Screens (I'm For Them)

Yes, there is probably more screen time than there needs to be in our house - if only because it takes away from moving-our-bodies time - Wii Fit and the like notwithstanding. This was true even before distance schooling, but I maintain that content and parental involvement outweigh the minutes.

Same - although in the inverse - is my opinion of the butts-in-chairs philosophy of schooling, but that's probably a separate post. Summary - Lizzy actually does pretty well in distance schooling because she's allowed all her ASD and ADHD quirks, like origami and drawing on her arms and chewing gum; if she's not sitting in a classroom, her behavior isn't distracting other kids. As long as I help keep her organized, she does okay.

The first week of September was all getting-to-know-you at school, as was most of the second. I wasn't on top of her, and so Lizzy (just 13, so add adolescent-know-it-all-ism to the rare mix that is our Liz) assumed that "soft start" was the same thing as "optional" as far as assignments go. It wasn't, it was just that they were working more on the getting-to-know-you social-emotional learning (SEL) than on academics, and the due dates were extended to allow for transitions and technical issues and all.

So we came to today, the third Wednesday of the school year, and bunches of things are marked overdue.

Liz, being Liz, is panicking and stating that it's all stupid and science is supposed to be science, not emotions and stuff, and I ask her to hang on and I can walk her through it after lunch. I have the privilege to do this; I'm not working until a) the folks who do DOT physicals call me back, and b) the district gets all the way down to me on the seniority list. She eats lunch, I pull an extra chair into her room, and we start on the four things marked "overdue."

One she can't do because it involved a class discussion the first week that she missed due to technical difficulties, and one she had meant to ask me to print for her (we don't have her Chromebook talking to the wireless printer yet), but had forgotten. This left one survey (done in about three minutes, although it's not showing as complete yet) and one "make a slide describing a character or a real-life person you identify with."

Ah, there's that social-emotional thing she loves so much. Other kids in her group did people like Michelle Obama or favorite Marvel characters or whatever, but Lizzy thinks SEL things are “stupid” unless she’s got someone to hold her hand and make her see the social connections. Enter me.

She wails that she doesn’t identify with any and challenges me to find one.

“L from Death Note,” I say, and her face lights up.

“Oh! And Light!” (I mean, okay, so my kid identifies with Mad Scientists from anime; she hasn't read the manga. All righty then).

I nod. She proceeds to craft a slide complete with images and descriptions of both these characters, explaining that they're both protagonists (I tried to explain deuteragonist but she wasn't having any) including that one is a good guy with no social skills, one is a bad guy who thinks he’s a good guy with lots of social skills. 

Note that she hasn't read the manga. She's seen (most of) the anime. That's screen time. But thanks to parental involvement (we talk about tropes and literary stuff and so forth all the time), she is able - with a little hand-holding - to extrapolate to characters she identifies with. That's remarkable for a person who is both on the autism spectrum and has ADHD.

Living a "natural" life is all well and good. You do you. But if you think screen time is intrinsically bad all on its own? That's mistaking the medium for the message.