Every morning on the weekday's school starts promptly at nine o'clock. There are clocks all over the house in this era of technology. When I was young there was an analog clock in the kitchen on the stove, my parents had one in their bedroom that sported an alarm to let them know when it was time to get up. There was a wall-mounted beautiful, antique grandfather-stye clock my father got years before at I'm sure an auction or flea market that had to be wound daily. And I had one in my room of the flip number style.
Do you remember those flip clocks? There was a piece of metal with each of the numbers 1-12 for the hour and 1-59 for the minutes. Every minute, one of the metal plates would click over with a very satisfying sound. It had an alarm that was either an incredibly painful and annoying sounding low-pitched beep or you could have it turn on the radio. I, and everyone else I knew, chose the radio option.
That was about it in terms of timekeeping at my house. There were some other, antique clocks but they weren't always working so they were classified as stuff in my mind and not clocks. There was a beautiful little cuckoo clock in the hall between my and my parents' room, but he wasn't wound regularly and mostly was a source of tweeting sounds from time to time as opposed to a reliable timekeeper.
We didn't have school at home when I was young, we just got in the car at a certain point, or on the bus, or eventually, I was the driver when it was time to go to school. These days we hsve clocks everywhere. If it's an appliance, it's sure to also have the time as a bonus feature. Televisions, coffee makers, microwaces, the oven just below the microwave, clocks in every bedroom, Alexa everywhere, Google Dot, and watches.
Now, with what I'm calling, "Stay At Home School" instead of the traditional, "Home School" on account of we're all staying and sheltering at home due to COVID 19. Our Stay At Home School starts promprly at 9:00. There are loads of ways we could mark the start of the school day, but a neutral third party is our best reminder. It works well, no one argues about the validity of the time, it just is time, Time to start school.
How do we all know? Becausae Kevo, our Roomba, starts his rounds at nine o'clock. When he leaves his base and starts working, the rest of us know it's time for us to do the same.
The Big Boy Update: My son has been trying to get away with things for his school work. I annoyed my husband enough today that he said he might have me take over. What my son is doing is telling his father he's allowed to do certain works certain ways. In some cases, this means less work for alarger assignment. In other ways its just my son cutting corners. The only way I know about this is because all the students do it to us as substitutes. I've learned how things should be done and I've also learned how to ask questions in a certain way in order to get the truth: "is that what Ms. Patel would say if you asked her what you should be doing?" or, "if I smeil this work to Ms. Patel, do you are you going to be proud of what you've done?" His teacher is also a stickler for accuracy and completeness. If you wrote something incorrectly in a sentence and you can't fit the correction in the existing space, you write the entire sentence over. She corrects everything, not letting the children get away with bad grammar, punctuation, capitalization or spelling. It's made a big difference in my son's work as a result. He expects corrections (he doesn't like them) and he understands it is not optional to correct them. He's gotten away with a lot over the past week with my husband just because he's new and doesn't know the expectations. Today, when my husband asked my son the right questions, my son admitted he had taken the easy way out and he did an entire assignment over.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter got very excited the other day. She ran towards the front of the house yelling, "I hear the ice cream truck!" We had to explain that there was no way the ice cream truck was in operation during this time in our nation. She was very disappointed, asking, "are you sure:" She is going to be the happiest child in the neighborhood when the ice cream truck finally returns.
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