The two sides of lockdown schooling: surviving and thriving

Today, day two of our locked down, new year home-schooling journey, I am grateful. I am grateful that I have kids who love to learn and who thrive on structure.


I am grateful for their teachers who are carrying out superhuman feats to deliver high quality, live learning over a full timetable.

I’m grateful for the internet and super fast broadband. I’m grateful, that though they might have cracked screens and sometimes struggle to charge, we have enough devices to go around. 

I’m grateful for my job and my husband’s job. I’m grateful that we can be at home. I’m grateful that I can work flexible hours (my saving grace!) - more hours than I’ve ever worked since having kids, despite a crashing economy and nationwide redundancies.

I’m grateful that we have physical space - dining tables, an office and a desk in the bedroom.

I am so grateful.

I am privileged.

I know that not everyone is riding out the storm in the same way that I am. I know this isn’t a level playing field. I know that there is not, and despite our best efforts there probably never will be, equality of opportunity.

I'm also painfully aware that for some people, home schooling is the least of their worries as the world is a very scary place right now and people struggle with much worse challenges than I.

***

Yesterday, day one, I wasn’t grateful. I was stressed. I was broken. I was desperately trying to work out Google Meet, waiting for links that worked and navigating apps when it kept kicking me out: ‘Failed to join the meeting’.

I was frustrated - not just short on patience, but hot-brimming-tears-frustration. I had naively wanted to work alongside a phonics class, but then it became clear that little man would need my help to even process what was happening on the screen, let alone engage with it. 

I was frustrated with my inability to chop and change and re-focus, and that as soon as I sat down to get my head in the game there would inevitably be a cry for help, or a request for a snack, or a realisation that there was a class about to begin and someone, somewhere needed prep work done.

I wasn’t grateful then.

I was still grateful for my kids and their attitude and that they made it easier, still grateful for their teachers who really were just trying their best, and grateful that we had had since last Wednesday to get our heads around this and not the less-than-24-hours that much of the country had been gifted. But gratitude was certainly not framing my day.

At 4pm I called it quits, decided I would catch up on my hours when my head was in the game, and crawled into bed to console my broken self while the kids ran riot and Jon finished work.

*** 

And it seems that that’s how this is going to go. Some days you will thrive and some days you will merely survive, and some days it will certainly feel like you’re drowning. I hope that you get more thriving days out of this saga than anything else.

I hope that you will learn how resilient you are.

I hope that you will see that you are stronger than you think.

I hope that you will learn to adapt to whatever your world throws at you on any given day.

But I pray that you will learn how to rely on God, that you will know that His mercies are new every morning, that He has graced you for whatever season you find yourself in and whatever that looks like in a global pandemic.

I pray that you will learn to run to Him first and foremost, forsaking social media, entitlement, comparison and opinion but choosing to identify with what His word says about you and about others. If ever there was a moment to rise above the noise, this is that moment! I pray all of this and more for you, and I pray it for myself too! God knows I need it!

And ultimately, I pray this for you: that the Lord would bless you, and keep you, and make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you. I pray that the Lord will turn His face toward you and give you peace. Peace, peace and peace in abundance.

 

Image: Photo by Ferenc Horvath on Unsplash
The two sides of lockdown schooling: surviving and thriving The two sides of lockdown schooling: surviving and thriving Reviewed by Love Emily on January 06, 2021 Rating: 5

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