Category: Parenting

6 ways to structure online learning for physical and mental well-being

Posted on by Suki

The other day I went for a “physical distance, social closeness” walk with a friend at the beach. She teaches adults at a law school, and was wondering how to do her online courses in a way that would mirror how she teaches in person.

In the past, she had observed that her students, adults with day jobs, were tired in the evenings, so she arranged things so that they would get up and move about the room for various different activities. How was she going to do this online?

Yes, we were both wearing masks, just not for the picture.

We brainstormed some ideas for her, and while we were doing that, I mused about how my own students are no longer doing all the things they were doing before the pandemic. Most of them are probably doing online courses for much of the day now, even for physical education. Lots of them have working parents who can’t fill in the holes.

During the first quarantine, I paid special attention to my teens, many of whom are quite independent and not used to being at home with their families all day. I redesigned some of my activities with their mental and physical health in mind.

This coming year, I am planning to pay more attention to promoting healthy habits in my classes. In the spirit of sharing with other teachers, and hoping that parents will keep this in mind at home, here are some of my ideas and the reasons for them.

1. Incorporate movement when possible

Maybe this seems obvious, but kids are moving even less than they used to. At school, at least they were moving around the classroom. And during recess, they had other kids to interact with.

Movement is really not an obvious match with the courses I teach, but I hope to encourage them to move before and after class when possible. And who knows, I might figure out a way to incorporate movement specifically in my webinars…without inciting chaos!

We saw this man out making awesome bubbles when we were on our walk. Send your kid outside to make bubbles in between classes!

2. Get students away from the computer screen for specific tasks

It’s so easy for all of us to get sucked into the screen and think of it as real life. But that leads us to be less in touch with the environment around us. My classrooms (where students do self-paced learning when they are not in the live webinar room) are obviously full of videos. But I also incorporate real-world activities when possible, asking them to engage with physical objects, pets, and other people in their household.

3. Engage the senses

Obviously, my students are engaged with their eyes whenever they are involved in the class and their ears during our webinars. I try to make sure that my courses are visually and aurally stimulating. But that’s just a small part of the world.

Now that they aren’t getting as much sensory stimulation in their daily lives, I’m giving more thought to how to incorporate all senses into my webinars and my assignments. That will be an easy one in my new Yum! class about food and eating.

Even cats need to change their focal distance!

4. Get students to change the focal distance of their eyes

Our webinars are mostly around an hour long. Although I recommend that parents never schedule young students for more than an hour at a time online, many parents already did that before the pandemic. Now, most of my students will probably be online most of the day.

In normal life, our eyes change their focal distance on a regular basis. Aside from using screens, there are very, very few typical activities that we do that require us to sit with one focal distance for a long time. My plan is to try to get students to look away from the screen whenever I can, if only for a moment.

5. Keep students in tune with their physical bodies

If students are now going to be sitting in front of a computer for wall-to-wall online courses, it will be very easy for them to literally forget about their physical bodies. Breathing, focus, and periods of quiet will help them be more present in their bodies.

Teachers who have a single group of kids in an online course for hours at a time will need to find ways to keep the kids’ attention but also keep their bodies engaged. This will be a hard task for them! Since I never teach for more than an hour at a time, by design, I don’t run into this problem.

6. Keep them grounded in the physical world

All of us need to remember that the physical world is where we are. Lots of the services we use online are designed to try to make us forget. Kids are especially susceptible to becoming convinced that their online “life” is more important than the physical world around them.

Teachers can help students by making sure that their assignments and activities involve the physical world around their students. Even though we don’t necessarily connect with our students’ families the way that classroom teachers do, we can ask them to use their home life as a resource. Even though the room in which they are attending school is one that we may never set foot in, we can integrate that physical space into the world we create online.

Related:

Raising a lifelong learner

Posted on by Suki

In my last piece, How Do I Make Sure There Are No Gaps In My Child’s Learning?, I addressed the fact that, in fact, there will always be gaps. Our goal as parents and educators is to create “lifelong learners.”

But what is that, and how do you do it?

Model the behavior

Pretty much anything you expect of your kids and students comes back to you. If you aren’t polite around your children, you can’t expect them to be polite when you aren’t around.*

* expecting them to be polite to YOU is another subject altogether!

If you ignore your kids and stare at your phone when they’re in the room, they are likely to do the same.

Being a lifelong learner is yet another place where you have to lead by example. Do your students or children see you learning? Do you try always to sound like you know everything? Then you are raising them to shy away from admitting they don’t know something and finding a way to attain that knowledge.

Make a model of yourself. Talk to your kids about what you learned. Tell your students that you are struggling to relearn to play piano after 30 years.

Assess your role

An older teacher once said to me, “I’m always the dumbest person in the room.” It wasn’t a comment on his self-esteem, but rather on his teaching method.

