Parents of school-aged children who are frustrated with being forced by coronavirus to supervise their education for potentially months on end have found their champion in a very cross Israeli mother.
She rails on Instagram that, “It’s not working this distance learning thing. Seriously, it’s impossible, it’s crazy!”
“You’ve finished us off - it’s only the second day! If we don’t die of corona, we’ll die of distance learning!” she shouts into the camera in a 90-second rant posted on Instagram.
“One of my daughter’s teachers is living in a dream world if he thinks she’ll get up at 8am to see him on screen. 8am she only just manages to roll over in bed. Where do you get off?” she says.
The woman, who says she has four children, complains that schools are asking too much of parents who are running from “one child to the other – here’s science, here’s math – forget it! And how am I supposed to know all those things? Now our children will find out how dumb we are… How am I supposed to know how to transform an improper fraction?
“The music teacher of my youngest sent over a musical score this morning. What am I going to do with that information? What, have I got some band in the house? I can’t read music. Just one second, let me pull out my clarinet and help my son with his score. Enough guys, teachers, dial it down with the expectations.”
The video was shared by Reena Ninan, a CBSN news anchor, with the caption: “Kol Hakavod [good job] sister. Sentiment of so many moms globally.”
It raised the issue of the extra stress placed on parents – as well as on children – by schools around the world closing due to coronavirus. “The kid’s fine, he’s on his cellphone all day. I’m falling to pieces,” the mother in the video says.
The closure of schools has been one of the most contentious measures introduced – or not – by governments in their efforts to fight the coronavirus. More than 70 countries have made the decision to shut down schools in the hope of reducing the spread of the virus.
On Wednesday, Boris Johnson announced that schools across the UK were to close indefinitely and that A-level and GCSE exams would not take place.
