Homeschooling hell

Well, isn’t this all fun and games? I still can’t quite get over how one Chinese bat caused all this unparalleled mess. When we had three children and became self-employed, we certainly didn’t sign up to homeschooling in the midst of a plague. Today was virtually intolerable. Each day is the same, almost with a routine yet totally without at the same time. At this stage, having been let down by the government on so many occasions, hope is seriously dwindling. Everyone I speak to (from afar) seems to feel the same sense of despair and apathy. Yes we’re lucky to be alive, and I can’t imagine the horror for so many who have lost loved ones, but it is beginning to feel as though we’re more like heroes every day. You don’t need to work for the NHS, you just have to stay at home and save lives. 

To set the idyllic scene, we have an average sized 3 bedroom house, and I love our home, but there are five of us and we are LIVING ON TOP OF EACH OTHER. There never was much personal space with three boys, but now it’s even worse. I’m seriously lucky if I can grab a 10 minute shower without somebody barging in and demanding things. This morning it was Oscar: “Mummy, does Harry have time to put a jumper on before live learning because he says he doesn’t but I’m wearing one so I want him to wear one!” Seriously? You’re really asking me this? Where is your father? What a joke. 

Live learning kicks off at 9.30am every morning, whether we’re ready for it or not. Clearly we’re not normally ready, because life gets in the way. Yesterday Oscar’s teacher waited for us before she started the lesson, which was very kind of her but also rather embarrassing turning up late to our own living room. All we really have to do is get the kids out of pyjamas, although quite a few don’t bother. 50% of Oscar’s class are at school, and seeing them every morning makes him and all the other children at home miss school even more and just want to be there. It really doesn’t seem fair on them. I’m sure the key workers’ children and vulnerable children at school would rather be at home, but the grass is always greener. I do believe they are much better off at school though, and so do the teachers, but obviously that’s not an option at the moment. 

Harry and Oscar’s live learning takes place at the same time. Very helpful. Essentially, we have one room downstairs as it’s open plan (read badly designed), and no headphones that actually work. We also have a rather stroppy and boisterous two year-old. You may be able to guess the problem. On numerous occasions, Harry has tuned into Oscar’s lesson rather than his own, Joseph has pulled the charger out of laptops or turned off the computer, kicking the boys out of lessons, he has screamed the place down so nobody can hear themselves think, and drawn on the sofa with permanent black pen. He likes to poo during live learning too. The lessons themselves are fantastic – I tend to hover near Oscar, and DH sorts Harry. They are both expected to participate, and do so regularly whether we like it or not. I have been known to ask Oscar in advance what he’s going to say, just to vet it. We have turned up in onesies a few times, we’ve all done it and we’re all in the same boat. Well, the same storm in slightly different boats perhaps. 

Live learning, as tedious as it sounds and sometimes can be, can also be a source of great hilarity. We more or less witnessed a live human birth the other week – one of Oscar’s friends proudly told us she could hear mummy pushing the baby out upstairs, and sure enough, out it came. Who needs David Attenborough? Wednesdays have recently become ‘Show and Tell Wednesdays’ purely because the children got bored and played with their toys on camera during phonics, which prompted questions from teachers. Something else to sort out for next week. The other slight drawback to live learning is that their MAP work (Mental Arithmetic Practice – yes we have gone back to the ’50s) needs to be done before the lesson kicks off so they can mark it and get spot checked. This isn’t always the case unless we do it for them.

And things don’t always go to plan either. Yesterday morning, for instance, the school had ‘internet issues’, which meant Harry’s class was left without a teacher for at least ten minutes, and Oscar’s teacher taught her lesson merrily but none of us could see it or hear her as ‘present mode’ wasn’t working. We all had our hands up, but unbeknown to us, the sanctimonious ‘raise hand’ tool wasn’t working either. In the end she took a five year-old’s advice and abandoned the lesson, recording it later for our delectation. It was a complete waste of an hour. Today, school cancelled live learning in its entirety owing to ‘significant difficulties’ with their internet connection. 