Of course, he had many of the answers that his students were searching for, but his job was not to be the Sage on the Stage. It was to be a guide and mentor.

Some parents seem to think that if they step back from being the authority on everything, they will lose basic parental authority. But that’s simply not true. Children are more likely to respect the authority of someone trustworthy and open than someone who cuts off debate.

Join in the fun

Let’s face it: being a lifelong learner is actually fun. And your kids are more likely to blossom at this task if you’re by their side. Consider everything that you come across in daily life to be a learning opportunity:

Weird bug in the house? Look it up and identify it.

Relative states an offensive opinion at a family dinner? Go home and engage your kids in learning about the issue.

Kid is suddenly fascinated with a topic you find mind-numbingly boring? Unnumb your mind and find out more.

Resources:

Humans need meaningful work

Posted on by Suki

…and if you don’t have any, you have to make it up for yourself!

I was reading an article in from a March New Yorker (yeah, I’m a little behind) about the opioid epidemic, and something really struck me as relevant to all of us, especially during this pandemic:

What Case and Deaton have found is that the places with a smaller fraction of the working-age population in jobs are places with higher rates of deaths of despair—and that this holds true even when you look at rates of suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related liver disease separately. They all go up where joblessness does.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/23/why-americans-are-dying-from-despair

The people they are referring to as “jobless” here are not people who are actively seeking employment. They are people who have given up. It turns out that the opioid epidemic is worst in places with higher rates of people who have simply given up on work.

Humans are built for meaningful work. We thrive on it. And it’s clear that “meaningful” doesn’t have to mean important, exciting, or high-status. A fellow school-mom told me that she found her job as a garbage truck driver extremely fulfilling, and I could go on and on about people I’ve met in all walks of life who found satisfaction in a job well-done—no matter what the job.

I think that this leads to an extremely important parenting issue during this pandemic:

Our kids need meaningful work

Any good teacher will tell you that their job isn’t to teach, it’s to inspire. All kids will learn if they feel that it’s the meaningful work that they are doing in their lives. Anyone can transmit information. Good teachers create an environment where learning is the job that kids are inspired to do.

But in a time of pandemic, lots of our kids are “stuck at home.” Their teachers are pixels on a screen, and now we parents are on the front line of helping them find meaning in what they are doing.

It’s a hard job! The other day I had a discussion about college during the time of Covid with my teen students, and it’s clear that this carrot that they were dangling in front of themselves is looking less like a carrot and more like an illusion, a whoopee cushion, or a relic from the past. Looking forward to college was the way they made the work they were doing feel meaningful.

Come fall, it’s going to be harder for them to find meaning in their studies. They and our younger children will all need a new way of finding pleasure in a job well done.

We ALL need meaningful work

So we parents are going to have to help inspire our kids to find meaning. But that means we have to look at our own lives and find it, too. A lot of adults out there are out of work, semi-permanently furloughed, part-time… Many of us have lost the rhythm of life that inspired us and made us feel pride in a job well done.

I’ve always felt that the number one thing parents can do for kids is to model the behavior they want to see. That means that we have to figure out a way to find meaning in what we are doing—whatever that may be.

Let’s avoid a new epidemic of despair

The New Yorker article points out that any person can become physically addicted to opioids. But the epidemic happened in places where a large amount of the people didn’t have work that gave their lives meaning.

As this pandemic runs its course, one of our jobs is to continue to be productive members of the society we live in, even if we’re stuck at home. Watching fear-mongering videos and going down Internet rabbit holes with other scared people is not going to give us what we need.

Humans need meaningful work. What does that mean to you?

How do I make sure there are no gaps in my child’s learning?

Posted on by Suki

Give up. There will be gaps.

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What, you want me to explain?

The world is too big to learn it all

This is a given. Maybe in the distant past some men of letters believed that they knew all of humanity’s learning. They were wrong. Even then, it was impossible to know and understand it all.

Now, it’s even harder because we know how much we don’t know. It’s easy to feel unlettered if your metric of being educated is “knowing everything.”

Kids today have enormous amounts of knowledge that you didn’t have. Adults watch in awe as a child navigates a new electronic device, finds what they’re looking for in their first web search, and explains the limitless, arcane knowledge they have about a fandom.

Yet adults are worried that their children will graduate from school with these ill-defined “gaps in learning.” Recently the newspapers have teemed with articles about how children who distance-schooled this past semester will be “behind.”

We have the world of knowledge in our pocket

The reality is that what we need to know has changed. We used to commit a certain amount of information to memory because it was simply too arduous to go find that information when we’d need it. That’s no longer true. Kids see no purpose in learning in a 19th century mode when they live in the 21st century world.

It’s true that memorization is a good skill to have, and exercising our memory is like exercising a muscle—it’s good for us. But it’s no longer true that there is one specific body of knowledge that must be memorized. If kids choose to memorize arcane fandom knowledge instead of a 19th century poem, it really doesn’t matter. In either case, when they need information that they didn’t commit to memory they can access it immediately.

