It has not been a great week thus far.
It started out well, the Electoral College voted Biden for president, as expected, but things quickly deteriorated in the G & G household from there. Our boys are in a pod with a little girl, and Tuesday evening, we got a call from her mother telling us she (the mother) had been around somebody recently, who, unbeknownst at the time, had Covid. It sounded like a very low-risk situation -- mostly outside, mostly masked -- but, still, we all figured we should play it very safe, so we canceled the pod, including the babysitter, until she could get tested. And since it's Christmas break next week, anyway, we just canceled it for the rest of this week. (She got tested and she's negative, if you were wondering.)
Without the babysitter, it's so difficult to do remote schooling. Lil' S2 isn't old enough to navigate his schedule by himself, so you pretty much have to sit near him the entire day. Lil' S1 can do everything on his own, but you still have to check in to make sure he's on task. He's got some slacker in him. He's a strong reader (a bit of a bookworm), and his math seems to be okay, but he puts such little effort into his other work. Anything that requires actually writing out answers to questions, he just doesn't want to do. His handwriting is atrocious and he's a surprisingly poor speller given how much he reads. It's a lack of practice, and it's difficult to get the reps in when almost all your work is done on online portals and nobody is really holding you accountable, anyway.
I was working with him today, and when I work with him, it almost always leads to a tantrum (from him, to be clear), because I don't let him slide. He has to do it right when I'm around. I don't mean he has to get the correct answer every time; I mean he has to put in the right effort. He has to use complete sentences that start with a capital and end with a period and use lower-case in between (on his own, he just capitalizes and punctuates things willy-nilly); he has to fully erase his mistakes, so that somebody can actually read his work; he has to write along an approximately straight line; so on and so forth. You need to get those things to become second-nature or else you'll really struggle to progress to the fun stuff.
The other thing he does, which, to be fair, pretty much every kid does (including me when I was that age), is argue tooth-and-nail about doing something he doesn't want to do, instead of just doing it in half the time, at half the effort, it takes to argue it. As an example, today he was doing a worksheet in which he had to give examples of antonyms for certain words, one of which was BOLD. The answer he wrote was LISINS. We then had the following conversation:
Me: What's this? What's LISINS?
Him: It's "listens."
Me: That's not how you spell it, and that's not an antonym for bold.
Him: Yes, it is.
Me: No, it isn't.
Him: Amma said it is!
Me: No, she didn't.
Him (revving up to tantrum mode): Yes, she did!
Me: Well, it's not right. Let's try to think of something else.
Him (full on meltdown): Amma said it is! I don't like it when you help me! I like it when Amma helps me! She said it's right!
Me: *Sigh*
The thing is, though, once I get him to actually calm down and put some effort into it (usually by threating to take away his iPad time), he'll just do it. He won't fight me, and he even seems to enjoy it. He's like a wild horse that has to be broken or something -- I don't know.
By the way, I found out later that S really did tell him it was okay to put listens as an antonym for bold, which... I don't even know what to say about that. I mean, it's the wrong part of speech -- listens is a verb and bold is an adjective -- but even aside from that, it still doesn't make any sense. Being a good listener is not the opposite of being bold. Those two words don't exist on the same continuum. It's like saying swims is the opposite of adamant. I have no idea how the connection was even made.
I tried to ask S about it, but she made it clear I shouldn't. Normally I wouldn't be able to leave well enough alone -- I'd have to know what the thought process was behind signing off on listens as an antonym for bold -- but this time I didn't push it, because we are both quite stressed right now. Not only are we both trying to work full-time and tend to our children in the midst of a raging pandemic, but our roof has a leak in it, and few things in life are more aggravating than a roof with a leak in it, especially when a massive storm of wintery mix blows through town. Hopefully, we can get somebody out to look at it ASAP. Will keep you posted.
Until next time...
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