
On our second day of COVID-induced homeschooling, I shared a photo of my kids happily pecking away on a pair of old laptops. (Mary Poppins? Lightweight.) By week’s end my family situation had already devolved into a scholastic Lord of the Flies: piles of ignored work, missed meetings, tears and recrimination, and curses upon the gods, the ’rona, and our Department of Education. There is clearly no winning homeschooling, but we’ve found a way to at least keep up by offloading the tedium of scheduling and nagging to Amazon’s emotionally void robot, Alexa.