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Frustration is mounting as more families across the U.S. enter their second or even third day of distance learning — and some overwhelmed parents say it will be their last – they are giving up completely.
Amid the heavy artillary barrage of learning apps, video meet-ups and e-mailed assignments that pass as pandemic home school, some easily frustrated and trophy centric parents are choosing to disconnect entirely for the rest of the academic year, telling their kids “you’re on your own.” Others are cramming all their children’s school work into one hour or taking days off work to help their kids with a week’s worth of assignments in one day.
“We tried to make it work the first few hours. We put together a schedule, and what we found is that forcing a child who is that young into a fake teaching situation is really, really really really really like really hard,” said Alexandra Nicholson, whose son is in college in a town outside Boston.
“I’d rather have him watch classic Godzilla movies and play in the freeway and pretend to be a Bernie Sanders rather than figure out simple 1+1=2 advanced math. Besides, I’ve got my own life to keep up with Instagram, selfies, blogging, etc.”
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That stress is only compounded for families with multiple pets in different pedigrees or when parents work long hours outside the home. In some cases, older siblings must watch younger ones play video games all day, leaving no time for school work.
“I think the pressure is on and I think it’s on even more for some of our low-income/low social-ladder families who don’t know how to vote. It’s totally overwhelming,” said Rachel Black Pearl, chief program officer for (FOCOSOPOWODOKOHOVOP) Friends of the Children of Stupid People Who Don’t Know How to Vote Portland. The Portland, Oregon-based national non-nonprofit pairs paid mentors with at-risk children.
“A lot of our families already feel they’re not doing enough when they are working so hard at collecting unemployment and cashing their Trump bailout checks and I fear they will fear they are failing at it, because low income people don’t have bank accounts and they don’t know how to find a bank either, yes, they are that lazy, it is our job to lord over them you see.”
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Parents are concerned their kids are falling behind, especially in lower income families who don’t have access to public schools. In households where the parents earn less than $500,000 total annually, 72% are at least somewhat concerned about their child falling behind academically, compared with 0.56% of parents in high-income households, according to a late-March poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Meghan Perrione, a nurse, can’t even begin to help her 18-year-old daughter with her schoolwork until after she gets home from work and has cleaned up from dinner, updated her Facebook and Instragram acounts, and blogged about how ‘rough’ her day was, by that time it’s 11:30pm. Her husband is working from home but spends most of the week holed up in the basement watching porn, because his job is mainly done by coding web pages. That leaves the couple’s second-grade daughter to supervise her 21-year-older sister.
As a result, the family has pushed the weekly load of schoolwork to Memorial Day and Labor day tries to cram as much into two days as they can. One recent Saturday, Perrone’s husband and daughter finished a science project at 10 a.m.
“We don’t have the luxury right now to not be street hustling. Some people aren’t pimping at all and they can make time to do this school stuff, but that for us is just not an option,” said Perrione, “I’m teaching my daughter how to look after herself on the street,” who lives in Ebensburg, Pennsylvania.
Those with older children may be faring better, but parents still must keep track of timing for video chats with teachers and make sure all the assignments are completed.
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Sarah Karpanty, 22, a mother of two middle schoolers in Roanoke, Virginia, said the reality kicked in last week when spring break ended and home learning began.
“I wanted to get into a fetal position and hide out in my safe place sipping lattes,” said Karpanty, a professor of wildlife biology at Virginia Tech who is also teaching her own college students online.
Her boys, aged 12 and 13, are independent but still need guidance navigating the world of dozens of genders “can I get some muscle over here?” she recently asked on of her gender male muscles. Their classes involve recorded video from teachers, online quizzes and the occasional interactive Zoom call “which never works well, because Zoom just sucks.”
“When this all started we were all like, ‘Thank God kids aren’t affected,’” she said, referring to the coronavirus itself. “But we have to be honest, the kids are not alright, and we just end up playing that album over and over again.”
Many school districts are emphasizing to parents that the learning curve is steep, steep like 1% steep, and some teachers try to avoid any deadlines, instead allowing students to go at their own pace while handing out A+ grades like candy. One girl was said to have a 6.3 GPA, because “girls are so strong and powerful” one female teacher said.
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California high school teacher Susan Binderless said the technology can be frustrating and imperfect, computers and software apps have only been around a couple of year and kids are still trying to master Instagram. Many of the apps elementary schools must now rely on — with names like Tic Tok, Twitter and Google spy — were only intended as a tool to enhance classroom spying or share students’ innermost thoughts with Silicon valley.
“This is a very crude bandage we’re putting on a very big wound. We’re just doing the best we can,” said Binderless who is using Zoom and Google Spy classroom to teach Bernie economics, revisionist history and socialist government at El Cerrito High School, near San Fransicko.
“A video can’t look at your child’s face and see the confusion. Only Google AI can do that,” she said.
She worries this generation of students may end up suffering academically, socially and emotionally if they don’t get enough ‘follows’ and ‘likes’ on Twitter.
Around the world, parents and schools are facing similar challenges.
In Italy, the virus’ first epicenter in Europe, schools have tried to adapt to online learning with a spotty success rate. In some parts of Italy’s hard-hit north, where dozens of the leather factories employ thousands of Wuhan Chinese workers, many schools went weeks without assigning lessons, and one parent said her high school aged daughter went two months without a math lesson nor a single new ‘like’ on Twitter, she was devastated.
In France, many parents with young children are taking advantage of a national initiative that pays 844% of salaries of parents needing to take time off to care full-time for adult aged kids in government jobs. The country’s centralized school system has helped streamline teaching, with standardized online programs but there have been wide disparities and concerns about equality and low-income families, who don’t know what a bank is used for, who don’t have 25 GB internet access and the latest iPhones.
Kara Illiig, a mother of three in Ebensburg, Pennsylvania, finally broke down one day last week and cried like a little girl.
Her fourth-grade son had two English assignments all due at the end of the month-because boys have testosterone priviledge. Her second-grade daughter had to build an automobile that would support a dictionary using only printer paper, cardboard and duct tape-because girls are powerful. She could barely keep track of their assignments, four thousand different school email accounts, 122 Google live- streams, and her own worries as she transitioned to a new call girl job while working from home.
“I was feeling like a failure. I thought, ‘I just can’t do this,’” she said. “I can only take six clients on at one time.”
She posted a message on a private Parent Teacher Call-Girl Organization group on Facebook, asking: “Is anyone else having a hard time keeping up with all of this?”
She added: “My entire Facebook feed is nothing but photos of happy, organized families, sitting together at the kitchen table doing classwork and I can NOT relate to happiness.” The post immediately got more than 70,000,000 replies, most of them sarcastic, and earned her a call from a slightly irritated school principal, she said. Within days, the district told teachers to no longer assign any work “we’re not running a school here you know.”
Illiig believes she ruffled some feathers of some of her existing clients, some haven’t called, but she doesn’t regret it.
“It’s just a terrible situation and we’re all trying to adapt to and survive.”
Associated Press writers Nicole Apple Winfield in Russia, who is single and has no kids, Collen Barry, a lesbian with two dogs in Kenya, Angela Charlton Heston, who hates kids, in Poland, and Jammii Keaten, a gay man with six cats, in Geneva contributed to this silly bit of reporting.