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“It is important,” said an email from the headteacher of the secondary school my eldest attends, “to maintain the distinction of the holidays.” I have never agreed more with any human being.
Thanks to Easter, homeschooling is out for two weeks, which means living the same life, only with less guilt and fewer arguments at 10am over whether 9am is a good time to start. Damn right, this is an important distinction.
I have solicited expert views on how to homeschool. I have also waxed philosophical about whether or not this is a good time to set your family free from the constraints of formal education and teach them other stuff instead, our own special skills such as how to make Korean-style whipped iced coffee (which they are brilliant at) or how to find something in a drawer. But my lived reality is neither of these things. Instead, it’s an unedifying cycle, where I badger them to at least get their homework out, hassle them into telling me what it is, and then end up doing it for them.
The 10-year-old had to write a letter to Boris Johnson, telling him how coronavirus made her feel. She found this inherently droll, given that he actually had it. Like, you would never do that with any other disease. “Dear person with tuberculosis, I want to tell you a little bit about how tuberculosis, which I don’t have, makes me feel.”
I said: “Give them a break, they might have set this before he was diagnosed. Anyway, how does it make you feel?”
“Nothing. I don’t have any feelings about coronavirus.”
“How do you feel about being off school?”
“Great.”
“Really? All the time? What about missing your friends?”
“Yes, I miss my friends.”
OK … “Dear Boris Johnson, I write to you with some ambivalence about the situation facing the nation. On the one hand, it’s great being off school. On the other, I miss my friends …”
“How long does this have to be?”
“Longer than that. That’s more of a postcard.” This is my special skill, making things longer. This is the work I was born to do. I could do a paragraph wishing him well, and asking about his symptoms. I could tell him about the pets in the household. Frankly, I was on fire, we had a serviceable letter in 10 minutes flat and the only problem was that I’d written it.
Next she had to analyse a piece of graffiti: “The people save the people / NHS staff, you are our pride.” What did she think it meant? What slogan would she spray paint on to a wall to show her appreciation for the NHS?
“Thanks?”
“Think you’d have to be a bit more specific, like: ‘Doctors, thanks!’” We agreed that nurses shouldn’t be left out. Then, that we would need some way to get their attention, and landed on: “Oi, nurses and doctors, thanks!” If I had just butted out, and it had been that lame, it would have been fine. But I had basically done it, and it was still that lame.
Then I went to harass the 12-year-old, who was answering questions about a speech in Midsummer Night’s Dream, which he claimed not to understand one word of. Oberon had just “forgiven” Titania – why had I put forgiveness in inverted commas, he wanted to know? Well, because it’s pretty gaslighty, drugging someone to fall in love, then being enraged by their infidelity. So I would call forgiveness quite a moot concept.
It turned out feminist revisionism was definitely not what he wanted. “Why not?” I asked.
“BECAUSE THAT’S NOT WHAT THEY’VE ASKED FOR. LITERALLY NOWHERE ON THIS SHEET DOES IT SAY: ‘WHAT WOULD A FEMINIST THINK OF OBERON?’.” The question, rather, was: “What do Oberon and Titania do next?”, relating to the line: “Sound, music! Come, my queen, take hands with me / And rock the ground whereon these sleepers be.”
“Well,” I said, “I guess it could mean dancing, given the music. Or it could mean having sex. That’s what people usually mean when they talk about the earth moving.”
“There is no way they are looking for the answer ‘Having sex’. I don’t think you even understand what homework is.”
“Well, you could put it more formally, like: ‘Dancing, or something a bit more marital.’” My attention then wandered for two seconds, and I turned round to find what he had actually written was: “They could be dancing, or doing something different.”
“But … ‘something different’ could be anything. It could be taking the dog for a walk. It’s like saying: ‘I have no idea what they do next. They could be doing any of an infinite number of different things.’”
“I’ve got a great idea,” he said. “Why don’t you go away, and do something different, and when you come back, neither of us will remember anything about this conversation.”
“Wait,” I said, “are you trying to bewitch me?”
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