Schooling in lockdown

Here in Auckland, our Covid Level 4 lockdown ends tonight, after five weeks holiday working from home.  We've still got at least another two weeks in Level 3 lockdown, which for us means almost no change.  (It's getting doubtful that any of our pre-booked school holiday activities will happen in two weeks' time.)

In that time our family has used the car twice -- once to get a Covid test and once to get a Covid vaccine.

That's a big change for us.  In normal life we use the car most days, driving to the various activities that the girls do -- ballet, rock climbing, swimming, music, gymnastics, athletics, etc.  "Homeschooling" is not a very accurate name for what we do; I'm not the first to suggest it should be called car schooling.

So, how's our schooling in lockdown going?

One difference for us is that our exercise is now all home-based.  Mulan has Zoom ballet lessons five days a week.  Miya has rock climbing and dance Zoom lessons.  Our dining room is a dance studio, while our dining table is in the lounge acting as a jigsaw puzzle table.

We go for runs around our local area and do various conditioning exercises at home.  On the downside my hands are getting soft from no rock climbing; on the upside my golfer's elbow is coming right with no rock climbing.

The girls both have music lessons over Zoom.  Mulan has recorder lessons, while Miya has clarinet, saxophone and trumpet lessons.  Miya is continuing to prepare for her Trinity Grade 4 clarinet exam, which is still planned for late October.  As part of this, we've signed her up for aural test training at e-music maestro.

Miya's deskwork remains the same.  She continues doing Khan Academy and touch typing.  She's still only primary school aged, so it's more about natural in-context learning and inculcating good attitudes.  We do stuff quizzes, and the children use kahoot to set their own quizzes.

This lockdown Mulan and Miya have started online gaming with the cousins, playing monopoly, gartic telephone, scribblio, psych, forge of empires, etc.

But the biggest change is that Mulan is back at home learning with us, instead of going to school.

Before lockdown hit, Mulan had a total of 17 days at Westlake Girls High School -- just enough time to start getting used to school life.  Now she's doing lockdown schooling.

I've heard it said that lockdown schooling is homeschooling.  It really isn't, for one important reason.

Essentially, homeschooling is about the parents/caregivers being the final decisionmakers on what gets taught.  This includes:

(a) Deciding what sorts of knowledge, skills and values are truly valuable to pass on to the children, 

(b) deciding what methods will work best to teach each child,

(c) deciding what order and amount to teach the knowledge/skills/values,

(d) deciding what lesson content to use to develop the knowledge/skills/values, and

(e) assessing what the children do, which then feeds back into the above.

With lockdown schooling, parents/caregivers do none of this.

All that lockdown parents/caregivers do is oversee or help with the completion of the work that the schools have supplied to the students to do.

And this is what we are doing with Mulan right now.

Mulan is connected to her teachers online on her new computer, where they tell her what she needs to do.  As part of our normal family life Mulan tells us what this is.  We then work with Mulan on this as much or as little as she needs.

At one extreme, Mulan's school maths is so easy that we haven't been involved at all in any of her maths learning during lockdown.  She simply does the required work quickly on her own and submits it, getting full marks every time.  (I've suggested that since lockdown is continuing for longer we should get back into doing Khan Academy maths with her; it would be a shame for Mulan to go backward with her maths just because school is not challenging her enough.)

For Mulan's other subjects we have been involved to some extent.  For her longer writings (English, music, science, etc) we typically read and give advice after she has written them, though sometimes we also talk through the ideas before she starts writing.  With the music composition, Miya helped out (Mama and I were useless!).  Miya also helped with the photography unit for English.

According to Mulan, what she has been learning over the past five weeks in lockdown is of a similar amount to what she was learning during those 17 days at school.  The main difference for her is that she says that she spends maybe three hours each day working on it rather than the full school day.  In other words, lockdown learning is, for Mulan, much more time efficient that school learning.

Nonetheless, Mulan says she would still rather be at school than do lockdown learning.  For her, learning at school in the social environment is more enjoyable that learning at home.  Even though school uses up more hours it seems that it is worth it.  And also, lockdown means missing all the other out-of-home activities we do; returning to school means also returning to ballet, swimming, gymnastics, athletics, etc.

