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by ping_pong 2131 days ago
I recently quit my job as a programmer and have taken the task of overseeing the kids education while my wife works. She is on Zoom meetings literally all day and then works until midnight, so me quitting alleviates most of the stress on the both of us.

We are home schooling them full time and pulled them out of private school. We are right now going through the process of figuring out their schedule, but we have also hired a home school consultant who is simply invaluable. We are trying to come up with a schedule for the school year as we speak.

Our son is profoundly gifted with behavior issues so he has special needs that frankly make it easier when he's home schooled, but the pandemic is making his social isolation worse, so we need to figure that out. This year will probably be messed up for everyone so experimenting this year won't be that much worse even if we mess up home schooling.

We also have resources available through Davidson and John Hopkins' CTY, so they will be taking courses through that. We'll try our best but we also know that this is a once in a decade situation that everyone is suffering from, so we're not putting too much pressure on ourselves to get it perfect. Most notably is the social isolation, so figuring that out is important for us.

1 comments

Hi, I'd love to know the name of our homeschool consultant (and I'm sure others would as well) if you're willing to share.

With regards to social isolation, if you're interested, we run a digital learning pod to help kids stay connected and develop social-emotional skills online. We meet twice a week and activities are designed to keep all members participating actively and engaging with each other and the facilitator. Kids facetime and skype outside the group and meet up for interest-based groups as well. It's working so well that some kid who had no friends at school when they were meeting kids in person now have developed wonderful friends with kids in the group.

Several of our kids are highly gifted or have other considerations. If you'd like to try it out, we'd love to have your son in our group. It's a unique challenge helping kids feel connected using an online medium, but we've discovered, not impossible and can even increase the diversity of the group since kids can connect from all around the world.

Here's also another article I wrote on Staying Connected which might be helpful. https://www.modulo.app/all-resources/onlineconnections