What is school (and what is it to you)
One of the challenges of living in Chile for the last year has been dealing with home/remote school. Like many places around the world Chilean students haven’t been attending school in person since the middle of March and there is no current plans to return school to a classroom mode this year. While this is not a unique challenges, it’s particularly hard in Santiago because many of us live in relatively small apartments and have children and parents somewhat on top of each other trying to connect to video calls and complete school work.
For us it’s bought into relief some of the functions that school has played in our life and some of the specific challenges of not having family around to support us. This is what we see school as offering:
School is a place that provides academic programming so that children can meet minimum standards in certain areas including maths, science and reading and writing.
School is a place where children can spend time with students of similar ages and get social interaction and development important emotional skills
School is a place where you can safely leave your children for around 30 hours a week so that you can do other tasks like work.
Now while this seems obvious we’ve found it useful because it helps us to work on some of the gaps we have from a lack of a classroom school because we can identify some of the things we need to do fix these gaps. The school has continued to provide the academic planning and the kids have participated in online classes. We’ve tried to set up playdates online and the kids now have a shared minecraft universe with some pals. And the child care, well, that’s the one we don’t have a real solution to but at least the kids are a bit older and can work more independent.
The other thing that has been bought into relief for us is that the fees we are paying are relatively high when the school is only providing the first service, so we spoke to them and they’ve also started some more fun social activities like online movie night where the kids zoom call into a call while they watch a movie together. Most expats can also access online remote schooling through their home country and if the only service your school is academic services it’s worth checking out what your entitlements might be through your native country, as the school restrictions are likely to last for a while at least on and off basis.
Here is some of my advice on how to deal with home school based on the last 4 months:
Upgrade your internet plan right now. You will be using a lot more than you planned and even if a lower plan seems feasible it will provide peace of mind to have the highest plan you can afford especially with so many people in one place trying to use the bandwidth simultaneously
Check out your schooling options. While this might be a funny time to switch schools, the same school that made sense for face to face classes might not be the best fit for a school mix which is more online
Find seperate rooms to take calls if you can, even if one person ends up taking some classes in a non standard place like the kitchen or the bathroom. While most of the typical advise suggests that kids shouldn’t work in bedrooms and can all work around the kitchen table we have found that kids (with their loud voices) can’t be in the same room doing video calls at the same time even if people have high quality headphones.
Accept it’s a non ideal situation. Work out the best balance you can, but take it easy on yourself if you can’t manage every day perfectly.