When we abruptly started to work from home in early March followed by local county shutting down all K12 schools, my lead sent a letter to us talking about how he and his wife would split their effort on homeschooling their two kids, on top of juggling the full-time jobs of theirs.
That homeschooling sounds so noble and heavy.
I happened to grow up in a very dysfunctional period when the entire nation’s K-12 education was crippled, and we had teachers not showing in classes as a norm, and almost all the homework was optional.
In other words, I did experience special shelter-in-place schooling, for years!
My generation wasted almost all the first 5–7 years of the K12 (actually back then, we only had K10) schooling time doing a minimal study. To kill time, we played tons of very creative self-invented social games among a few dozens of kids in the neighborhood almost all day long. All our parents were busy doing mandatory political studies in the offices on campus and left all kids freely wondering at home and socializing with kids of all ages.
I did not pick up serious school studies until 7th grade. Same went with my entire generation.
But during that period of time, I acquired so many other skills from the older kids, like all kinds of cooking, bargaining in the underground farmers market with a strong capability of fast mental calculation of produce I planned to buy (otherwise the smart farmers would easily charge you way more than they should be), savaging good electronic components parts in the 2nd hand trade plaza for building a radio (never succeeded), knitting, singing, dancing, climbing trees, hide and seek in the attics of the empty university classrooms buildings …
We turned out to be okay, and my generation had almost the highest portion of population exodus to the western developed world, and we continued doing fine in our later years, in the foreign land, among colleagues of the same age who went through the best K-12 educations in the world.
This experience had always made me wonder whether there is something seriously wrong with the modern K-12 one fits all education system.
Another telling personal experience is my daughter’s self-taught culinary skills.
I have always been the most spoiled mom among my friends because I had been unconditionally spoiling my daughter ever since she was able to make demands to me, and I never said no to her. Well, the only exception was her demand for raising cats or dogs.
One example was that I never let her enter the kitchen to help me cooking, nor force her to go with me on grocery shopping. On top of that, I never bother teaching her any of my grandma-style cooking techniques. All she needed to do was to eat whatever I put on the table or bring it to school as lunch. That itself brought me tons of joy.
So when we dropped our daughter to her dorm on the college that was thousands of miles away, and when I cried all my way back home alone, it still did not occur to me how my daughter was going to take care of her three meals from then on as I did zero preparation on training her even just making a scrambled egg.
Yet, yet, a few years later, she turned out to be so good at cooking all kinds of ethnic food and all kinds of bakeries, good looking and sophisticate tasting sorts as you see in the cookbooks.
“I just watched YouTube and learned from there.” She always shrugged off my usual overreaction of any dishes she made or photos of the dishes sent to me. “Besides, even though you never taught me how to cook, I was always immersed in your daily cooking activities since I was a toddler, and I had been under the subconscious influence of your home cooking and passion for food.”
Like I said, I am the spoiled one among the two of us.
Let me just stopped here not to go into too many details on how I never checked my daughter’s homework in her entire K-12 education history.
My excuses had always been that my own parents never checked mine, and my husband’s excuse was that children’s homework should be taken care of by the tiger moms.
Our daughter turned out to be a wonderful fine person. At this very moment, she freelances with Google’s creative labs, joined-venture with the National Board of Film of Canada and teaches at one of the most-sought-after graduate schools in the nation. She is living the dream life of mine.
So, whenever I saw my friends got into a dispute with their kids on what they should or should not do and tension went skyrocketing, I would always step in using my mother-daughter examples to calm them down.
The kids will be fine.
I do remember back in my childhood years, in some long gray days of summer or winter break time when I always stayed with my grandparents, I could be sitting on an old armchair closing my eyes, and my mind ran wild at the adventures of my imagination. My grandpa or grandma would approach me with an anxious look to see if I was ok.
“I am fine.” I would reply, temporarily back on earth from my imaginary fantasy world.
Looking back, more than half of the time, I felt grateful that I had that unique kind of childhood where I was free-spirit, with tons of solitude moment, could choose to do nothing yet I was allowed to do anything including one attempt to make a bomb with other older kids.
