Someone’s screaming in frustration in the living room again. From the tone it’s one of the teenagers trying to instruct the smallest one with her reading.
The nice thing about remote learning is that when the kids visit from Jersey they don’t have to miss school. I’m in class for my job at least once a week too.
Each morning they’re here starts off with the four of us glued to a screen in various corners of the house. Two on the bed, one on the couch, one at the table.
The smallest one, who’s 8-years-old, has a hard time paying attention or logging in or speaking on camera or generally anything that would make educating her at home easier. I know she’d rather sprawl on the couch in her oversized sweater watching her little monster high cartoons. She puffs up dark brown cheeks and grimaces so hard her eyes disappear whenever I tell her to keep at it, that she’s not the only one. That there’s a whole city of kids in just as much flux as she is.
I don’t think she can fully conceptualize that though. They plain didn’t like working on their homework in the homeless hotel their mom had them in before, so I can imagine how those children that didn’t have another option managed.
“Read the…s…ta…tement. Statement. Read the statement that means Lion isn’t as strong as he thinks he is,” she reads.
If I’m there, I make her sound out vowels and consonants phonetically because that’s how I learned. If the kids are there, they tell her to speak louder and to not skip over words because she can clearly read. If Pops is there he tries to see the words to follow along.
“What do you think the story meant?” I ask, trying to prompt her to answer. I feel like a nagging teacher, coaxing a turtle out of its shell. I feel like a mom, and consequently, look like mine in a house dress drinking coffee while leaning over a small child. I feel wildly underqualified for this, and Pops says that all parents are the same way. No one knows what they’re doing ‘for real for real,’ he said.
After we discuss the ridiculously boiled down version of an Aesop fable about why it’s a good idea for the Mouse to be friends with the Lion, it takes three of us to figure out how to navigate the screen to submit answers. Then, feeling equally like jackasses, we figure out that the error is occurring because the teacher hasn’t graded it yet.
The days are in and out of screens, mishaps, open Zoom calls and speakerphones, blunders, and inevitably, someone falling asleep in a bonnet on camera.
The only thing that breaks up the monotony are the smells that waft in from upstairs neighbors and my uncle cursing the welders and construction guys out from his backyard. A sempiternal source of entertainment.
Every once in a while if I’m also busy clacking away on a story, Pops attempts to cook for us. The last time resulted in him sticking a pack of unopened frozen chicken in the microwave to ‘cook’ before baking it, so I made a pretty conscientious effort to always break for dinner.
My sisters aren’t private tutor and pod learning kids. None of my siblings have that privilege.
The small one’s a month behind already because of a mix up with login information, but we’ve adapted and muscled through. We have open discussions for history or literature classes since, spoiler alert, those were my favorite. They buckle down for math and science with Google or Youtube videos if necessary.
We laugh about what we don’t know and what we can’t control.
And, secretly, I pray or cry for them every day.
