So the 10-year-old went back to school, railing at the injustice. There are two other school-age individuals in the house, who, according to one news story this week, will not even go back in September. They have adjusted to a whole new pedagogic model, where time is endless, and nobody knows anything for sure. “No, no,” I valiantly insist. “I’m pretty sure the rules of angles have remained the same.” OK, wiseguy, so what are they, then? I don’t know, I concede. Which of us knows anything for sure?
There is some classic myth-making going on that middle-class families are somehow really good at home-schooling. Not all middle-class families. I am running such a low-rules environment here that the 12-year-olds have forgotten how to even lie about what the rules are. I heard one telling his friend’s mum the other day that he walked the dog for two hours a day and only had 15 minutes’ screen time.
The resumption of school for the youngest is only two days a week. In a class of 30, 12 are coming in. I can’t say for certain that they are actually learning anything. There is a lot of extravagant weirdness – drills in which way to walk down a corridor, 90-minute queues for lunch, endless hygiene workshops, a lot of hyper-vigilance on who coughed where and whether they had a tissue on them – and quite a bit of watching films. There is a lot of ingenious current affairs/craft mash-up, so they will do Thank You NHS posters one day and Black Lives Matter ones the next.
When she comes home, we greet her as if she is back from a stint in the Foreign Legion. She has seen more people in a day than the rest of us have seen in three months. She jangles with stories and events, which is amazing, considering they are not even allowed to have fights at break. She can go on for half an hour about which teacher has new earrings. And we all live on the scraps of her social interaction, baby birds, waiting in the nest with our mouths open: “No, tell us again, what colour were the earrings?”
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
