Remote Teaching

Like many teachers around the world, I am currently involved in remote teaching. Professionally, this has been an exciting challenge to engage with new or unfamiliar forms of technology and consider ways of sustaining student learning and engagement in a time when they are also feeling emotionally isolated and anxious. Balancing my students' academic learning with their mental wellbeing is at the forefront of my mind, and if that means I have to compromise traditional "coverage" of content, I think it's worth it in the long-run.

As a mother of three children between the ages of 2 and 11, though, it kind of feels like I am "remote parenting" more than I am remote teaching. Anyone who claims that working from home is the easy life has clearly never had to engage in a virtual meeting whilst shooing their own children out of the bedroom where they have hidden for some peace and quiet! Jimmy Fallon can probably empathise. It's difficult, when I am technically home, to have to ignore them or say "Not now, Mummy has to work." On the plus side, my commute is much easier -- and I'm not paying extortionate travel costs every week!

I've often had colleagues say to me over the years, "I don't know how you do it all." I've always found that comment slightly offensive and subtly sexist. I'm pretty sure no one has said the same thing to my male colleagues who have children. And the truth is this: I don't do it all. I never have. I'm lucky to have a husband who takes on the majority of the childcare, adapting his work schedule to accommodate this. I have also relied on the support of my children's school and my childminder. Now more than ever, I appreciate their commitment, which I know first-hand often comes with many personal compromises.

It's still early days yet, and the Easter holiday is soon approaching, but right now the days are just dragging on, one day blending into the next. We'll eventually settle into a new routine, but for now structure has gone out the window and my own children have had to become "self-directed learners". I would feel guilty, but when Cupcake came downstairs yesterday in medieval dressing up clothes and proclaimed that she was going to slay the jabberwocky, it was clear to me that she has absorbed some History and English. She then engaged in her first virtual piano lesson, dressed as Joan of Arc, before making a radio out of a rock. She may be refusing to do the maths and science work her teacher has sent, but who says she isn't learning?