A Pupil Who Saw His Fable and Credited His Mum

When the third-graders of a primary school in Sveta Nedelja, near Zagreb, came back to their classroom in spring 2020, after weeks of lessons on laptops, their teacher showed them what they had made while they were away.

During the remote weeks she had set them fables, then asked each of them to write a fable as a short play. She collected the plays into an e-book for the class. Now she put it on the big screen and told them, proudly, how well they had done.

Some nodded. One boy announced, loudly, that he did not remember that.

She scrolled to the plays and showed them their own names. There was a silence of a kind third-graders do not usually produce.

Then the boy put up his hand and set the record straight. He had, he said, never seen that in his life. But his mum really deserved a five for writing it.

A five is the top mark in Croatia. The class laughed. The teacher laughed loudest. The grade had been given and the term was closed.

Remote learning was supposed to be a test of the children, and it turned out to be a test of their parents, marked by the children.

There was a second correction that week. For PE during the remote months, the teacher had posted exercise videos and asked families to film their children doing them. Back in the schoolyard, a few minutes into a real PE lesson, another boy stopped, red in the face, and told her he had watched all the videos. He just had not realised it was this hard to actually do.

I know both of these boys. I have been the mother of both.

In Brussels, during lockdown, I wrote, or, as I put it at the time, “helped with”, the middle one’s project on the water cycle. It had a diagram, a poem and a short story narrated by a raindrop. It received a merit, and a comment from the teacher praising “the mature vocabulary”.

The middle one read the comment, looked at me across the kitchen and said: “That’s yours, then.”

And the eldest did the PE videos, or at least watched them, from the sofa, with a bowl of crisps, describing it as “active rest”.

Both of them, when school reopened, were found out within a week. I was found out too. The water-cycle teacher, at the next parents’ evening, asked whether I had enjoyed the project.

I said yes. I said the raindrop was my favourite. She said it was hers too, and gave me a look I last received from a teacher in 1989.