One word? When seven would do…

But I guess that kind of goes with the job description eh?!

I read an interpretation of the rabbit, squirrel and other animals tale from this site somewhere recently (could have been EO newsletter or similar HE communication) and it’s been one of those pieces of writing / theories which has sparked off loads of ponderings in me. I have just ordered the book from amazon actually and will see whether it continues to inspire me .

The other quote I love is the one by William Butler Yeats – “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” which for me always reminds me of why we are doing the whole Home Ed thing and also why I strive toward autonomy in our approach.

Barbara and I had some very interesting (but fuelled by alcohol and the wrong side of midnight for real lucidity and sense!) conversations about education, learning styles, approach and the whole Home Ed thing and as ever when I spend a lot of time talking to someone else about it in great details I came away feeling challenged, inspired, motivated, confident and with a sort of quivery excited feeling about what we are doing. Of course I have my doubts and fears and niggles and I am as ever aware that while I might be all passionate and feel I have found the One True Path my children might well not view it in such a way 😉 We talked about the (possibly inevitable) school curiosity we half expect at some pount from them and how we’ll deal with it, qualifications and what they actually mean, the relevance of some things to real life and the motivation for people of doing things they want to do and are interested in as opposed to things they know they have to do but are not really passionate about.

It was one of those evenings where you are just drunk and in the right sort of company to keep feeling you have suddenly stumbled across the answers to life, the universe and everything only to realise you might have the answer but are not actually sure what the question was any more (with full credit to Douglas Adams for that idea, but it was very relevant 😉 )

Chris, understandably given his job as a senior school maths teacher, felt that Maths GCSE along with English and a further 3 was a bare minium qualification wise and I have to concede that despite not actually believing it myself I am aware that enough of the rest of society does believe it that it probably is a bare minimum, but as Barbara explained you don’t need to be studying the curriculum for x years in order to achieve it. You can do the whole autonomous maths thing until they reach an age whereby their numeracy levels and understanding of maths processes, albeit without realising the names for such theories, are at a level where you whizz through the syllabus, putting names and categories to all they know and then sit the exam to get the bit of paper just to have some sort of universally recognised evidence of your ability although you got there by a different route. My example being that although I don’t actually know what a simultaneous equation is by name and Ady didn’t realise what a number bond was if you gave us a maths paper with questions asking us to demonstrate those skills we would still have them (and yes I know that is probably because we were taught them at school many years ago but a lot of the things are used in a practical way in real life). Ady did poorly at maths (and various other subjects actually) at school but playing darts and working behind a bar for years means his mental arithmatic is probably better than some people with excellent maths grades, I know carpet fitters who struggled to read and write but could work out area sums in their heads without giving it a second thought and the builder who did our extension is one of the least articulate people I know but could calculate building materials needed for a job from line drawn plans in his head to the nearest inch of wood and ounce of nails. If you phrased the sum in the right context these people would pass with flying colours without ever actually knowing the complex maths processes they are completing.

This is becoming a little random and without one clear point (which is possibly indicative of the original conversations!) but where I was trying to go with this was the following points:

1. qualifications – less an indication of true aptitude than a demonstration of ability to pass an exam. I don’t want to train my children to regurgitate information in a verbatim manner without actually comrehending any of what they are churning out or indeed really ‘learning’ any of it. I want to bring all their learning alive so that every bit of information they process is of use to them, is something they need or want to know and indeed will be ‘used’ in some way by them. However because I do realise that to be considered a success to the rest of the world they also need bits of paper to show they are capable of retaining knowledge and bringing it back out again on demand when we reach a point where they grasp why we are doing it and can see the value of having those bits of paper too we will spend some time transferring that learning into a process for getting the qualification too – I’d just rather Davies learnt about having four apples and giving two to Scarlett he had divided them in half and then tell him that after he’d done it, than to spend ages talking about hypothetical apples and children and him never identifying the link between the two – or indeed thinking that maths is actually to do with apples 😉 I know there are areas where it simply will not crop up pratically – I imagine pythagorus’ theory will not be something he needs to learn in order to go about his daily life, but hopefully by getting his head round other maths processes in his own way by the time we need to cover the more complicated and slightly obscure ones he will already have his mind working in that way and be able to compute it more easily.

