Homeschooling Hell

(This blog contains Explicit language)…….

“Welcome to Arkham Asylum home for the criminally insane” stutters a young lady with almost square glasses wearing a pristine white lab coat with a pen tucked into her upper pocket. She continues “Down this hall we have your normal gallery of rogues from the Joker to Bane. Supervillians if you will “.
I turn my attention behind her and point “I am not going to lie I am mainly here to see if I can spot Batman. That should of been somewhat obvious by my chosen attire of cape and cowl but wait one second what is down that corridor?”
The woman mutters nervously “well now that is where we keep the really fucked up inmates… the broken we call them…you do not want or need to see them?”
“But I really insist I do” I say with a confident and calm smirk.
“Well if you insist, follow me!” the woman says abruptly now with a clear air of tension surrounding her.
We walk with a clear intention toward the first reinforced high security cell kitted out with the latest prisoner containment technology. “Within this cell is one of our most traumatised patients who came to us in 2020”
With a clear fascination
I look in front of me at a disheveled, worn out man with heavy bags under his eyes frantically scribbling on a piece of paper and muttering “its not right, its not right. The sum. I can’t make it right” before erratically bursting into a flood of tears.
“What happened to him?” I ask equally concerned and intrigued.
“Let me tell you a little story about a time when the parents of the world had to do the unthinkable” she says followed by a sudden hand gesture. The lights suddenly flicker on illuminating the once dark corridor as hundreds of occupied cells erupt into full focus.
“My God there must be thousands of them. What happened?” I wonder out loud, bewildered.
“They had to… had to…had to” she mutters terrified of what she is about to utter “home school”. A clap of lightning and a low rumble echoes around us as… they stare at me… I mean they are literally staring at me whilst I write this… oh you two want me, as the author, to elaborate a little bit. Well for you, my fictional characters, I suppose I could.
Now full disclosure I have not actually home schooled my little critters myself and believe me I say this with very little hesitation; thank actual fuck for that. Between me and you I am pretty sure the boy is feral and the girl has little regard for human life, she scares me. This lack of homeschooling is due to me and my ex being key workers which, lets be honest, gives us essentially celebrity status in this modern age. Like any self entitled celebrity we have palmed our childcare duties off to others to deal with i.e the education system. So therefore, the following hilarious take on this surreal predicament comes from the experiences told to me by… well you guys to be honest.
Now lets start to list a few basic issues with the concept of homeschooling shall we and why it is somewhat destined to end catastrophically for all involved. First of all, at a school the only distraction a child has from school work is their own mind and their friends. Lockdown removed the friend element. It made us all, children included, loners. A role I had been preparing for since early childhood and I am now somewhat a professional in the matter.
Now do me a favour take a look around the room you are currently situated in. You see the endless amount of shiny toys and means of entertainment scattered around you that were bought lovingly by yourself, friends and family? These were essentially a means to distract the monstrosities of the womb for five minutes whilst you tried to sneak in a quick bath or eat your tea without it being force fed into your mouth like you had just woken up in a food themed edition of a ‘Saw’ style trap.
Well that fucking backfired, didn’t it? What a monumental fuck up of an idea that was, because just you try to teach a four year old basic math when their call of the wild beckons. Ok, not the call of the wild but the call of Thomas trains, YouTube, video games and whatever other wanking things the kid is obsessed with. To be honest it doesn’t even have to be something he likes. A line of ants could crawl past and he would become transfixed as if his entire life depended on this miniature fellowship of the ring making it to the end of Mt Room. “Fuck you math, Frodo has separated from the rest of the fellowship and has become entangled in Shelob’s (the house spider) web” he exclaims. To be fair it would not take much for me to be distracted from math, my enthusiasm for which is about the same level as following a leprechaun to the end of a rainbow and finding a pot of chocolate coins.
That is another issue with home-schooling, you have to pretend to be enthusiastic about every subject. Even the ones you hate and could give zero fucks about. “Oh algebra my favourite, Timmy! Go do me a quick favour lad and get the bottle of whisky to settle my sheer, overwhelming excitement… no Timmy dear the big bottle… don’t worry about pouring it into a glass I will just swig it”. I am not a teacher. I can not make this shit fun. Teachers are incredible.

When I was a teachers assistant at a school I was bewildered at the passion, sense of fun and enthusiasm these remarkable humans could instil into a classroom. A mixture of a stand up comedian, educator, referee and parental figure teachers are truly incredible at what they do. I am shit at what they do. Truly and utterly shit. I can barely handle and discipline two children let alone an army of the fuckers all eagerly anticipating the next opportunity to piss on (sometimes literally) my well thought out, structured day of education.
I am going to be honest half the time I don’t have a fucking clue about what I am supposedly teaching in any given day. I like to think I am a relatively smart individual, not exceptional in any sense but smart enough. However, just to double check we are teaching these kids how to get decent GSCEs, correct? Because for a moment I thought I had been handed a training manual on how to work at NASA at the weekend and simultaneously trying to cure cancer on weekdays.
Just as an example, what the actual fuck is a passive verb or for that matter a modal verb? When did grammar start its own movement to become recognised? A verb can not simply be a verb as it is no longer happy with the confines set by it’s binary description. The LBGTQ+ movement is incredibly valid (humans cannot be categorised so simply) yet grammar surely does not need to have an endless list of subcategories. A verb is a doing word. Simple, lets move on shall we.
To conclude, I think we all should admire and thank our teachers from the bottom of our hearts for the work they do for our children. We have been in a fraction of their shoes for a fraction of the time but essentially we have marched back to Clarks thrown the shoes on the counter and said “don’t worry about the refund, just take the fucking things back they don’t fit, have ruined my feet and they give me huge ass blisters” before hightailing it out of the store before the assistant can even blink. What is more we need to really be thankful we are not the parents of Hogwarts students. Can you imagine trying to fucking teach Quidditch in a small ass back garden or having Professor Snape on Zoom as he teaches you defence against the dark arts? Actually to be honest that sounds pretty damn cool, doesn’t it?