From my point of view, lockdown learning is working better than homeschool learning, in the sense that Mulan is very responsibly taking charge of what she needs to do and calmly getting it done.  I've been very impressed with how she's gone about things during lockdown.  When she was homeschooling, if I had have told her to do the same thing she would have mucked around and tried to avoid getting it done.  I think partly she enjoys teasing me (she wouldn't dare tease her teachers in that way!) and partly it is hard to get started on something that is initially slightly out of one's comfort zone.  At least for Mulan, having an outside person setting the tasks is the key.

Having said all that, lockdown, for our family, has been a much-enjoyed quality time together.  We all get on well, and it has been wonderful to have Mulan around home again during the day.  As much as we'd like lockdown to end, and get back to all the fun outside activities, it really isn't that bad at all.

Miya's 11th birthday

For the second year running Miya had her birthday in Covid-19 lockdown.  After all the months of Covid-freedom it's an unfortunate coincidence to be in lockdown at the same time of the year again.

Fortunately we'd already had the big birthday activity, when we did the ninja warrior course at Jump.  But we did miss the extended family in-person get-together.

On the bright side, at the Zoom party on Sunday we got to eat all the birthday cake while the others watched on.  Miya is starting to do a lot of cooking, and this year she baked her own birthday cake -- chocolate with mint-chocolate icing.  Very delicious!

The grandparents gave Miya a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle (socially-distanced delivery with the grocery exchange).  By this morning the puzzle was complete.  Miya and I mostly worked on it together, with Mulan helping occasionally during schoolwork breaks.

A yellow before Covid lockdown

We're back in Covid-19 lockdown again.

On Tuesday afternoon it was announced that there was a Covid case in the community (around our own neighbourhood, in Devonport), so at midnight we went into level 4 lockdown.

Good call.  I trust the expert epidemiologists and statisticians on this, that without a serious and complete lockdown the new delta variant will get wildly out of control and our hospitals will be quickly overwhelmed.

Just before the Tuesday announcement I was starting to feel a bit under the weather, and had planned to get a Covid test.  I tried our GP (who we usually get it from), who said to go to the local testing station.  So I tried the testing station, who said come back on Wednesday.

I joined the Covid test queue at 8:30am, when the testing station opened.  Six and a half hours later I  finally got the test!  Luckily I brought along a book.  With the book propped up on the steering wheel, inching along in the car was bearable.  But I returned home utterly exhausted.

This morning at 5:20am I got the text message that my result was negative.  Just a regular cold, likely picked up at Belmont Music Centre, as usual.

Tuesday morning, before the Covid announcement, Miya and I had our usual climbing session at Northern Rocks.  We videoed a yellow climb that Miya had newly completed:

Ballet tickets on sale now

Ticket sales opened yesterday for The Classical Collab's performance of Romeo and Juliet.  There'll be three shows on the 17th and 18th of September.

Mulan and Miya are both performing -- looking forward to it!

Lotsa new climbs

It's like Christmas at Northern Rocks.  There was a competition during the weekend (we didn't go as we were busy with other things), and they changed almost all of the climbs.  Woohoo, lotsa new climbs to try.

Unfortunately I overindulged yesterday, and now my golfer's elbow is pretty sore.

Yellow climbs

Green climbs are getting commonplace.

Here's a couple of yellow climbs that Miya completed today:

Mulan at school

 Last Monday, Mulan attended school for the first time ever.

The whole family walked her there, signed her in at the office, and watched her get taken away by the Dean and two prefects.

I last wrote in May that we were considering school -- how did we get from there to here?

Throughout May and most of June we were all very undecided.  Mulan had no strong opinions, and we were all back-and-forthing about advantages and disadvantages.  School or homeschool?  Westlake Girls or Takapuna Grammar?

We'd talked with the enrolments people at both Westlake and Takapuna, and walked around the buildings.

After peering in the Westlake windows one weekend I opined that it reminded me of small-town China.  The Communist Party buildings are extravagantly grand, while the normal folks' buildings are old and tired.  Similarly, the Westlake admin buildings are new and corporate-fancy, while the classrooms look like nothing much has changed since my days at school 30ish years ago.  I grumpily wondered at the possible corruption, that the Westlake administrators had conveniently given themselves comfy new offices while leaving the student facilities pretty basic.

But grumpiness aside, we had to decide which option was best for Mulan.

In the end we opted for Westlake, putting in the enrolment application on the 20th of June.

(a) We decided that even though schools are often frustratingly inefficient and occasionally ridiculous, overall it would give Mulan new and valuable opportunities and experiences.  If she could get in with a good bunch of classmates and teachers, then it'd be both fun and rewarding.  And if it didn't work out, we could always return to homeschooling.

