How I Talk to My Friends about COVID Homeschooling

My friends are all excited about homeschooling right now, but their definition of homeschooling turns out to be pretty different from mine.

“Homeschooling is booming now,” says my old friend Charice. “You guys were trendsetters.”

“Yep,” I say.

A few months ago, I would have launched into a big explanation of how doing school at home online isn’t really homeschooling — or at least, it’s not really how Malcolm and I do homeschooling. It was important to me to clarify the differences: For me, homeschooling was a big choice. It had been challenging sometimes and lonely sometimes and rewarding almost all of the time, but it was very different from following along with an online curriculum that our school district published online every week. And I found myself frustrated that people couldn’t understand that difference. I wasn't magically prepared for the world to shut down either — homeschooling was harder in a socially quarantined world, too.

And at first, I tried really hard to help the loose acquaintances with a million questions about homeschooling. I talked to them about how we developed our schedule through months of living, how we chose the subjects we would work on, how we found the resources to help us explore those subjects. But the more I talked, the more I realized that I was wasting a lot of energy — homeschooling wasn’t what these people wanted. What they wanted was the same thing I wanted: A way to get through an impossible situation with our families’ hearts and health intact. Most of the people asking me about homeschooling were really asking how to manage their school’s online curriculum at home, which is certainly a reasonable thing to ask about, but not really one of my areas of expertise. I was wasting my time and their time because we weren’t talking about the same thing. Many of them never even responded to my lengthy text messages, full of information and support, even with a casual “thanks.”

I found myself falling down a hole of irritated self-righteousness. These people didn't understand what homeschooling was — and they didn’t really want to. They had no interest in homeschooling their kids. It took me a little while to realize that that was totally fair. I was getting upset over the way they used a word and because it felt like their questions negated my own hard-earned experiences. I realized we were all exhausted and worried trying to pretend that this was a “new normal” and not a complete and total abnormal. It wasn’t my job to teach these newly at-sea people how to learn in this weird new space any more than it was their job to teach me how to learn in it. What we could do was be kind and help each other when we could, without letting that help become a burden that we would start to resent.

So here’s what I do now when one of my in-school acquaintances comes to me to ask about homeschooling through quarantine. I don’t try to explain how my homeschool is different from what they mean, I don’t walk them through my philosophy and plans, and I don’t point them toward the curriculum I love. Instead, I remind them that we’re all doing the best we can. I talk to them about establishing a rhythm that gets everybody out of bed and fed and moving around during the day because that’s something I do think COVID homeschoolers can benefit from, too. I shrug when they ask where they can find a free online program that will cover every subject and grade every assignment, and I recommend that if their goal is to return to public school, they stick with the public school’s online program. “Getting your homeschool up and running, figuring all of that out, is probably the hardest, most labor-intensive part,” I say. “If you don’t want to homeschool beyond the present crisis, it’s probably not worth it.”

I remind myself — and Charice — that we are not alone in all this. However our kids learn, this new challenge is our shared reality, and we can help each other, even if it’s not in the ways we might think. Charice introduced me and Malcolm to an online jazz class that has had us rocking out together on the couch every Sunday night, and I lent Charice a box of Malcom’s math manipulatives that have made a big difference in her daughter’s online math classes. I still think it’s a stretch for her to call herself a homeschooler, but that doesn’t really matter much in the grand scheme of things. What matters is that I have a chance to make my world a kinder, more supportive place, and I’d be crazy not to seize that opportunity.

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