Peadar de Burca: Buckets of Rain

We felt a little cheated to be honest. We give Lilly time and attention. We give her space too, because kids have to learn to work things out for themselves. We have a culture of learning in our house. Of reading. Since returning from Ireland, the PSW has for obvious reasons, taken over homework duties. She comes home every day from the plague pits of Silesia and spends hours immersed in the magical kingdom of fractions and Polish grammar. Lilly’s grandfather comes and coaches her in German. The school donated a laptop to her so she didn’t have to do remote learning on a 1994 Nokia handset.

Perhaps, we thought, she shouldn’t be in her room. So we moved her downstairs to the kitchen where I sit working. That’s how it was for the last week, the two of us at the table, typing away. I was there to help her if needed, but any time I asked, she said, “everything was fine.”

Then we checked her grades again.

More 1’s.

In some subjects she hadn’t received a grade because the number 1 didn’t adequately reflect how cataclysmically awful her score was. No doubt the teachers were torn between inserting a emoji of a turd or the opening line from the Lord’s Prayer. Needless to say, I hit the roof. I’m sorry, I know this goes against the tenets of being a modern parent, but sometimes you need to swing the hammer and let out your inner Thor. Or Jaws. This is a better description of how it

was for an hour in our household; the ending of Jaws where the shark is on the boat and biting the shit out of Quint. I’m not so sure who I was in this analogy. I may have been the one showing my teeth a lot, yet how was it I felt like I was being ripped in two? There were tears on all sides. And so many questions to which our daughter had very little to say.

A few days have passed. I’ve been thinking. Our children and yours too, have been putting up with a really shitty situation. I doubt many of them are thriving under remote learning. For some, it’s incredibly boring, not to mention incredibly easy to fake their participation. Some kids need the stimuli of a real classroom, the smell of books, the roar of their peers, the affirmation of a teacher. We’ve got a great headmaster in our school, a real maverick. It’s a happy place, full of great kids. It’s hard for me and the PSW to replicat that, but we’ll try. In the words of Bob Zimmerman, “Life is sad. Life is a bust. All ya can do is do what you must. You do what you must do and ya do it well. I’ll do it for you. Honey baby can’t you tell?”