For everyone Teaching while parenting: an impossible art?

The solution came after less than two weeks of online learning in the form of emails from two parents I deeply respect, who were opting out of the online learning platform, choosing instead a more flexible approach to suit the needs of their families. Boom! Gold. There they were; the words I needed as a parent.

After two weeks of trying to do it all, I sent an email to the hard-working teachers of my own children – my colleagues – informing them I was going to take a more flexible approach. They wouldn’t be hearing from my children at 1pm each day to do ‘the quiz’ as evidence of their completed work. They wouldn’t be doing the assessment tasks. After all, there would be no reporting – and, as the AEU pointed out, how can assessment possibly be authentic? There is no level playing field with online learning!

I thought I had solved the problem. But it wasn’t done.

On ABC’s The Drum, I heard Science & Technology Australia’s new chief executive Misha Schubert, and others, citing data indicating this ‘new normal’ was disproportionately impacting on women. By and large, women were the ones carrying the ‘mental load’ at home. I was certainly feeling it. How exactly should I tackle remote learning now? Should I feed my children the worksheets from the school? Tell them they can opt in and out of learning tasks? Ditch the learning from home curriculum altogether?

I went rogue. We ditched it all.

Through this period, my own children completed what I consider rich learning tasks, even though they were not the mandated ones. My son disappeared up to the shed and reappeared with a wooden ladder he made. He was so inspired by the music from Pirates of the Carribean that he taught himself how to play it on the piano. He enlisted his twin sister to help move a heavy plastic slide up to an outdoor platform, built by my father, to create a whole new, much more fun slide experience.

My daughter, meanwhile, had her first day ever of disappearing into a book. She sat on the couch in the sun and read and read and read. She composed her own song that I helped her transcribe. And thanks mainly to the kitchen-garden program we have at our school, she cooked dinner a couple of times. Her usual ‘go-to’ creative outlet is drawing, but she found a new passion during this phase of the pandemic: photographing mushrooms. She also announced that she wanted to write a book.

And yet, I was still feeling the pressure. I was feeling torn about how to keep my children connected but simultaneously protected from the demands of the curriculum they simply couldn’t meet.

I knew, by listening to talkback radio, that many families were far worse off than I was. Families experiencing illness, job losses, the death of loved ones, domestic violence. How were the women who were essential workers or the parents of children with special needs coping? Or those with medical conditions?

But, as a teacher and single parent, I was carrying a disproportionate load compared to colleagues who didn’t have children or who had partners sharing the mental and logistical responsibilities. I felt powerless – and was becoming increasingly frustrated and even angry towards those decision-makers who didn’t have primary school-aged children and therefore couldn’t possibly see the impact of how the department’s expectations were being interpreted or understand my lived experience.

I also knew I was part of the problem. As an educator delivering the mandated hours of content per day, I was also stuck in an uncomfortable place, where doing my job potentially made me yet another authority figure imposing more rules on this new and quite anxious landscape.

I began to hear anecdotes about mothers who “never yell” at their children shocked to find themselves yelling. Other mothers who intuitively wanted to opt out, but who stayed the course because they felt that “everyone else must be doing it” and they didn’t want to be seen as failing. Or worse, mothers telling me that they felt like they were failing.