I am struggling to keep up with my child’s online schooling

“Ma’am I don’t have a dinosaur foot ready because my mom didn’t see the message”

declared my son during his online class.

My Monday morning started like this and here is why parents all around are stretched thin beyond their capabilities.

I had not signed up for this. Frankly, I am overwhelmed with all the school work along with office work, meetings, household chores and trying to exist in general.

I know these are special circumstances beyond our control but that doesn’t make it any less harder and I am gonna say this on behalf of many parents like me, that I am struggling to keep up.

Don’t get me wrong I love my son’s school and both of us are highly satisfied with the way they conduct learning. But when we had chosen the school based on its pedagogy we didn’t know we will end up doing online classes for two years.

We are still happy with the way his learning is being conducted but the online classes mean a lot of work for the parents too inspite of teachers trying their best to not overload parents.

Teachers are themselves working very hard to keep our kids learning ongoing under these special circumstances. But I am not a teacher and for me it is a struggle indeed to just keep up with the tons of worksheet, theme, presentation and what not.

The circumstances are special but the burden is real.

It has been a weekly chore since the past 2 years of printing worksheets, arranging all the prerequisites that would be needed for the different classes, keeping track of all the work my child is doing through the week and then uploading it all, folder wise on the shared drive.

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Yesterday our Sunday night was spent cutting out different colour shapes of various numbers from colourful Origami sheets. Swipe to see the next picture. Most of our Sunday nights are spent same way, getting ready for next weeks classes, sorting, arranging & uploading the work done in the week just gone by.

And I am not even sure what to say about the fact that it is extremely difficult for us to manage our office work during the school time. Sometimes I feel like crying just coz I am so stressed trying to mange it all at once.

Or the fact that Baby A gets distracted, he is a baby and though he is very quick to catch things but it is almost impossible to make his pay attention for a long period. We have to constantly be there beside him else he ends up loosing focus.

It is another fight to make him just go and sit for his next classes on time when he is busy doing something totally random.

There are reading materials to be done, projects to prepare and getting him ready for presentations. Although the teachers are the one who cover everything in class itself. (Our school has a no home work policy.)Yet it is a lot of time and energy Investment from our end too.

But the catch is though schools have started offline classes we are still gonna continue with the online mode. Hard as it may be, this still feels safer to us.

I know it is how we all are surviving right now. Kids have it harder, with no social interaction and no real classes. And teachers are doing everything to ensure that students are taken care of. But we as parents are struggling and we fail continuously. TBH we failed to upload any submissions for the past couple of weeks, simply because we didn’t get the time or energy to do it. And yeah he sometimes turns up in class without the dinosaur foot he was supposed to have.