By Charlie Emilia
For the past few months, as the world was ravaged by a pandemic those of us with children old enough to need schooling have been taking a beating with these online learning classes as a replacement. Personally, I feel like I’m in the Sunken Place, but via Zoom; so, I’m drowning in nothingness, but make it high tech.
It would be really great to say I don’t know how I got here, but honestly, I volunteered as tribute. Just like Katniss, I did it for my sister. I’ve got this really amazing, generous sister who works at an office and can’t do her job remotely. However, I have a slightly more flexible schedule and the ability to complete my work online.
Some of you may already be seasoned in online learning. Enter me! Salt-free chicken! This is my first semester doing this, since my elder niece has graduated and gone on to medical school. She did a very good job at assisting them, so much so I thought this was going to be easy, fun even. So, I offered to let my nephew and younger niece do their Zoom classes at my house while my sister is at work. How hard could it be to let some kids sit in my living room watching a screen? That’s doable, right? Wrong. These children are in grades two and three, they’re just learning to read and write properly. We can’t expect them to know how to log in to classes on their own, but I’ll get more into that later.
Week one was baptism by fire. I didn’t even know what grades these children were in, but I dove head-first into WhatsApp group purgatory. I’m generally opposed to being in groups I don’t start, even though I love to create them. But, being in a group full of random phone numbers representing parents who are all asking the same questions over and over….it gets to be stressful. I am part of two, since I work with two children in two separate grades. The first week we were treated to mass texts about passwords, Zoom meeting numbers, class schedules and something about Google classrooms. I didn’t even know Google was a school, how can it have classrooms? I’m joking….or am I?
From my own experience on social media I think this could have been better handled by creating a broadcast list of all the parents. Many of the messages are not relevant to us all, which means I’m stuck in a long chain of information taking up space in my phone. Any time I need to find my child’s passwords I have to scroll through other parents’ struggles to get little Broccoli (I don’t know child names) online, or people complaining about being kicked off their Zoom. I would just clear the entire chat to free up space, but I don’t know what is pertinent to my own children.
So, no I am not enjoying the WhatsApp groups. Also, has nobody heard of boundaries? Why are we active and communicating at 3:00am? Both groups are now muted for my sanity. Once I got the login information from the chat I promptly stopped paying attention to anything else. Why would I? Sadly, between GEBE and their Wi-Fi connections, these children are being set up for a very long and difficult “new normal.” The one comfort I am allotted from these WhatsApp groups is that everyone is not okay. Most of us are struggling. If I had a dollar for every time a parent said they were facing difficulty, I’d have enough to hire someone to home-school these children in a sanitised environment.
Outside of the technical difficulties we are also faced with having to encourage children to learn in a place where they’ve been conditioned to think of as a safe zone away from teaching. My niece once asked, “Why am I doing school work if I’m at home?” Same, Nymie. Same. We also have to adhere to a teaching schedule. I have so many questions! How can I expect a child just learning to read and write to be able to log in to classes on their own? When do I get to finfish my own work if class sessions are at 15-minute intervals and I have to help them log in and out? Have you met my Boomer mother who asks me how to work Microsoft Excel, because she’s who fills in for me when I have to head into the office. How do I come up with a “gym” period for a child when I too am out of shape? Why do they have so much class work as well as homework? How do I help them do homework when I can barely keep up with the regular classwork? Can we just do a bunch of assignments in the books and turn them in at the end of the week?
Sitting in this hell of my own choosing I do my best to remember it’s not the fault of the children. They are trying to escape just as much as I am, maybe even more, because it’s possible for me to get in my car and drive away. These poor souls are trapped in a system being tested on them like lab creatures. I don’t blame the teachers either, since really, they did not sign up for this. They’re doing the best they can with what they’ve been dealt. A majority of their schooling has now been rendered null and void. Imagine having to be a makeshift IT person as well as an educator. Do you know how often they must say, “Have you tried shutting it down and starting it back up again?” Nobody expected this. Nobody wanted this.
But, what I do think is that I needed to admit that I am having a hard time with all of this and others are too. It’s hard to work a full-time job, or even a part-time situation, in addition to helping these children with a full lesson plan. Since starting this ordeal I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that I am very bad at learning via screens. I hated school the entire way through and only went to get it over with and level up for work. I am equipped to be a lunch lady, at best, since that’s the only thing I’ve been enjoying. Just give me a hairnet and get me off the Internet! I hate it here.
Photo: Standing behind my nephew to help explain how to play an assigned game.