Oscar has always been on top of his ‘learning’, as they like to call it these days. Both class teachers he’s had want to keep him forever and have begged for 26 Oscars. In a nutshell, when he’s good he’s very, very good, and when he’s bad he’s horrid. But he’s never, ever horrid at school, which I suppose is at least one small mercy. He’s also academic and doesn’t seem remotely phased by part-part-whole models, split digraphs, or the seven vast continents. He does, however, have an absurd tendency to drop his pencil a worrying number of times each lesson, which is maddening, and he’s like a politician ordering his worksheets – faffing about and not listening to the Vidyard in question.  

Over the last few weeks Osky has made a diorama of a zoo, created repeated patterns by painting with vegetables and sponges, written a non-chronological report on ‘Our World’, learnt about food chains, read books with tricky words aplenty, baked pizza from scratch, and enjoyed circuit training. Furthermore he has taken it upon himself to beat his big brother’s Reading Eggs score (and he’s nearly there), and he has been known to correct Harry’s maths and English comprehension at just five years old. He’s my little superstar, as illustrated by achieving Star of the Week, but he’s also an incredibly difficult child to raise without turning to copious bottles of wine. 

Art – Andy Warhol style

By contrast, Harry is a virtual dream to raise and I often wonder what it would be like to have an only child. He eats and he sleeps and in my experience that’s the main battle; Oscar could learn a lot from him. HOWEVER. I have never known a child stare into space so much as Harry when he’s supposed to be working. His teacher rings me every week to check we’re still on the straight and narrow (little does she know) and I told her how distracted he becomes and how slow he is at completing every piece of work. She simply said, “Yes, that sounds right, that’s Harry.” She wasn’t concerned, just accepting. It turns out his father and I aren’t quite as accepting. We are both academic and both perfectionists, which for poor Harry is a toxic combination. We often have to swap children before one of us blows a gasket. 

In his defence, Harry’s work isn’t always easy for a premature, emotionally and developmentally young seven year-old. He is currently writing a Mayan myth (not forgetting to include his ‘exponential noun phrases’) – his friends’ mums and I quite frankly wish the Mayans never existed after the grief they’ve given us these last few weeks. Luckily for Harry there was some kind of structure in place, he didn’t just have to go all in with a myth, although I’m beginning to wonder if the background and planning just prolonged the inevitable writing of this god damn myth. During the course of this painful research, I have learnt a huge amount of useless information about the crab-eating raccoon and the Panamanian night monkey. It appears that Harry has learnt absolutely nothing. 

This afternoon DH and Harry called me for help with ‘sentence openers’. It all seems to be so prescribed these days that there doesn’t seem space for natural eloquence or fluency in writing. And I’m beginning to sound just like my lapsed Catholic English teacher. Nevertheless, a sentence opener is crucial so I set about with ‘Deep within the Panamanian forest’, and ‘Lurking there beneath the leaves,’ and ‘Having had time to think’, and then I asked Harry for some. “He lived.” “He lived?” “Yes, ‘He lived’.” And what else? How did he live? When did he live? Where did he live? Why did he live? Be curious my boy!

This went on for 20 minutes or so and Harry never made it past “He lived”. In the end I wrote it for him. I know this does absolutely nothing for his education, but it made me feel better that he was at least handing something decent in. I tried to employ vocabulary that Harry would at least have heard of, which restricted me somewhat. I also typed incredibly slowly in case one of his teachers ‘dropped in’ online to watch him work, which they do frequently. Although incidentally, we have the pleasure of teaching our seven-year-olds how to touch type over this lockdown too! On the plus side, Harry has, perhaps by some divine intervention, already managed to grasp the concepts of similes, metaphors and alliteration at a mere seven years old, so it can’t be all bad. 

‘Guided reading’ is another stumbling block. It’s not guided reading, in fact in no way is it ‘guided’ or ‘reading’ in my opinion. It’s a teacher (anyone who fancies an easy half-hour with a cuppa by the looks of it) reading a book on video, and then a series of questions. Is there any reason we can’t still call that reading comprehension, or perhaps more correctly listening comprehension, or am I missing something here? Anyway, whatever we choose to call it, Harry is diabolical at it, absolutely diabolical. And I think he always will be. To give him credit, he tried it on his own, listening to the whole 15 minute chapter, or at least we thought he was listening, but was he? Considering he failed to answer one single, measly question about the chapter, I have to conclude he wasn’t. I asked him to listen to it again, and low and behold, the same thing happened. The third time I listened too to save time and nerves. Without a lot of prompting, as in essentially telling him the answers, all those questions would still have been wrong. 

