Quarantine Education

Shane Parrish asked, “What are some of the second and subsequent order consequences of covid-19 that you foresee with 80 percent confidence?”, how things would be different from the quarantine for CoVid19. It’s a good question to ask, if students participate in home school what else will change. A running list.

• Better chronotype matching. Morning people get to do school in the morning, night owls at night. My oldest daughter gets two extra hours of sleep and goes to math class in her pajamas.
• Better resources. We’ve taken drawing class from Mo Willems and learned about animals from the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden staff. My kids had great teachers but online they have access to the best ones.
• Teaching young people. Though I haven’t seen much of this yet, it’s coming. Many instructors comment that they didn’t really understand something until they taught it. This can be true for kids at home too.
• Learning technology tools. My younger daughter dictates her homework rather than typing it which she could do whereas in school she would use a pencil. If tools shape our thinking she’s thinking in new ways.
• Plato’s cave and school. That same younger daughter needed help with answering why we have a leap day. That led to a talk about why we have the Georgian Calendar and not one that uses a leap week. Which also applies to why we do school-school and not home-school.
• Asynchronous communications. If the future of work requires some asynchronous skill then this quarantine has been good practice.
• Intrinsic motivations. My kids follow a program put forth by their school but this is mostly finished before lunch and they can move onto more enjoyable things. My guess is that a long-term homeschool arrangement would break the link between learning and school and create a hub where learning is connected to school, but many other things as well.

One week down and we are doing well.