Nashville schools remaining remote at least 47 more days
You might have noticed Paul has not been writing as much lately. That’s because I (switching to first person, jarring I know,) have two new coworkers aged 5 & 7 who require more tech support than my office has lately. I mean, I’m not sure who thought a kindergartner who can’t read was going to be able to handle that bitchin’ Dell that the school issued, but my tech support tickets are primarily resolved with a side of Cheerios now.
TL;DR – Paul’s tales from home schooling
We ripped apart our dining room to turn it into a school/office, have three laptops running in it (wife decided to sit in the cube farm with the kiddos, my monster machine was not moving from my office space without rewiring the house either,) and during the time when I’m away from my office-away-from-the-office I’m on a laptop as well, literally 20 feet from my work computer.
We topped out at five concurrent video streams the other day. Four were meetings – two with the kiddos classes, one with wife’s work, one with one of my coworkers, and a YouTube video silently playing in the hall display we did not notice. It was one of the more conspicuous streaming escapades I’ve had since attempting to stream a 54GB mkv over a gigabit connection.
While I generally advocate for kids and tech as I knew this reality was coming, the school system and video conferencing as it stands still feel like they’re stuck in 2008. Plagued with technical difficulties, internet overload, and platform after platform of different teacher attempts to get work done, it’s been annoying. I mean, not that I’m complaining particularly loudly because I know what time they had to get this ready for 80,000+ kids.
Today we sat waiting for a Spanish class that never ended up meeting because the teacher’s computer refused to connect to Teams. The announcement that it wasn’t working went out in Bloomz. I didn’t get the email or the app notification.
I wonder how other parents are handling this. Feels like it’s been nothing but fighting and tech support for clients who don’t want tech support and just want you to stop fixing it and play with them, trying to squeeze in work while the kids demand attention that I can’t give at that time, fighting to get homework accomplished, and when the day is over for them (usually around 2 or 3) and it’s their time we’ve been butting heads at that point since 8am. At that point honestly I think we all resent each other. It’s been compounded the past two weeks by weather that makes it terrible to go out.
