When my fourteen year old son went to high school at the beginning of the year, it was a great fit for him. He really loved it.

For five days.

Then a student had a positive corona test and all the boys were sent home. Zoom classes replaced in-person classes for the next week and a half. Then he returned for one more week of school before the break before the fall holidays. And that was it.

Since then, it’s been zoom, zoom, zoom.

Sitting in his room for hours every day across from a screen, alone. I didn’t like it at all. At one point I instructed him to sit at a table outside, facing the orchard next to our house. He said that it was much better – I knew being outdoors with fresh air, sunshine and the sight of nature would be a much better learning environment – but the internet connection wasn’t reliable and back to his room he went.

But he was learning and continued to feel motivated and connected to his teachers.

Then the school reopened for local ninth graders, but the dorm remained closed. So my son and three others who are too far for a daily commute were left alone on Zoom. As non-ideal as it is when the teacher is teaching directly on the screen to all the students, it becomes much less ideal when he is teaching in person to most of the students and just a few are left on the screen, ignored in the proverbial corner.

My son has amazed me with his consistent ability to show up on zoom classes with a good attitude, day after day. But when the announcement was made about the regular classes resuming (though not for him) he got discouraged and upset. How, he asked me, is he supposed to ask a question or have any personal interaction with his teacher in this situation? Hope that his teacher remembers to look at the screen to see if he has a question once an hour?

After hearing this news, the next day he didn’t attend online classes – he had lost his incentive to participate.

That day was followed by Shabbos, which allowed him to decompress. He took a long run with a friend on Saturday night to a local spring to burn off the frustration he was feeling – he was still wound up pretty tight – and came back feeling much calmer and more accepting of the situation. Not happy about it, but able to deal with it. And he went back to his online classes.

Fortunately, the school asked for parental feedback and enough of us voted for a capsule that they finally opened the ninth grade dorm yesterday. (A capsule means, they keep the kids isolated as a group for an extended period; they each have to have a negative corona test to be allowed in, no entrances or exits are allowed once the capsule ‘closes’; no connection with other students not in the same capsule.) I was so happy to take my son to school yesterday. And he is SO happy to be back!

I believe globally we’re going to be paying the emotional and developmental price for this online learning ‘solution’ for years to come. Kids aren’t meant to learn like this.

>> BH my son just became a bar mitzvah. Thank G-d he has matured a lot in the past few years and all the skills I learned from you have been very helpful. Recently with the whole remote learning we see that he is unmotivated and takes very little initiative in completing his work. I wouldn’t say he was ever super motivated but he learned in school and did ok grades wise. Now it’s a disaster. I was hoping you could give me some guidance about how to build in my son an innate desire for learning and motivation to help him be more successful. Thank you! <<

For years, the main question people have asked of me as a homeschooler has been, “What about socialization?” It wasn’t hard for people to picture kids doing well academically in the home environment, but it became clear to me after hearing this question for so many years, that the most important part of school was social.

And now, students have had the most important component of school taken away, and parents are left focusing on the academics as if it’s an independent issue from the learning environment.

It’s not.

We really can’t directly create intrinsic motivation and desire for anything. This is an organic process that happens on its own, that is part of an emotional maturing process that comes from within the child. What we can do is create external conditions that support the child’s maturation process.

This consists of a lot of emotional connection, emotional safety and emotional space. Developing interests actually comes in the quiet spaces in our lives, not when we’re scheduled and kept busy from the outside. We have to find the emptiness to want to fill it. We can help our kids make room for an interest to develop by backing off and giving them room to find their interests. (This suggestion generally makes parents very anxious and the process of waiting for the interest to emerge requires a lot of trust in the inherent maturational process; it often looks like they are lazing around and zoning out for a while).

The ideal learning situation is when a student has an interest in the material and a connection with the teacher. In this situation, you’ll see students do super well – they stay engaged, the enjoy learning, they want to be there.

When one of those is missing, learning can still happen.

When both interest and connection are missing, learning will come to a standstill. And then you have the unmotivated student.

When all my son’s ninth grade class was on Zoom, he told me that hardly anyone was paying attention. Honestly, this is predictable – the question we should really ask is why are some students able to learn effectively on Zoom? (The answer is above – a combination of interest and connection with the teacher.)

How can you get a child who feels no connection to the material or teacher to care about it? You can’t.

You really can’t.

This is why people then try to use the carrot/stick approach. To promise incentives, and when that doesn’t work, to use penalties or punishments. That includes the withdrawal of our positive feelings about them.

My suggestion would be to pull back as much as possible regarding your expectations of his participation on Zoom. I know parents feel like they have to make sure their kids are showing up for their online classes, but understand it’s asking something unreasonable and unnatural of our kids to learn in this way. Perhaps you can look at his schedule with him, and ask him to pick the most important classes for him to show up at – like two or three a day.

(Honestly, I don’t think any of us adults would be able to sit through hours of classes on topics that we don’t care about, day after day. If we continued to show up at the screen daily, we would zone out and open another window on our screen, to read or watch videos of things that interest us more.)

Encourage him to find outlets or hobbies for all of that pent up energy. Teenage boys are meant to be moving around a LOT! If he wants to talk about why he doesn’t like online learning, be willing to hear him out without telling him why it’s important for him to do it anyway.

Let him know how awesome you think he is, independent of his school success. Honestly, it matters so little in the course of one’s life how he does in school. What is much, much more important is that he feels loved and appreciated, and has some feeling of success in an area that matters to him.

My thirteen year old was feeling kind of blah – hardly any kids his age around, no extracurricular activities available, politics in the shul that made it an unpleasant environment…Then of his own volition he began learning in the evenings hilchos shechita with a local shochet. He found a different shul to attend where people are warm and welcoming (he gets up for neitz – the sunrise service – and enjoys having breakfast there before coming home). Then he had a couple of extended jobs come his way working for people he likes, and making money. He feels purposeful and positive about his days now.

I don’t see the blah period as a bad thing; it’s actually an inherent part of his life getting better. There has to be awareness of having a space to fill, and a desire to fill it, before someone can make choices that feel better to them.

Avivah