Why I’ll be home schooling on my own terms……

So here we are, home-schooling round two and, after just five short days, I quit!!

It’s safe to say that any enthusiasm and positivity I had the first time around has gone out of the window, any lessons I learned from home schooling four children for six months have been completely forgotten, and any patience I had during a time I was already hanging by a thread, has vanished quicker than you can say “zoom chat”.

During our first attempt at home schooling from March through to July, I genuinely tried to embrace those days at home with the kids. I truly enjoyed our bonus time together as a family, just the six of us pottering around at home, enjoying the sunshine in the garden, or getting out for daily walk in the woods. I enthusiastically leapt about in front of the TV each morning to PE with Joe, bent myself double doing Cosmic Yoga and ploughed through times tables and fronted adverbials like a powerhouse, with minimum of complaints. I loved the days when our house smelled of home made brownies and poster paints, when we hung rainbows in our windows, got super competitive over online quizzes and how the kids beamed with happiness on FaceTime to their grandparents, albeit with wonky home haircuts.

But this time round in the Winter, when it’s cold and wet and miserable outside, when everything we had been promised would be better is actually looking a whole lot worse, it’s not quite so easy. When all of us are buckling under the pressure of trying to fit six hours of schooling into an eight hour working day, when the government is ramping up the demands that all work must be completed “or else”, it’s far more difficult to just embrace it.  When these little cherubs (ahem) whom we relished through the Summer months are far less willing to complete a never ending supply of maths worksheets as opposed to splashing in the padding pool with an ice lolly, it’s a whole different ball game. And who can really blame them? Life was so much easier when we were high on Vitamin D with a belly full of banana bread.

The truth is this is hard for everyone, incredibly hard in fact, and when you’re juggling a full time job and a never ending laundry basket, when your phone is buzzing and your emails pinging, when you’re still trying to work out how to unmute yourself on Zoom ten months later, it’s more than enough to break us. When you’ve got deadlines to meet, bills to pay, physical ailments to juggle or toddlers to restrain, when you’re worried about your family, missing your friends and your freedom, when you can’t even remember the last time you got to use the bathroom in peace, it’s enough to send us spiralling.

When Jessica’s Mummy is sharing all seven pieces of work beautifully submitted before 11am and asking for more, when Charlie’s Dad boasting in the WhatsApp group about the life scale model he’s made of Antarctica purely out of empty egg cartons and PVA glue, when you think you’ve finished all of the work set for the week before realising it was all just set for one day, it can be soul destroying. It’s far too easy to believe from glossy snapshots on Instagram that you’re the only parent sitting at home crying in your PJ’s because the printers out of ink, because the websites won’t load, because your To Do List resembles a till receipt. It’s crushing to wake up and realise that after five short days, you are no longer the parent you set out to be.

And for me that’s the crux of it right there: that I am no longer able to parent my children on my terms, in my time, in the way I have done for all of these years. All of a sudden I’ve been pushed into a role I’m nowhere near qualified for, a role I never even wanted in the first place. All of a sudden I’m working two full time jobs side by side and, in all honesty, failing at both. Over night I’ve become the shouty Mum, the impatient Mum, the losing her sh*t on a daily basis Mum, and every night this week I’ve gone to bed, completely overwhelmed with guilt knowing I lost my patience with the kids that day, thinking how they’d looked at me, their eyes brimming with tears, and I’d snapped at them that I didn’t have time for their meltdowns. That at a time when they are feeling anxious and unsettled and completely confused as to what is going on in the world, I had simply made it worse.

And so I quit. 

As much as I appreciate every single teacher out there who is putting their time and effort into uploading work for each of my children right now, I just can’t do it. As much as I appreciate that our children need educating and there is a real danger of them falling behind, I just don’t have it in me. As much as everything we read and hear is telling us that our children need to maintain this level of schooling or we face an educational crisis, there is something far more important than all of that – our happiness. 

And to every single parent out there who is feeling the same way, because I am certain there are plenty, believe me when I say that there are a thousand different ways for children to learn as opposed to sitting at a desk churning out worksheets and written content. There are so many more ways to educate our children than this endless cycle of frustration when we can’t access an app, click a link, print a worksheet; so many more ways to still give your children exactly what they need to progress without jeopardising your mental health and theirs. So take a deep breath, and that goes for me too, do what you physically can, and if all else fails, just do what makes you happy.  

Let them read their favourite books, write letters to their family and friends, dream up scripts to silly plays and have them act it out between them. Let them tell jokes, solve riddles, do word puzzles and write stories; let them watch movies with the subtitles on, enjoy comics, instruction manuals and colouring books. Let them play shop, count change, take it in turns to add up money and work out the profits; let them play LEGO, sort shapes, group colours, build towers and knock them right back down again.

Let them bake cakes, write out shopping lists, read labels, weigh ingredients and work out cooking times. Let them play dress up and use their imaginations, re-enact historical battles and pose as monumental figures; let them watch documentaries and nature programmes, download education apps and play number games, let those reins loosen on screen time if that’s all it takes to give yourself a minute.

Let them study maps and colour world flags, learn how to say hello in ten different languages, try native dishes from a host of countries and mood board your adventures for holidays to come. Let them play in the garden in their winter hats and woollen scarves and jump in puddles in mismatched wellies; let them scavenge for treasure, climb trees, collect leaves, let them loose whatever the weather to run wild and just get it out of their system.

Just let them be happy, let them be carefree, let this chaos impact as little as possible on their mental health going forward. Let us one day look back and know that perhaps we never quite grasped the concept of those fronted adverbials, and maybe we never worked out just why Fred had 19 sweets and Freda only had two, but that our children escaped this time relatively unscathed and that ultimately, we held it together at a time the whole world fell apart.