Parents as educators? Now is the time to rise to the occasion

A Seminole County mom is calling on the Florida Department of Education to hit the pause button on this school year rather than moving forward with digital learning.

Anne-Marie Wuzel penned a blog post listing the myriad reasons a quick shift to homeschooling is a bad idea.

She makes some good points but her overall point — that the rest of the school year should just be scrapped entirely — is off.

As a mom, and the wife of an educator, this is a good time to dip my toe in the column pool.

Wuzel makes one point that is absolutely spot on.

“I thought there would be ‘instruction’ from our child’s teacher, but I’m learning, that may not be the case,” she wrote.

The degree to which parents are being instructed on how to help their children will vary from district to district, school to school and teacher to teacher. In many cases, that instruction is lacking.

Because this crisis hit swiftly, there was little time to develop a cohesive statewide plan to implement digital learning on a statewide level. Districts are left with minimal guidance to give schools, who are left to give minimal guidance to teachers. And yes, that leaves parents wanting.

My own husband has been making decisions on the fly for his classes, spending countless hours texting or calling other educators in his department to swap notes. And make no mistake, he’s no stranger to online classes. As a former college professor turned high school teacher, he’s perhaps more equipped than most to navigate online learning. But his students are not. They left for spring break with the benefit of face-to-face learning that, for most, was all they knew. Now they’re being asked to employ the discipline that doing school work from home demands.

The situation is not ideal — not for students, parents or teachers. But scrapping the school year entirely is not the answer.

Remember that teachers aren’t asking you to provide a full six-hour school day for your child. A few hours a day will do it. That’s still a lot if you’re a working parent, I know. And for parents of younger children or children with special needs or families with multiple school aged children, it’s even more to ask.

Yes, as Wuzel opines, working parents are put in a situation where they must juggle the demands of their own work while at the same time being a teacher, in most cases untrained ones at that. The task will be easier for some than others. For some it might be impossible. Some might ignore it all together.

But this variance in parental participation was accounted for. Standardized testing has been canceled. Grades are being doled out more leniently. Grade level promotions are being granted with a lesser degree of scrutiny.

On top of that, districts made resources like laptops and iPads available to students in need. Spectrum offered free wi-fi to families who lacked it.

Is it a perfect situation? Far from it.

Could there have been more resources for parents to navigate their new duties as educators? Most definitely.

But our children are in some ways being hit harder by this pandemic than their adult caregivers. They don’t have the benefit of understanding the severity of what’s happening around them.

All they know is that their friends are now out of reach. Their birthday parties, extracurricular activities and any other social activities they’ve come to expect and enjoy, are all being canceled.

School is the one shred of normalcy they have left. Don’t take it away from them.

And consider also that, as scores of restaurant and hotel workers, journalists and working professionals are losing their jobs amid what will likely be the most devastating economic crash of our lifetime, education is one profession we can, and must save.

Your child’s teachers might not be in their classrooms to deliver the education we’ve come to expect in a privileged society, but they are behind their laptops, ready and willing to answer questions.

This is not easy for them either. But make no mistake, they care about your child’s success. If you’re having a hard time, talk to them. They’ll walk you through it.

In the meantime, know that you are not alone. This pandemic is sparing no one.

Does it suck? Yup. But now is not the time to bury our heads in the sand. At the risk of sounding harsh, suck it up buttercup, because this is our new normal for the foreseeable future and life must go on.

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For parents struggling with the new distance learning routine, the Florida Department of Education has put together a family resource guide with tips and tools available here.