The stay-at-home dad: Online kids — NASA, stand-up comedy and Magic Tree Houses

I’ve never been particularly interested in popular opinion, especially if I find that opinion to be lazy.

One such popular opinion is that Nicolas Cage makes too many movies. That’s ridiculous. There’s no such thing as too much Nick Cage.

Another lazy popular opinion is that “online learning is bad for kids.” This complaint, which I occasionally hear from other parents (and, notably, people without kids), likely stems from a mix of pandemic-related frustrations, political nonsense, and, yes, sound, relevant research on the importance of in-person instruction and social interaction.

It’s true that, for most kids anyway, in-person education works better than all the stuff we were forced to do on the fly at the height of the pandemic. I wouldn’t argue with that at all. However, somewhere along the line, people began to demonize online learning, making it a binary choice between one or the other.

To those e-learning doubters out there, I want to tell you that using both can be valuable. This summer, I’ve found some incredible virtual opportunities that rival or exceed even the best soccer camps. (No soccer hate here, by the way. Do the soccer camp AND the cool computer stuff!).

Just last week, two of my kids used virtual education platforms to interact with some incredible people from different parts of the country. No reason to even change out of pajamas.

My 7-year-old daughter joined a Q&A session with her favorite writer, Mary Pope Osborne, author of the popular Magic Tree House children’s series. Osborne directly answered two of my daughter’s questions and even gave some specific advice to an imaginative kid growing up alongside multiple, attention-seeking siblings.

And look, I’m sure Osborne does in-person readings and Q&As too, and maybe she’s visited the Inland Northwest before, but we were able to log onto a Zoom call on a random weekday afternoon and ask questions to a renowned author. We didn’t even need to wear shoes. We don’t like shoes over here at Casa de Team Wilson!

Meanwhile, my oldest daughter, 11, attended two different online sessions with NASA scientists, including one with a young woman in the astronaut program who may head off to space in the near future. My daughter has been buzzing about it for days, watching recent space launches and analyzing those incredible new telescope images from deep space. Who knows… just those two sessions of “virtual learning” could propel my daughter to NASA herself one day, and it’s exciting to watch her interests blossom, however they come to her.

Not every virtual opportunity has been profound, and we’ve found some sorta random classes this summer as well. We enrolled our oldest son, 9, into a five-session “Stand-up comedy for kids” class. He already writes ideas in a joke journal, so we thought this class might be an opportunity to learn more about joke structure and (here’s the sneaky parenting tactic) give him a fun space to improve his writing and storytelling skills.

It was this class where we randomly encountered an anti-e-learning parent, which one wouldn’t expect from going to a virtual class. Anyway, the kids were working independently on a writing prompt, and the instructor jumped between one-on-one interactions with the five-or-so attendees. While my son left his camera on, most of the other kids turned theirs off at the time, with the exception of one other kid.

When the instructor began interacting with this other kid, we suddenly saw the boy’s father jump into the frame.

“Why are all these other kids not on camera?” he asked, aggressively.

The teacher calmly responded, “Oh, the kids are just working on their jokes while waiting for me to work with them.”

Then the dad really unloaded.

“This is the problem,” he shouted. “These kids can’t even put their cameras on and then they need an emotional support animal while going through the airport.”

He went on and on, complaining about the structure of the online class, and whatever, I don’t know what’s going on in this guy’s life. It just really confused me. Why would you enroll your kid in a free, online class if you hate them so much?

I can understand why so many parents wanted to permanently ditch the virtual learning model during the pandemic and focus on in-person learning. But now that things are much more normal (except for all that COVID still spreading around, oops!), I would encourage the skeptics out there to reassess some of the fun stuff out there and see its value as a supplementary learning tool.

Did I mention the part about not having to wear shoes? Actually there’s my real beef with a lazy popular opinion. Shoes. I don’t see the appeal.

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Tyler Wilson is a freelance writer and stay-at-home dad to four kids, ages 5-11. He is tired. He can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com.