The first week of homeschooling was actually quite pleasant. E has asthma so we pulled her out of school before the NSW government started encouraging parents to do so.
I look back on that first week as the halcyon days of homeschooling. Back then, there was no one to compare myself to, no parents posting pictures to the Year 3 Whatsapp group of artistic masterpieces (‘Sara made this fairy garden in the park so other kids can enjoy J’), maths geniuses (‘100%! Go girl!’), or science projects (‘Jake made a model photovoltaic system while I was doing the laundry. LOL.’)
In those first days my husband and I were left to create our own routine: piano practice, some maths, and rote learning the spelling list (‘Who cares what a grapheme is,’ I blithely told my eight-year old, ‘as long as you can spell it?’) In the afternoons we did YouTube yoga in the lounge room or went for a bike ride.
And then the schools closed. Which was great from a public health perspective but devastating for my self-esteem.
Because – what actually is a grapheme? Suddenly, I had to know the answer to that, and many other of life’s imponderables. Instead of drilling E in her times tables whilst we pedalled our bikes along the beach, I had to sit down and teach her to “step” through the numbers, so she could get a feel for their ordinal value. Instead of testing her on the week’s words, she (and I) had to figure out not just what a grapheme is, but the difference between a grapheme, a phoneme and a digraph (don’t ask). Instead of letting her write whatever she wanted to during creative time, I had to bribe her into breaking down the salient elements of a classroom text so turgid it made us both want to pull our eyeballs out of our heads to feel something other than bored.
It took less than a day of this to break me. If I was going to homeschool for an unknowable number of weeks, I realised, I had to play to my strengths.
Now our routine is this. I check what the teachers have set for lessons, and I pick out one or two exercises which look useful. E does piano, maths and spelling with occasional check ins from me and my husband. She goes for a bike ride or a walk with one or both of us.
And then, upon returning home, I let her have hours and hours of screen time whilst I and my husband get some work done. E spends far more than the two recommended hours at a computer or tablet per day. And frankly, if she has done her reading and piano and exercise, then why shouldn’t she?
When E opens the laptop or turns on the iPad, she is simply following the example which my husband and I set. And we are modelling the hustle and juggle that constitutes creative practice.
Read: 8 ideas for artists homeschooling kids
It’s not like she is hanging out on Reddit: E spends a couple of hours a day, like me, on her laptop, writing a book. Like my husband, she also spends hours making movies – for E, these are stop motion animations starring various Lego mini-figures.
As she goes about her projects, E also osmotically absorbs lessons from us on how to juggle a creative life with family and work. She hears me hustling for work, and our daughter learns about resilience and emotional buoyancy. She sees me flop on the couch and announce I am taking the day off, admitting that I need time out to process the stress of the pandemic – boom, a lesson in self-care. My husband sets aside time to provide free advice to artists on digital strategy and our daughter learns that the creative sector thrives on the generosity of its members.
My advice to homeschooling artists, or anyone juggling work and homeschool at the moment: play to your strengths, and don’t be too dogmatic about screen time. If you are a writer like me, then print out a hero’s journey diagram and help your kids with structure (Yes, I did this. It helps me, too). If you’re a filmmaker like my husband, you can offer your kid tips on the importance of jeopardy to create tension.
Put your kids in front of a screen if you need time to hustle or you just need some time out. Turn on the adult content restrictions, nudge them towards creative activities, and turn off your internal guilt monologue. You are teaching your kids about the struggle, the sheer bloody-mindedness and the passion that goes into leading a creative life.