Learning Without Teaching

This post has been inspired by Jax

The Other Side of the Story

A Silent Assassin

My name is John.  I'm not your typical story hero.  I'm not a hero.  I kill the heroes.  Why do good guys always win the stories?  Cause it's not like that in real life.  But you better be glad about that if you're anyone like me. I'm not against people.  I don't care about people, its just I'd do anything to get paid.  I'd say anything.  I'd probably even kill my own family. Well depends, though it would have to be a lot of money.  Anyway, there's this one case that got me .... seriously ... in trouble.  And this, this is the story, I was creeping down the alleyway, I'd just finished my last task, don't really wanna talk about it; it wasn't a nice one.  I had to up the price a lot on the person, it was hard, I wouldn't do it otherwise.  But there was this van, I swear it was following me.  I crept round the alleyway, I hated people following me, plus they could want business or they could want to kill me, or they could be doing business I suppose, if you put it that way.  I quickly went into the alleyway, [bit i can't hear here]... but then two people got out, big build, nothing like me.  I'm the silent assassin with the gun, they're the silent assassins with hands.  Them guns, couldn't do nothing without em but hands they could strangle me, that's what I was worried about.  They were getting closer and the alleyway was a dead end.

This is the beginning of a story my 11 year old is making up.  I do not say writing, she is recording it with her digital voice recorder and I have just typed it up.  This is straight off the recorder, we would usually go through it and discuss punctuation, sentence structure and sense.  She cannot read fluently without a lot of effort and cannot write anything of any complexity.   I have not asked her to do this and I do not ask her to edit any of her work.  She insists.  I say insists because shamefully I am a little reluctant, she is my third severely dyslexic child and I have scribed myself out.  I do it though, that is my job and despite my reluctance I am impressed.  Her grasp of how to vary sentences in order to retain the readers interest comes entirely from her own observation of the books that have been read to her and the tapes she has listened to.

At her age I could not have done this, say we were given an essay to write for weekend homework, something like 'A day in the life of a penny' or some such thing, Sunday evening would find me behind the sofa in floods of terrified tears.  Make the assignment open ended and it got worse.   For me the pressure totally destroyed any creativity I might have had.  Lessons on grammar and sentence structure, participles adjectives etc, totally confused me, some of the instruction was at too simple a level and undermined my understanding, some was confusing, to the unready dyslexic brain adverb and adjective are too similar to be distinguished from  memory.

This may never be finished but it is a better proof of her understanding of the power and use of the written language than any number of work sheets or exercises.  And the desire to do this is fragile, make it in any way compulsory and I think the desire to do  it would disappear.   Before she did this she had done no creative writing for at least six months, I do not think this has held her back.

Introduce into this situation a 12 month plan and an order to exhibit the learning therefrom and the fragile joy of self directed exploration of the world around her, of which literature, in books, cds, tv and other media composes a not insignificant part would be severely damaged.

I know for certain that Beth would not be doing this if she were still in school.  By shining a bright harsh light on what she could not do the local authority school would have further undermined her confidence and disabled her strengths.

This same local authority wants to inspect my provision!  And if Graham Badman and Ed Balls have their way they will be able to force themselves into my home and make Beth answer their questions on her own.  They may get more than they bargained for, but what if they take offence and take it out on us.  Can we trust a system that supports a head teacher and board of governors concealing the tying up and whipping of a six year old girl by the governors children and sacks the conscientious adult who tells the parent and this is upheld by tribunal?  If it had been your child what would you have wanted?

And as far as we can tell we will have no right of appeal.

the G 20 March. Put People First

Earlier in the year we went to the G20 march. It was wet and cold but an interesting day. I would have liked to have seen more fallout from this.

Seven and a half weeks in.

Not a pretty sight.

Thanks to my lovely daughter Jo it soon looked like...

this.

All this was in order not to frighten the plaster room staff who would have to take the plasters off the next day. I had been getting increasingly excited and impatient and found it difficult to sleep that night.

Fortunately Beth had been with friends for a sleepover so for the last couple of days before the plaster came off she was occupied. That was a very good thing. I was determined that the plasters would stay off and had the rest of the day planned, a bath(ahhhhhhh), a short walk around the garden where I haven't been for seven and a half weeks and where I would usually spend a good part of any sunny day,and a bottle of champagne. I couldn't wait.

On the way to the plaster room ...

and waiting.

This is not fun but she was quick and efficient and we had a nice chat about photography and how we missed the chemicals and swishing and splashing involved in using film.

This is much gentler and I was now minutes away from freedom.

Here goes the other one.

Then to x-ray ...

and waiting.

Then back to fracture clinic and more waiting, so a very extravagant overpriced treat was in order for my patient helper.

Meet Fred.

Not to long a wait for the registrar who told me that I was to be non weight bearing for another four weeks!!!!!!!!

Why didn't they tell me that when I queried the plasters coming off in four weeks instead of just saying oh well different hospitals have different routines. Typical NHS, tell the patient nothing. So bang goes my lovely dream of an afternoon. I don't want to walk before my body is healed but knowing I was going to be stuck downstairs and in a wheelchair for eight rather than four weeks would have made a real difference to how we tackled the problems it presented. And knowing that I wouldn't be walking for three months would have prevented the completely unnecessary disappointment we felt especially for Beth whose whole world has been turned upside down by this. The lack of consideration for the patients experience makes an institution full of lovely people doing their best to help totally inhumane in many ways.  

Anyway rant over, next someone came and fitted me with a brace (photos to follow) and then more waiting for the 'Physioterrorist', (his term)

She was lovely though and assessed my movement and gave me exercises and promised to book local physio for the day after my next appointment, (presumably for more x-rays but who knows).

