Homeschooling in the deep freeze is not cool
Thick fog blankets the fields outside, obscuring the land. It seems to have seeped inside my brain as well, weighing down my thoughts. This is decidedly problematic, as I’m currently teaching two year groups simultaneously while also working full-time, all from a building site.
There’s a good chance you’re reading this column while snatching three minutes’ respite from your new (untaught and unsought) role as educator. If so, it probably hasn’t escaped your notice that, over on social media, rural homeschooling is depicted as one endless, wholesome round of ruddycheeked tree-climbing, perhaps with a little Aga-side baking thrown in for curricular range.
And IRL? Weeeeeell… In many ways we are profoundly #blessed to be in the new house for this second foray into slapdash schooling. We have more space to spread out. We can take walks without ingesting pollution or invoking a police response, and we finally have a garden in which you could swing a clowder of cats. (Does getting a child to google the collective nouns for domestic animals count as a literacy lesson? Asking for a friend…)
On the other hand… relocating yourself does not automatically lead to reinventing yourself. So, just as in London, our children’s lockdown education is predominantly defined by their mother’s simultaneous under-stocking of stationery and overestimation of her patience levels (homeschool maths: if two children lose 12 biros in as many hours, how many strands of hair will their mother be left with?).
There are, admittedly, more jumpers this time. The floodwater that surprised us on Christmas Eve has seeped into and up the walls, chilling the bones of the house. Every inch of warped flooring on ground level is being lifted and dumped. No longer on the main gas network, we eyeball the dramatic drop in our oil tank, calculate the concurrent effect on the bank balance and swap the heating for extra layers. We roll about like Russian dolls till midafternoon, when class takes to bed with an electric blanket.
In an effort to dispel the fog, I focus my mind on the coming spring – our first with a decent garden. Our front hall has a glass roof, a little like a greenhouse. So I buy the seeds that can, apparently, begin their growth inside, in preparation to be potted out once I’ve magicked my raised beds out of the pages of my notebook and on to the soil.
Local friends tell me I’m doing it wrong. Experienced kitchen gardeners focus on growing those vegetables that are expensive to buy in shops. But I’ve set my sights far lower. Getting something – anything – green, fresh and optimistic to take root in our garden seems ambitious enough, given both my unique hamfistedness and the wider chaos in the world.
We plunge our hands into a dark, cold compost bag that smells of mysterious, secret life, and follow the directions on the seed packets with a beginner’s pedantry. It seems unfair that getting a cauliflower to grow should be so hard, when it is so simple for a virus to spread.
Though they’re destined to sit on the same shelf, these seeds all need quite different things. Broad beans must be sown deep under the soil, and far apart. Lettuce clusters together in lines, closer to the surface. Most families, I imagine, are realising the same in lockdown. A biologist would say we all need the same basic things to survive: food, water, warmth… But within that, we all need our different quirks satisfied to thrive. Some need lots of space, others lots of stimulation.
Some of my seeds will respond to my care almost immediately, others will show no sign of germination then, perhaps, end up yielding more. I can chivvy things along, encouraging, coaxing, even forcing. But the seeds contain their own plans. Much, I comfort myself, like homeschooling.