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Writer's pictureBrenda Ellis

Let’s Talk About Remote Learning

I don’t know how things went in your school district during the pandemic, but around here kids spent a lot of time on their tablets. With the shut down, schools had to spend their spring break scrambling around for a way to conduct school remotely.


I felt for them. What a situation to be thrown into.


Overall, I was amazed at how schools responded and the rapid rate of the response too. A friend sent me the link to her kindergarten student’s remote learning. It was a very nicely put together page, with videos from the kindergarten teachers and lots and lots of learning links. Schools passed out laptops and tablets to those who needed them. For students without internet, paper packets were made available. School cafeterias became drive-throughs. The schools responded.


But what it really all amounted to, was a lot of online time for most kids. And this is not the way many students learn.



My college-aged daughter struggled also with online learning. What she really needed was in-person instruction. Her classes would have gone so much better for her.


Is it possible to learn online? Certainly! I hope you are learning things from this blog. But it takes a great deal of maturity, some background knowledge of the subject, and some executive functioning to be able to “self-learn” from a screen.


In our state of Texas, the next school year offered 3 things for students: in person instruction, live online instruction, and non-live instruction. So, it was good news that parents who weren't comfortable sending their children to school did not have to. But parents were thrust into being far more involved in their children's schooling than they had signed up to be! Add in the fact that many parents were trying to work from home and none of us had any warning and it was a tough place.


Now here lies the decision.


Did your children do well with that type of learning during the pandemic? Did that fit your family? Following someone else's schedule, someone's calendar, someone's goals...this is not free homeschooling. There are homeschoolers who, even before this pandemic, followed someone else's plans daily. That is a type of homeschooling. We will talk more about it later. Truly, freely homeschooling does not make you dependent on others to tell your student what to do and when to do it.


Did you know your family could be free like that? Did you know that you can take the day off to go to the zoo with Daddy because he's off work? Did you know you don't have to do school between the hours of 8am-3pm? Did you know you can do school totally unplugged? Did you know you could take your school on the road with you?


But I have to work. OK. Did you know you can do school around your work schedule? Did you know it only takes a few hours a day (for most grade levels)? Did you know there was a thing called unschooling? Did you know that sometimes another family member can be the main teacher? Did you know you had this many options?


Does freely homeschooling sound better than making sure your child logs in on time, spending hours online trying to keep up with remote learning? Are you ready to find out the difference between homeschooling and pandemic schooling?


If you are ready to learn more, I'm here for that.



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