Open schools, with full attendance. People will get sick, vulnerable people will pass away in large numbers. By natural selection, the survivors will develop some sort of immunity. Sounds impractical, terrible, cruel, unacceptable, but that is exactly what happened in the Spanish Flu of 1918 -1920. Mankind took a hit, but carried on. Another impractical idea that is currently unacceptable, is that people bring into their family, grandparents, retired or disabled people to look after and tutor their children. Another impractical idea that won’t work, spouses be kind, considerate, and loving to each other so families stay together, where one spouse can stay home to take care of the children. Another idea that can’t work, is that neighbors get together where one person can watch over the neighbor kids and supervise online learning. None of these ideas will probably ‘work’, because we are only at the beginning of the process. These are just pokey tries based on the past, but it is a start. Looking at what I have written, I acknowledge my bias that each of these ‘ideas’, avoids government involvement. I am not from Texas but I have been in Texas for so long, that the disdain to look for ‘answers’ from big government has rubbed off. That said I am open to other ideas. Necessity is the mother of invention, and invention must start. Sitting around and feeling sorry for oneself is not acceptable.