Anyone who’s entered the fraught world of home schooling over the past three months will know that it is a land of contrasts. That behind every Instagram picture of a homemade papier-mache pig lies an untold story of spilt glue and family fallouts.
Compare, for example, the colour-coded timetable I made at the start of lockdown for my two school-age daughters; the day divided up into chunks for maths, literacy, and maybe even the odd spot of poetry, origami or expressive dance … Fast forward to week nine and I find myself staggering into the wasteland (the living room) and instead of fractions and phonics, my bleary-eyed girls, aged seven and five, are scavenging for the remote control, desperate for the soothing “bab-bmmmm” of Netflix.
As a journalist who has worked to tight deadlines and on some tricky briefs, I felt that home schooling would be a challenge, yes, but a manageable one. I now see that I set out expecting Snowdon and found myself at the foot of Everest.
We must have only been a few hours into the new regime when WhatsApp messages started coming in from friends running their own failing academies: “Seriously. How do teachers do it?” … “How much do teachers get paid?” … “Thirty kids! Imagine it. THIRTY of them!” Teachers, the nation quickly discovered, are simply made of different stuff from the rest of us. They’re superhumans.
Aside from bits of homework at the weekend, I’d never really seen my children in “learning mode”, so I was curious to see what kinds of tasks engage them and make them tick. Let’s just say that I was hoping I might discover some hitherto overlooked academic gift but instead found out that they can barely keep track of a rubber.
With a five-year-old who often simply isn’t “in the mood” and would rather pretend to be a horse than do just about anything else, I quickly realised that I needed to recalibrate my expectations and find new reserves of patience.
One morning, getting her to write three sentences about what happens on a farm took so much negotiation that I seriously considered throwing my hat in the ring for some last-minute Brexit talks. Yet when her teacher emailed through a recorded video of a phonics lesson, I was amazed to see my daughter immediately fall silent, sit up straight, cross her legs and smile. It was sheer educational witchcraft – a spell that I simply cannot recreate, even with a pack of flashcards and the promise of a digestive biscuit.
It is no exaggeration to say that the respect I already had for teachers has turned into borderline stalkerish adulation. Not only do teachers know about prepositions, obtuse angles and split digraphs, they somehow make learning about them fun – as my children are only too keen to remind me.
Being a teacher, I’ve learned, requires quick-thinking, ingenuity and Rada-levels of improv skills. It is not enough to tell a five-year-old to simply learn her first spellings – they have to be written in chalk, or shouted aloud from a trampoline, preferably in the style of a B-list Barbie character. Similarly, you can’t just tell a seven-year-old to learn her six times table and expect it to happen – you need songs, tricks and games to make the numbers stick.
However frazzling it’s been at times, I know that when home school ends and the house falls silent again, I’ll look back fondly on these strange few months – even if I won’t exactly miss them. The memories of squabbles, cross words and endless cajoling will fade away – they always do. Instead, I hope I’ll remember the day, around week six, when the novelty of PE with Joe Wicks had finally worn off and nobody could be bothered to get off the sofa. Feeling suddenly under pressure to come up with something fun and vaguely physical, I found a YouTube video of Tina Turner’s last concert at Wembley Stadium and got everyone to dance along. The times tables might still be a work in progress but I take some pride in the fact that my daughters will graduate from home school able to competently perform the full nine-minute dance routine to Proud Mary.
Now, with the five-year-old now back at school in her reception class bubble and the end of term in sight, attention is turning to teachers’ gifts. PayPal Money Pools makes the collection easy – a couple of taps and the link is sent across to the other parents in the class. Now I feel tempted to write personal IOUs to everyone in the staffroom too. Many children won’t have had proper contact with their teachers for months by the time we reach the holidays, but I feel certain that an avalanche of gratitude and gifts is coming their way regardless, all of it powered by the same, simple thought of parents everywhere: we don’t know how you do it.
Pooling resources
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