Home Ed... at Home?!

Imagine you go on holiday to a different country. Somewhere exotic - Turkey, perhaps. But while you are there, you don’t leave your hotel. The hotel staff speak your language, the restaurant cooks the food you are familiar with, the air conditioning keeps the temperature down. You stay a while, and then you go home. 

Have you really been to Turkey? Technically, yes, but you didn’t get to experience the culture, the language, the food, the sights and smells, the heat. 

This is how the Home Education community feels as hundreds of thousands of school children suddenly have to learn from home and their parents start frantically messaging us asking for tips on how to homeschool. 

Shout it from the rooftops: This is not home education. As home educators we are used to being anywhere but home. We spend our days at forest schools, groups, museums, libraries, classes, workshops, stately homes, playdates. We may be more accustomed to having our children with us all the time but please remember, isolation has us all reeling too. And when all this is over and the schools re-open, remember that you have barely glimpsed our world - but maybe let that glimpse inspire you to find out more. 

We have struggled this week. For a start, I had some sort of virus. It became clear quite quickly that it wasn’t COVID-19 but it still seemed prudent to self-isolate for the recommended time. DH works in the care sector and is considered front-line, so he was trying to work from home. Our resident teenager (with us since late last year and likely to stay for a while yet; henceforth to be known as RT) was off school and having to adjust to that. I was feeling awful and soon realised that our normal home routine just wasn’t going to work under the circumstances. 

After a rather stressful day at the beginning of the week staggering around and trying to force some work from the boys, I came to my senses. If there’s one thing home edders are familiar with, it‘s how the rhythm can suddenly change. Developmental leaps, seasons, illnesses and so much more can completely stir up the way that each child learns, and we adapt to that. So we have stopped and we are giving ourselves space to find our new normal. 

The big adjustment for us, of course, is the loss of our social groups. We are so used to structuring our week around groups and co-ops and classes and meet-ups. Suddenly, those are gone. Some of our closest friends are extremely vulnerable and so in strict isolation. The museums and stately homes we visit so frequently are closed. 

The last time we saw anyone outside the immediate family was Monday, when a friend dropped something off and had a brief chat from a safe distance. There has been the odd bit of contact via video link but nowhere near enough. 

Right now, this feels really overwhelming, especially on top of worry about loved ones, the stress of limited food supplies, and the myriad small disappointments of missed weddings, bar mitzvahs, holidays, projects. 

So we breathe. We stop, look around, and trust that things will resolve into a new normal soon. We plan countryside walks and activities. We start working out how to move some activities online, learn to make the most of time spent together via Skype, Zoom and FaceTime. We make use of livestreamed events (music sessions, educational talks, synagogue services) and build our week around them. 

Together we will work out how to navigate the next few months. 

And I will go quietly nuts as Ben pursues his goal of flooding the house (with water or cooking oil, he isn’t fussy) with a tenacity and ingenuity worth of a much better cause.