Homeschooling and School
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Thursday, May 17th, 2007So we’re back from our holiday. A week in Italy, then home, then a week in London has been a welcome change of scene. We’re back to our usual routines which has its own kind of pleasure and although the new sights and sounds were exciting for the children, they seem to do better with their usual routines. So it’s the manic morning leading up to the preschool run, followed by homeschool, followed by split lunches to accommodate three children with different schedules, preschool pickup, the relief of naptime when we do lots of reading and educational games passed off as something ‘incredibly fun’, running the children ragged at the park or at a playdate followed by the inexorable slide towards the witching hour that is suppertime and bathtime and the ratcheting towards storytime when I can hear that glass of red wine calling me from downstairs.
So we are much as we were before. I know now I’m making the right decision to homeschool Harry. Seeing him learn, thrive at home, is wonderful. I cannot and will not send him back to a school which turns him back into that frightened, tearful child we had last year. But this decision is not without cost. Pretty much all my personal projects have had to be put on hold. I simply don’t have time to do anything for myself at the moment and I have regrets about that. I’m hoping as we settle into a more relaxed form of schooling that there will be less of a ‘workload’ for me. And more interest for Harry. The pharmacist asked him today, “Are you enjoying homeschooling?” “Yes,” replied Harry and then paused. “Mind you,” he continued thoughtfully, “it is a bit boring.”
I’m also really struggling with this whole issue of socialising with other mothers. Homeschooling is extremely uncommon in the UK (I had never met or even heard of any another home educators before we took Harry out of school) and, as I mentioned before, I have inadvertently become something of a social pariah. Last year I was a yummy mummy with a child in a top school, another in a posh preschool and a baby in the McLaren stroller. I lived in the country, paid my dues by being active in the community, hell I was even a member of a book club. You couldn’t get much more middle-class than me. My children were clean, well-behaved (mostly) and invited to every birthday party going.
Fast forward to now and everything is the same except that my eldest child is no longer in school and we have been insidiously ostracised in our local community. I can see other mothers whispering about me as I pass them. My son hasn’t been invited to a birthday party in weeks. He has no real friends any more in our village: not one of his old school friends invited him over in the Easter holiday.
Sad as it sounds, I had been carving out a new role for myself as a School-gate Mother which carries lots of interaction, social activities and shared interests in an otherwise quiet, rather dull community and that has now gone. My new role as a homeschooling mother leaves me busier but lonelier.
I’m left in this kind of limbo, wondering where we go from here. Not enough homeschooled families around here (and you need a few because not everyone is going to click with you) for me and my boy and an increased need for socialisation because our school-related interactions are no longer. Harry does not want to join the local football/soccer club just yet and there is little else to do.
The schools, the social life and the community (by which I mean less nosey, judgemental neighbours) of London are calling me. I could be a proper Notting Hill yummy mummy! But have I got the strength to uproot us all and move up there? And if not have I got the strength to stay here and let things settle a bit? The decision to remove him from school was simple. But the fallout has been more difficult to deal with.
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Posted in Homeschooling and School
Starting homeschooling
Monday, April 9th, 2007This week we have hit the ground running with homeschool. My initial reservations have proved (mostly) unfounded and we have covered large amounts of learning with a fair amount of enthusiasm (on both our parts).
Fitting in a good block of homeschooling every morning and afternoon has been tricky with two younger children in the house and I am finding it difficult to do the basic chores like clearing the dishwasher and preparing supper, given that nap time is now given over to teaching Harry rather than doing these essential chores. I am more than happy to not do them in favour of poring over books with him (children’s encyclopedias are particularly interesting, even to me as I find gaps in my knowledge or remind myself of facts that have mysteriously and definitively disappeared since my first pregnancy) but unfortunately a magic fairy does not appear to do the chores instead of me and I find I reach five o’clock with no idea of what to give the children to eat and then a kitchen full of dirty dishes after the children are in bed when I would rather be sitting down with a glass of wine. Evenings, too, are now about finding out what Harry would be learning this year were he in school (I’m amazed to think that I probably would have had no idea what he was learning at school) and trying to think of innovative ways to teach him. I’m sure this will settle as we get into some sort of routine and I have to say - in a rather irritatingly smug way - that I do sometimes feel a bit like those homeschooling mothers with lots of beautiful children and a calm, assured manner that I so often envy.