But when she brought my appointment it was for five weeks and on the very day that Jo had booked a spa treat for us both to celebrate my ordeal being over, if only!

Then more waiting, this time for Jo who was coming to take me home as Bruce was lecturing in the afternoon, but this time it was in the restaurant having beans and chips, our hospital treat, much better.

And a bit of dsing.

And back home to reassess the next five weeks.

Why we home educate

We home educate because my youngest pleaded and reasoned with me to do so for a full hour at the age of 8 after seeing a news item on home education.  Her arguments were lucid, intelligent and undeniable.  This episode stood out all the more clearly as her behaviour had become very worrying at the time, alternating between crying and screaming and very little else.  She had been at school for four years and had felt increasingly misunderstood and criticised by the staff and been teased and bullied by many of the children.  She has learning differences including dyslexia and dyspraxia and possibly dyscalculia.  We had just initiated the statementing process as the school seemed to be punishing her for her problems rather than modifying their methods to meet her needs.  We did not do this lightly, I have a sister with a high functioning autistic child and getting a statement including the inevitable tribunal ate up a whole year of her life.

We had spent many years ‘negotiating’ with this school to get them to meet the needs of my older two dyslexic children.  This had been a very difficult and stressful experience and gained us the label, publicly expressed, of difficult parents.  The school’s reluctance to help seemed to stem from the fact that my children although massively underperforming, could still get an average mark and so did not threaten the school’s position in the league tables.  Also in hindsight it was due to them not having a clue what to do as no member of staff had adequate training in learning differences and although they had outside agencies they could call on ,such as an English Language Unit, it cost them money and made very little difference  as ignorance was also rife there.

My fourth child was born 20 years after my first so I had had plenty of opportunity to observe my children learning autonomously and very effectively both preschool and in their free time while at school, so when I read about autonomous home education it was like a bell going off in my head.  It also tied in with the conclusions I had come to through the reading I had been doing about child development and learning since my first child was born; a passion derived from my own dissatisfaction with the way I had been parented and educated.  We were fortunate in realising that we didn’t need to reproduce school at home as Beth was too traumatised to accept any sort of instruction and any attempt to control her learning would have led to battles and upset and certainly not to education.

We have been welcomed generously into the local home education communities and had the opportunity to take part in some marvellous days out, and made good friends.

I would like to say that after nearly three years of home education Beth is a happy and balanced child with no problems at all, but I cannot, the special needs have not magically disappeared and although not now vilified because of them she finds her difficulties very frustrating, especially her problems with reading.  Like her severely dyslexic brother she is a voracious consumer of literature and the fact that it has to be pre-recorded or read to her by a parent definitely cramps her style.  She also has some anxiety and social issues however we have made definite progress and with very little of what a school child would recognise as work she is now taking off with her reading having read the first Harry Potter, doing lots of writing and understanding maths at a level at least average for her age.

As Tech so eloquently says no one can know everything and anyone who says they do is lying, that is only going to get exponentially truer. How can people imagine it possible in this era of such rapid technological advances? We truly cannot begin to imagine what sort of future our children will inhabit. It seems to me that the child, immersed in the community, able to access as much or as little of the current culture as they wish and able to follow their own interests, is far more likely to get some sort of intuition about what they need to know in order to live happy fruitful lives.

More on home education here, here and here.


For Jax's home ed roundup and Debs's blog carnival.

Home Education Blog Carnival, call for posts.

Home education – why and how? Call for posts



By Jax Blunt



In the past I've read some really inspiring posts on various ppl's blogs on the why and how of how they came to home education and how it works for them as a family.

I'd love to read some more of those posts, either updates from ppl who've written them before, or a first think about it from ppl just thinking about it now, particularly inspired perhaps by other stories, especially those that have come to light during the battles against the Badman review. For me I'll do an update on how it particularly suits us at this point and what we've learnt from it along the way, and I'll dig out the old posts and cross link them.

I'd also love to link to other ppl's posts on the topic, so please feel free to leave links in comments on my blog :http://liveotherwise.co.uk/makingitup/so that I can gather them together in a carnival style post in a few days time. Send the links to me by Tues evening and I'll publish a roundup on Weds?

Looking forward to reading all about you all.

If you all put the words home education in your blogpost title and in any tag fields you've got, that will help them to be more findable via search engines. This is the time of year when some ppl may be having second thoughts about a new school year, so a great time to get some extra publicity and information out there to the rest of the world too.
There is now a twitter account specifically for this here http://twitter.com/HECarnival

Going Girly

For some time Beth has been against everything and anything girly and the colour pink has been to her like garlic to a vampire. But a transformation has been – very slowly – happening, starting funnily enough with cutting her hair very short. This seems to have been cathartic and released her from the desire to hide behind boyish clothes. This was I think partly a reaction to the bullying she experienced at school and I delight to see it go. I also delight in the actuality and the prospect of girly clothes, not too girly of course though.

So to Tesco we went, taking our voucher to keep the cost low, and a new wardrobe was acquired, full of lovely colours and flowing skirt like things. And – biggest shock of all as my kids duck when they see a camera, rather like the cats – a photo session was requested.

Here are the results:

But she is please to find that she can still climb the trees.

Talking about it to big sis.

A New Blog

A new blog, somehow couldn't bring myself to put the real life stuff amongst the political at the moment.

This blog is to record our life and learning, which was why I was blogging in the first place and now I had better do it. I'm not really doing it for the dear LA, I have always tried to have a record, photographic and written of the important parts of our life. It is something I would have loved to be able to look at when I had my children, so I do it for them.

It will probably go backwards and forwards for some time as I am way behind but have lots of photos.

I will try to make it interesting but it is really just a record.
Welcome to anyone who makes the journey here to read my scribblings.