‘Killjoy’ Tudors taking fun out of kids’ hols
There are phrases you long to here at Christmas, such as “daddy, we didn’t know whether to get you the Aston Martin in Quantum of Solace silver, or black – so we got you both”.
Then there is “we know you love great music, but it was so difficult to choose between the new Britney CD or Neil Young’s fab 1968 live recording, Sugar Mountain. So look under the tree, daddy. Yes, they’re both there”.
(Actually, while I am hopeful the former scenario will take place on Thursday, the latter will not. I’ve already bought myself the Britney album because I couldn’t bear the disappointment of not being given it).
But what goes around comes around, and what St Nick giveth in the way of fun and enjoyment, the local education authority taketh away.
And so my younger daughter returned home towards the end of term and uttered the phrase that shakes every parent to the core come holiday time: “Daddy, I’ve got to do a project on the Tudors.”
A school project. In the holidays. That’s got be an infringement of some sort of human right, such as the inalienable right to be a child.
Will teachers be spending the Christmas holidays rattling off days’ of marking, lesson planning and preparing individual learning packages? Yes? No? Either way, it doesn’t matter because that’s what they are paid to do.
Children, however, are meant to have fun during the holidays. It’s why they are called holidays.
This whole school project business has got madly out of hand. Over the years, we’ve done battle with the Egyptians, the Romans, the Tudors, Tudor explorers, equatorial rainforests, Emmeline Pankhurst and now the Tudors again, all of them assigned at primary school.
These projects have to be researched, written and completed at home, taking up day after day, and requiring heavy parental input. There are introductions, glossaries, bibliographies, the like of which I didn’t face until university. And no, I wasn’t in the remedial set at school, except for maths.
And don’t give me this “the children are meant to complete the work on their own”. Everyone knows parents have to help, in loco teacheris. Leaving a nine-year-old to compile an informative, eye-catching and most, importantly, assessment fulfilling project is like asking a squirrel to rewire a plug.
The whole experience gives extra resonance to the Band Aid song, Do They Know It’s Christmas? It’s only now that I realise Bono’s famous line “Well, tonight thank God it’s them instead of you”, was in fact a heart-rending cry to those parents not up to their ears in the Tudor lineage.
I was so upset I lodged a protest about the unseasonal demands of studying the Tudors during yuletide and we have had the deadline to complete the project extended. It’s a small but significant reprieve for the spirit of Christmas.
