Picture the scene: you’re ready for a day of remote learning, dressed in business casual from the waist up, perished jogging bottoms and ratty slippers on your bottom half.
You’ve cleared the immediate area behind you of the detritus of daily life, so Year 10 have nothing to giggle about when they are “surface snooping”.
You’ve logged in to Teams, or Satchel or Zoom, and you’re ready to start the day’s remote learning when you notice things seem quiet. Too quiet, actually. Because when you have two children under 4, silence is not golden. It’s deeply ominous.
It was only last week that I received a text from my husband (from the sanctuary of his real-life office) asking how the day was going, followed by a CCTV screen grab of the bottom of our garden, where my youngest (age 1) was wandering, unsupervised, poking at a worm with a stick and living his best free-range life.
The rest of the day was spent with him coiled around my shoulders, clinging on like a little spider monkey as I held meetings and checked Macbeth quizzes.
At the time, I thought I couldn’t wait for remote teaching to end, but now it has and I’m reflecting on how it went, perhaps there were some good bits in there too.
The perks of remote teaching
The perks of being at home with the children really did outweigh any embarrassment felt the time my eldest (age 3) announced that he had done a “MASSIVE POO, MUMMY!” while I was in a middle leaders’ meeting. Here are the benefits I found:
No morning rush hour
During remote learning, no one in my house missed that mad spell of the morning when there were fights over the wearing of socks, when there was scrambling for packed lunches that would pass muster for the dinner ladies at preschool and when we were performing the dance/wrestle of the seatbelt as I frantically tried to get both children strapped into the car.
We all stayed in our pyjamas longer of a morning than was acceptable pre-lockdown, and, yes, a lot more pre-8am telly was watched, but it was nice to take mornings at a marginally more leisurely pace. Beginning meetings and lessons for the day online meant no one could possibly know that the kitchen floor was a sea of Cheerios and discarded toy trains.
The juggling act
Balancing the demands of childcare with remote education required a deft handling of time, energy and quick thinking. Although exhausting, there was something empowering about completing another day wrangling two children, four online lessons, a meeting, phone calls with parents and a deadline. Let’s just say there was a lot of snack-based bribery.
Perhaps it isn’t something I will miss per se, but it will serve as a reminder that if we can survive that, we can survive most things, even explaining the structure of the Aristotelian triad in one breath whilst trying to explain the structure of the solar system to my space-obsessed three-year-old in another.
New traditions
With the commute reduced to a few steps, we found new ways to mark the end of the working week. Enter the pizza kitchen disco on Fridays. What started as a way to fend off endless requests for snacks and entertainment morphed into the best part of the lockdown working week: come 4pm the laptop went away, the oven went on, and Alexa was charged with providing ’90s dance hits cheesier than the pizza toppings.
Dancing on the table is not just allowed but positively encouraged. It’s a big ask for small children to be quiet for hours at a time, so providing a time to kick back and expend some energy was powerful for all of us.
I am relishing being back in school for many reasons, but juggling working from home and having small children around taught me that balance is key and that we really are flexible, adaptable and resilient beyond anything we thought before.
We need to recognise and congratulate ourselves for that. And the Friday pizza kitchen discos are staying!
Laura May Rowlands is head of English in a secondary school in Hampshire
