COVID-19 Shutdown Forced Homeschool Parent Log – Day 82

Forced Homeschool Parent Log – Day 82

Summer starts tomorrow. The school district said the last day of “school” was actually last Friday, but that’s a load of crap.

The original last day of school was on the calendar for tomorrow, June 4^th, and I’ll be damned if I’m letting my kids off the hook. Since the schools stopped giving them work, I had to make up my own for this week.

We are having a Home Economics class, involving studying the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook and making us dinners. I’m teaching an engineering course on Fluid Dynamics, involving studying all the owner’s manuals for our pool equipment and also skimming the leaves out of the pool. And we’re hosting a work/study program on Urban Housing and Development, which consists mostly of cleaning out our garage.

Tomorrow is our official last day of homeschool, and we will probably just abandon any attempts at learning and eat cupcakes and sign yearbooks. “Yearbooks” in this case will probably just be Post-it notes, since we don’t have their actual yearbooks yet and they don’t want their brothers writing “YOU SUCK!” in them anyway.

We will be teaching one last class tomorrow if any of our boys decide to partake in the time-honored tradition of taking their binders apart and flinging their paperwork all around the homeschool. In that case, their last elective of the homeschool year will be the Janitorial Arts.

The last day of school is always a minimum day, so at noon we will officially mark the end of this ridiculous, idiotic distance learning catastrophe, and we will begin our summer. After 83 days of forced homeschooling three teenage boys, if someone tries to tell us we can’t go on summer vacation, they are going to be invited to a PE class where my three testosterone-y boys introduce them to street tackle dodgeball sumo fistfight, or as it’s more commonly known around here, afternoon.

We are getting in the car and leaving for summer vacation on Friday. I don’t know where we’re going and I don’t care. We might just drive until we run out of gas and camp in a ditch. That sounds amazing.

And I swear on my life, or more to the point, on my children’s lives since they will not live through another homeschooling adventure, if our administrators try to tell us we’re not going back to normal next year, I’m bringing a street tackle dodgeball sumo fistfight game to the district office.

All of your teenagers are invited to join.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2020 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

The Just a Smidge Homeschool Schedule

I don’t want to brag or anything, but we are handling this new nationwide “distance learning” directive like a boss over here at Smidge Central.

Do we need the boys to leave the house to get their education every day?

Heck no! We can totally do all that stuff right here at home. A home that used to be much, much larger, as I remember it.

We spent the weekend coming up with our new homeschooling schedule – and by weekend, I mean five minutes on Sunday night over a couple drinks. The schedule has since been honed to razor-sharp perfection, and we are running like a Swiss watch over here on day three.

Since this has been such a massive win for us, educationally speaking, we just wouldn’t feel right keeping it to ourselves. So, we have decided to post our homeschooling schedule here for you to adopt in your own home.

The Just a Smidge Homeschool Schedule

From whenever you wake up until 8:00 A.M.

Reading time (we think – we are taking this opportunity to sleep in until 8:00 because that NEVER happens, so we’re not really sure what they’re doing, but we told them to read and we also really don’t care that much as long as they let us sleep.)

8:00 – 9:00

Culinary – boys complain about having to make their own breakfasts

9:00 – 9:30

Work Experience – boys complain about having to vacuum and do dishes

9:30 – 11:30

Classroom – boys complain that the assignments from the teachers are dumb and don’t make sense. I ask them if they read the directions. They say stupid things and then shut up after they finally read the directions. Repeat. I also use this time to attempt to figure out the logistics of expelling one or more of my children from homeschool. Does that mean they have to live in the backyard? If so, I’m totally fine with that. We own tents.

11:30 – Noon

Culinary – boys complain that they aren’t hungry for lunch yet, but they are lying, because they are boys and therefore always hungry. They make themselves cereal and chips.

Noon – 1:00 P.M.

Reading time – boys complain that they already read a ton before we got up and their books are boring and this is dumb and why can’t we go play since there is no school. They also complain about being hungry. They shut up once they actually open their books and get sucked back into the amazing stories that await them on every page.

1:00 – 2:00

Physical Education – boys go to the garage and mostly punch each other and put each other in headlocks while they are supposed to be lifting weights, doing pullups, or running around the block. As long as they stay out in the garage for an hour, we give them full credit.

2:00 – 5:00

Free Play, including one hour of screen time – boys always start their three-hour free play time with their one hour of screen time, because they have already figured out that the one hour will likely be extended indefinitely since it’s the only peace and quiet I’ve had all day and I need to get some damn things done around here!

5:00 P.M.

Guided Culinary – dinner prep with the boys playing active roles in all major food preparation activities. We are having cereal again because I just can’t anymore.

6:00 P.M.

Survival Skills – get away from me if you want to live. Also, make sure you get yourself to bed at a reasonable hour. It’s a school night.

Anyway, like I said, we’re pretty much owning this whole homeschooling thing. Use this amazing schedule with our compliments.

Best of luck!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2020 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

Multitasking Moms

I am getting stupider. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t all that smart to begin with, but over the last few years I have actually felt myself dumbing down tremendously. I can pinpoint the exact moment it started happening, too: My first day as the stay-at-home dad.

Back when I was an engineer and had an office job, I was actually pretty good at getting things done. I would knock out tasks left and right and check off the to-do list every day. Now that I’m in charge of the house, I can’t find my socks. Seriously, I have like two pairs left and they don’t match.

I have always blamed multitasking on my recent inability to do anything well. I’ve told my wife for years that my brain does not have the ability to do two things at once. I can do one thing adequately or two things very poorly. Those are my choices.

Well, now it turns out that my inability to multitask has been validated. Hooray! Dr. Labcoat and his research team at the University of Stanford-or-Somewhere recently published a groundbreaking study that proves, among many other things, that funding is somehow still available for college brain studies. Also that no one’s brain has the ability to do two things at once. The study found that people who thought they were good at multitasking actually multitasked worse than people who normally tend to focus on one task at a time.

They also found that multitasking during cognitive tests actually reduced performance on those tests as much as smoking marijuana. I think that part of the study was done in Colorado. When the Stanford researchers contacted them for follow-up data, the Colorado team replied, “Huh?”

Add all that to the fact that they believe more studies will prove that multitasking actually causes brain damage, and... hang on, I have to go change the laundry.

This news is huge! I finally have some concrete scientific proof to point to when my wife questions my inability to function. It’s not me, honey, it’s the kids. There’s three of them and they all want stuff at the same time. They’re to blame, not me. It’s science.

As an example of what I’m talking about, here’s a typical conversation between me and my wife when she gets home from a long day at work:

Her: “What’s for dinner?”

Me: “Sorry, Son Number Three’s shoelace broke this afternoon, so I haven’t gotten around to planning dinner yet.”

Her: “Uh... it’s 6:45.”

Me: “Have you seen my socks?”

See what I mean?

Mother’s Day is this weekend, and as we celebrate all those stay-at-home moms, all those working moms, and all those single moms who do everything all at once, let’s remember this multitasking study. The fact that they can get anything done at all is a sheer miracle. The amount that they do accomplish for their families is a testament to how awesome they really are.

They could probably find a cure for cancer if we just left them alone for a few hours.

So to all you moms out there - Happy Mother’s Day! Take the day off and go smoke some dope or drink a couple bottles of wine. It will actually be better for your brain than dealing with the kids. You can find a cure for cancer some other day.

You know, come to think of it, those two pairs of socks I still have might match if I just swapped their partners...

See, this is what I’m talking about. What’s for dinner?

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2016 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!