via
https://ift.tt/2KdyXPklazaefair replied to your post: ugh
why…why does half-day kindergarten have homework
well, to be fair, this is half-day Homeschool Kindergarten because all schools in New York State cannot have students attend and all work must be done remotely, but, yes, this was already a problem before– the problem apparently is that the NYS curriculum is for full-day kindergarten but the district doesn’t have the staff for full-day so they’re sending half the curriculum home with the kids? So even before they were on remote learning, my friend was already being expected to spend hours a day on homework with her kindergartner.
But now that it’s All Homeschool All The Time it’s like… six hours a day of assignments, with hours more of adult setup time required, and it’s really deeply strange to me. They’re in kindergarten and first grade, doing some basic math worksheets and like writing some letters to family really ought to cover it? Oh no, we have to watch this video on YouTube and go do this checklist from National Geographic dot com (woe betide anyone who installed parental controls on their kids’ computer accounts, you’ve got to individually authorize not only each site but also each place the videos are hosted and it usually doesn’t work so they’re sitting on their mom’s lap watching videos on her goddamned fucking phone because no teacher apparently has ever had parental control software on their barely-literate kids’ accounts given what a fucking hellscape YouTube is full of innocuous-looking videos with screamers and white supremacist bullshit in them)
Yesterday I spent half an hour cutting out some playing cards from cardstock and arranging them so we could spend 15 minutes this morning playing a sight words game. The day before, my friend had to spend nearly an hour making grids of twenty for a game involving raisins, and had misread the instructions so she had to do it like three times, and we had to play the game twice because the first time we just played it and then didn’t have a record of having played it that we could enter into the computer because we didn’t write it down as we played it and the photos I’d taken didn’t count. OH MY GOD.
ANYWAY
This isn’t stressful ENOUGH, I didn’t just cry at the kitchen table over breakfast because the local classical NPR affiliate broadcasted a live recording from 2013 of the Vienna Philharmonic doing Strauss’s Vienna Waltz to a packed house with everyone clapping along and then the announcer was like “ha ha remember how we used to be able to enjoy things”
OBVIOUSLY what we needed was to wrestle with three different sites’ authorizations on the parental controls [which took 35 minutes of frustrating work] so we could watch (I am not lying) a FORTY-FIVE SECOND VIDEO of a robin feeding its young and record a FOUR-SECOND video response of the child describing what happened. (”The mommy bird was feeding the babies because they were hungry!”)
CHRISTING FUCK what a fucking nightmare.
I AM NOT EVEN A PARENT. I spent most of this trying to keep the children moderately entertained and not wandering off into the house because they do not really understand that they are At School and just think this is a super boring vacation. Much love and solidarity to those of you who are.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
