Boundaries Are How I'm Surviving Homeschool

There is no bell to signal the start of the day, but the students show up, often wearing their pajamas, bedhead, and the smell of their morning breath. They spread their workbooks out on a table still sticky from breakfast. It’s time for school, and their teacher — me — is as confused as ever.

How did we get here? How long will it last? Superintendent of Public Instruction Elsie Arntzen alluded to school closures for the rest of the school year. Can that really be? Dare I call this homeschool? It feels more like crisis school. My homeschool friends tell me their normal instructional experience looks nothing like this: they go on field trips and join homeschool co-ops, sharing the responsibility of teaching with other homeschool parents. Now public, private, and homeschool parents alike are all in this together. Alone.

Hats off to teachers. Within days, my elementary-age children’s teachers reinvented their classrooms, converting face-to-face teaching to face-to-screen instruction. I know they still do so much of the work with so little of the reward. They can’t see their lessons take root inside a child’s mind or hear the enthusiasm in a child’s voice when they understand something new. Teachers have risen to the challenge of COVID-19 in a very real way, and yet I find myself envious of the natural barriers between them and their students in a school setting.

I don’t have that.

Instead, I have an 1,800-square-foot home and a 5-year-old who would crawl inside my skin if she could.

I realized pretty early on that boundaries would be the key to a healthy merger of school/home life. Here’s what I’m doing to stay sane:

Designate a Space for Class

Most of us don’t have places in our home already set up for our full-time jobs and full-time school, but we have the tools if we’re creative. I knew that having my children work shoulder to shoulder would incite constant sibling disputes, so I set my 8-year-old up at a desk in our kitchen and my 5-year-old is at a small table in a corner of the living room. I don’t have time to exercise now, but pacing back and forth between them as I answer their questions is getting it done. My step counter is so proud of me! If you haven’t created a drop spot for school stuff, now is the time. We use hooks for coats and backpacks and bins mounted to the wall for school papers and projects.

Establish a Teacher’s Lounge

In all my years as a student, I got a scant number of glimpses inside the teacher’s lounge. It seemed like such an elusive, mysterious, wonderful place: were they having a luau in there? Satanic ritual? Magic show? I would never know, but my wild imagination was always trying to figure it out. The truth is far less sexy: teacher’s lounges are, quite simply, the place teachers go to eat their lunch in peace, maybe browse Facebook for 20 minutes, and get away from their students. Well guess what my house has now. A teacher’s lounge. Okay, it’s really just my bedroom, but there’s a lock on the door, and no one is allowed in unless they are bleeding or on fire.

Set a Schedule

If there’s one thing this event has afforded us, it’s lots of free time with very few deadlines. Frankly, we could go to bed late every night, sleep in every morning, and consume way too many Pop-Tarts and hot dogs. And we did, but after about a week it stopped being fun and started to feel a lot like the way Gary Busey’s hair looks: disheveled and indicative of a possible mental decline. Our schedule is still pretty loose, but we have established that we are starting school work around 9:30 a.m., we break for lunch at noon, and we’re done by around 2. I also force rest time on them in the afternoons, but that’s mostly so that I can return to the teacher’s lounge and eat dark chocolate in peace.

Take Breaks

This one came from my teacher friends. School work is easier to get through when you let little ones take intermittent breaks to ease their mind and relieve frustration. They’re called Brain Breaks and can include physical activity, relaxation, or play. Set some ground rules, like that the break will only be 10 minutes, and explain what needs to happen when the break is over, like jumping right back into a reading assignment.

Don’t forget to have fun

About a week ago, my husband and 8-year-old son were looking up videos of baking soda and vinegar explosions on YouTube. You know, for science class. At some point, they decided to upgrade their blasts to Diet Coke and Mentos, and I watched out of the window as a fountain of carbonation launch into the air in our backyard. Ultimately, our kids aren’t going to remember whether or not they aced every spelling test, but they will remember if we were angry with them for not acing every spelling test. In this non-standard time, maybe we’ll realize we’ve put far too much emphasis on standardized exams and high scores. I don’t know what kind of changes this crisis will signal for our education system, but I do know that if my family has gained connection, empathy, and emotional maturity, I will consider that an A++.