If parent/caregiver and student have established a workable routine that seems reasonably productive and sustainable, hurry up and do nothing different whatsoever. Parents and caregivers tend to know their students best, and any advice a school or anyone else gives ought to be taken as an offering that can be rejected.

On the other hand, if this transition has for you proven challenging, here are a few ideas to consider.

How Much Work Should You Expect?

2 hours of “work” a day for a 6th grader, and maybe 3-4 or more for an 11th-12th grader might be considered “reasonable.”

Why such a low expectations, when students typically spend 7 hours per day in school?

Well, first, after you subtract lunch, passing periods, breaks, and other parts of the day that aren’t strictly focused, we’re really talking about 4-5 hours.

And second, in physical schools, the presence of peers and adults provides dozens of stimulating and challenging interactions a day that make school engaging for adolescents, who are intensely social creatures and reckoning with the formation of their own identity and how it fits within a social order outside their families.

Absent that stimulation, for all but the rare student indeed, completing 5 or more hours of academic work per day is maybe two times as much as we can expect.

Sustainability productivity’s also important. If you and your student are consistently yelling at one another about school, or giving one another the silent treatment–that’s not sustainable. Short of that, you’re doing well and should be commended.

Nor is it likely sustainable for your student to be spending long days and every free moment completing work.

As Cal Newport, an academic who studies and writes about concentration and productivity puts it, when you scramble to sneak in work whenever you have a few moments of free time, “you’re robbing your directed attention centers of the uninterrupted rest they need for restoration. Even if these work dashes consume only a small amount of time, they prevent you from reaching the levels of deeper relaxation in which attention restoration can occur.”

“Attention restoration,” Newport argues, is what allows for high quality deep work, which is not only more sustainable, it leads to much better results than constant low-level task completion.

Shaping the Path

Ever since the Stanford Prison Experiment (and probably before), mountains of social science research has attempted to explain the extent to which human beings are influenced by their environment and circumstances.

At present, to say the least, this is a complex field of inquiry with scores of nuances and conflicting views. Nevertheless, it’s probably fair to say, for most of us: to a significant extent.

By way of illustration: imagine a student (or adult, for that matter) who wakes up at 10am, skips breakfast, scrounges around for 10 minutes for her laptop, discovers it is charged to only 3%, then looks all over her bedroom for the charger, then looks for a pencil and a scrap of paper, and finally settles into a relatively quiet space to work. How much mental and emotional energy has she already expended? How much left does she have for her school work?

For some families, of course, who do not have access to laptops and wifi and food, this scenario seems imminently workable, and even luxurious. Many districts are finding ways to help satisfy basic needs, though certainly more needs to be done.

After satisfying basic needs, even small adjustments to the environment and routines, making them more conducive to student learning, can make huge differences.

In Switch, the Heath brothers attempt to simplify and popularize some of the behavioralist research, and they call environment and routine modification “Shaping the Path” (pretty good summary available here).

In the case of home learning and an expectation of some amount of self-direction, the following can help shape the path:

• consistent to-bed and wake-up times
• scheduled screen-free time (screen-free doesn’t mean getting off the computer and onto the phone)
• consistent place to work with appropriate materials and with technology charged

One thing that teachers know and that parents, deep down, also know, is that kids don’t do what we say, they do what we do. So, if you are yourself working at home, it will be worth shaping your own path and even showing it to your kids.

Express Genuine Interest

How do you talk to your student about their academic work?

It’s tempting, in these conversations, to focus on completion of work to the teacher’s standards. This is understandable. You want your student to keep up, to not lose ground, to make academic progress. You want them to do the work.

The problem is, these conversations can easily go south quickly.

P: “I notice you’re playing video games.”

S: “Uh, huh.”

P: “Did you do all your work?”

S: “Pretty much.”

P: “What’s that mean?”

Unfortunately, P here has all but begged for a snarky response, or silence, and S will be happy to oblige. S does not do this because S’s a bad kid; it’s an act of self-preservation. What are they preserving themselves from? Boredom, partly.

The conversation about whether work has been completed is boring.

Not only that, since children literally embody the hopes of parents for the future, and since we happen to be living through an apocalypse-grade pandemic, conversations about school work can quickly become a complex knot of projection and self-delusion, pulled tighter by anger and fear, that not even Carl Jung could untangle.

So, what’s to be done?

Express genuine interest.

Here are a few questions you could ask S:

• What’s the most interesting thing you learned today?
• Can you show me a piece of work you’re proud of?
• What was the most difficult thing you worked on today?
• What was the easiest thing you worked on today?
• Can you tell me something you learned that I might not know?

The idea’s to begin the conversation in a place the student selects, and then get yourself interested in what they say. Attempt to avoid evaluation, praise what’s been done, and ask open-ended follow-up questions.

Challenge Option: Something Greater Than Themselves

It’s been widely shared that Isaac Newton “invented” calculus while quarantined during a 17th century plague. It’s not been widely emphasized that prior to the quarantine, Newton had for many years been doing math like his hair was on fire.

This point needs emphasizing because many students respond less constructively to the pressure to change the world than they do to gentle pressure to explore themselves and their place in it.

Some students probably do have interests and activities that light them up, and which can be pursued during quarantine. Playing the piano, studying languages, making short films, for example. If your students likes doing those things, by all means encourage them to spend more time doing them.

If your student doesn’t seem to have a genuine interest, or, more likely, they spend time doing things that seem unproductive, this may be a time to explore options.

Encourage the idea that consumption should be balanced with production. The inveterate Netflix watcher could be encouraged, for example, to write a two-minute scene with the characters from her favorite show. The Fortnite player could create an infographic explaining the relative advantages of different weapons.

And there’s always this giant problem we’re dealing with at present, which poses an incredible opportunity for creative cooperation and innovation, which, in many dimensions, is the purview of the young. So you could unleash your student on the news and ask their opinion about what this means and what might be done.

You may be surprised by your student’s thoughtfulness and ideas for solutions, and you will almost certainly be warmed by the size of your student’s heart.

A mentor of mine captured this in his apothegm: “Teenagers are driven by twin compulsions: the desire to rebel, and the desire to be part of something greater than themselves.”