11 Truths from Virtual School Week We Lost Count

This is our very last week of virtual school. I am so excited. It feels like getting to finally take off the 100 pound backpack you’ve been carrying around. Don’t you think?

Here are a few of my truths from the past three months…

#1. Apparently, telling the kids to, “Go get some exercise sometime today,” did not satisfy my 8th grader’s P.E. requirement.

The P.E. teacher sent an email threatening to give my son an F in P.E. I was like…

So I emailed him back and asked if he started turning in work for P.E. if he could get an ‘I’ for Incomplete. The P.E. teacher emailed me back and said he could “average the grades” and see if it came out to an Incomplete, Fail, or Pass.

Grades? What grades?

So we started opening up the P.E. assignments. Turned out dude was seriously sending out tasks with a log to turn in, so we began to follow through. Now I guess we will wait and see how it all averages out, but I must admit I thought it was all a little silly. I don’t have a good reason for why it’s silly, but that’s my attitude, I guess.

#2. No matter how many warnings the printer has given you, it will in fact run out of ink one day.

It will definitely be on a day when you meant to print out many graphic organizers for several of your children.

#3. They call worksheets “graphic organizers” now.

These are basically blank charts, but calling them graphic organizers strikes fear in the hearts of children so much better than just saying “charts.”

#4. All the teachers will want to have class meetings on the last week of school. You will have to make your own graphic organizer to keep up with whose meeting is with which teacher when.

….because really after skipping ALL of the optional class meetings for the entire months of virtual school, you should perhaps get some closure and peace and quiet in the house by making them attend the final meetings.

#5. Best Parent/Teacher conferences ever!!

As a mom of four boys who may or may not always listen well in class, it was such welcome news to learn that the parent/teacher conferences are taking the place of report cards for our elementary school students this quarter. YES! Not only that, but the conferences were so easy. There were no surprises since I was the one guiding them through their school work each day.

#6. The boys and I now have all the usernames and passwords memorized.

#7. The teachers email me when my son decides to skip assignments that “look too hard” to him.

That’s been quite the nice hack. It only happened twice, but he was so busted.

#8. I learned how to make Power Point presentations.

Believe it or not, I have never been required to do one. I graduated in college in 2002, but I thought they were boring, so I used poster boards and films for my presentations instead. Apparently, kids start working with Power Point in 3rd grade now. If you don’t handle the “delete” button correctly, you actually do away with the entire text box, so Daniel and I also became very proficient at creating new text boxes.

My eighth grader cranked his Power Point out in thirty minutes, each slide chock full of paragraphs of information, and this was the first Power Point presentation he had ever made for school. I was amazed at his aptitude. Daniel and I spent the same thirty minutes deleting text boxes on accident and re-creating them and just filling in the blanks on his ready-made slides.

#9. It is hard to make them be honest on their P.E. log when the assignment is to engage in “striking a ball with an implement for 90 minutes this week.”

We own one tennis ball, which might actually be the dog’s, and they tend to not play tennis for more than ten to fifteen minutes at a time. No one wanted to do baseball. We don’t have ping pong anymore. We used to, but we couldn’t find it. I did not help them look for any of this. I told them to play the assigned games and write their logs on their own, but I seriously doubt that it truly added up to ninety minutes.

#10. It is difficult to practice your recorder when you can never find it. It is possible that our recorder-player lost the recorder on purpose…

#11. Everyone brings their problems to one person: ME

I did not handle this well at all in the beginning. After three months of managing everyone’s problems all day long, I find myself constantly seeking solitude. I want to be alone all the time. For some reason, I have a renewed energy towards working on my blog. Do you think hard times drive me to my blog? It seems like when things were going better, I did not need to blog, and now…. Aughhhhhhhh!

I think every mom (or in some cases dad) in America feels like they have become a professional meal maker and problem solver. That does become easier after much practice, but it means you NEED alone time. If you cannot find me this summer, I guarantee you I am hiding at my house or in a Chick-fil-a parking lot somewhere.