130: Home Schooling Pods

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We want our kids to have social lives but also for them safe, and we can’t imagine an in-person school experience really being that. That means we’re probably keeping our kids at our house for the next year. Ideally, we have them at a house with a few other kids so they can socialize. A few kids is a lot different than the hundreds they’d interact with at the elementary school.

How we’re doing it:

  • We found a former teacher who doesn‘t want to go back to work at an in-person school. We’ll pay her monthly.
  • We have a family we’re close with who has similar social-distancing values as we do who wants to join. They’ll bring their kids over to our house every day.
  • We set up a dedicated space as a schoolhouse – our garage – and we will have the kids and teacher use it to teach the Zoom classes or whatever the curriculum is.

This “pod” system seems to be catching on. If you go to NextDoor you can see teachers looking for pods and parents looking for teachers. Others:

  • Myra Margolin, who created a Facebook page to help connect families in the D.C. region interested in “microschooling,” found more than 1,000 people join the group.
  • Andrea MacRae is trying to organize “bubbles” for children and families in the East Bay area. She has interested families fill out detailed surveys about their values and risk comfort, and then matches those families with other like-minded families — including those who won’t be able to pay and those that include essential workers.

If we get this working it seems like a great way to get everyone through this pandemic safely. While this is working for us, I could see how it could be tough for kids of essential workers, those who can’t find teachers, or families who afford it. I feel very fortunate we can do it.

Other Stuff

Here’s what happening on Facebook. Seems like Republicans are just much better at social sharing. Trump did kick ass on Facebook during the 2016 election.

American in UK soccer watch. Pulisic is on fire this season. Check out him absolutely destroying yesterday. Oh, and he got a goal right after this video.

Just a harmless dog and cat video to end it out:

Corona

The Trump administration announced a plan of $2 billion for 600 million doses of a vaccine, with the first 100 million promised before the end of the year.

The good news: In just over two months, the East Coast states — Delaware to Maine — have gone from the country’s worst hot spot to something like Europe where the virus is under control.

The bad: The U.S. recorded 1,127 deaths on Tuesday, the highest daily total since late May

One interesting graph I saw (below) that shows that (a) more tests are happening and (b) more are coming back positive – pushing our cases higher.

That’s it. Have a great Thursday

Only 64 more days to go

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