I don’t want to generalize, nor am I American, so this is probably irrelevant anyway, but as my wife is an experienced spec ed teacher and I myself have also worked in the educational system for most of my life I feel somewhat competent in giving some perspective.
Now, we do live in one of the Nordic countries, and I’ve lived in one of the others as well, and we were both raised bi-lingual (Swedish speaking Finns, to be exact). As my immune system is compromised due to a chronic sickness and I’m also an asthmatic, we decided to keep our son home for quite a while during Covid. My wife works with a relatively small group of pupils (~5) since she’s a private teacher for children with some form of Autism so we didn’t regard that as a really dangerous vector, as they were all masked up due to their own medical issues.
Anyhow, even with all our experience and know-how (and that’s besides the social part he missed) it was a major undertaking to homeschool our boy even for a 6 month period, and he’s a smart boy too. We made most of the material myself except for his school books, and damn if it wasn’t close to a full time job. Ironically we all did get COVID (and I survived, to my surprise) about 2 weeks after he went back to school.
His handwriting had improved a lot though, and he were several chapters in front of the rest of his class in math. He’s also almost a year before his peers in English, which means he speaks three languages almost fluently at 10 years old.
So, tl;dr: you’re not wrong, but it is possible. Exhausting, but possible.
I don’t want to generalize, nor am I American, so this is probably irrelevant anyway, but as my wife is an experienced spec ed teacher and I myself have also worked in the educational system for most of my life I feel somewhat competent in giving some perspective.
Now, we do live in one of the Nordic countries, and I’ve lived in one of the others as well, and we were both raised bi-lingual (Swedish speaking Finns, to be exact). As my immune system is compromised due to a chronic sickness and I’m also an asthmatic, we decided to keep our son home for quite a while during Covid. My wife works with a relatively small group of pupils (~5) since she’s a private teacher for children with some form of Autism so we didn’t regard that as a really dangerous vector, as they were all masked up due to their own medical issues.
Anyhow, even with all our experience and know-how (and that’s besides the social part he missed) it was a major undertaking to homeschool our boy even for a 6 month period, and he’s a smart boy too. We made most of the material myself except for his school books, and damn if it wasn’t close to a full time job. Ironically we all did get COVID (and I survived, to my surprise) about 2 weeks after he went back to school.
His handwriting had improved a lot though, and he were several chapters in front of the rest of his class in math. He’s also almost a year before his peers in English, which means he speaks three languages almost fluently at 10 years old.
So, tl;dr: you’re not wrong, but it is possible. Exhausting, but possible.
Edit: typos.