I know this just sounds mean, but if we "keep it real" as the kids say, not all kids have parents who can help them out with algebra or even spelling for that matter. I just had a quick conversation with my mom, she dialed me instead of my sister accidentally, but said she was in the middle of "teaching" my sister's kids at home. She seemed a little stressed and was quick to say she was worried about the younger boy who does not have a strict regiment to follow compared to the older boy who has his online classes and has to sit there all day going from class to class.
Learning is not just the teacher spitting out facts, kids have to repeat it and incorporate it into their lives somehow to try and make it stick. Luckily for my kids, both Wife and I can tackle almost any subject together. I tutored Algebra for 3 semesters and a couple of summer sessions and took four calculus classes, so I can handle math and most sciences. Wife pretty much writes for her job, so writing an essay or anything for any other class is no big deal. I write these blogs daily too, so I can help with that as well. What about the homes where that is not the case? Wife is pretty smart, but put her in front of math problems and she reverts right back to junior high and pushes back. She wants nothing to do with A train is going this fast and B train is going this fast, where do they meet? How are the millions of parents who barely finish high school going to help their kids flourish? There are also the naive deniers, say in history class when discussing Christopher Columbus, are the idiot parents that think he came and stole the land and is a "fill in the negative blank" going to foster a good impression of this great man that got us started as a country. There is already so much negativism about the US, all those parents on the left can't be providing good background history about men like George Washington and those men that forged this country.
I know that Covid-19 is real and still killing every day, but maybe school should just be on hiatus until a better solution presents itself. I am still hopeful for a vaccine, a couple of companies are in stage 3, so hopefully we can start seeing the end of this in a couple of months. I just read that something like 500,000 kids are currently infected with Covid-19, as long as it doesn't kill them that fact is not the worst thing in the world. It is almost like having influenza, most of us get a version of it yearly and we survive it. I am not necessarily on the side of "just let them go back to school", a big 20 year old defensive lineman did just die from a college today, and no disrespect to him, but he was about as big as me, he had to be over 350 pounds even if he was a jock.
I agree with my mom, I don't see much learning getting done while the kids are home. It is a bold effort and I guess at least it justifies the teachers getting paid, I don't know what we would do if Wife's check stopped all of a sudden, but in the end, until the kiddos get back to school, learning will be very minimal. I guess in some weird way, it can be fun to see some grandparents who watch their young grandchildren getting their brains working to help their little kin folk out. Maybe the kids aren't learning, but maybe the old people can dust off their brains a little bit.
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