Always a teacher: home-learning made better by granny

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/01/2022 (1515 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Like most parents, I had a mix of feelings when the province announced kids would start remote learning after the winter break — fear, anxiety, relief, denial.

Juggling work and three kids in three different grades learning at home is overwhelming.

Our experience with remote learning in the past has been hard, though I recognize my family is fortunate. Both my partner and I can work from home, and our kids have access to technology and a Wi-Fi connection that’s decent overall but choppy when we’re all logged into video calls. I am grateful for that privilege. However, like our Wi-Fi, my mental bandwidth has become choppy and stretched thin. I often feel like I have only enough attention span to survive. These are trying times for all of us.

This time around, however, I was handed a lifeline. My mom, who I can only describe as a saintly woman with more patience than seems humanly possible, stepped in to help us for the week. She is a recently retired teacher (though you know the old saying, “Once a teacher, always a teacher.”)

I texted her the day before remote learning was set to begin. “Can you help me with the kids tomorrow?”

“What time?” she replied.

We made plans for Jan. 10. I thought if I could just get hold of the situation, I could manage. However, after a super-busy and productive first day, she asked me if I would like her to come back.

“Yes, please,” I said.

Each day she trudged up my walkway at around 9 a.m. with a bin of books, flashcards, stickers, puzzles and whatever else she thought would help my kids learn in our living room classroom.

She brought snow pants to wear for outdoor recess and had the kids make lunch for themselves. She carved out a routine from our chaos and gave the kids the kind of structure we hadn’t had in home learning before. She took advantage of every moment as a teachable one and reacted with calmness and empathy in the face of frustration.

I realize how lucky we are to have had my mom.

One afternoon last week, my youngest daughter was becoming agitated with an assignment she was doing. Printing, I think. Frustration was mounting, and she was mostly upset with herself for the mistakes she was making. I was sitting at the dining room table, a few feet away, tapping away at my laptop and listening to the interaction between her and my mom.

“I made a mistake,” my daughter said through gritted teeth.

“That’s OK,” my mom responded, without missing a beat, with the type of cheerful enthusiasm of a Grade 1 teacher. “You know why mistakes are OK? Because they help your teachers know what to teach you.”

Her reaction to my kid’s frustration was exquisite. Like MacGyver defusing a bomb, my mom eased my kid’s frustration and taught her (and me) a really important lesson about the value of mistakes, being kind, and looking at life and its challenges from another perspective.

I made a mistake the next day. I rushed out of the house in a hurry to get to an appointment across the city I was running late for, only to arrive and realize I was a day early. The morning had already been hectic, and I was more upset than I should have been. I texted my mom in frustration.

“Arrgh. Wrong day,” I wrote.

She told me it was better to be a day early than late. It was exactly the dose of perspective I needed.

I hope my kids learned a lot from their week of home-learning with Granny. I sure did.

Thanks for being the best teacher we could ask for, Mom.

shelley.cook@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @ShelleyACook