s the government considers a phased reopening of schools, let’s hear it for parents who’ve toughed it out home-schooling their children. Well done, everyone, but you do realise that you’re not real teachers, don’t you? The phased reopening of schools looks set to be complicated, just as for many disadvantaged pupils home education has proved chaotic and calamitous, with long-term consequences for social injustice. Many children have accessed little, if any, online learning. It has emerged that the promised 200,000 laptops to help them may not even arrive until late May/June. Schools have experienced huge difficulties trying to access the free school meal voucher scheme. I could go on, but the point seems clear enough: educators educate, but that’s not all they do. Obviously, parents deserve praise, and lots of it. The lockdown continues to be challenging for children and carers alike – keeping on top of it is an enormous achievement. I know I’m lucky to have a teenager in this situation, that it would have been totally different with a younger child requiring constant hands-on supervision. You’d have to be a parenting saint not to sometimes find it stressful and difficult. Still, parents are only dealing with their child or children. Even after everything that’s happened, how many of us could claim to truly comprehend what it’s like to educate and care for whole classes, and entire schools, full of children? Whatever some of us may tell ourselves during these weeks, parents haven’t been doing what teachers do. Not that they were supposed to – this has been an emergency, not some bizarre competitive parenting contest. However, had it been, it wouldn’t even have been close. What has played out (if all went to plan) is more akin to a temporary parent-cum-teaching assistant, steered online by their school. It’s not running a full class, or several of them, and doing everything else that educators do. The childcare aspect alone has hit home for parents during this period – the fact that schools enable them to do something as fundamental as go to work. Then there’s the extracurricular stuff: the shocking amount of often unrecognised (and unpaid) proto-social work that goes on all over the country in Britain’s poorer schools, with many teachers having to feed and clothe their most vulnerable pupils. So pat yourself on the back if you’ve worked hard home-schooling your children, keeping them interested, happy and, of course, educated. At the same time, spare a thought for teachers who do all this, and more, but for many more children. People rightly applaud NHS staff and key workers, but perhaps our educators also deserve a lot more appreciation than they generally get. It’s a tough job; sometimes the toughest parts aren’t even in the official job description. During lockdown, parents may been committed, patient, resourceful and lots of other great and admirable things, but they have not been teachers. Forget feminism - can we talk about my hair? What is the feminist position on caring about resembling a lockdown hell-hag? Lockdown has proved useful for working out exactly how vain you are, starting with how early your vanity kicked in. Mine is kicking in with a vengeance. Seriously, the state of me. What is the Zoom etiquette for popping a wastepaper basket over your head? My skin is more pallid than usual and would be “end-stage consumption” on the Farrow & Ball paint chart. Now, after weeks of waiting for my hairdressing scissors/hair dye to arrive, I’ve reached peak Methuselah’s grandmother. My nails look as if I’ve spent the last two months trying to claw my way out of a crypt. I suspect my eyebrows have developed their own eco-system. And on it goes. I’m not even that high maintenance. Once I could have said “road maintenance” and got a laugh; now I’d just get sympathy and, worse, murmured agreement. I’m being facetious, but this is a feminist mind-melt. Am I a gender traitor for pining for my hair stylist or just a shallow idiot? In the past, I’ve tended to be impatient with people over-fretting about the rightness/wrongness of makeup and sundry grooming rituals – my attitude is, do what you like, with the emphasis on “you”. Still, even now, the core feminist questions apply. Should appearance matter so much? Who or what tells us that it should? When it comes to societal pressure, what conditioning are women also buckling under? All these issues are as valid as ever, but there are limits and for some of us, those limits are manifesting in our skin, nails and hair. Let’s just say that I wouldn’t be 100% uninterested in sourcing a head-to-toe face mask. Give space cadet Elon Musk a reality check The Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, doesn’t seem inclined to let coronavirus interfere with his one-tech-tycoon crusade to make us equate “billionaire” with “billions of stupid”. He has been raging about the US lockdown, describing it as “fascist” and “against all constitutional rights”. Previously, he derided the “panic”, passed on what’s been criticised as dubious science to his 33 million Twitter followers, incorrectly declared children to be “essentially immune” and much more. He is entitled to favour lifting the lockdown. He’s also entitled to be concerned about Tesla. (Though don’t cry him a river – along with others, Musk’s company, Space X, has just landed a multimillion-dollar contract for a Nasa moon landing project.) However, contrary to what his outsize sense of entitlement is telling him, he isn’t the last word on every subject. The effect of Musk’s sustained public protest has been to make the arena of techy super-moguls look ill informed, brattish and grotesquely self-interested. After a public outcry, Victoria Beckham reconsidered her decision to furlough staff in her fashion company. Maybe Musk could also try reading the global room. • Barbara Ellen is an Observer columnist