Let Mammy School be all about fun... it’s love they need now

WE USED to play a game in this house when the kids were very little. It was called Mammy School and the consensus was that it was much, much more interesting than real school.

I can’t remember now if it opened its metaphorical doors during a time when their own school was closed – during the Big Snow or when a small electrical fire grounded their State education for a few weeks, perhaps – or it if was just a summer holiday rainy day distraction, but I have to confess that the children weren’t the only ones who enjoyed it.

This was back when I was volunteering in a paired reading programme with junior infants in the school and I took all those skills – as well as my thwarted earlier ambitions to be a primary school teacher – and played them out at our kitchen table over a week or so. I can remember that there was a lot of storytelling, a great deal of drawing and a fair smattering of letter formation. We did history – unencumbered by the party line of a curriculum, I gave them my own hot take on the Vikings – and a bit of PE in the garden and, oh, it was a grand time in all our little lives. I loved it so much that when real school intervened again – absolutely true story – I downloaded the mature student application form for St Patrick’s Teacher Training College in Drumcondra and began filling it in. Then I realised it was Saturday night and I was quite drunk and it probably wasn’t the most auspicious time to consider a career change.

I’m not going to pretend that a little part of me wouldn’t relish the challenge of home schooling small children that this crisis presents. But I also appreciate that Mammy School didn’t follow a timetable or a prescribed curriculum. I didn’t teach geography or science, because I was never particularly passionate about either. And I didn’t have targets to reach. If forming an ‘f’ in a lined copybook proved too difficult for one of my small pupils, we simply switched to a ‘c’. And crucially, I was the kid in my own class who, had I not been a smart alec with a short attention span, would have become a primary school teacher.

It is very hard to be a small child’s parent as well as their official educator and that is especially true now. Even the very youngest children have gleaned that we are living through a frightening time – and both theirs and their parents’ natural instincts must be to seek and give comfort and reassurance, not spelling tests. The internet is currently awash with videos and posts from parents at their wits’ end after just a couple of days of home schooling – I particularly feel for the young dad who confesses to considering the introduction of corporal punishment and expulsion into his kitchen classroom, even as his adorable daughter clambers all over him.

IAM at the other end of the educational curve these days so my own current home-schooling efforts are modest. If anything, I’m doing less now than I was before all this – back then I was conversing daily with my youngest through Irish in preparation for the Leaving Cert orals that never were. Meanwhile, she’s working away independently in her bedroom, checking in on Google Classroom each morning for her work and notes, submitting her assignments and, to be honest, wondering why she’s getting so little feedback from her teachers. When I’m finished this, I’ll edit her history project essay for her – a real work skill I picked up on the road I did travel by – but Mammy School is very much a part-time, casual venture in this house at the moment.

And for what it’s worth, I think that’s probably the best kind of Mammy School right now. For all the parents bamboozled by Jollyphonics and the modh coinníollach, I would suggest that you give yourselves a break and revert to just being a parent.

Children will catch up and nobody, come September and a return to routine school, will be expecting this academic year’s curriculum to be polished off to a high shine. Do the best you can – and if that best involves lying on the sofa watching Peppa Pig all day, then so be it.

Keeping our children safe and happy is far more important in this worrying time than teaching multiplication tables. Nobody will be expecting straight As from this most challenging term: honestly, ‘could do better’ is more than good enough.