There was an account in today’s chapter (yes, sadly guided reading is here to stay) which resonated with me because it was about a class of children learning the recorder in a music lesson. The whole first half of the chapter – five minutes or so – was centred on this recorder lesson. The first question Harry had to answer was something along the lines of, ‘how did the children permanently damage their hearing?’ It goes without saying that the answer was evident, even Oscar who had been practising squat jumps for PE in the corner and seemingly not listening to the story had subliminally absorbed the correct answer. Harry, however, had not. Where does his mind take him? Or does he literally switch off? It’s head-screwing and frustrating in equal measures, even for his mother. 

Yesterday we had been stuck inside homeschooling literally all day, which is very unlike me as I’m rather like an impatient dog and insist on a walk at the very least. We were so close to climbing the walls. However, the previous day we had gone to play in the snow and Oscar lasted all of 15 minutes before he started crying from the cold and had a nosebleed. Well, more of a nose drop to be precise, which I suppose is a blessing, but it was enough to make us go home and abandon our slippery sledges. Yesterday wasn’t much more of a success. We hopped in the car for a change of scenery as you do these days (via Costa obviously) and five minutes up the road Oscar was car sick. So we went home again. You know when you really, really try and life just conspires against you? Maybe that’s how Harry feels about guided reading. 

Now lockdown takes its toll on even the strongest of relationships, and we would freely admit ours has been no exception. With DH being off work with no pay and my peripatetic teaching job deemed ‘unnecessary’ in such times (I mean who doesn’t need to learn how to sing ‘Where the bee sucks?’, honestly), things are tough and we get under each other’s feet. 

Interestingly, there is a strange side to homeschooling which seems to bring out our competitive spirit too. I frequently offer to help Harry when he’s struggling and take over from DH so he can get on with something else (such as playing on his phone) while Oscar’s on a break for example, but whenever it’s Maths, I develop this overwhelming feeling my DH just doesn’t want me there. Possibly because he sees himself as the Maths King of the family since he took A-level Maths and I didn’t, and in all fairness, he is the first to ask me for help with English, French, RE, PE and all the fluffy stuff like PHSE. The things our parents’ generation never considered to be real subjects, but those which ironically, have been more valuable globally than anything over the last 12 months. 

With Maths, however, it’s really quite exciting to see my husband’s primeval surge takeover. He is so proud to be in charge teaching our son and there’s something so natural about it that reminds me of the caveman days. Of course we disagree on methods and strategies too, because we’re married so we have to. Or perhaps they taught Maths differently in different regions of the south of England in the ’80s? Little did I know I was a user of the ‘bus stop method’; we just called it division in our day and I’m fairly sure that was the only way to do it (please don’t quote me on that). Nowadays they have to draw 18 pizzas, then take away 14, then share the olives between ones and tens columns. Or something. My point is it’s lovely and frustrating to see DH teach in equal measure! We have succumbed to printing out reams of times tables for Harry ‘for reference’, otherwise it’s lunchtime before he’s even worked out 8 x 6, which he manages to get wrong EVERY SINGLE DAY. 

Yes, we can both help herd the boys and homeschool most of the time, but we’re still outnumbered and like any married couple, we still bite each other’s heads off when the milk has been left out or one of us forgot to bolt the rabbit hutch. However, there are benefits to homeschooling together; it’s so, so, so bad, that it can be quite funny. We have laughed many a time on account of our sons’ stupidity or naivety, and it can be quite lovely. Think of it as an unexpected, marital bond. It’s even funnier when we try to whisper so our children don’t hear us slag them off. We have to have a little fun don’t we? And of course we love them more than ourselves or we wouldn’t do it. What a time to be alive.