Despite beginning this venture with the highest aspirations, we are announcing the closure of our beloved homeschool after less than 24 hours.
Our principal, your mother, would have delivered this news in person. Unfortunately, she was up late commiserating over homeschool duties with the other neighborhood homeschool principals and was unable to get out of bed for morning announcements.
At this time, we believe she is suffering from a major hangover and not the coronavirus despite the two ailments sharing identical symptoms. She is self-quarantining for the remainder of the week, just to be safe, and not fielding any bullshit questions about Latin verb conjugation or meals.
We know there are parents out there who can both love their children unconditionally and also teach them Common Core mathematics. If this global pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that we are not those parents. Just because we chose to close our homeschool, it does not mean your mother and I do not love you. It means we love you enough to know we can either love you or teach you algebra, not both.
Take your friend, Billy Mathers. His parents took a six-month hiatus from their jobs to attend to his homeschooling. They devised a curriculum, including zero screen time, covering every aspect of his education. They then live-streamed their homeschool to help other parents set up their own homeschools, proving to us how stupid we were to even attempt homeschooling.
The Mathers care deeply about Billy’s long-term education, which is why Billy will go to a better college than you and earn more money over the course of his lifetime. But the Mathers don’t love Billy the way we love you, which is why we plan to allow you as much screen time as you want during the next three months of quarantine.
Always remember, at some indeterminate point in the future, when you despise your job and are barely able to cover the mortgage, that we loved you with your very own iPad. We admit we are failures with the schooling thing, but know we were always prepared to throw money at our failure.
We are Costco parents. We are Amazon Prime progenitors. Come to us when you need something that can be summoned out of the smallest factory in the feeblest country on the planet during any hour of the day. But expecting us to spend all our time teaching you the finer points of our cultural and historical norms is not what we signed up for.
What holds us together as a family is that we look down on the educational system. You kids despise getting up every morning and spending your lives being told what to do by underpaid teachers. We hate packing lunches, gathering supplies, and tarrying you to and from school whilst being judged through your performance by those same underpaid teachers. But when we, your parents, become the underpaid teachers, our faith in the system falters. In order that we survive as a family, we must have something to blame. And that is the teachers.
The Mathers are live-streaming a lesson on the American Revolution in an hour. Join the webcast if you’re bored, or don’t, whatever. Text us if you need anything. Your mother and I will be in the bedroom self-quarantining because we love you and don’t want to pass along any of our germs or failures.