The exact spot

This afternoon H read out to me from the history section of the life in the UK book. We discussed all sorts of things between each sentence.

We had just moved the table out of the sunshine, so it was in the same place as all those years ago in this post about afternoons burning down old candles.

Summer holidays :)

Election Fever - Daily Diary - No Traces

Elections

I didn't ever expect to be paying attention to the Israeli elections. I am not going as far as with the US ones, no getting up at 5am to see what happened. Or staying up nearly as all night with our elections. I love it when I am able to do that. Twitter is my best source of info.

German daily diary

I have written one for H, to show him how I do this for my Arabic. I explained how just using German means he can read it back and practise the words he knows that way.

Then I explained how he can have a small dictionary of just the words like heute and ich bin which he might want to use each time he writes about his day.

My 3 years of effort are being condensed into 5 mins of tips for him. Mothering in a nutshell...

No Traces

Since H has started at LVS I have stopped making home ed notes. There is no record of the sort I used to create. It is a loss to have no perspective on what has happened since Sept 2014. I am disconnected from a process which I used to be part of and carefully observant of. How easily I drift away from a previous way of living. I wonder how other home ed families experience the moving on phase?

Photos and doing maths in the kitchen

Waiting for the photos to turn up in my email inbox. My plan is to be able to change my profile pictures once a month. All I need is enough photos to choose from.

Post-Home Ed continues in the car

We have sorted out 2 things. My bio for a poetry blog and my thoughts about the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris.

Bio

Sarah loves going to readings and absolutely adores all the chat afterwards. She blogs at (here).

Charlie Hebdo

It is about 3 things.

1 What counts as a crime in each country and what counts as the various levels of crime? This shifts.

2 What kind of punishments do we agree are given and what limits do we have to the punishments we impose? This shifts with time.

3 The relationship between the 2 concepts, what punishment is allocated to what crime? This shifts over time too.

So here we do not have capital punishment, however we do have unintentional killings by armed police at the time of the crime or afterwards. We also have unexplained deaths in police custody. Those are not actions I have ever voted for. They need to be reduced to zero.

Does the permission to behave in ways which are offensive degrade the whole culture? Of course. But how to limit jokes in bad taste and the casual cruelties of communal life? Do they act as lightning conductors to release tension and prevent something worse, or do we collectively think we can't handle the responsibility of improving our communal life and throw up our hands at that point?

Is it better overall to know that we do not have the death penalty and are able to react as a community relatively calmly to very bad behaviour? I suppose I agree with that. It holds up a standard of calmness and professionalism for me to aspire to.

Explaining an exchange

On my visit today I got talking to a teacher. Since I have spent some time home educating I find this interesting and personal. She told me of a brief part of a conversation she had with a home educated young woman of about 16. Somehow she asked why she wasn't taking GCSEs or what she would do without GCSEs. The reply was brief, well rehearsed, but didn't get either of them further forward.

I gave my analysis that this was not a casual question. It went straight for the young person's family's deepest fears, hopes and values. It was not safe for her either as a teacher, since she was in effect asking for her own lifetime of study and qualifications to be examined and threshed just like that. Which it had been, in an instant.

I suggested going back and trying to discuss the fact that this had not been a wise topic for conversation, they needed an awful lot more discussion and friendship first. They needed the tools for having such a discussion. They'd have to build those tools during many conversations about a shared love of dogs or the countryside for example.

...

Mmm - this song: Stay High by Tora Lo. H gave me a cd to enjoy in the car and I found this song I knew from somewhere. It's the 'Habits remix'.

Home ed, being on the other side

I now see that, as with breastfeeding, once an era is over I simply move to the next era. That post-era era lasts the rest of my life. It will include offering perceptive comments on the process.

Quite soon my comments will be from more of a distance. Without care they could be unhelpful. So the most important thing is to be alert to what the person I am speaking to needs right now from all the things I could say.

The people who are in the midst of it can offer the practical comments and wry smiles. My view is from afterwards.

Those things which were 100% of my life are not so any more. That is unsettling to someone who is right in it. How could I not keep up with the latest research and legal confrontations? This is a generation gap of a non-family sort.

My quote is on the school website :) - LVS-Oxford

Go to the bottom of this front page...at first I wondered who had said this positive comment, then it seemed familiar, and my name right there confirmed it!

