Since the later part of March Eric and Mikee, together with every other child in most of Europe, have been in a virtual school.The systems set up by different schools differ however a lot.
Eric has a few lessons a week, but mostly get his homework via his email and reply by sending in his assignments via email. He has a few proper lessons and interestingly enough, his guitar lessons are among those.
Mikee on the other hand has a full program all day with lessons via Zoom and Google Classroom. Her classes are small, normally no more than 10 students, which encourages participation from everyone. And in the afternoon she meets her tutor via Zoom and teams up with her class mates for group work of different kinds. Mikee studies close to 12 hours a day.
Mikee is at a boarding school (Haileybury, north of London) and every morning at 08:20 (sharp) her house has a roll call and she meets her house mistress. And every afternoon at 13:40 the process repeats. And every fortnight the parents meet up for a Zoom meeting as well. It is a very efficient system and both Jennifer and I are duly impressed.
We were advised that the children shouldn’t study in their bedroom if it was possible to have them somewhere else. To feel that they are going to work they come down, have breakfast and off they go to their respective study centre.
We have a special desk in the breakfast room, originally much used by Jennifer, and Eric has set up his books and files there together with his computer. And Jennifer is often nearby in the kitchen, where she keeps her computer too, so she can support (and guard) Eric.
And Mikee moved into “my library”, and I am now working from my Chambers. I connected the extra screen in the library to her computer, so she has lots of screen real estate for all her documents.
We are lucky having lots of space and can offer everyone a chance of undisturbed studying or work. The glorious weather has offered a temptation for the children to be outside, but during study hours (all day during the week for Mikee) they have dutifully stayed inside.
But Mikee helped Eric with a video recording of the peasants situation in the fourteenth century (when Knightstone was built) and Mikee did a video presentation for prospective parents and students at Haileybury about the school and those were done outside.
