Wow – in a blink of a Cornavirus eye time has zipped by! It felt like yesterday was just the end of March and in reality it’s the end of May! Some of us have fared better than others surviving homeschooling and working from home.
From the start I have said, “I can work from home and I can figure out homeschooling but together at the same time is a shitshow!”My child now happily shares with anyone who asks that she does not like her “home school” teacher (aka me) but she’ll get over it! There have been many tears on both of our parts, easily more than a handful of days to say the least but at least I can now say I know what she is learning in school!
So how did we turn our frowns upside down? We unexpectedly invented a game that finally helped make the last few weeks better and I couldn’t NOT share in the hopes someone else might find it helpful. My dear daughter is 7 so let’s just accept that pushing boundaries is something we deal with daily! As a businesswoman trying to work from home and still answer her million questions a day, my patience was tapped out to say the least! Normally I am able to silo my two worlds; Professional by day, Mom by night! However, in a post school closure world with the commencement of distance learning, those two worlds collided and it was not pretty! For a bit there it felt like the yelling started and ended with sunrise and sunset but thankfully we ended each day with our bedtime routing of reading and tucking her in with both of us resolving to make the next day better.
Then one day, it happened, I turned to her and said (well, lets be honest, yelled) “I dare you to speak to your teacher the way just spoke to me! Go ahead let’s record a video now, you yell at her and see what she tells you!” My child looked at me as if I had 100% lost my mind and replied, “No Way! I’m not gonna do that!” I sensed victory could be in the not so distant future so my mantra became, if you would not speak like this to your teacher then you had best not speak that way to me. After many, many, many and many more days of that phrase I was almost shocked into silence the one day she came to me and said, “Teacher-Mommy can I ask a question?” It was the sweetest and softest voice that I could only recall hearing a few times. She mostly reserved it for teachers or doctors or when she wanted to try to butter us up for a request. I had to bite my tongue because I knew the worst thing I could have done in that moment was laugh and thankfully I didn’t because at that point, the game began. We started pretending I was her teacher while she is at “school” in the living room. The transformation has been amazing! She asks for homework sometimes – shocking right?! She absolutely loves it when I play along and the days have shifted tremendously to a more peaceful co-existence. Don’t misunderstand there are still days but I’ll take 75% peaceful vs. 75% yelling any day!
Hopefully this might give some inspiration as we navigate what summer will look like as we continue to work remote and figure out what our summer school plan of attack will be!