I don't know what to say. When a new situation doesn't match with any previous experience, because it is good and is in a different league, that lack of a match is the clue that tells me I am in a good and healthy situation. Maybe other people are better at spotting good situations and bad ones, but it is new to me. This neutral reaction is all I have to go on. I am getting used to it and trust it more now.

Being a terrible maths teacher

I refuse to have a session.
I then insist it is just 10 minutes.
I get all enthusiastic and write out the solution way too fast and am demonstrating, not teaching.
I use unusual words to describe what is meant to happen.
I make up rules like "If it isn't written down, it isn't maths."
I yawn.
I make myself a cup of tea.
I eat apple, which H hates, while he shows me what he's doing.

He tells me I go too fast.
He tells me I should be helping him.
He tells me I should be explaining better.
He want to do maths when I just want to do my own stuff online.
He wants to do maths after 11pm.
He won't let go graciously.

We argue.
I want to see very neat handwriting and carefully laid out lines of maths, one alteration per line.
He wants to hold the pen from the wrong end and do it all in his head and expect me to follow it.
He rattles off some numbers and I can't follow what question he is on, so he has to start again.

Packing up a badminton net and poles to send it to school

This has not been pretty.

After a bit I announced that I would do it on my own, with absolutely no interference from anyone else. I was not going to waste a single brain cell on untangling then re-untangling the net and strings. Or on explaining my reasoning.

Now it is very neatly and carefully stowed in a big sports bag. Each stringy part has its own plastic bag to keep it separate from the next stringy nightmare. I have said that only the most logical and talented person at school is to touch it and set it up.

It took me about 3 minutes. The arguing beforehand took longer.

I actually don't know what home education is

I have been making a few notes on what we do and discuss. It is exactly the same set of things as a couple of weeks ago before the transition to being back in a formal place of education.

So as a result I realise that although we have been home educating completely autonomously for 6.5 years, all the notes I took and typed up for the Local Authority are useless. They are not evidence for home ed occurring at all. Just for living in a family household with me.

So what is home ed then? The absence of a greater authority than the mother and father? No, because I have been hyper-aware of the presence and threat of the Local Authority over our lives. There has been a big cloud of disapproval, fear and misunderstanding following us around for all this time from family and acquaintances. At best, confusion and awe.

My presence and commitment? That could be it. When H was deregistered both times, he instantly developed this look of a flower turning towards me as if towards the sun.

Yet this time H has gone to a place of formal education he has not switched off psychologically as he did last time, 6 years ago.

I still don't feel I have put my finger on it yet. So what is autonomous home education? What is it about home education which makes it such, beyond the legal status? Is it purely a legal construct? No more than that? All that fear, over a nebulous contemporary human definition?

Help me out in the comments box.

---

It is Monday morning now and I think there are 2 parts to this: the legal framework and the parent/child bond of loyalty and trust. The most important of those is this bond. If anything gets between the parent and the child it causes damage to both sides, irrespective of the type of education. If choosing home ed is the way to get the poison out of the relationship, then so be it.

I have become a font of all knowledge all of a sudden

Today I quoted the line 'Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness' in the car to H on the way to school. He asked me how I knew it. From having it read out at my school when I was 15 or so.

Two nights ago we had some intensive Periodic Table learning. He asked me what various initials meant and I got a good many right. He was most impressed with me. I was impressed with his new passion.

That poster of the Periodic Table has been up on our wall in the kitchen since the first days of home education, gathering grease and dust and making the place feel home educational. I carefully cleaned it off and gave it to him on his sofa. I shared my wisdom from the other sofa.

It's very gratifying to find that this one poster has finally come in handy. It seemed important to me to have it there on my wall as a statement.

Here's a tip on family life: have 2 sofas. That's it. How did we manage for 16 years with just one sofa in the sitting room? Smaller children fit with one mother all together on one I suppose, all under one duvet, using both ends.

Mineral oil computer fish tank cooling systems

While buying a phone today I got chatting and found out about this option for upgrading your home built computer:

Images of computers bathed in mineral oil

YouTube video of the

So today was a good day for all sorts of reasons. And it hasn't finished yet.

Day 1 of post-home-ed-era. I need a better phrase, because once in the home ed world, forever changed.