The Paroking Diaries - Blog 6: Nail Tales and Fraction Frenzies

I’m measuring the weeks according to the remaining gel polish left on my fingers. A quarter of two fingers is hanging on in there. A rudimentary calculation based upon the average tenure being a fortnight means I am doing well so it must be at least week seven, which it is. Their stubbornness surely defies all odds, which at the same time I salute as a reminder of the life we had before lockdown when nails were worth being painted for.

It’s Monday, not that this means anything these days and it’s a notion that the children are also living and breathing. The ‘teenager’ is still in bed at 8.54 and I know that his tutor is expecting him to be online and registered by 9.00. I tell him, or rather yell at him that he ought to get up, he has perfected the sub-five-minute change with eyes still closed. He throws on the clothes that are conveniently still at this foot of his bed from the night before and yawns his way down the stairs to his desk. He mouths at me, ‘bacon sandwich’ and flicks on the screen to be greeted by a smiling teacher, who in contrast is obviously up and dressed and waxing lyrical about timetables and focus. I slip the bacon sandwich into his lap and he gives me a thumbs up. I’m not sure if this is for me or for himself, because he is obviously delighted that he has clocked another long sleep and dodged a telling off from the school and us by fulfilling the requirement of registration on time and therefore also all parental expectations concerning presenteeism.

I turn my attentions to the other two. The ‘against all odds’ daughter is looking at equivalent fractions. After some huffing and puffing when confronted with the learning sheets I decide we should go down the practical path, we’re out of chocolate which is no surprise but fully stocked on apples, which relates to a dodging of the good stuff and an overstuffing of the bad ones. I begin by demonstrating a half, a quarter, then eighths, except I haven’t cut them straight and so a half is more like two thirds and one third, and five of the eighths is more like six or seven. The ‘against all odds’ daughter looks at me quizzically and suggests that if they are equal then the Pope is also no longer Catholic. My fraction lesson is rejected, and she returns to the neat fraction wall that the teacher has given her, declaring that afterall she does understand it because wonky apple slices demonstrate nothing but an inept apple corer and another sub-standard ‘parent stand-in’ teaching lesson. The apple is also a little brown, or beige if we are being polite so it is doubly rejected as both a maths lesson and a healthy snack.

We move on. The ‘middle child’ is writing a character letter from the position of ‘empathy’ to another character within Private Peaceful. I explain that empathy means standing in someone else’s shoes and understanding how they may feel. He says he sees, “Is it a bit like how I can see that you hate home schooling because we ask you to do most of it and the printer never works,” “Yes,” I say thinking that this must be the best lesson in the day because surely that denotes a shred of sympathy for my position, although, his detachment from the printer anxiety and the uploading and downloading involved in the online lesson obviously hasn’t attracted the proportional empathy I would expect because ‘the middle child’ is now sitting on his behind looking at his 139 message alerts from ‘Da boys’ or the ‘Roboxlians’.

I am torn between science next which is another video sensation on rocks – although there is a promise of some volcano eruption which may brighten things up, and the sock pile which is also groaning and, so I decide I need to go down the Montessori route and teach life-skills whilst we’re on about basalt and magma. I set up the learning rocks video on my phone and prop it up against the sock basket which looks like the earth’s crust about to blow. There are piles of school socks to pair, although I wonder if this is a pointless exercise like the fractions lesson, because afterall there aren’t any socks being worn, particularly school ones. The ‘against all odds’ girl pitches in with some pairing – ‘two make a whole’, she says. I am aglow with cross-lateral fraction teaching, although I say 100 makes too many socks and a hundredth of anything is too small a fraction to be concerned with. We drop half of them on the floor and continue to miss vital rock elements that we later regret when the ‘against all odds’ daughter has to fill out the worksheet and Google can’t find the answers. This means we must re-start the video and watch it whilst not pairing socks, making cottage pie or answering what’s app messages about the possibility of schools re-opening on 1st June whilst trying to dampen down a beaming smile. The children ask why I am so happy, because this is an oddity, when it’s mainly been scowling and frowning since school closures began. I don’t answer, concentrating instead on a volcanic eruption for the second time.

Everyone is a little scratchy, which means it’s time for the 4pm bike ride, the usual peak of the daily fallout. We’ve been talking about VE day whilst pedalling. The ‘middle child’ and ‘against all odds’ girl want to know about the Blitz in London. I tell them about how children in World War II were often evacuated to the countryside to live with people they may not have known. This comes as something of a horror to the ‘against all odds’ girl who says that sounds even worse then having to be homeschooled by your mother during the pandemic. I try to explain that really, we haven’t got it so bad because all we have do is stay at home until it is safe, and the virus is under control. I can see her thinking which is an interesting sight as there is a slight upward lift in her bicycle helmet whilst she does so. She says, the children in WWII went to school but in comparison she has to stay home, so I am wrong because they had it better because at least they got taught by qualified teachers whereas they have to put up with me who tries to wing it in maths with gone off apples and considers sock pairing to be a viable substitute for science.

The school day closes as we brake to a halt in the driveway and I get ready for my zoom chat with my friends. We have agreed to wear dangly earrings to make it ‘fun’ because I need to practice smiling and at least if everyone is looking at my ears, they won’t notice that I have gel nails hanging on at the tips of two fingers. This serves as a further blessing because I have just been asked to edit a book by a client but am hoping we can dodge zoom chats or facetime calls to discuss it because I don’t want my barely-there rouge tipped nails to be seen, although at least I have some socks so perhaps I can pose with my feet up on the desk but with my fingers behind my back, although knowing my luck, I’ll fall off the chair and the client will get some holey socks in their face and a one-fingered red-tipped bird up at the screen.