Lessons from my first day in the home classroom
How was it for you? A shellshocked Harry de Quetteville admits that he’s got some serious brushing up to do
It was an hour into the day before I heard the first “But Mummy, at school we do it like…” followed by a momentarily terse: “Well here, we do it differently.” It turns out the regular school timetable, for a five- and seven-yearold, has a reassuring familiarity, much as they may pretend otherwise. English, then maths, then playtime, then reading… creatures of habit, they are.
Our timetable was a little different. Actually, I tell a lie. They didn’t say, “But Mummy…” They said, “But Miss Mummy…” a joke I fear will run and run. Somehow “Mr Daddy” didn’t occur to them. But somewhere from here to eternity, which is how long this home schooling term already feels, I’m sure they’ll get to it.
How was it for you, the first day in this strange netherworld of not quite work, not quite school? What a mash up. Home offices are one thing, festooned with crummy printers and dodgy Wi-fi signals. But we’ve had time to get used to those. The home classroom is something else altogether. Yes, we have the gloriously garish arts and crafts taped to the walls. Yes, we have homework books. But no one is in uniform (you didn’t go that far, did you?) and much as I would love to, I can’t pretend that we can pass as teachers.
And that’s even though my wife is a teacher. But she’s not their teacher, that’s the crucial thing. So we have to pretend we are in perma-liaison with their real teachers to maintain any kind of discipline. (Sorry, I’ve lost my train of thought because the eldest has just burst in to demand I replace the batteries in a long-lost toy car. It’s break time, promise.)
What there is, is a corner of the sitting room dedicated to the little monsters, with two pint-size tables where they can reassemble some part of the fiction that normal schooling continues. They may not be in class, we may not be their teachers but, we reckoned, the boys could still have a space, even if it’s only 20 sq ft, that is their own (cue momentous music) “learning zone”.
What did they learn? Well, I have to applaud the great work of their primary school which, with no time to prepare, sent them home with bundles of exercises and lessons to get going. We started with English, with our youngest listening to a bookreading on the ipad, with questions and written answers to follow, while our eldest read for himself and did the same questions.
But even that was only possible because my wife’s school has closed for the holidays already, so she was able to handle the morning. I was up here, in the home office, trying to get my head around polymerase chain reaction testing kits for Covid-19 for another section of the paper. How it would have been with more than two monsters, or a toddler in tow, I shudder to think.
Even by the time that first ‘class’ began, however, the day had already been very different. For a start, they were excited: out of bed as though it were Christmas, rather than being dragged out and dressing sock by agonising sock. The new rules seemed exotic. The new rules being, they must tidy their room and, get this, go for a run! Yes, if you have boys you know they require exercise. It’s like having lurchers, except less hairy. So out to the park we ventured. Is it all right to say that without being castigated as a quarantine buster?
By just after 8.30am we were back and they were ready to have their minds gloriously expanded. A little less than an hour later, they streaked away from their desks into the kitchen, where a thousand sticky stars in various shiny colours awaited. Twenty minutes later, it was back to skool, with a project on explorers, a process which led to a new condition we may soon be calling parental-curriculum-shock.
On the one hand, it is hard not to be astounded by the wealth of material out there – the Youtube classes, the endless free courses, the maps, apps and info packs all available online at the touch of a button. Indeed, it’s hard not to be overwhelmed by it, hard not to feel that all the other parents must have a laminated 9-5 schedule of improving,
Mensa-approved learning that will have their little monsters doing calculus and playing the piano like little Wolfgang Amadeus by the time we all trudge back to the school gates. Bing! There goes another update from the class Whatsapp group. Shall parents have a digi-meet at 4pm to discuss strategy? Erm… Yet, contrasting this wealth of material is a certain narrowness of approach. Explorers, you say? Marco Polo, you say? Here is a list of animals, check off which ones he might have seen. Which country did he travel to? Tick the box that applies. Yes, for an old fogey, it might seem that the skills of yore – longhand comprehension and composition – are being sidelined, especially in this new world of remote-learning. But you know? Not really. There is an astonishingly happy medium. Take the point when our eldest called Granny on Facetime, and interviewed her about holidays in the olden days (I suspect he was hoping to hear about dinosaurs). It was, as he grilled her, and she dredged up memories of yore, a win-win – perhaps even, as I dashed up here to bash out another few hundred words, a win-win-win.
Can we do this every day, one asks? Well, yes, we might have to, and it might be good if we did, finding a new way of engaging the extended family to help out with bringing up our babies.
So there will be letters, longhand, to aunts and uncles over 70, cooped up in destinations around the country. Imagine the excitement if they write back? And there will be “creative hour”: music and art and (more than they could get at school) cooking and gardening, too. And there will be computer games and Youtube videos, of the educational variety, to give us a break to work.
By work I mean prepare. Because we need time to bone up, to avoid those embarrassing questions (“But why is the sky blue, Mr Daddy?”). I mean, why is the sky blue? This will be a chance for me to learn all that stuff without being embarrassed that I didn’t know it already. I have already stolen the “Lift the Flap Perodic Table” book from their shelf for my bedtime reading. Did you know that emeralds and rubies get their colour from chromium deposits? No, neither did I. But there’s every danger that the boys do.
I need to brush up. I need to keep juggling. I need to keep rushing up and down the stairs. I need to find some more batteries. To find out where Marco Polo went. Do I get a gold star?