John Merrow rightly says that the new stay-at-home schooling is not homeschooling.
There are no bells, no crowd control, and very few real teachers.
It is home LEARNING, and there is a wealth of resources available to parents.
He offers many activities and links to resources.
A parent recently said on Twitter that the current situation cannot be compared to homeschooling, because those parents who exercise that option have access to museums, libraries, and other community activities that are mostly closed for the same reason schools are closed.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you, John Merrow.
It also can’t be compared to homeschooling because most of those parents have their children’s teachers sending them work, materials, videos, etc. to actually conduct the instruction of their children. They are, at best in most cases, acting as teaching assistants (not that that’s an easy job either, as all too many parents are now discovering.) So John Merrow is both right and wrong. He wants to push the idea that parents should be encouraging something now that they haven’t been before (what he terms “home learning”) but the idea that somehow parents who didn’t understand this before are going to discover it now is a bit optimistic at best. Regardless, he’s also wrong that the routine of school isn’t translatable to the home environment, especially for older children (middle and high school), who can benefit from trying to maintain some of that structure and using the (admittedly inadequate) resources provided by distance learning from their regular teachers to bring some normalcy to their lives and to continue learning the subjects that they were in school.
We cannot assume that much learning is going on in poor family homes, and it may have little to do with access to libraries or museums. Many poor parents are not well educated, and many others speak no English. My grandson is in 4th grade a school that is 70% free and reduced lunch. Only four students in the class of twenty-two participated in the “web chat” that the teacher held yesterday. There is a tech gap in poor families. The school offered to send home Chrome books, but most poor families do not have WiFi.
This!
And this is exactly what many thought leaders who love to take swipes at the current way schools operate don’t understand. Yes, if THEY or their neighbors can homeschool THEIR children, THEY are going to museums, parks, traveling, orchestra concerts, etc.
But many poor city kids as well as the kids in the rural areas (almost regardless of income level) may only get to experience those things through field trips. IF they can fundraise to pay for them. That was the experience for me.
Perhaps we could call it Home Instruction.
These idiots. Broward County just announced a big laptop-dispensing program. Very soon, we are going to be at millions of cases in the U.S. And Florida will be especially hard hit because our Repugnican governor won’t enforce social distancing. And in the middle of the plague, these freaking #@&@#(#&@&(&!!!!!! MORONS want to make sure that children are doing their online worksheets on freaking gerunds.
Morons. Morons. Morons.
Trump-level malfeasance and nonleadership.
Bring out your dead and your gerunds worksheets!
Hear ye, hear ye! Bring out your dead! Gerunds worksheets due Friday!
A post from la-la land. School per Merrow is dumping content into empty vessels. Memorizing state capitals & the periodic table. (Wonder when he last set foot in school?) Whee, now’s your chance to revolutionize your kids’ ed, parents. Teach them to ask questions and research the answers; do projects– never happens at school!
Revolutionary: pot-plant seedlings and observe/ note growth; discuss. (I think I’ve only seen that… on the windowsill at every PreK classroom I visit).
Ditch the pablum sent home by teachers: they’re just mindlessly attempting to transfer school’s routines to the school… Which he follows up with a mind-numbing list of online resources that would overwhelm and terrify any parent: where do I start? How do I shape it? It’s… all knowledge!
And the children are as happy as larks! They hate school but love learning at home! What does that tell you?
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My own grandkids have been home schooled until high school.
This homeschool is a coop, where the kids go to science and math, in real classes with wonderful expert teachers. My son’s wife, Andee Kinzy, created “ImprovED Shakespeare’ where all the kids participate in productions of the bard’s plays, requiring them to read, memorize great language and speak to an audience, as well as learning to cooperate in a heater production https://www.facebook.com/ImprovEdShakespeare/
Here is one which Andee filmed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajl0C1ZrI5U
In this clip my granddaughter (age 13) plays Petruccio, in Taming of the Shrew https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1083256781705017
and at the HOME of my wonderful daughter in-law, we have a clip that shows the kind of social activities that this home school can provide. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8tG5Jn_KNc&list=PL7xHO_u0s9tC1bYfrJbZdUlUxNjBac1Q9&index=4
Home school is no mom and dad taking over the education of their kids!!!!
