Every time I try to eat something, the three eager faces of my sons appear in my direct eyeline, demanding to know what it is and whether they can they have some.
Each time he is asked to oversee a live English lesson, my husband walks around the house announcing: “I have a call at 10.30am! I have a call at 1pm! I have a call at 3.30pm!”
And, through the power of year five maths osmosis, I have finally mastered the art of adding fractions with different denominators. Welcome to home-schooling, the sequel.
As a veteran of pandemic-era remote learning, I am happy to report that, this time around, I have not been caught off guard. I still have vital components left over from my previous stint, such as extra printer cartridges, lined and squared exercise books, and the ability to effectively dissociate from being called “bro” 47 times a day.
I’m one of the thousands of parents juggling work, a partner who is also working from home and various Teams, Seesaw, emails and class WhatsApp chat updates as remote learning in the UAE enters week four. Temporarily absent are those blissful seven hours a day when my three children would be out of the house and officially someone else’s problem (delightful problems, don’t get me wrong!), so now seems like a good time to take a snapshot of where I’m at and what I’ve learnt.
My children, aged 13, 10 and seven, are spread around the house. The eldest is often on the sofa wearing beige athleisure and chatting a steady stream of indecipherable nonsense to his friends on Teams. My easily distracted middle child is sat with me at the dining table trying to come up with a name for the mythical creature we just drew for target time. And my youngest is in the kitchen giving the teacher IT advice while wearing a back-to-front Minecraft T-shirt.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the wheels have come off, but I have certainly loosened up the rules a bit – a lesson I learnt the hard way during the pandemic.
So what pointers have I picked up? Having last thought about decimals, the perimeter of an equilateral triangle and adverbial conjunctions back in 1989, these have now returned to haunt me. Admittedly, there's something a tad shameful in not knowing the difference between long division and repeated subtraction. Algebraic formulas, you say? Not a chance. Please direct all further inquiries to the teacher.
I have also learnt that my children's classes appear to be populated by genius-level pupils who finish the work within five minutes of it being set.
“Miss! Miss! I’m done!” they trill into their unmuted mic, while we’re still stuck on question two involving working out the base and height of a parallelogram. Learning to be chill about this is key, but I have often wondered what-in-the-ChatGPT is going on there.
My 13-year-old son spends his school day wrapped in a blanket shaped like a taco, leaving various emotional support water bottles around the house and telling his friends that they’re “cooked”.
Cooked, it’s worth noting is different to cookin’. When you’re cooked, you’re fried, y’know? But when you’re cookin’? Well, the sky’s the limit. Then there’s the relentless background noise of conversations that start “POV” or “Bruh”; the humming of Gangster’s Paradise as if it’s 1995 again and the spontaneous – and rather riveting – exclamations of Italian brainrot.
I am also equal parts amused and afraid to venture into my kitchen, where my seven-year-old holds court and ambushes me with questions to which I am expected to have instant opinions. These include whether teleportation is better than invisibility; Salt burgers are better than Five Guys; or whether during a zombie apocalypse, I would rather be armed with a flame-thrower or TNT? Having thought about it, my answers are: yes; too close to call; flame-thrower.
Unfortunately for me, the kitchen is where the kettle is, and I need the kettle to make the tea that currently fuels my every waking moment. At this point, though, moving everything I need out of the kitchen to avoid being asked things like “have you ever walked into a family of stingrays?” is starting to seem like an increasingly rational move.
“You’re not stitching me up in your article, are you?” my husband just asked me.
“Define ‘stitch up’?” I reply. Fortunately, he didn’t hear me. He’s on a call.
