with friends. An ex work colleague to be exact – she got out in the same wave of redundancies I did. In about three weeks time she’s off to Australia, and she came at least partly to talk about blogs. Obviously she’ll be using wordpress 😉
Dd varied in her behaviour today. She is getting annoyed that she isn’t included in adult conversation, but what she really means is that she thinks everyone should talk about the things she wants to talk about. When I suggest she listens to what we are saying and trys to join in she tells me she doesn’t want to talk about whatever it is. I’m not sure what to do about this – I would have thought that she would naturally want to join in with adults but she doesn’t seem inclined to put the effort in – she wants ppl, all ppl to do as she does. Then again, I guess her point of view is fairly natural too. 😉
Dp and I are considering curriculum. Again. I do think it might make life easier to have a set of boxes/ books to just pull stuff out of when we are feeling uninspired, but at the same time, part of the reason that we aren’t interested in school is because we don’t want to abdicate our responsibility for her education, and surely buying a curriculum is just another form of this? (Although knowing the lengths of research ppl go to in choosing a home curriculum, I think that that charge is not particularly true…) But how do you decide what to teach if you’ve decided to teach?
Reeling, writhing and fainting in coils is my best suggestion so far.
We’ve been talking tonight about D-Day. Apparently someone somewhere is complaining about how little “the youth of today” (wonderful phrase) know about it all. That lead to a discussion about what we know about it – not an awful lot really. More sort of hearsay gleaned from stories, novels and films than anything accurate – my History O level (Grade B I’ll have you know) stopped at Gladstone and Disraeli – not that I could tell you when that was. And slightly heretical question – why do we need to know about it? I know all about those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, but I’m not planning on starting any world wars, so ?
Comments
7 responses to “a pleasant afternoon”
I did sort of start with the curriculum type route, for pretty much the resons you describe, and I have to say it was a total nightmare. We both hated it, no matter how much i pretended I was in charge of it, it just loomed every day as stuff that needed to get done. I’ll think about my resonings some more re this, for discussion at Lowestoft ;-), as I can’t sit with my back, and can’t speak with my mouth, so I’m pretty anti-scoial right now 🙂
I think it’s important to know about stuff like D-Day – I think we should have an idea about *how* we got to this point, about things other people have done to improve our lives, etc. Having said that, my history is … well, patchy would be a compliment!
C’s grandpa has a video called ‘The Manchester Blitz’ – Poppy pointed it out to me yesterday, and said that she’d been “answering questions about that” – turned out she’d been doing some of the WW2 pages in her history workbook last week!
Re curricula … I think it’s perfectly possible to have plenty of stuff that you can pull out when lacking inspiration without it being a curriculum 🙂 E.g. the above-mentioned workbooks, ‘educational’ PC games, piles of comics with only 10% of the stuff filled in, puzzles, interesting DVD’s, and so on.
Do you ever wonder about how (or whether) it is all slotting together though? I know dd isvery young (have to keep reminding myself, she is very young!) so I shouldn’t really be getting stressed at the moment, but I do sort of wonder about the well roundedness bit. Not that you necessarily get that from school (patchy would be a compliment for all sorts of areas of my school based knowledge, geography being the best example!).
Oh I know, I’m just fretting over nothing at the moment. Let’s put it down to *still* feeling crap. 🙁
wrt the slotting together, I do know what you mean, I worry about that too – but even now sometimes things ‘slot together’ in *my* head, years later. At the end of the day no-one but the children can sdo that part, imo.
Well, Alison’s description of “stuff” is certainly a perfect desciption of what i might loosely refer to as our “available learning resources”!!!! Come for a visit Jax and i’ll show you! lol!
As regards curricula – well i think you have to be an extremely particular person to follow it in the way its intended or in a way you fully intend – and if you don’t i suspect it would become another expensive thing to feel guilty about. I certainly would here. On the other hand, whenever we have a “topic” come up, i whip together related stuff and add to it here and there and i suppose that becomes my “box of stuff to pull out.” That doesn’t mean i wouldn’t buy a “section” of Sonlight – i probably would/will and use it like i would an OU course, an interesting stand-alone experience. But in all honesty, if you are worrying about patchiness, then a curriculum is only someones view of rounded anyway. Given what my school called a rounded experience, i would be dubious about doing it from that point of view.
The only time i will change that view is if a particular child requests it and then i’ll do it. But i refuse to do “school”, as far as i can see if i am going to force them through a box of stuff then i might as well just drop them off at the gates of somewhere, because my person view of the value of HE will have been lost. So if Moo wants a curriculum for example, thats fine but it will be her discipline to get through it, or interest us in what she is doing so we join in.
I like having a curriculum. There, I’ve said it. Not that anyone’s terribly surpised.;) Before we bought much of anything I sat down and thought about how Catie learns things – she loves being read to, and learns a lot through conversation, but she’s not particularly hands-on, and she’s not good at being told stuff. Then I chose some things which I liked the sound of, which I thought she would enjoy doing, and which would build from where she was. I’m quite keen on progressive curriculum for maths and english, but we drop things or at least take a break if they’re not working, and afaics, the beauty of using a curriculum as a home-edder is that you can go at the speed of the child, as opposed to in school where every child must go at the same speed, however inappropraite that speed may be.
Ah – but then i suspect you are indeed a “particular sort of person” – and in both senses of the word – you do like it (so thats fine) and you do like to do with it what you want. So you feel good – whereas i suspect i would start to see it as a monster in the corner against who i could “rebel”!!!!
Like i say, i don’t have a problem with curriculum at all – i just can’t see it working for me – particulalry as most of them seem to have God very wound up into them, which i wouldn’t really want :~)