While nobody would’ve thought this two weeks ago, we find ourselves in curious times. Stuck at home. Working from home. Doing school from home. Home has become…home – instead of just that place you sleep at between doing fun stuff.
Home has also become the school house for most of us with children. Scrambled lesson plans being turned into digital work for kids, partly for learning, sure, but partly to stave off the cabin fever that is already enveloping most of us.
Have no fear. Your friendly rambling moron is here. I once dropped out of a secondary education class, so that gives me more than enough to offer these lesson plans for week one. Enjoy. Lessons for the Four R’s. Readin’, wRitin’, aRithmetic, and Recess.
Reading:
Listen, if your kid is reading this newspaper, he or she is good. Practically nobody reads newspapers anymore. Frankly, if your 7th grader is reading this newspaper, you need to make sure he isn’t smoking a pipe and listening to Sinatra.
Assignment: Read the weird classifieds and have them report to you the strangest one. Surely Aunt Phyllis in Tracy is selling her stock of pureed beets or something this time of year.
Writing:
Every crisis seems to have a weird habit that we all pick up. During 9/11, we all hung flags outside our house. Stuff like that. This crisis has released a flood of corporate gobbledygook on us in the form of the Coronavirus Corporate Email.
Assignment: Have your kid write one of those corporate COVID-19 emails. “Hi, this is John Schnossenfrausen from Stamps.Com. In these troubling times, we here at Stamps.com would like you to know how we are addressing this crisis…” Stuff like that. Make it really compassionate and make it seem like these corporate fat cats really care. I mean, they don’t. But make it seem like that. The longer the better. Make us want to claw our eyeballs out.
Recess:
Kids have got to keep active. Listen to me, a fat kid, you do not want your kid going back to school in 2023 all doughy. I mean, all the other kids will also be doughy, but lines at the cafeteria can be brutal.
Assignment: Laundry. You can get a great workout gathering all the dirty stinky clothes from a full day of sitting on your ass sending emails. Teach them about separating whites from darks. Teach them to not use bleach unless you want pink clothes and finally teach them to fold them neatly. (Or for teenage boys, just shove them into a corner of the room that is different from the corner of the room where the dirty clothes are.)
Arithmetic:
These are trying times. If you’ve been to Price Chopper or HyVee lately, you’ve no doubt been stunned at the lack of everything. Everything except mint Oreos. There are plenty of mint Oreos. What you won’t find anything of, however, is toilet paper. All the world’s toilet paper is gone. Here is where you can stretch your kids’ minds and also help do some household budgeting.
Assignment: If Joe has four people in his house. These four people poop an average of 1.25 times per day. They consume 7 squares of toilet paper for a wipe. They wipe two times. You have 14 rolls of toilet paper in the house. How long until Joe will need to resort to using old Landmarks for toilet paper?
Send in your answers, folks. Keep those kids busy. Or, at least, try to keep them down to five squares of toilet paper. You know… for America.
(Get more solid advice from Chris Kamler on Twitter where you can find him as @TheFakeNed. Watch him on Landmark Live Thursday nights at 6 on Facebook at Platte County Landmark)