HybridSchoolingLife

The wheels of time turn, an era changes as if it were only a moment. Many things have changed, from old habits that were forced to become new ones.

“New Normal,” as it’s coolly called. Yeah, the COVID-19 pandemic made the world seem to spin in the opposite direction.

I remember there was once a proverb, “United we stand, divided we fall”. But the reality is, this proverb didn’t apply and was even the opposite of the situation during this pandemic. Instead, we were forbidden from making contact and gathering to speed up the process of breaking the chain of the Covid virus transmission.

The impact of this pandemic was also deeply felt in the field of education. The policy of learning from home forced parents to become accompanying teachers for their children at home because interactions through screens were also limited due to concerns for the children’s eyes health. This was a unique challenge for us parents who work in healthcare — how to divide our time between our jobs and our children’s education while trying to ensure we didn’t bring the virus home.

“Mom… Miss’s voice is not clear. What should I do? I don’t understand what Miss is explaining. There’s homework, too…”, complained my eldest with his Papuan accent, whose online class was constantly interrupted due to weather issues, which wasn’t a one- or two-time occurrence. Understandably, we live in the interior of Papua, where the internet signal depends on the weather because it connects directly to the satellite.

Our area was indeed a “Green Zone” for Covid-19. However, frequent, unconducive security situations resulted in teachers here rarely being at their assigned posts, and the effect was that schools were closed for an unpredictable length of time.

To meet our children’s educational needs, and without neglecting our duties and service as medical workers in this isolated remote area, our children ended up receiving an education that was different from the rest. While children usually go to school, are guided by teachers, and play with their peers in class, and then follow up with tutoring or extra classes after school, it was different for our children. They followed online classes, which, thank God, were held during the New Normal era and could continue until the COVID-19 pandemic was declared over through the Independent Learning Curriculum.

Our children only met their schoolteachers once a week, just to present the results of their learning from the previous week. Then the teacher would give them assignments for the upcoming week. Interactions with the teacher were also only via screen, never meeting face – to – face.

Subsequently, our children learned at home every day with a schedule tailored to the subjects they were required to master and the assignments from school. For extracurricular activities, we used various applications, both free and paid subscriptions. There were interactive teachers or just access to video tutorials, from both within the country and abroad. The children became accustomed to communicating in foreign languages because they met online teachers from different countries around the world.

There were so many options circulating in the virtual world. It was up to us as parents to wisely choose which was best, according to the child’s intellectual capacity, the time difference with teachers from other countries, and the parents’ financial ability.

The children ended up learning more with the guidance of their parents at home, which had a positive psychological impact, obviously strengthening the bond between child and parent. However, on the other hand, psychologically, the children also lost out because they didn’t socialize with their peers. It felt like their right to play was being taken away. It was painful, but it still had to be endured and lived through.

#HybridSchoolingLife was coined from the way we educate our children. Because we, parents who have children in the interior, also want our children to be able to compete with children who live, are raised, and learn in the city with all its facilities. That’s what we’re fighting for in this highest settlement in the Papua mountains.

Taking on the role of a teacher at home for two students with different age ranges, different educational needs, and different personalities and characters, became a unique challenge for us parents to be able to facilitate their educational needs. There were many things we had to learn before we could teach them to our children.

#HybridSchoolingLife became a solution and an innovative educational adaptation for our children, which was suitable and fit our current situation. This term arose from our daily experience, where there are times when they interact with teachers and classmates through a screen, and there are times when they learn directly from us, their parents, who become their teachers at home through face – to – face interaction.

When our work and service demanded we be in contact with patients who had a high potential for contracting any virus, with all the chaotic SOPs for prevention that took up so much time when we came home, it became a new source of stress for us to re-balance the rhythm of life that raced against time, which never added a second, minute, or hour to each day we went through.

Being geographically limited by mountains, valleys, and large rivers, without any land access for transportation to our location here, did not become a reason for us to surrender and be complacent with all the limitations presented for us to conquer. The absence of electricity company services, the lack of adequate clean water facilities, the absence of a stable telephone and internet network did not break our spirit and determination to educate our children in a way and with the facilities we could optimally provide.

Hopefully in the future, the #HybridSchooling system we have implemented can continue to be updated in line with the demands of an ever-changing era, so that even though our children were born, raised, and educated in the interior of Papua, they will not lose in competition with children their age in other, more civilized places.

Kreator : Vidya D’CharV