Are you homeschooling your children during the UK lockdown? Yes, me too. I detest it. I never wanted to be a teacher; that is why I chose to send my children to school.

I remember meeting with the careers’ advisor at high school and they insisted that I should train to be a teacher. Apparently, there was no other career option available at that time (mid 1990s). I knew I was not destined for teaching, at least not in a school environment, so I ignored their instructions and tried to find my way. Who knew what would happen when I eventually had children of my own?

Homeschooling is exhausting. I am still trying to develop my freelance writing business and grow my reiki practitioner business. Since I cannot offer hands-on healing sessions to clients due to the pandemic and lockdown, I need to find ways to stay connected so that I can find customers when the clinic reopens at some point later this year. My only means at the moment is social media. But my access to it is limited because I have to allow my daughters time on the laptop, connected to the internet, to do their schoolwork. Our internet connection cannot cope with too many devices working at once, and inevitably it crashes leaving us having to restart the router and try again.

Aside from connectivity issues, I find homeschooling a huge drain on my physical and mental health. I am run ragged trying to maintain a clean house, exercise the dog, practice my reiki meditation, do my work, and supervise the children with theirs. When they ask me for help with a maths sum or an English task, I struggle to explain how I reach my answer because they learn in a vastly different way than I did thirty years ago. How can I teach them using outdated methods that I learned by? It is like a foreign language to them, and I do not have the time to learn their methods just so we can complete a few homework tasks.

I am grateful that our school has provided comprehensive resources for home learning, and I appreciate the effort made by our teachers and the teaching staff. However, when I received phone calls from my daughters’ teachers asking why they weren’t completing all the tasks every day, I felt like I was in trouble for not forcing them. This is a pandemic. Life is not normal. We have not socialized with friends for months, we haven’t seen our family members properly, and we are stuck at home in limbo. Why would they be motivated to do schoolwork every day? And how am I supposed to enforce that when I don’t want to damage their fragile mental health in the face of all the challenges we have had to deal with?

How are you coping with homeschool? Does it work for you, or have you changed the routine to make it fit your lifestyle?

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