Parenting, as anyone who’s had a kid or been a kid knows, is a complicated job under the best of circumstances. During a pandemic, it’s a whole new ballgame.
On March 14, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that New York City’s public schools would close until at least April 20 to limit the spread of the coronavirus. After three days of on-site faculty training, the Department of Education (DOE) transitioned to a distance-learning format facilitated by the web service Google Classroom, where teachers upload assignments for students to complete at home. Many parents expect the new system to last until summer vacation.
Jamie Yates, who lives in Red Hook, has three children: 16-year-old River, 13-year-old Cash, and nine-year-old Cassidy. Normally, they all attend public school in the same building in Carroll Gardens at 610 Henry Street, which houses the Brooklyn New School (BNS) and Brooklyn Collaborative.
Yates has two part-time jobs – in ad sales (which she can do by phone and email) and at a furniture store – but the furniture store has closed for now. Her partial furlough hasn’t offered much of a break. Instead, her second job now takes place at home, supervising the real-life bodies within a virtual classroom.
“It’s hard because I do still have some work that I need to do,” she said. “For me, it’s brain overload, because I’ve got three kids that I need to manage and make sure that they’re doing all of their work.”
Yates praised the efforts of the teachers and administrators at BNS and Brooklyn Collaborative. “They’ve been really on it. Any special services that my kids have, they’ve been sending emails and getting my consent to continue doing those virtually. That’s been really great. It’s just keeping up with all of it that’s hard for me. My email box is literally full all the time.”
Red Hook resident Kiki Valentine has a five-year-old, Hart, who also attended BNS before COVID-19. For the most part, Valentine has enjoyed their shared quarantine. “It’s actually great. We already spend a lot of time together, and we have a lot of fulfilling and enriching activities together,” she said. “Keep in mind, no one is sick, so if that changes, everything will probably change.”
For Valentine, who left her job as the director of operations for a public health company prior to the pandemic, remote learning has been “pretty seamless” so far. The Google Classroom software isn’t too difficult: “I’m pretty tech-savvy, and I haven’t had problems,” she reported.
Despite the change of format, BNS has emphasized continuity. “There are a lot of contributions from different educators of different subjects, like Spanish, PE, art, math, and general classroom activities that they already had going. Seeing how that’s been maintained has been really encouraging,” Valentine said.
Some DOE teachers offer optional live instruction by Zoom or Google Meet. “It was very nice to see my son interacting with his teacher in real time,” Valentine related. “This morning, we watched his teacher Doug read a book that the kids really like called The Book with No Pictures.”
Having a child nearby all the time isn’t always easy, though, particularly during a world-historical catastrophe. “Last week, I felt very sad about certain things, so processing those feelings in front of a child has been an interesting navigation, because I don’t want my child to repress their feelings if they are scared or frustrated,” she said.
Valentine confessed that watching Hart’s teacher read to him and his classmates made her “cry a little” as she thought about what a “great teacher” and “great class” the pandemic had removed from her son’s life. “There is some grieving around the loss of that community for him,” she said. “This is grief we’re all experiencing to different varying degrees.”
For children, however, electronic community isn’t such a strange concept. “Kids these days are on FaceTime with their grandparents who live elsewhere, or with their friends who live elsewhere, so it’s not a stark contrast from regular life,” Valentine acknowledged. “It’s just more of that instead of hanging out in person. He has said, ‘Can I have a virtual playdate with Finn?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’”
Yates’s children have been faring reasonably well during the crisis. “There were a couple times with my daughter where she wanted to play with someone she saw outside at the park, and we had to explain to her that she couldn’t play with that person right now, and that was really hard. But honestly, I think it’s harder on us than it is on them. Kids are very resilient,” Yates observed. “I have kids who are pretty chill homebodies, so they’re actually doing fine.”
Sometimes, taking it easy can go too far. “They’re all trying to view this as a vacation – they don’t want to go to bed on time. Keeping them to a routine is next to impossible. It’s hard for me to keep to a routine at this point,” Yates admitted.
Discipline has been a challenge in the home-based school environment. “My middle guy is the typical middle kid in that he wants everything to go smoothly, so he’s doing his part to do what he needs to do. My oldest is kind of slacking and tells me that he does the work, but I have to check up on him. My youngest essentially bursts into tears every time I have to give her an assignment,” Yates recounted.
Valentine underlined the importance of both flexibility and structure for e-learners. “A lot of homeschoolers will tell you that homeschooling is not sitting down and teaching for eight hours. In school-based learning, they learn for about two hours, out of all those hours they’re there every day, considering their meals, transitions from one place to another, or lunch, or recess, or library time,” she explained. “If you think about it that way, the day becomes much less stressful.”
In Valentine’s view, “focused, dedicated learning” should be “broken up” into “one hour in the morning and one hour at some point in the afternoon,” surrounded on each end by “enriching activities that are their choice and things to do together. Learn how to bake bread, make something together, work on that photo album that you’ve been meaning to do for several years.”
Unfortunately, for parents whose full-time occupations constitute “essential services” that haven’t ceased during the pandemic, such advice may be difficult to follow. “My thought is always going to the folks who maybe are still having to work through this or who don’t have the resources to spend the time needed to help their kids get the work done,” Yates said. “I think the virtual learning option is not realistic for a lot of people.”