2. Homogenous education is very unlikely to happen here. In the same way that I think trying to teach a class of 30 children all at once is mental I also think even trying to get two children to will be tricky and perhaps not appropriate. Davies learnt his colours from things like building blocks and sticklebricks, Scarlett learnt hers from a Dora book of colours. Davies learnt a lot about not so attractive traits from his Mr Men books – Tarly tends to learn from playing with Davies and me intervening when there is greediness or untidyness going on 😉 In the same way as the rabbit should not be forced to swim or the bird to run once we are past basic numeracy and literacy unless they are actually wanting to learn about the same things I see no reason why they should have to. By Scarlett’s age Davies had a very good knowledge of dinosaurs, Tarly’s is not nearly so good, but she does understand about bees and honey and caterpillars and butterflies as well as he does at two years older. For me the whole idea of Home Ed was that the children received a tailor made education and that means one which is personal to them each. There will of course be some overlaps, and I guess if we were following a curriculum we might be approaching it at different levels.

Ady and I have talked more about HE and I have a sort of loose plan in my head now which gives me reassurance for not just being a total lazy bugger and will also be wheeled out as our master plan to share with anyone who doubts the sanity of what we are doing. It goes thus:

Next 2 years – taking Davies to 7 and Tarly to 5. We continue in our current vein really. We do lots of reading aloud and trips to the library hopefully fostering a love of books and early reading skills leading to having two children who can read by the end of this period. We have various reading schemes and early reader stuff around which will aid this as and when. I have all but given up on 100EL for Davies and I think phonics have done their job in teaching him the names and sounds of each letter but seem to be failing to get to the next level with blending them together to make words. I just don’t think that is the way his mind works. My next trick is to bring out some of the look and read type ones where whole words are recognised and see if that makes more sense to him. Scarlett clearly wouldn’t be ready for that approach but she might just be ready for learning the individual letters and you never know the blending thing might come logically to her next. So that’s literacy! Numeracy will be appproached in much the same way but I think I might lead the play a little more towards maths type stuff such as toy shops with the till and the money and I’m pondering pocket money again. In our house full of toys, educational resources and books we should easily be able to provide all the early years basics and continue with the additional stuff our children get on top by being out and about instead of locked in a classroom such as their bigger general knowledge and love of obscure questions 😉

The next five years – Davies 7 to 12, Tarly 5 to 10 will be slightly more focused with us building on the numeracy and literacy to appropriate levels – hopefully they will be independantly reading during this stage and my plan is a series of project type work. This was something I enjoyed hugely as a child and I think really fostered my creativity and imagination. We would do a project per term at school on either a completely self chosen topic or from a list the teacher provided and using a scrapbook we would research our subject, create writing and art work around it, do stuff like questionaires and interviews, read books around the topic and so on. As HEers we could obviously supplement this even more with field trips, internet assistance, art and craft, related things like clothing, food and role play too. I envisage cunningly choosing the list of topics to take in science, history and geography as they go and will probably set them quiz type tasks related to their project which take in numeracy and literacy too.

For the next five years – Davies 12-17 and Tarly 10-15 we would aim to really firm up educationally to ensure they are not finishing compulsory school age with ‘nothing to show for it’. By then I would hope they would show some aptitude or inclination toward a particular career path or area of expertise and have some idea of where they want to progres after HE. I would like to start working, probably only on one or two subjects at a time towards some qualifications. I am very hopeful that they will be motivated enough to ‘want’ to do this in both working towards personal career aims and in having aims and challenges to meet inspiring them, whilst continuing to learn about what inspires and interests them. While the basic maths and english may not be what grabs them I will probably try and convince them of their value in terms of a basic proof of their ability. I will be very sad if there are no other topics given the vast range of GCSEs available that they are inclined to follow and get a qualification in – feeling that past Math and English unless a subject is pertinant to their actual interests and what they think they would like to do with their lives it is probably irrelevant. If one of them decides they want to be a chef then there is probably little point in them learning physics but they might want to pick up nutrition, french for learning cookery terms, geography for learning about where food stuffs come from and so on. I’m not expecting my 10 year old daughter to know what she wants to be when she grows up (I’m 31 and still not sure!) but I know that by 10 I certainly had subjects I favoured above others and even stuff I did in my own time which was able to be linked to educational stuff (I liked word puzzles, reading, writing stories and illustrating them for example) and those would have been more logical for me to work on and gain qualifications in than spending time struggling with the ones I found difficult or just boring and only acheiving average in all of them as a result.

I’m sure I’ll come back to this and it is probably more an affirmation of what I was already planning but I wanted to get it written down and would welcome comments and thoughts on it as it is, after all, the result of a big blue bottle of wine and could all be total nonsense!!