Schooling at Home These Days

I grew up in China with the very traditional classroom setting education. Well, the education systems in China and the one here in the US are so different in a very fundamental way but that’s a different topic for another day. But, at least when I was in school, no homeschool is allowed at all. I think there might have been one famous person I know who decided to pull his kids out of school but we really never heard the end result of how the kids turned out. So long story short, I was never expecting myself to even toy with the idea of homeschooling in a million years. All the way up to almost the end of last year, I was still extremely firm on sending my kids to public schools.

Right around the time when we bought out tickets to visit China last year, I suddenly realized that it would mean that my girl would be ditching school for a whole month to visit China. Luckily, she was only in this community preschool program and they don’t really mind you paying the fee but not showing up. I obviously was not worried about my kids academic progress at this point much at all but I still felt kinda awkward having to tell the teachers that “we are going to be absent for a month but I promise, we will come back so hold that spot for her, please!” On top of the fact that all the major Chinese holidays and the American holidays are on off schedules, meaning we would always have to miss school if we wanted to visit China, I also realized that sending my kids to a local public school it means that they will officially have more English exposure than Chinese exposure. This is one of the main milestones/obstacles that will determine the future of many kids’ Chinese fluency. We definitely want our kids to maintain their Chinese level even if that means that we would have to sacrifice English a little bit. Because I mean, I didn’t grow up in an English speaking environment, I still had no problem getting a master’s degree from an American University. With these two major reasons in mind—Chinese priority and wanting to bring school with us while traveling—we finally decided to just bite the bullet and say that we are going to home school our kids.

I told my parents and some other of my family members about this decision during one of the first conversations we had after we landed in China earlier this year—before COVID got out of control. We had lengthy discussions, well, arguments more likely, about our decision to homeschool. Let me just say, my family was not that pleased nor confident in my decision of homeschooling. We eventually decided to drop the conversation and ended it just like many other discussions I’ve had with my family—it’s up to me but they wish I could have listened to them and they wish me the best.

A few days later, COVID exploded and eventually everyone started to do schools online. With so many people in my family being teachers—from elementary all the way to graduate school level, all struggling to figure out how to do remote learnings and do “homeschool“, I somehow had this weird sense of joy to see them struggle while I felt totally calm about the whole education thing because well, we fortunately have settled for homeschool and we’ve got our ducks in a row. Barely, but hey, it felt good to know that we don’t need to panic and scramble.

Now fast forward to a few months later, in the US, we see surges of COVID cases everywhere yet there seemed to be no clear plan about how our schools going to operate. We have signed up for this homeschool enrichment program for a couple of days a week so our kids can get some hybrid experience and socialization. This program runs under our local public school district so even though we are homeschooling, we have been still watching every move our school district makes. I just want to say that feeling rather frustrated about the lack of a clear plan and the lack of effective communication is an understatement. The teachers, poor teachers, have been absolutely wonderful during all these craziness but honestly, I definitely am losing my confidence in the public elementary education system little by little these days. And don’t even get me started on how puzzled I was when I received an email from the school saying that they are hoping to get donations of Ziploc Bags to put the activity packets in—are we really this much under funded?!

Anyways. These days, we are doing remote learnings at home with a mixture of live sessions and recorded lessons from the enrichment program. My kids are having lots of fun still but I really do think that it is because my kids are still so little and they literally have no idea what they are missing—which I’m grateful for because now I don’t have to deal with resistance for this different way schools run these days. Other than that, we are just doing our thing.

I am definitely grateful for the help I received leading up to our decision of homeschooling and the help I am continuing to receive now. Without all the help, I definitely couldn’t have done it all, let alone feeling peaceful about our current education situation for our children.

Fortunately, so far the biggest real challenge we’ve had is how to keep the other two kids entertained without distracting my girl from school works. With the weather being cooler, I was able to get the younger two out to the backyard more so my girl can have the whole place to herself. I might have sacrificed my garden harvest this fall by having more toddler exposures around the garden but that counts as education for the boys too right?

Another thing I have been grateful for is that my kids have been absolutely troopers through this all. When my attention has to be shared among them—helping sister with school works, teaching my middle one something, all while trying to keep the youngest off the table and from dumping everything out, my kids seem to be quite understanding in general. Oh they still throw tantrums and I still have many days of feeling “why do I even try?!” but in general, I do feel that I need to remind myself how good my kids are in general.

Now that we are way into October already, I just got a survey to pick what we are going to do next semester. Honestly, I don’t know what I am supposed to do. I decided to just stay with remote learning in hope that we are actually helping to keep the classroom size smaller so the kids who have to go to school due to all kinds of reasons can have a safer environment at school. At the same time, I, more than my kids obviously, do wonder if I am being unfair to my children by not letting them go back to classrooms for the supposedly enriching social aspect of life. I know it really boils down to what I believe education means but still, it does not making decisions these days any easier.

So hopefully, by choosing the seemingly less popular route of education, I could really take advantage of this highly personalized approach to help my children to get the real education they need in life beyond textbooks. Meanwhile, let’s just hope that we can cruise through the rest of this school year without too many more hiccups.