I’ve blogged over on WW but wanted to carry on my daily account too.
A fairly easy day today, there was a teaching assistant and her charge, a 15 year old selective mute boy here this morning so I spent quite a while chatting to the TA who was really nice and seemed very pleased to find someone who had not only heard of SM but actually knew someone with it. We fed and dealt with animals and then spent ages finding the key for the workshop to get loppers out. Then down to the orchard where they guy who is pruning them all was in situ so I spent ages talking to him about how that works and learning various stuff about grafting, pruning, apple varieties and more. He was a real character and loved to talk :).
The kids did some pruning of lopped branches preparing it for firewood and brash heaps using the bow saw and pruning saws. Ady and I put a fence up and then I got to drive the tractor back to the yard pulling the trailer – very exciting :). I showed the kids how to do it and they both had a little go in the field. Davies did really well, mastering the steering and the throttle but Scarlett went in with her usual bull in a china shop approach and having not properly listened to me forgot which was the brake, panicked and put her foot down on the accelerator instead, yelling at me to help. I ran after it, grabbed the engine kill lever but as she jerked forward I put it forward instead making it go faster so had to run again to turn it off. Wish we’d caught that on video 😉
Lunch was more sausages, cooked by the unpronouceable guy and shared with him and another of the people regularly here. I have no idea whether people here are on the payroll or volunteering but he comes every day and tinkers with tools and welds things. He was asking about Home Ed and was very supportive. UG then said how lovely D&S are and that they are a great example of why kids should be HE from the start as his ex has 3 HE kids who are in and out of school. HE seems very prevalent here in Glastonbury but I suspect there are more than the odd case of parents being too stoned to get kids to school… 😉
It was our initial plan to get the pizza oven cooking today but we ended up lingering over lunch and then UG was very insistent we had some cider with him as it goes so well with sausages so we had half a pint each pouring it the way he’d been taught in Spain to get air into it, he called it ‘breaking the mother’ which actually seemed to mean most ended up on the patio but it was fairly rough cider so we didn’t mind too much ;).
We then walked into town, had a wander round, decided we’d left it too late for pizza so got some other stuff for dinner instead and then walked back. The neighbour wandered over at one point and invited us back on Sunday for another swim (hurrah!) and I checked in some weekend guests who had arrived with no one to tell them anything or even show them their room as everyone else seemed to be out. We’ve been invited back here ‘any time you like’ which is nice, even for the festival if we like. If we can go round everywhere getting that sort of invite we may never go back to a house again ;).
We put the animals away, had dinner and now it’s time to change the sofa and table into a bed!
I always expected there would be lots of HEors in Hebden Bridge, but apparently there are very few. I guess when there is a critical mass of Hebden/Glasto type parents it changes the schools quite a lot too.
Comment by Jan — 26 March 2011 @ 9:29 pm
Ooh, only just catching up here and nice to see that knowing T made you well-informed but sad to see a 15yo still struggling… hoping very much not to be in that sit’n.
Comment by Joanna — 27 March 2011 @ 9:47 pm
Jo he’s been struggling for a long time without help it seems. I didn;t hear any talk of a mother but he lives with his Dad and has been utterly failed by school. The woman working with him now said he is really behind in literacy and numeracy and is very un-creative but was left in mainstream school unsupported til pretty recently. Apparently he was always considered ‘no trouble’ as he was quiet and just sat there despite clearly struggling with the work. Things went wrong when he got badly bullied and ended up throwing a chair at someone so was excluded and they turned to Home Ed. I don’t know who is paying for the woman we met, I suspect the state?
They seem to have now decided he doesn’t need to do exams and can be helped to find what he enjoys and does well at and encourage him with that and general life skills. He was okay at eye contact and I got nods and head shakes from him but apparently his SM was fairly gradual from a much later age than T. I am sure this situation willl be nothing like yours.
Comment by Nic — 27 March 2011 @ 10:20 pm