My kids are just 4 and 6.
I think a few months of disturbed schooling won't write their futures off.
However, in the home environment, my wife cannot seem to settle them into a learning routine.
Without the energy burnt at school and after school club, our house rings with cried and shouts often until 11pm.
I take them out when I can but I'm still working, busier than ever not having my usual team around me.
What does amaze me is not what the kids do not know but what the adults do not know.
I've recently quoted for taking down 'pines'
I made the mistake of trying to educate the client in my cheerfull pedagogical manner, only to be curtly told that I was wrong, these were pines because they had needles, cones and clearly smelt of pine.
We will see if I get the job but I'm not optimistic.
Another recent discussion on a FB gardening page became weirdly heated when I suggested that knowing the difference between a horse and sweet chestnut was as important as knowing the difference between a daffodil bulb and an onion.
Several posters had been claiming that they or others had always eaten horse chestnuts, others having no knowledge of the game of conkers and others accusing me of arrogance and bullying for correcting people who might never have been privileged enough to have seen a horse chestnut before.
I'm surprised because I didn't grow up in the countryside but on the edge and could tell the difference between the two at 3 years old having walked with my father in the local woodlands for both, to eat and to play and plant.
I'm not trained in school teaching methods but I can and do show my kids the flowers, fungi, leaves, animals and recently the stars and satellites, hoping to catch sight of the Starlink.
I plant bulbs, capture insects and let my 6 year old think she is controlling the mower.
I try to teach them the importance of re-cycling and the pleasure in dropping bottles down the recycling hatch to hear them break below and of course I read in English most nights I've the energy for it though I often fall asleep before they do.
Stuart