My biggest home-schooling lesson? Learning to wait

I thought I knew what I was getting into, when I decided to become a public high school teacher. Days spent lesson planning, marking and cajoling/counselling teenagers. Prepare report cards, speak with parents, think about critical thinking, pedagogy and best practices. Did I mention the marking?

I never thought teaching would one day involve learning how to design asynchronous lessons that could be accessed at any time of the day. Or how to evaluate online work while taking into account varied student access to technology; or how to teach science without lab equipment; or how to conduct meetings via Google hangouts, all while supervising my own school-age kids.

Welcome to life during a pandemic, where the days are surreal, the outfits athleisure-ific, and the goal posts perpetually in motion.

My last column was about the challenges of home-schooling. The past few weeks, like many public school educators, I’ve started teaching online while managing my own kids’ school work. At first, I was overwhelmed: I’ve never taught online courses before, and while I make use of Google classroom and other educational tools regularly, it is another thing to transfer my entire teaching practice online.

There have been some positive developments. School boards have gone to Herculean efforts to distribute technology to students who need it, across the province. According to an April 5 Toronto Star article by Kristin Rushowy, the TDSB alone couriered 28,000 lap