Kathy Donaghy: School’s out for education at home and now we owe ourselves an A for effort
Lockdown at least gave us parents time to reflect, writes Kathy Donaghy
FRAYED nerves and tantrums over the schoolwork – and that was just the parents. If there was a report on home-schooling, ours would read “Could do much better”.
The term has come to an end. Summer’s rolling out and there’s no schoolwork in sight for months.
Many of us are now reflecting on the job of home-schooling.
Mostly, it was an experiment in juggling – trying to get your kids to do some schoolwork while you worked from home and attended to all the other myriad tasks of a given day.
On the positive side, the lockdown provided a ‘pause’ in our lives.
Many parents talked about how they and their children welcomed stepping off the treadmill.
Others reported how their children had taken up new hobbies such as gardening and cooking, learning new skills in lockdown.
The lockdown provided something we all badly needed: time.
For the first time in years, my family seemed to have more time in a day. We had time to sit and talk about things.
Sometimes that meant addressing the scary stuff like coronavirus itself with our two boys, Dallan (11) and Oirghiall (8).
Lockdown coincided with the formation of a new Government and the Black Lives Matters protests.
We answered the kids’ questions on these matters to the best of our ability.
There was more time to notice what was going on in the garden. We went for walks in all weather.
We swam in the sea, we went kayaking, and we lit a fire on the summer solstice and read about the pagan traditions around this time.
Through all of this time, my own respect for the work that the teachers do in class every day with my children deepened.
The boys’ teachers kept in touch through the online Aladdin
system. We often didn’t get all the work done.
The teachers reassured us that doing something was good enough.
When the school reports came in, I wondered what could there possibly be to say.
It felt like they’d been in school only a wet week before lockdown happened.
However, the remarks and comments my children’s teachers made were spot on, in addressing their strong points and the things on which they could improve.
According to Professor Anne Looney, Dean of Education at Dublin City University (DCU), as we families start to put away the schoolbooks, dismantle the home-school room and bin the schedule, it’s important for parents and children to reflect on the time they all spent together.
“Don’t beat yourself up about it and move on. The school will take care of long division, and all the technical things you found a step too far.
“If you got through this and you and your kids are still talking, you’re healthy and relatively happy and the kids are happy about going back to school in September, that’s no mean achievement.
“There isn’t a test of all the things you taught your children.
“Your child will not fail because you didn’t turn your utility room into a Little House on the Prairie-style school room,” she said.
Prof Looney makes the point that there are a lot of kids who’ve spent lots of time in lockdown hanging out with their dogs and their siblings, building relationships.
Some will be going back to school with more skills like cooking, ironing and knowing how to empty the dishwasher.
Come September, we should entrust them to the people who are trained in the complicated stuff of primary school like Irish verbs and maths.
Teachers will be able to fill any gaps that have been created in lockdown, she said.
She also points out that for some parents, whose own experience of school was not positive, home-schooling would have been an incredibly difficult thing.
For some, she says, the concept of becoming a teacher to their child when their own experience was difficult was a step too far.
“If we look back on the national home-schooling experience, we need to remember that there was a wide variety of children’s experiences and parents’ experiences,” she said.
I’m glad to see the schoolbooks gone from the table top.
I’m happy that my sons won’t have to see me grimace when they ask me another question when I’m also trying to work. I’m happy that we can finally let them be in summer holiday mode.
But I also know that there will come a day when they will have flown the nest, when the table and the house will be empty of their schoolbooks and their questions and the noise and fun they bring to everything.
I know that a time will come when I will look back on lockdown and the home-schooling experiment of 2020, and long for one more day of it. But not yet.
The school will take care of the technical things you can’t