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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

The Full Suburban: Rolling with home-schooling punches

The Ditto siblings are home-schooled in Spokane Valley.  (Julia Ditto/For The Spokesman-Review)
By Julia Ditto For The Spokesman-Review

This week, the Ditto family, along with thousands of other families in the Spokane area, will be rounding the final corner in the marathon known as “forced home-schooling due to COVID-19.” School is officially out this Friday, but, truth be told, we’ve been on a bit of a downward slide since school unexpectedly let out in mid-March.

People seem to assume that, because I have so many kids, I must be a whiz at all things kid-related, that I’ve kept track of all the vaccines they’ve received since the day they were born, that I’m aware of which molars come in first and how many teeth will be in their heads by the time they’re 20 and that I have a million tricks up my sleeve for engaging children in the wonderful world of learning.

Listen: Every weekday morning at 9:30, I hand my preschooler an iPad and headphones so he can watch an “educational show” for the next hour and a half, coming up for air only if the battery dies or “Wild Kratts” runs out of episodes.

My older kids file into our home office to retrieve one of the five laptops the district lent to us for online school when the world went haywire, then they jockey for a spot at our kitchen table because no one wants to retreat to a quiet room elsewhere in the house; it’s together or nothing.

I putter around doing laundry, exercising and crossing things off my to-do list while they log into whichever Google Classroom they’re supposed to be in at that moment. And so it goes until about noon.

The first week of online school, I just about lost my mind trying to keep track of all their login codes, instructional platforms, class times, assignments and teacher e-mails. With six kids in four schools, I was getting e-mails, texts and pings from all directions. It was overwhelming, and I eventually just threw up my hands and left it to my tech-savvy kids to keep track of their schoolwork.

Sometimes one of them might need help entering a password, or I might need to separate two brothers who are poking each other incessantly. But other than that, I have been extremely hands-off with the whole home-schooling experience.

Of all my kids, 15-year-old George has it the worst. He spends each weekday morning going through his online lessons, just like the rest of my kids (minus the 5-year-old who is still on the iPad).

But then, after a brief respite for lunch and riding his bike, he logs onto a virtual “football camp” for an hour each afternoon where the coaches of his high school team go through plays that the kids will maybe get a chance to execute sometime in the fall if perchance they get to go back to school.

After football “practice,” he has two hours of screen-free living before he hops onto Zoom for a two-hour driver’s education class. Yes, world, prepare yourself to share the road with an entire generation of drivers trained exclusively online. They will get to practice actual driving! Sometime! If the driver licensing office ever reopens so they can all be issued their learner’s permits!

But the fact of the matter is, teachers and students, for the most part, have rolled with these punches beautifully. My hat goes off to all the teachers who had to slog through this mess even more than the rest of us.

At least I could walk away once my kids logged into their virtual classrooms. The teachers had to sit there for 30 minutes trying to teach important concepts while computers glitched in and out, people wandered away to grab a glass of juice and little brothers snuck into the frame for a photo bomb.

I’m not gonna lie: I will not be sad to see online school go (although I’m guessing we’ll all be welcoming some version of it back in the fall). But well done, teachers, students and parents. This is not what any of us signed up for, but we made it through. I’m no expert at parenting, but I’d call that a win.