On Monday the peace of the last two months will come to a crashing halt with 6.45am bathroom wars, a rush to make fresh sandwiches for the school lunchboxes, the dash to the ferry and finally a sprint to the school bus before it leaves without us, which will happen if the boat arrives two minutes late. Back to school means back to stress, not for well-prepared and rested teachers or their eager charges, but parents. Civilised family breakfasts before work and relaxed evenings afterwards are a thing of the past, and there will be plenty of trials in between. On any normal school day daughter number two will have returned home from primary school by 3.30pm and the mobile will start ringing. I may be trying to speak to the Secretary of Education about matters of education reform, but my daughter will be asking equally tricky educational questions such as if I can think of any more homophones for the word poor (paw, pore, pour . . .). She might insist I come home immediately to 'unstick' the computer or ask why I failed to return the form for her to play netball after school. Three hours and numerous phone calls later and I'm on my journey home - but the phone calls have not ended yet. One more informs me the ink in the printer has run out. Can I buy a new cartridge? No, it's too late, I am nowhere near a computer store. As soon as I'm through the door I'll be splattered with ink - and the printer still won't work, which means daughter number one will fail to deliver her beautifully typed essay for sex-ed on the story of a sperm and will almost certainly be given a detention. Her younger sister, meanwhile, may be frustrated after hours of heroic work to make a space ship that can be dropped from a great height and land on its feet without toppling over. She used to go to a tutor to do her homework but those were the days before problem solving and projects, when she only had to do her sums, copy Chinese characters and English sentences and revise for dictation. Now she has to conduct research on the Victorians and engage in rocket science - more creative yes, but taxing for the support team. By official bedtime we'll be searching encyclopedias and the Internet to discover facts about the Eiffel Tower, Taj Mahal or Alexander Graham Bell that will impress a teacher. Ah, teachers, those super-organised people who despair of us mortals; creatures who inhabit the adult world, spend too little time with our children, fail to make sure there are two gym shoes in a PE bag and haven't mastered the Stylus 680 printer. Children should look forward to school - the fun and learning to be had from their teachers' best-planned lessons. But parents struggling to juggle it all will be notching up imaginary black marks of their own, and wondering if teacher will understand.