(b) We decided to go to the closest school.  It's hard to argue against a 5 minute walk, and Mulan doesn't have to leave home until about 8:40am.  Westlake people have also been consistently warm, welcoming and professional.

For a few weeks until the end of term 2, three days a week Mulan caught the bus to her cousins' place, doing deskwork studies alongside them.  The thought was to get her more used to regular school hours, as well as polish up on maths, science and music.

Mulan is now enrolled in Year 10, and has English, Maths, Science, Social Studies, PE and Health as her compulsory subjects.  She's chosen Music, Dance and Business Studies as her options.

We were worried that school would require a big after-school time commitment, but in the end decided to risk it and for term 3 Mulan has enrolled in her usual after-school activities, which total about 17 hours per week.  The only activity she dropped was homeschool rock climbing, which happens during school hours.  She's also continuing to deliver papers.

Before starting school we had to buy a lot of equipment -- laptop computer, smartphone, uniform and stationary.  Including the school fees, I guess it's close on $2000.

Mulan had never done Business Studies before, so during the school holiday Westlake emailed us a 50-page book of what they'd done in the Accounting topic they'd covered in term 2.  Mulan downloaded it onto her new smartphone and skimmed through it on the bus to ballet lessons.  She thought it looked fairly easy -- after the introductions it's mostly just a matter of putting in the hours to get familiar with double-entry bookkeeping, balance sheets, profit and loss statements, and so on.  So far, last week in class her teacher has been getting her to work on it on her own while her classmates are revising for the unit test this week.

So, what do we think of school so far after a week?

For one thing, Mama said she understands me much better now!  Occasionally in the past Mama would worry that our homeschooling was too relaxed and the girls weren't doing much.  She'd complain that I should be teaching the girls more.  I'd tell her not to worry, and that the girls are doing just as much or more than they'd be doing at school.  After hearing back from Mulan last week on what she did in class, Mama now agrees with me that schools do even less.

But from Mulan's perspective, for now that's ideal.  Last week was a nice, relaxed introduction to school life, and Mulan was able to keep up and also do her after-school stuff.  So far, she's not at all tired.

So far, the worst thing I've heard from Mulan is that she doesn't have time to bike to the public library to pick up two books that are waiting for her.  She wants me to make a special trip, so she can read before bed!  

For Maths, Mulan said they're covering stuff she did a couple of years ago.  We contacted Westlake about possibly moving Mulan to the extension class, or her teacher giving her alternative work.  They've given her a take-home test to do, so if she does well I guess we'll hear back from them about ways to extend Mulan appropriately.

Aside from Maths, in all Mulan's classes she's doing new stuff, in a non-stressful and easily manageable way.

For English, the class was partway through a unit on a Roald Dahl short story.  They'd read the story before the holiday, and on Monday were discussing themes.  They were supposed to submit an essay on Friday.

Mulan had never written an essay in her life.  (My opiniated view is that there's no need to teach essay writing early.  If kids are wide readers, then when they eventually need to write they'll already have a good sense of writing styles and will adapt quickly.)

At home on Wednesday, Mulan wrote about 400 words summarising the short story.  In my opinion it was a very clearly written summary.  Unfortunately it didn't answer the essay question the teacher had set.  Mulan saved it, and started afresh.

After school on Thursday Mulan had a one-hour window to do the essay before her swimming lesson.  When she walked in the door I gave her four 250-word sample essays to read, and suggested she write in that style.  She took it away and before she left for swimming she'd completed a very well-structured 350-word essay.  I gave her a couple of minor general suggestions to tighten it up, but otherwise it was all her own work.

Mulan submitted her essay Friday morning, only to find that the deadline is now extended to tomorrow.  The students are continuing to work on their essays in class, and Mulan's teacher has suggested that Mulan expand more on her argumentative points.

Mulan has made a few friends, hanging out with them in the corridor at lunchtime.  She's joined the knitting club with one friend, meeting on Wednesday lunchtimes.  And she plans to join the orchestra -- she'll take her cello at 8am on Wednesday.  Westlake is in talks with Mulan's recorder teacher, deciding if he can teach her at school during school hours.

So far, we're very happy with the way things are working out.  This half year it's about relaxedly finding Mulan's interests and levels, so that next year, for NCEA 1, Mulan can join the right classes at the right levels.