“Important” is a cultural designation

Maybe you think that there is a body of information that is important for every person to master. That body of information used to be chosen by certain men in power throughout the ages.

But how would you go about deciding it now? One person’s important knowledge is another person’s irrelevant information.

I actually do think that there is a body of knowledge that every educated person should be familiar with, but frankly, I think that it’s an ever-changing body of knowledge, and it’s too large for any one person to master.

Create lifelong learners

If we take what I’ve written as true:

  • There’s too much information
  • We have immediate access to information
  • There is no set body of knowledge that we can agree on

…what do we do?

I like this quote: “A brain is a river, not a rock!”

Our job as educators has changed. We won’t succeed just by implanting a body of knowledge into our students’ brains. As soon as we do, there will certainly be changes to that body of knowledge and our students will be out of date again.

Our job as educators and parents is to nurture lifelong learners. How do we do that?

Click here to read some thoughts on how to raise a lifelong learner.

Related:

Fall 2020 education: flexibility is key

Posted on by Suki

Longtime readers know that my family has used almost every type of educational approach for our kids. We like to joke that the only type of school that we haven’t tried is Christian Military Academy!

My younger son is currently about to graduate from a mainstream public high school (his choice), and I have to say, I have been pleasantly surprised at how well they have handled this crazy situation that was dumped in their laps. I’ve heard lots of complaints from parents in other districts, but I share none of them. It’s not perfect, but my son’s teachers got well-trained, really quickly, and they are trying hard.

Teachers are doing their best to maintain connections with their students.

They’re even making embarrassing videos.

One of the things that our district is doing really well is parent communication. OK, perhaps they are overdoing it: I don’t actually need a text message to tell me to read my email!

This week they asked for parent input through ThoughtExchange, a nifty little tool for exchanging ideas.

I had one thing to say and I hope I said it well: the public school system needs to be more flexible.

Rooted in tradition is not necessarily good

Public schools have not grown organically. They were formed on a specific model of learning, and all changes have taken place as if that model is not worth questioning.

When people have come up with better ideas that built on top of that model, they were tolerated. The charter school system, for example, was built on top of the standard public school model.

When people have come up with ideas that require throwing that model out the window, like the great educational thinker John Holt, for example, public schools would have none of it. They had certain tenets that would not be questioned:

All students must learn in age-homogeneous groups.

All students must be required to be on campus a minimum number of hours.

All students must study state-mandated curriculum.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Enter the quarantine

This pause in school-as-usual can be seen two ways:

It can be seen as an irritating interruption, to be gotten past as soon as possible.

Or it can be seen as an opportunity.

I prefer opportunity.

Integrate home and school

Kids do better emotionally when they feel nurtured, loved, supported—all that stuff they have in a healthy home. We have cut families out of schools by design, and yet principals wail about lack of parent participation. Schools are simply not designed to be emotionally healthy and integrated with home life.

Now that we’ve got parents and home intertwined with school, let’s not give that up.

Stop demonizing alternatives

This is my teen attending an online class while jumping on the trampoline.

When you judge a fish by how well it climbs a tree, the fish comes out looking pretty lame. Alternative schools are for kids who need alternatives. That means that the alternative will not reflect the demographic make-up of the surrounding district. When students and families choose schools, they make choices based on themselves, not the society they live in.

Yes, we should make sure that all choices are open and welcoming to all families, but districts need to allow for differences. For example, stop demonizing a program that attracts struggling students for its low test scores.

States have to stop assuming that all cultural groups are the same. Programs that suit the unique needs of a cultural group are not equivalent to racism. Equal education does not mean the same education.

Principals have to stop coming into schools and trying to strip the individualism out of the school in the name of “quality.”

Offer maximum flexibility

In a world where families can choose 20 different types of toothpaste, education is presented as a monolithic single choice.

That doesn’t fit with our culture. Some students, certainly, not only need to be at school for the allotted time but also need aftercare. Some students thrive in standard curriculum with a typical school day schedule.

But many students don’t. Parents around the country are remarking on the positive changes they are seeing in their children:

My kids are learning so much more at home.

My teen is sleeping—finally! And waking up a reasonable human being.

My kid who was bullied has had a huge dip in her anxiety level.

We started following my kids’ interests and suddenly they love education.

Live and LEARN

If public school administrators and teachers don’t learn from this experience, they’re in the wrong profession. Teachers talk about creating lifelong learners—this should be the goal of everyone. We should all look at this situation and see what we can take away from it that is positive and good.

I was happy to see that I wasn’t the lone voice for thoughtful reconsidering of what school should be in the ThoughtExchange conversation initiated by my district. Let’s make sure the districts hear our voices, and don’t think that reversion to the status quo is any sort of achievement.

Resources:

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