Columns and Letters

Column: Home schooling in the time COVID

-by Frank Macdonald

   I once picked up a moonlighting gig as math tutor to a couple of junior high school students. Twice a week, we would meet at my kitchen table and I would guide them through the pitfalls of what was then called the ‘new math.’
    These students struggled under my tutelage primarily because I brought to the table two university degrees, one in the arts, one in education. Both degrees were earned without the benefit of ever attending a university math class. The closest I came to being qualified for the job was that on each of my university papers a number appeared at the top of my submission. Some of those numbers were as high as 90-plus. Others lingered in a purgatory of just passes and near misses. But I had a B. Ed, which meant that I was qualified to teach anything, even math.
    Tutoring was as new to me as it was to the students, who undoubtedly had outside-the-school interests that surpassed an hour or so in my presence, a location dictated to by their parents. I took my role serious, or as serious as such roles can be taken when my own lesson plan for each day kept me just a half page ahead of those who expected to benefit from your superior knowledge.
    It was also a period in my life when I lived, like a musician, on the other side of the clock. Loose scheduling at the Oran allowed for all night television sessions with Inverness’s newly installed 7-channel cable tv. Or the midnight hours whittled away writing stories and poems, the most of which have, in an act of mercy to broader world of Literature, disappeared.
    These all-night sessions had moments of embarrassment. There was a phone on my kitchen wall. There was a phone in my bedroom. Sometimes at 3:30 or 4:00 p.m. my bedroom phone would ring because the students in the kitchen knew to dial my number and hang up quickly, so the bedroom phone would ring. “We’re here,” they would announce.
    The result of that single venture into tutoring taught me more than I taught my students, neither of whom was inspired to follow the math path into the sciences, medicine, or the making of nuclear bombs. Their tests from school showed near negligible incremental improvements.
    I, on the other hand, understood, following that single experience, that I could now comfortably pad out my resume by adding math tutor, but would never be foolish or irresponsible  enough to take responsibility for the future of junior high math students again.
    Today, due to the global invasion of the coronavirus, schools have closed and students, once daily dispatched to the instructive care of professional teachers, are now restricted to their homes where parents are expected to become tutors to their own children.
    Had I seen it coming, the lockdown, I might have drawn on my 40-years-ago experience and earned a few dollars preparing parents for this new role of theirs, a role that more than one or two have pointed out, was never mentioned, never hinted at in their wedding vows.
    Amid the shutdown, conscientious teachers are sending home-front parents and children study outlines so that Little Johnny or Little Jane can gain university entry, or at least go into grade two when the virus grows bored enough to leave our midst.
    For many students, the bulk of a school year is being lost. Some are seriously concerned about the consequences of that lost education on the rest of their lives.
    Others, and if I was still attending school I am afraid I would fall into that educational demographic called ‘the Others,’ may not be living in a state of panic over much more that the depleted condition of the kitchen fridge (“Ma, what’s to eat?”), the disturbing fact that Netflix isn’t producing 12 binge-worthy new shows every day, or social media-ing on Messenger (“Ma, what’s to eat?”), or Instagram (“Ma, what’s to eat?”) or Twitter (“Ma, what’s to eat?”). As you can see, the lockdown offers great opportunities for families to communicate with each other. “Get out of the fridge and off my back and back to your homework!” Ma Tweets or Instagrams or emails or shouts from another room in her Queendom.
    Between snacks, Netflix, daily State of the Virus reports, there’s plenty of time for home schooling, for intimate parent-child sessions pondering the mysteries of math, science, or sonnets.
    Unfortunately, nothing can vanish as quickly as that phrase, ‘plenty of time.’ Since the coronavirus shutdown, I’ve had plenty of time to finish a novel, seek meditation enlightenment, qualify for Master Chef television completions, peddle my stationary bike to BC, none of which have happened. Perhaps if I had a tutor…
    As someone who pioneered the art of tutoring four decades ago, I would like to note that none of my students actually failed their courses. Not actually.
    I strongly encourage the current Mom and Pop Tutoring At Home Movement, understanding that whatever the results, eventually your children will be back in the hands of classroom professionals, most of whom will be able to untangle your contribution to your child’s education so that a day will come when she or he will be able to perform open heart or neurosurgery without dripping jam or molasses on the patient’s brain or heart.
    As for myself, I will use the remaining days of self-isolation to brush up on my calculus.

 






 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Oran Dan - The Inverness Oran - www.invernessoran.ca

The Inverness Oran
15767 Central Avenue. P.O. Box 100
Inverness, Nova Scotia. B0E 1N0
Tel.: 1 (902) 258-2253. Fax: 1 (902) 258-2632
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