Luckily (although that’s relative) my youngest child is still in preprimary school, so there’s no formal syllabus for us to try to complete. My son, on the other hand, is at the stage of learning to read and write, so days are filled placing finger spaces between letters, learning which letters are formed in the “tummy” line, which letters have tails, and the special friends that are “ch”, “sh”, “th”.
We also try to read. I had thought to offer him the incentive of watching the Harry Potter movies once he can read a Harry Potter book, but given that most days we’re sounding out the word “big’” that aspiration may have us deep in homeschooling until long after lockdown is lifted.
My daughter — being the younger child and tired of being fobbed off by being told to draw another picture or do another puzzle — is quick to intervene whenever her brother stumbles. More often than not I tell her to be quiet and go away, like some oafish Dickensian character thwarting her daughter’s intellectual ambitions.
All to say, it’s no sea of domestic serenity here. What’s more I’m awash — thanks to Whatsapp groups and online learning resources — with more suggestions of crafty things I might do with my children, and photos and videos documenting other charming, happy children doing just that, than I and my children could possibly do in all our combined lifetimes.
I thought I’d found some salvation and a prospective course of action when I stumbled on a tweet from an American woman saying that she and her son were “done with the first grade. We cannot cope with this insanity. Survival and protecting his wellbeing come first.” That is until she also volunteered that she runs a nonprofit, manages a complex project in Egypt and runs a Covid-19 tracking platform, which while I’m certainly trying to do some work, I can’t (cough) really claim to be doing right now. She also said her first grader knows more Egyptian history than most adults do.
That’s a comfort that’s being proferred to those of us doing homeschooling, or rather doing it inadequately, right now: that even if our children don’t get the fundamentals of the syllabus right they will learn all sorts of things from us as professionals. But in my case I fear it’s more style than substance that’s being imparted: my children are inclined to lecture me on everything from their Lego constructions to why they should have more television, and why it isn’t yet bath time. There’s no real equivalent of Egyptian history. Although they do tell me it’s “unfair” when I turn the TV off.
Off course I know this jumbled-up, freestyling, homeschooling thing I’m trying to do is a relatively trivial burden compared to those of so many other women. It must be almost impossibly difficult to be an essential worker at this time, to have children home from school, and to try to make provision not just for their basic care but for their education. It must be almost impossibly difficult to be a single caregiver (mother, father, grandmother) confined with small children in a small space and be required to observe the full force of the lockdown.
We knew long before lockdown of the chronic undervaluing of labour involving care such as teaching, health care and domestic work — labour disproportionately done by women. Lockdown has simply underlined this for us. As Paulo dos Santos has written: the pandemic requires an unprecedented mobilisation of ... work to care for ourselves, our families and our communities.
All of us are reliant on that labour. But lockdown has certainly brought home for me, in a painfully poignant way, just how much my productivity as a female professional is dependent on other women’s labour.
• Fritz, a public interest lawyer, is CEO of Freedom Under Law.
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