So. So far so good.
Regrettably, I appear to have been slightly sidelined by the other school-gate mothers, possibly unintentionally because I no longer feature on their social radar, possibly intentionally because they see me as That Weirdo Mother Who Thinks Their School is Not Good Enough For Her Son. Either way it hurts a little but I expected it and I am making friends with the few other home educating parents in my very rural neck of the woods. And of course I have my trusty best friends who, if they could remain friends with me through my post natal depression, will most likely be friends for life. Despite our lifestyles diverging as I become a homeschooler and therefore do not share the school-gate patois or experiences of the Nativity play and sports days and, worse still, have less time for cups of coffee while our babies play contentedly on the rug together, I still - very gratefully - cannot imagine our friendships suffering.
And if I write that here as a matter of public record they will feel like complete heels if they now ever break that friendship.
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Homeschooling worries
Wednesday, March 21st, 2007Every afternoon, while almost every other five year old in the country is at school, I homeschool my eldest son. After about five minutes of writing his letters he asks if he has done enough and starts whining. It goes downhill from there and at that point I am grateful he is getting the bulk of his education at preschool. But from the end of next week he becomes too old for preschool - where he has been since we removed him from school - and he will be homeschooled full time.
Olivia, Janie and Jen all asked ‘how’s the homeschooling/home educating going?’
My answer is this: I’m reluctant, on so many levels, about homeschooling Harry. For now I have the safety net of knowing that if I screw up he is still getting an education at preschool. Knowing his education is in my hands, while not exactly keeping me awake at night, is nevertheless a weight on my mind. I worry how I am going to manage to teach him with two other small children in the house. I want another baby and I wonder if I will be doing us all a disservice by doing so - my son’s education, my well-being, my stress levels and the level of attention I can give everyone. I can barely manage now some days, another baby seems to be just asking for trouble. I also write now and I rely on time to do that while the older two are at preschool. If I had some daily help while the children are small or while I struggled through another pregnancy and that awful first year with a small baby I could probably feel confident about homeschooling my son. I’m sure most of my concerns would seem trivial if he was my only child and I had only his education to think about during the day. But I don’t.
I also worry that he is missing out on the better aspects of school like friends, after-school clubs like football and being invited to social events like birthday parties. We can make up for these things to some extent by being involved in our local network of home educators, by arranging classes for football and by keeping in contact with some of his old classmates but it is not the same as being with your friends all day, sharing joint activities and experiences.
But my biggest worry is that I won’t be able to teach him at home. School relies on authority and discipline to teach incredibly boring things to large numbers of children. Transposing that to the home environment is tricky. Anyone who has considered home education is likely to be familiar with unschooling methods. The assumption behind this kind of non-teaching is that children, if left to their own devices, will learn naturally; their natural curiosity will lead them to learn. Good guidance will bring out their natural talents and they will enjoy learning. As someone who failed spectacularly at school but has gone on to become an academic, I don’t need any convincing about unschooling and the fact that most people enjoying learning when they enjoy (the process of) learning. But I have problems with it: it is one thing to believe in it for your own learning purposes but it is quite another to trust this method when it is someone else’s education at stake. As I said, it’s not that I don’t believe it will work, but I would regret my son growing up and finding doors closed to him if he has not pursued a traditional education (although I am told that home educated children tend to do very well regarding university entry) and I particularly worry that if we pursue this route and he decides he wants to go back to school at some point then he will be very poorly equipped to rejoin school at the same educational level as his peers. His knowledge would be as good or better, but it would be different. Add to that his inexperience with being taught in a traditional way and there could be a problem.
So to keep his options open for career choice and for returning to school if he wants to, I feel pressure to teach him similar subjects in a similar manner to those he would be learning in school. But it is very difficult to keep your own child motivated doing this kind of work at home where a) his teacher is his mother and doesn’t have the same authority as a teacher does, b) he would rather be playing with toys/doing something else, c) he is bored because there are no other children here (although his little brother would join him in a year and a half) and d) as most of us will remember from our own school days, most of the stuff we learn at school is boring and irrelevant to real life (although calculus, of course, comes in useful when wandering up and down the aisles in the grocery store).
