Gen Z has suddenly and rapidly turned into Gen Zoom. Instead of dorm life, lectures and long nights at the library, they are now back home with their entire student life online only. Videoconferencing via Zoom or google classroom is the new normal for lectures, seminars and group work. Covid-19 or the coronavirus is turning many lives and families upside-down, requiring all of us to do our part and stay at home. Our college student is back home and last week classes picked up where they left off before spring break. When she left for college, I turned her bedroom into the funflector home office. Sheltering at home with college students was not on our radar! Now, we had to get creative in how we use the space in our small house.
Timesharing
Her bed is in a secluded part of the house, but without much daylight. As Scandinavians, we know in our bones how crucial daylight and also a view of trees and greenery are for our wellbeing, so we had to find a brighter spot for the desk. With the attitude of “let’s try this and if it doesn’t work, we’ll figure out a different solution,” we squeezed in a small desk and some office storage in the master bedroom. The room is sitting unused most of the day, is in a corner of the house and has a door to close, so it was the most undisturbed place we could think of.
Extra Internet Capacity for Students at Home
Our internet comes via old, lead wrapped (!) telephone wires and is not very reliable. With five people working and studying from home, we quickly needed to add more capacity. A Skyroam Solis Lite, a Wifi hotspot that connects to the internet via several mobile networks, does the job. It’s too pricey as a long-term solution, ($119 for the device and then $99/month). However, for two months until the semester is over, it is a necessary expense.
Scheduling
So here we come to the point that we have not quite mastered yet: scheduling. We started with an ambitious schedule with study/work time, dinner time and 1/2 an hour each of outdoor time and chores per day. Some days it worked better than others, but the first week ended with me turning off the internet for a couple of hours on Saturday until the house was clean. 🤷♀️
One thing we have done persistently is calling Oma (Grandma) at about the same time every day. She’s in Sweden 7 hours ahead, so we need to do it early afternoon. I call every other day and the kids take turns the other days. Oma enjoys hearing about their classes, college decisions etc directly from them. She is as worried about us as we are about her, so daily checkins are good.
Outdoor Time
A couple of very rainy days and essay deadlines derailed the “daily” walks. Some days we don’t manage to get out at all and some we only take quick walks around the block after dinner, in the dark. We know that getting some fresh air, daylight, exercise and connecting to nature is crucial for mental and physical health. It also improves creativity, which is much needed for term papers, blog posts and composition assignments. In case we’ll be stuck “sheltering at home” for a long time, we better improve. We are so lucky to have the perfect little lake to walk around close by, and maybe it’s good not to be too rigorous on scheduling. Look how different the same spot along Bull Creek can look at different times of the day. They are all taken during the last week of March.
Please share what you have figured out on how to adjust to sheltering at home with college students!
With greetings from our home office in Libertyville, IL
Elisabeth