Helping

[liv]

Covid-adjacent but mostly about adapting to circumstances rather than the illness directly.

If you're suddenly homeschooling your children, or if you're suddenly having to teach online when you're used to face-to-face, there are several things I might be able to help with. I have a lot of experience and knowledge of education, all age groups from about aged 7 to university-level. My current job is primarily about online learning so I know quite a lot about both the pedagogy and the technology. I can offer advice on how to teach a range of topics, what online resources are available, or conversely how to adapt the expertise you already have to a virtual context.

I'm no expert on homeschooling, so I'm probably not the best person to help you plan your curriculum, decide your educational philosophy etc. I'm thinking more on the individual topic or activity level. My professional training is in life sciences, and I have a fairly solid grasp of maths, biology and chemistry. Plus quite a lot of experience of tutoring in random other subjects like literature and religion and social sciences. I'm less useful at sport and creative arts, but I can still probably help to find resources and give advice on a general level.

Another thing I can offer, and would actually be quite happy to do, is I can give some direct external input into your teaching. Sometimes children don't take learning entirely seriously, or get over-invested emotionally, if teacher is also their parent, and a new person can be useful. So I can give a virtual lesson if we can arrange a time and topic, or I can set a novel task for a pupil, or I can look at and give helpful, constructive comments on something your children have created, even grade or mark things if you're into that. Feel free to PM me if you're not comfortable discussing details in public.

Aside from that, I wanted to plug covidcoffeecorner, which is a lovely little community where people post a different topic every day and a few dozen people chat about it. So if you miss mostly topic-centred communities from LJ (or even older systems) it might be worth having a look. There's also fictional_fans which has picked up a lot of activity lately, if you are interested in fandom-related (in the broadest sense) topic-focused discussions.

I assume few people are actually short of reading material, but I wanted to recommend a couple of collections.

honigfrosch is gathering poetry in various languages.

The Decameron project has a bunch of quite well-known speculative fiction authors writing stories in response to the pandemic. (Not all of them are directly about disease; it's modelled on the original where fictional people who were sheltering from plague wrote a bunch of stories.) It's hosted on Patreon but available without payment.

angelofthenorth made a second language café post last month, and it didn't get nearly as much attention as the first, so I reckon now would be a good time to revive it, if you feel like practising foreign languages with friendly people.

Comments

[angelofthenorth]

Language Cafe will next go up on the 15th of April if people don't want to revive an old post. I didn't do 15th March because I was preparing for my Leeds trip :)