July 2020

What’s the difference between Pandemic Pods, Micro Schools, and Educational Family Co-ops?

The reason you are probably considering starting your own educational family co-op right now is that either your school district is shut down OR you are not comfortable sending the kids to school due to fears of infection. Remember, ultimately flexibility is what will make this arrangement work.

Before we learn things formally, we have a lot of informal, experiential knowledge. This is particularly true in science. We live in a physical, chemical, biological world and we pick up how things work by virtue of our first-hand experiences. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to walk or eat or make even the most basic predictions about our environments — we “know” that if we throw something, it will eventually hit the ground. We rely on the fact that our feet won’t sink through the ground. We observe that water flows downhill. We have tons of intuitive ideas about our world. But not all of our intuitions are accurate. Sometimes, we have to learn things the “hard way.” Washing hands to clean off invisible pathogens is fairly new — how could we “know” that there was bad stuff that we couldn’t see hiding under our fingernails?

Where we come from — our background culture: our country of origin and language, our heritage and religion (or lack there of), our family, our education, our friends, and where we live — has an enormous impact on our ability to communicate. What’s more, when people from different cultural backgrounds try to interact with each other, these differences can cause catastrophic failures.

These are the complete guidelines for COVID response in schools for the fall of 2020.

Practical Suggestions for Starting Educational Family Co-ops in lieu of sending them to school this fall.