Making It Up

as we go along

school

Monday morning changes.

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So today, this happened.

first day of school

Which was a bit startling. Big has, on her choice, gone to the local academy, joining year 11 to do GCSEs. She looked very happy and excited in her new uniform, which fitted her pretty well, and was thrown together in a week. All good fun.

(Or not. If you follow me on twitter, and experienced the saga of The Wrong Blazer. Still, fixed now, although I do have the original one to send back for a refund yet.) 

I don’t quite know how I feel about this change. It’s complicated. Maybe I’ll wait until the end of the week to process it properly and write it up then. The main thing is that she drove this, so I support her, even if a tiny bit of me feels like a home ed failure. The lesson to take from this is not to create your identity around your children, but around yourself. Still a work in progress there apparently.

Anyway, once she set off, that left 3 children to focus on. So far this morning, Smallest has done her hammering set, then a bunch of stencils, and then found an addition/subtraction game I picked up cheap in Lidl and worked through the easiest set of sums. She’s now trying to teach Tigerboy to add and subtract, mainly be whispering the answers to him so that he can call them out 😉

cooperative hammering

He’s had a go at hammering, spent some time on CBeebies on the computer and is now point blank refusing to coperate with being taught maths by a 5 year old. No change there then. 

Small is here as well. He’s working on a plan of education for this year. I hope. We’re not precisely seeing eye to eye on that one, but it will sort out in time one way or another.

So, basically, we’re still home educating. But we’re school using too. Like I said, changes.

Who are your friends?

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Take a look around at your nearest and dearest friends. What do you have in common with them? Probably some interests that drew you together. Perhaps you are neighbours. Maybe you met them via your children’s interests – I’ve met two parents through Brownies and swimming since we’ve moved here that we’ve spent time with outside of those activities.

Most of my friends share a common interest in home education. Some of them are older than me, some younger. One is even exactly the same age as me, so I’ll grant you that I could have met her at school 😉 Actually though, I met them through groups, through blogs, at camps and on lists. (In the interests of full disclosure I will say that one person I met through home ed turned out to be someone I was at school with. Lost contact with her after that though, and then met her again on a list I think. Small world eh?)

And most of those friends are not within six months of my age. In fact, Tim left (his) senior school before I got to mine 😉 I would not have been able to socialise with them easily, if at all, at school. And that’s supposing that our teachers allowed talking in class which, mainly, they didn’t. And I don’t find socialising easy, I’m not comfortable in big groups, definitely not the life and soul of the party. School didn’t give me those skills.

What gave me the skills I needed was my time at university and then work. At university I mixed with mature students as well as those my own age, ppl from all walks of life and all around the country. I got to broaden my horizons and encounter all sorts, both in lectures, social activities, and in holiday and weekend work. (Working in pubs and as a cleaner definitely opened my eyes after in some ways quite a sheltered upbringing involving a private school for girls.)

Once I got to full time work it broadened my social horizons hugely. Oh and there was Mensa, which I have to thank (or blame? 😉 ) for my relationship with Tim. In fact, apart from facebook friends, there is only one person (plus her family) I’m still in touch with from school. So much for the lasting friendships eh?

My children, as you are very aware, don’t go to school. It does mean that it feels we have to work a little harder to find them friendship opportunities. They have lots of home ed friends, but not many of them are particularly close by, although they do now stay in touch via google chat, email and various online games such as build-a-bearville. They go to Beavers, brownies and swimming as well, and are looking to join the swimming club. We also then have to work to make sure they see their friends – Big has started what will hopefully be a regular activity of going to a funplay session at the pool once a week with a swimming/ Brownie friend. She gets to meet other girls there too. (And probably boys, but she isn’t that interested in them. Yet.)

She does tend to gravitate to children around her own age, but she isn’t forced to. One of her Brownie friends is a year younger, the other 2 weeks. The children in her swimming class are probably within 2-3 years of her age.

The children at her home ed group are mainly younger than her, it’s just the way it is atm. When we went bowling last week they all grouped together to help the youngest bowler with very little assistance from any adult. By contrast the three children recently pulled out of school were too nervous and shy to stay and join in. 🙁

Why do ppl think that school helps with socialisation? I don’t get it. It’s a completely false environment, not at all representative of the rest of the world. What transferable social skills do ppl think you learn there? (That *is* what ppl mean by socialisation isn’t it?) I think a lot of ppl learn how to bully or be bullied. How to cheat, pretend to be someone other than they are, how to fit in with the crowd. I daresay for some children it is a lifeline, an escape from a home life that isn’t good for them. And I daresay for some it’s absolutely fine, neither particularly positive, nor particularly negative, just a place where they spend the day. But I don’t think it’s the be all and end all of social skills, and I think a society that has come to believe that should be taking a long hard look at itself.

Let’s face it, family is the natural unit of society. with extended family, neighbourhoods and communities spreading out around it. School is a johny come lately whippersnapper, a manmade institution that seems to lurch from crisis to crisis, surviving really because no one knows what else to do. It isn’t even particularly good at education, which theoretically is its primary purpose (though for a different perspective, I recommend Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling). So why, when ppl worry about home education is it socialisation that we find ourselves explaining time and again? Doesn’t really make any sense does it?

I don’t have any answers. Except to say that socialisation is not something I worry about all that much when I think about home ed versus school. And I’d very much like the ppl who do keep asking that question to pause and think about it rationally and then come up with something more interesting please 🙂 .