Between pi and pinot, us parents are cooked

As home schooling drags on in Victoria there’s lots of screaming, crying and frustration – and that’s just the parents.

There’s a meme going around. “You think it’s bad now? In 20 years our country will be run by people home schooled by day drinkers”.

In Victoria the state government has been trusting us to home school our kids for an astonishing 150 days now. Don’t they realise we’re really not up to the task?

During the big lockdown last year, we went on strike by breakfast, hit the bottle by recess and sacked ourselves by lunchtime. And yet no one cared and they continued to rely on us to home school our precious offspring for another three arduous lockdowns. Unbelievable.

In my house there’s been lots of screaming, crying and frustration at not being able to do assignments – and that’s me, not the kids.

Time is dragging and tempers are fraying in Lockdown 6, which was meant to last seven days but is now at three weeks and still going strong.

The kids have given up ever going back to school and the adults are running out of things to bribe them with.

Parents are running out of things to bribe children with. Picture: Tony Gough

“Come on, kids, finish your work and then we can go and stare at the playground you’re not allowed to play in ...” That’s not going to work.

On good days my kids get through their school tasks on screens then spend more time on screens playing computer games.

On bad days the whole house becomes sidetracked by the challenge of making “an illegal sandwich” shaped like a 3D Atari logo. Yep, that’s what passes as fun during lockdown.

Sometimes it’s up to me to plead and cajole them to do their work. Other times they’re telling me off for being too loud because they’ve got a critically important whole-class WebEx about minibeasts and I’m on the phone for work.

The kids think they’re smart, but they’re not so smart. They ask us for help, don’t they? That’s probably the dumbest thing they could do.

At this point, we’re exhausted by the effort of trying to remember the value of pi (which is sadly nothing to do with pie) and pretending to be knowledgeable about the allegorical themes of Macbeth to impress our surly teens.

In Victoria the state government has been trusting parents to home school kids for an astonishing 150 days. Picture Rebecca Michael.

And we go to bed each night with assessment questions and homework tasks running through our minds.

Question: If a parent drinks two wines by lunchtime, how much time will their child get on the Xbox in the afternoon?

Question: If Mum and Dad have three degrees between them, how come neither of them can make numbers add up automatically on an Excel spreadsheet?

Question: If the train is going 50 miles an hour, how long will it take Mummy to get across the border and into another state?

I put out a call to friends for stories of their remote learning escapades. From building structures out of peas and toothpicks to being expected to know off the top of our heads how far away Broome is, remote learning is testing us.

It’s also giving us a renewed respect for teachers.

It seems educated professional parents are having to google answers for basic homework tasks set for primary-schoolers – and still not getting it right every time.

As one mum told me: “I have two degrees. I googled my grade one’s maths homework. And got it wrong.”

Another said her daughter was also in grade one but she still had to google things: “I didn’t know what a diagraph was ... Two letters that make one sound!” Oh, so the word diagraph has a diagraph in it ... Wow, now I feel smart.

And another said home learning had exposed the many gaps in her general knowledge and her grade three daughter “now only comes to me for printing”. Ouch.

Others are getting pulled into being chief camera operator, logistics expert, sound engineer and rigger for teenagers required to produce home movies. In other words, press record on an iPhone.

Another friend told me about her son’s “Olympic event at home” which involved lots of running and jumping, loud music, and an obstacle course that went through the house. Too bad she was on a conference call for work at the time.

For others it’s more a case of “unschooling” with parents and kids having an unspoken agreement to just leave each other alone for most of the day.

Anything to get us through.

That’s why it’s time to bring back the professionals and get kids back to school. Teachers no doubt would love a break from teaching our kids over the screen and home schooling their own in their “spare” time.

As another meme puts it, “Home schooling: Where both child and parent hope they don’t have the same teacher next term”.

Amen to that.

Susie O’Brien is a Herald Sun columnist. Her book, The Secret of Half-arsed Parenting, is out now.