Perils of lessons on a home front
I’VE DONE home schooling. Though not with my own children thank goodness. When I was in my 20s I worked (briefly) as a live-in governess, attempting to educate the 11-year-old daughter of famous parents. How hard could it be? I’d done some teaching in an averagely raucous classroom so surely teaching one-to-one would be a breeze?
I imagined a peaceful Victorian scene, her golden head bent over an exercise book as she wrestled with quadratic equations. Me, endlessly sympathetic and patient. In the summer we’d sit in the garden in pretty cotton frocks and read poetry to each other. Never a cross word.
It wasn’t anything like that. It wasn’t her fault, poor kid. She obviously yearned to be at school, to be with the few friends she had. I drew up a timetable but with the best will in the world it was hard to stick to it.
There were no laptops then. Just me, her and a maths book with (thank goodness) the answers in the back. But 40 minutes of
maths soon dwindled to 20 when both of us lost the will to live and moved on to grammar and spelling or the Tudors, where I was on slightly firmer ground. Museums, art galleries and her ballet classes provided occasional respite from the schoolroom and felt like a mildly educational activity.
The other drawback was that I was not only the governess, I was also the cleaner and the cook which hadn’t been part of the job description and the atmosphere in this apparently privileged home was toxic.
I became increasingly miserable and felt that I was failing in my duty to this lonely little girl. It was a disaster. So I have some idea of how Britain’s hard-pressed parents are feeling as they try to homeschool their children with a tentative back-toclassrooms date of March 8. And I’m thankful that my own are grown-up so that I don’t have to. How on earth can anyone work from home and provide an education along with meals and laundry?
But that’s exactly what many frazzled parents are doing. Day in, day out. In the first lockdown there were cheerful accounts of families coming together to learn and enjoy one another’s company. We hear a lot less of that now. Reality has kicked in.
So no wonder there was intense, teethgrinding irritation last week when the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, said cheerily: “We owe mums everywhere an enormous debt of thanks for doing the enormously difficult job of juggling childcare and work at this tricky time.”
He sounded as though he was thanking “mums” for baking Victoria sponges for the school fair. What about fathers, asked many in exasperation? (Though it’s true he was responding to a specific question about working women. ) But when so many are at the end of their tethers such glibness makes politicians sound as out of touch as we often fear they are.