Siblings Fighting, Yelling Helps Parents Recreate Authentic Classroom Ambience At Home

A key environmental element that many families cannot hope to replicate to a sufficient degree on their own.

Jerusalem, October 20 – Distance learning has posed numerous logistical, financial, and parenting challenges for the vast majority of families, but one enterprising couple has managed to replicate the environment to which their children had become accustomed at school, by repurposing the existing family screaming matches, competition for attention, and other domestic tensions to generate a set of surroundings nearly identical to the one the children encountered each day in the education system.

Odelia and Iddo Schuster, parents of three grade school children, count themselves luckier than most in that they can both work from home at least part of the time. This flexible employment arrangement has allowed at least one of them to remain available while the children pursue their education via Zoom sessions and other online resources. The availability of enough devices to conduct those sessions and activities, however, has proven insufficient to duplicate the classroom experience to which the children had grown accustomed while at school. The Schuster family has adapted to that challenge by using their everyday fighting and yelling in place of the fighting and yelling that takes place in the classroom at school, thus supplying a key environmental element that many families cannot hope to replicate to a sufficient degree on their own.

“It was Odelia’s idea,” gushed Iddo, 40, a business consultant. “She worked as a schoolteacher for a few years when we were just married, and some of that experience just stuck with her. We’re definitely at an advantage here compared to other families; she knows how a classroom works and exactly how much of what to inject at the right time to create the pedagogical surroundings we all know well from our own time behind a little desk.”

Odelia recounted that her children fighting had always reminded her of the classroom experience from her teaching years. “I grew up an only child, so sibling relations wasn’t usually a source of information for me on this,” she explained. “It wasn’t until I had to apply my own experiences as a student to shaping my own classroom environment as a teacher, and now as a parent, that I realized the parallels between the contexts. Fittingly, I was able to put two and two together in the right way only while sitting in the middle of a knock-down, drag-out fight between the sixth-grader and the fourth-grader over whose job it was to pick up the pieces of scrap paper they had left from doing a project together that was actually assigned to the first-grader.”

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