Prepping for schools to be closed this year
I’ve got a 2nd grader and a kindergartner who’s entering school come a couple of weeks from now. Being as we’re in the Metro Nashville area in-person learning isn’t an option. They’ve been sort of dangling after Labor Day as a potential back to school timeframe but looking at the virus numbers that’s a pipe dream.
We’re two parents who each have to go into work occasionally which puts us in a markedly better position than most but it still leaves a kindergartner and a 2nd grader and 4+ hours of instruction on a tablet or laptop which has not been provided by the school system.
As an IT guy, I can’t imagine the sheer amount of spyware that’s going to be one step away from badly designed education software, nor do I expect things will go well when a couple million kids nationwide hit the internet at the same time in an attempt to do their classwork.
I have a feeling that there’s going to be major headbutting between the bandwidth required for school and America’s micromanagers absurd newfound obsession with high bandwidth video calls. I don’t expect the internet to work in the morning for a while, so I’m going to have to get all my trolling out late at night.
We’re in the process of turning the one room not overrun by kid stuff into a school room… desks… filled with kid stuff. I’m going to hopefully have a list of software we’re going to need installed soon so I can get to finding out what doesn’t work (we’ve got an old iPad, an Amazon Fire Kids Edition that refuses to cooperate unless I disable security, laptop that will spend the next year updating to whatever the latest security patch is, etc).
Yeah, believe it or not I don’t have a whole host of computers and monitors sitting around to try and run whatever school software we’re getting thrown into. I’ll manage to make do, but Metro schools besides being fairly shortsighted for holding out hope of in-person classes seems to think anyone in the IT world is going to believe that the laptops and IT supplies will be ready for them anywhere near the beginning of the school year.
This is going to be really weird…
Having been homeschooled in a very non-friend-inspiring way, this is exactly what I didn’t want for my kids. But whatever, we’ll do what we have to so we don’t kill others, or come down with an illness that takes us months to recover from.
