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So here we are at the end of another term of homeschooling and here are some things that I have learnt about myself.
I do not enjoy being with my kids as much as I have been these last 7 weeks. I love them dearly and think that they are fabulous mini people and I am immensely proud of them, but I have realised that a little absence from them helps me to truly enjoy them.
My kids enjoy my excessive, exclusive company as much as I theirs.
Homeschooling in the midsts of a pandemic is not home-ed. The jail sentence that we are all living, limits us greatly to attempting any kind of creative approaches to learning. There is only so much forest learning that we can do in the freezing January/February temperatures.
My toddler is a HUGE distraction to us all. She is systematically executing a fiendish plan for complete domination and succeeding impeccably.
I have lost about £25 this last week alone since agreeing to put a pound in the pot every time I drop the F-bomb.
The teachers at my children’s school are amazing. I always thought very highly of them, but having first hand insight into how they teach and how they have adapted to teaching virtually I am amazed at how well they do it. My 9 year old is not too bad, his class being a bit older have taken to the online classes and working independently very quickly and although his class seems calmer, his teachers are still doing amazingly getting them through their lessons. When I watch my daughters teacher wrangling 6 & 7 year olds and getting them enthusiastic and confident about learning online I am so impressed. It is reminiscent of what I imagine herding cats would be like; each cat has its own agenda, gets distracted very easily and is incapable of hiding their disdain at what they are learning. Yet my daughters teacher carries on and gets so much out of them all individually it is truly amazing to witness.
I am finally after a year, actually missing hugging other people. Not being a hugger and tending to find social interaction of that sort incredibly awkward, I have actually enjoyed not having to awkwardly bumble my way through greetings with people worrying about if I should hug or kiss them. Judging the situation wrongly and making them (and myself) very uncomfortable as I lunge towards them. After a year off, I am ready to make people feel uncomfortable again, I am so over social distancing, I am over living in my bubble of 5 I want to see my friends, I want to go to the cinema, I want to go out for meal, I want to go to the pub. I want to go to the supermarket and view it as the chore it is, not see it as a luxury, the gift of getting to leave the house alone.
We’ve done a year next month, the interim of the summer doesn’t count, that summer haze blip of ‘eating out to help out’ that has contributed, i’m convinced in no small way, to the cluster fuck our country is currently in. Most of all I want to stop having to endure all the overnight self professed ‘scientific experts’ on Facebook, each spouting their own self assured non-sense, fluffing up each others misinformed information and creating a shed load of scaremongering. The level of stupid online is high enough without all these extra keyboard warriors stirring up the pot and contaminating my wall with yet more stupid.
I suppose the biggest thing I’ve learnt this term, is that I’ve actually reached my limit mentally, I have really struggled this time around, the (self inflicted) pressure I have felt to hold everything together has taken its toll on me and I am so looking forward to getting some semblance of normality back.
I know everyone says that all you can do is your best, and I know that I am, but yesterday my 6 year old said with genuine, incredulous surprise ‘Oranges grow on trees? Really??’ Her extreme surprise at gaining this knowledge makes me realise that maybe I’m not doing as well as I thought I was on the whole teaching front!!