I am fairly certain I will combine formal teaching (reading, writing and arithmetic) with play later on in the day (which is only what most five year olds need at this age) and try to pass learning off as play in the same way I try to pass spinach off as pizza topping. But who knows how much planning and work that will involve?
But in my darker moments of worry about home educating I hang on to the fact that my son was desperately miserable in school. Seeing him run happily into preschool at the moment is such a relief. All the research shows that a bad experience in reception/kindergarten class can put a child off school for life. Too late for my son in that respect but I don’t want to compound the problem by returning him to school before he can cope with it. I suppose if I could find a school that was smaller, friendlier where he would be happy he might run happily into school the same way he goes into preschool now. We are looking at another school this week which looks, on paper at least, as if it would suit his needs.
And since removing him from school and reading about home educating and the way children learn I have other major concerns about school and the education system.
1) Research suggests that young children, boys in particular, struggle in schools where class sizes are large.
2) Boys, particularly, can suffer by being pushed to read and write at a young age. In many other European countries formal learning doesn’t start until seven and research shows that pupils overtake their British peers later on.
3) The aggressive testing of 7, 11 and 14 year olds using SATs, GCSEs at 16, AS levels at 17 and A levels at 18 in England concerns me deeply. By the time they leave school the average 18 year old has taken up to 105 tests and exams. It is not just the time spent doing these exams and the stress involved that bothers me but the time taken away from learning that practicing for these tests necessitates.
4) Bullying concerns me. I am grateful in many ways that I could see my son was being hurt because much has come out since then of incidences about which I knew nothing. When I hear how many children don’t tell their parents about bullying for fear of it being made worse I dread what might have happened to Harry without my knowledge and I worry what might happen to any of my children if they go to school now.
5) I worry that children are put off learning by the way they are taught in schools and that children can pass exams and leave school without actually really knowing very much of importance.
So I will be homeschooling until my son wants to go back to school - which may be never - or until I lose my sanity trying to teach him successfully at home - which may be in a couple of weeks.
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Home educating
Thursday, November 9th, 2006On Tuesday I withdrew my son from school.
The day before, I phoned the head of another local school which we had been to see just before the half term break. I had bought the uniform in anticipation of Harry starting on Tuesday morning. The head was busy when I phoned and I was asked to call back. When I called back, the headteacher, who had been warm and welcoming on our visit, was short and sounded, well, annoyed. She effectively told me that my son’s problems were probably of his own making and that changing schools wouldn’t help him. I listened for seven minutes while she went through all the problems that would probably arise from Harry changing schools. When I replied that we had thought of those things but the situation had got bad enough that we wanted to move him she simply said, ‘well if you’re going to move him then I suppose it’s best to get on with it. Call me when you’ve made a decision (we already had). Goodbye.’ and hung up. I put the phone down and sat looking at it stupidly, wondering what the hell had happened. Had the boys’ fighting when we looked around the school (they were bored at the end when I was asking questions) put the headteacher off? I was totally confused.
Then with sickening certainty I knew that she must have phoned Harry’s current headteacher, Mrs L. Apart from the breach in confidentiality, this headteacher had listened to Mrs L’s explanation of what had been going on and then phoned me with her diatribe.
That evening, desperately disappointed and tearful over both schools lack of concern for my son’s welfare, Matthew and I decided that Harry would be home educated. It is unlikely any of our children will set foot in the state system again.
After I told Mrs L of our decision I received a letter from her in which she wrote: ‘over the course of my career I have come across children who cry, scream and hide at the thought of going to school when they would much rather be at home. But they need to learn that school is a safe place to be and that it’s actually fun to be here!’
I thought the exclamation point was a super added touch.
My son thought that school was so safe that he would come home and draw pictures likes this where the big boys are in grey. My son is the one in red on the right, lying on the grass, having been pushed over by the big boys. I would have told Mrs L about Harry’s nightmares when lions were attacking him in the playground except that I don’t expect she would have cared.
