The pandemic recalibrated school’s routinary activities in just a snap. The facilitation of classes dramatically shifted from face to face to online delivery learning modality. This adjustment brought drastic change and posted challenges to parents working from home.
Juggling work and children’s online learning schedules. During pre-pandemic, where teaching is facilitated in school, teachers focus on what’s on the table. Teachers teach, check, and work on necessary school documents and others solely school related tasks. That is why, it is undeniable that parents struggle in the work from home set up. Trying to balance tasks had gotten harder. Parents work on their schedule while considering their children’s online learning schedules too. Since both are of equal importance, which to prioritize becomes an issue.
Interruption during work meetings. Information dissemination gets tough during pandemic, so frequent online meetings are unavoidable. Such are necessary to keep employees updated and provide a venue for feedbacking and raising of queries and other concerns. Moreover, teachers are expected to attend multiple webinars to capacitate themselves in using different online modality platforms. Since teachers are working from home, overlapping of household chores, webinars and meetings happen. Inasmuch as teachers are interrupted, focusing on meetings and webinars gets difficult.
Employee burnout. Teachers feel overwhelmed with the uncontrollable volume of work in the new normal set up. In addition, the loads of work are handed over observing no time and day since teachers can be reached anytime through their social media accounts. The unanticipated pouring of work clearly contributes to the struggles of working from home mothers.
Zoom and Group Chat Fatigue. Often, we see teachers cracking jokes about the pile of group chats they have in their social media account. Zoom and Google Meetings become part of their system. Queries oftentimes are raised in GCs right after the online discussion and even for a fact that the teacher has sent message about it prior somebody asking, still same questions are asked which results to zoom and group chat fatigue. The set up becomes more challenging since there are other things to attend to at home unlike the traditional face to face classes where teachers can immediately correct, answer queries, monitor outputs and clarify matters without considering any home task.
Incomplete equipment and facilities. Apart from the trainings and webinars to attend to on digital literacy to upgrade teachers’ skills on the utilization of online modality, teachers had to plan for a functional workplace at home. The said workplace should be in suitable condition for it contributes to one’s productivity. Thus, teachers must provide a comfortable chair, a working table, headphones or headset, and look for a good workspace at home. In addition, they must provide a proper computer system that operates at a good speed. Furthermore, she must make sure that the internet connection is reasonably fast and reliable to make online teaching feasible.
Working from home is really a big challenge to mothers and brings confusion as to whether she acts as a ‘mom’ or a ‘ma’am’. It results to incertitude on what she needs to attend to- work tasks or home tasks. Mothers are most of the time caught in a dilemma on which schedule must be prioritized and are confronted with lack of equipment, distractions, and burnout. Although we cannot deny the fact that there are numerous benefits and advantages of working from home like less stress in commuting, save on expenses, improved technical skills, reduction in work absences, flexible schedule and ample time with family, still a teacher deserves work related support, motivation, and consideration as she interchangeably performs her role as a ‘mom’ and as a ‘ma’am’.