‘Non-essential’ parents struggle to balance work demands with home schooling debacle

Struggling to juggle a work-from-home job with homeschooling? We’re here to help, with some free lockdown lessons – starting with toilet paper calculations.

PANDEMIC purgatory is to work from home, while trying to home school your kids during coronavirus lockdown.

In the fantasy world inhabited by education bureaucrats, Queensland parents working from home have flexible and secure jobs, understanding bosses, a supportive partner and children champing at the bit to learn from home.

In the Real World, these “non-essential worker’’ parents are struggling to avoid the sack as they juggle technology meltdowns, recalcitrant kids and a dog’s breakfast of teaching materials, all from the kitchen table.

Coronavirus will change Queensland forever and it’s not all bad

Private schools demand senior students return to class

‘Really good numbers’ not enough to reopen schools amid pandemic

As working parents juggle home schooling, the Prime Minister wants kids back in class

Teacher Holly Maddigan, 32, is at home on maternity leave, overseeing home schooling of her daughter Aurora, 4, as well as looking her four-month-old baby Deyanira. Picture: Liam Kidston.

As the Prime Minister said on Friday, home schooling is “not working too well” for many parents who still have jobs.

You’re not alone in your struggle to juggle work-from-home with home schooling – and we’re here to help with a few free lockdown lessons.

Apologies if they don’t use a culturally appropriate pedagogical framework, scaffolding or Instrument Specific Marking Guides:

Maths: A family uses one packet of four rolls of toilet paper every week. How many packets of 24 rolls does the family require, to last four weeks of home quarantine?

Information technology: Queensland state schools have 530,000 students and 50,000 teachers. Students have to download lessons and teachers have to upload lessons at 9am on Monday. How many people will be uploading and downloading lessons at the same time?

English: Write a persuasive essay for or against all students returning to school next week.

Legal studies: Recreational fishing is banned. Fishing to feed your family is permitted. If you are fishing for fun, but would eat any fish you catch, will you be fined?

Literacy: Download the Queensland Health Home Confinement, Movement and Gathering Direction. In plain English, list five reasons you can leave your home. For bonus marks, answer: Can you go for a driving lesson?

Civics and Citizenship: The state government wants to change rental laws but parliament has not passed any legislation. The Residential Tenancies Authority says that “the legislation itself is currently being written, but the laws are already being applied.’’ Is this legal?

History: Research and write 500 words about the rise of the police state in Nazi Germany.

Physical Education: Design an outdoor game that involves family members plus one other person, with all players to remain 1.5m apart and exercising at all times.

Science: How can you gain immunity to a virus?

WHY HOME SCHOOLING’S A HEADACHE

Now Education Queensland has assured parents they are “not required to deliver lessons’’. They just have to supervise their children’s learning.

The first challenge for parents, whose taxes pay the salaries of public servants and teachers, is to figure out what their child is supposed to learn each day. This appears to be straightforward in primary school but in high school, a family with two teenagers can be fielding instructions from a dozen teachers, all using different lesson plans and technology platforms.

Some teachers are live-streaming lessons to kids at home, while kids in classrooms are supervised by administrative staff. Others, including PE teachers, have recorded videos. Some teachers are available for just an hour a week to answer questions online. Far too many are just telling kids to look at lessons online and complete the work in isolation. A child who doesn’t understand a concept can always “look on YouTube’’.

Many students have work spread across several EQ platforms. There’s Learning Place, One School, DayMap, learning@home, QParents and EdStudio. Some teachers are also using external apps such as Zoom, Stile, mathspace, Studyladder and OneNote.

It’s bad enough that EQ’s IT system crashed on Day One. Schools had warned parents they could be reported to police or Child Safety unless their children emailed teachers every morning. Long-suffering teachers were instructed to upload the teaching materials on the first day back. With 530,000 students downloading and 50,000 teachers uploading lessons simultaneously, who’d have guessed there might be a problem?

School holidays ought to have been extended for a few days to give teachers “student free’’ time to upload their teaching materials, so parents could download it well before the first home lesson.

All lessons should be emailed directly to parents and students, or at least put on the same platform online, so parents can find them easily and supervise without a technology help desk.

Lessons should be kept simple and engaging. From Prep to Year 10, Education Queensland or the Queensland Curriculum Assessment Authority should develop common lessons for each subject in each grade, so everyone’s on the same page. Two weeks’ worth of lessons have been published on the learning@home website – so why is each school and every teacher still demanding something different?

The coronavirus pandemic is a great opportunity to reform our convoluted, cluttered school curriculum. If Education Queensland reckons kids can get all their learning done in three hours a day at home, why do they need to spend six hours a day at school and then wade through three hours of homework each night? No wonder so many children suffer anxiety and depression.

Let’s make lessons inspiring and relevant, and get rid of silly academic jargon. Knowing how to write an obscure long word doesn’t make you smarter than everyone else. Let’s ease the pressure on teachers, students and parents by getting back to basics.

###