The last few weeks have been terrible; upsetting, stressful and filling me with anxiety. I have been tearful and angry on my son’s behalf. I just felt so passive in this whole situation (I like feeling in control although I am not a control freak, I just like to be able to feel in control and then I don’t need to be in control, see?) and I felt unable to protect my boy at a time when he needs protecting most and that the school was making me feel stupid, over-protective and a nuisance. Now we have made the decision to educate him at home I feel empowered. My son’s educational future is in my hands: that’s a scary prospect, but also exciting. I’m sure at times it will be tiring and I will wish he was at school like every other child from the village but I’m looking forward to seeing him learn and grow. He’s incredibly bright and needs challenging. Most likely he will challenge me. But most importantly I will be in control of his education, his wellbeing and his safety. I hope I NEVER again have to drop off at school every day an anxious, tearful, frightened child.
He may want to go back to school at some point and that will be fine by me because that will be his choice. He will have control over his own future, as he should.
The most intriguing aspect of all this has been about my feelings as a mother. For the last couple of years I have very much thought about life at home with small children as something to be endured until the time when they went to school and I got my life back. I was, for the most part, wishing the days away. Since we decided on homeschooling I have felt such a shift in the way I perceive my ‘job’ as a mother. Instead of waiting for the children to start school so I can reclaim my life I am now enjoying living in the present. This is my life, it is here, now. I am looking forward to having Harry at home to teach, to getting on with doing something positive with each day beyond the daily slavery of cooking, cleaning, changing nappies relentlessly. Not just a sense of purpose I suppose, but a subtle realisation that my children’s welfare is more important than anything and that I will happily do whatever it takes to realise that. I am lucky enough to be able not to have to work. They will be grown up and off to university before I am ready. These days are important and fun and I have learnt to appreciate that.
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Posted in Homeschooling and School, Parenting
How to stop bullying
Thursday, October 12th, 2006On Monday the teacher and the teaching assistant had to forcibly drag my son into the classroom while I watched in disbelief that it had come to this.
I saw the head that morning. I was told that my son’s injuries were due to his ’silly behaviour’. I left with the reassurance that Harry would be watched more closely in the playground where the majority of the incidences have occurred. I also left with the resolve to have nothing further to do with such an uncaring school.
For the last three days I have been considering all the options. I’ve done and thought about nothing else. Worse, I’ve no idea what to do: I’m concerned that I’m so exhausted (the baby slept through for the first time in weeks on Monday night but I was woken at 4.55am, 5.20 and 6am by the other two who had streaming colds) that I can’t think rationally let alone make a decision of this magnitude.
There is every chance that the bullying will stop with the action the school is taking (closer supervision of Harry in the playground) but I don’t know if I can physically get him back into school. He wants to stay at the school (in theory) but he doesn’t want to go to school (in practice). There is the option to return him to his previous pre-school which he seems keen on but it is a backward step and we still have to find another school (or return him to his current school older and more confident) next September. There is another good school relatively near with a place but I’m not sure if he is simply not ready for any school where there is a big, potentially rough, playground. There is a private school further away (longer school run every day) where he would be one of eight in the class as opposed to one of twenty three. All eight in the class are boys which is not ideal. It’s very expensive. There is home education for now or the forseeable future with any or none of these options available for the future. At the back of all this is the worry that moving him might turn out to be unnecessary and that he may settle happily when/if the situation is resolved. I walked the dogs today and I could see the children playing football on the playing field and I like the idea of him being so close by. It’s a really good school. His school friends would live in the village. He and his brothers would be definitely be able to be at the same school together (not a certainty if he goes to a school outside our catchment area). But if we leave him where he is I worry about real, long-term damage to his confidence, self-esteem and willingness to go to any school if the ‘wait and see’ approach fails.
After Monday I sent him to school without too much difficulty on Tuesday while I tried to make up my mind what to do. He had a reasonable day: he was pulled around by the clothes by two classmates, hurting his hip and being pushed over. He wasn’t hurt and he didn’t cry but he was frightened. A sensitive kid unable to deal with daily ‘rough and tumble’ or insufficient supervision? I don’t know. What if he had been hurt? I thought I’d give it one more day. Instead, Harry decided to come down with chickenpox.
The week after next is half term which would be the best time to move him. So I sit here unable to decide what is best for him and unable to send him to school to see if the situation will improve. When I asked him who his friends were and he replied, ‘I’m not sure who my friends are anymore, mummy’, I felt a knot in the pit of my stomach so tight at the confusion he must be feeling. The right decision is so very important. And I’m not sure what’s going to help me make it.
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Posted in Homeschooling and School, Parenting
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