I appreciate Merrow’s desire to be helpful and optimistic toward parents and guardians during the shutdown. There are some great ideas in his post. I appreciate that he calls on parents to ask their children questions instead of trying to be knowledge transmitting sages on stages. I cringe, however, when I see the word ‘schooling’ or the word ‘learning’ associated with what is happening today. What is happening today is not homeschooling, and not distance or home learning, but a school shutdown, a temporary school shutdown with home and online activities substituting for real education. That’s it. That’s all.
Sorry to disagree, but I cringe when I see statements like this one: “ What Covid-19 offers us is the opportunity to redefine education…” That’s taking optimism about this deadly crisis too far. ”Redefining” education sounds too much like the Distrupters’ edutech sales pitches we’ve been inundated with for twenty years. It reminds me of Zuckerberg’s line about “reimagining” education. Dangerous language, this.
It is time for the Resistance to start thinking long-term about saving education from being redefined or reimagined after the shutdown. I guarantee the Disrupters are thinking long-term about using this pandemic and the associated economic difficulties that will ensue and endure to increase funding for more tech products instead of increasing funding for smaller class size. We need to think about the salaries, class size reductions, school nurses, librarians, and counselors we‘ve been fighting for. We educators and supporters of public education need to help and guide families through this difficult time, but we also need to be careful how we do just that.
John Merrow – And here I thought you were going to praise the work of John Holt and self-directed learning. It’s (choose your own adjective) that self-directed learning gets tossed in with other educational scaffolds that pass as “homeschooling.”
What Covid-19 offers us is the opportunity to redefine education…” That’s taking optimism about this deadly crisis too far. ”
It’s not optimism but opportunism
You gotta wonder why Merrow is writing this piece at all, to say nothing of why now?
Does home schooling really need “defense” from parents and others who might call what they are doing “homeschooling”?
Why does it even matter what they call it?
Response to LeftCoastTeacher
A rose by another name would smell as sweet. An image of a rose on a screen by another name would smell as not sweet.
Individual subjects, lesson plans and established periods make sense no matter it is one kid or thirty or a thousand. After all, personal daily/weekly planners are still being sold at Target and Office Depot.
This is wishful thinking. Maybe one out of a hundred wants to learn new things, and maybe one out of two hundred knows what exactly he wants to learn and where to find it, but everyone else will be watching TV or YouTube, chatting with friends on their smartphone and playing first person shooter all day long.
The sound changes from /ʌ/ to /oʊ/. Even if you pronounce it as /o/ in “ton”, it would still change from a single sound to diphthong, not just from short to long.
Likewise, you don’t need a degree in education to teach your children English or math, especially if you have a good textbook.
Yes, they are called chores: make a breakfast, brew coffee, bake some cookies, do the dishes, clean the rooms, cut the dead tree, dig a hole for a new tree, etc. Tons of projects just waiting for someone to work on them.
Care to suggest a particular editing tool for a smartphone?
When your kid becomes a YouTube star with millions of views, he will not care about algebra and gerund.
I absolutely agree. My blog http://www.homeschoolguru.org has been inundated with parents looking for help with getting through the COVID 19 crisis but as you say, this is not homeschooling and the approach that most homeschool families take is not going to work alongside the expectations schools are putting on families who are trying to keep their children ‘on track’ through this crisis. It’s difficult because, although I home educate my children and have a strong homeschooling ethos, I do think both approaches (school or homeschool) are fine if they work for the child. It’s just there really isn’t much overlap in the way the two systems work. Your article really expresses perfectly what I think a lot of educators are feeling about the current situation.