A magical place

Today we visited Crook Hall in Durham, a place we return to once every couple of years.  Each time, its charm increases, its interior displays have developed and its garden has grown.  A hidden gem in the city centre, nestling only a few hundred yards from the concrete horrors of the passport office, this lovely little 13th century house weaves a special magic.



When we first visited, dd and her friends were most taken with the ghost stories, which may or may not have any foundation.  Apparently, the ghost of a beautiful and heartbroken young woman (aka 'the white lady') periodically appears on the staircase, and there are spectral sensations to be felt on touching the walls of the Jacobean hall.


Spooks or not, it's a lovely space in which to walk, to draw, to tackle the maze, or simply to sit and chat.  Much drawing done today by dd, which will doubtless end up in some digitized form further down the line.

Climbing the wall

Climbing the wall ... literally ...            


Today, the home ed teens went rock climbing.                         


You know, those poor, sheltered kids who never get out among other children! (LOL)

Pride and Prejudice

I've certainly learned my lesson regarding the Comments sections of mainstream newspapers.  This report on why Brangelina's children won't go to school prompted so many prejudiced and stereotypical views of home education that I couldn't resist countering some of the more extreme assumptions.  Naturally, my pride in dd's achievements and interests shone through, which clearly irked some of the more judgmental participants in the debate.  The fact that DD attends a writing class facilitated by a professional author (alongside schooled children - it's one of those social activities that they don't believe our kids have access to) was evidence to this person that I am "an idiot of a parent".  Presumably, this was because I had the arrogance to believe that a published writer might be best equipped to help children with their own writing.

And despite several home educators outlining exactly how much socialization our children have, comments kept on coming through to the effect that children shouldn't be home with their parents all day.  Because it's well known we keep 'em in the cupboard under the stairs until they turn 18!  I despair, really I do.

Never again - it's not worth the effort to type a response to such ignorance.

The forces of darkness

We've just come back from Whitby Gothic Weekend. It's our fourth visit and every time I'm deeply impressed by the warmth and friendliness demonstrated by the dark and scary looking people we encounter there. Judging; books; covers, that kind of thing ... 

DD is a huge fan of dystopian science fiction, so veers towards a really futuristic look.  "1984", "Brave New World", "We", "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" - that kind of thing.  So much so that one of her 14th birthday presents was an  electric sheep T-shirt from Think Geek .  I'm gradually becoming very enamoured of the steampunk style. There's something really enchanting about alternative histories where the future is clockwork, Babbage's difference engine really did change the world a century before the internet, and the likes of HG Wells and Jules Verne were dealing in reportage rather than science fiction.  


DD sees this kind of thing as hopelessly romantic and holds true to her much darker visions.  Well, except in the case of the inspired lunacy that is Robert Rankin's world . Sadly, in terms of the real world, I think her dystopias might be much nearer the mark.

Idleness

Dd has one of her fairly regular bouts of tonsillitis. Though gradually - hopefully! - decreasing in frequency, every few months they leave her well enough to potter about at home but too croaky and headache-y to venture out too far. Sometimes I think they represent her body putting some brakes on too much activity and, if so, it sure works. We've spent the last few days virtually glued to the sofa, just enjoying companionable quiet. She might be online, playing WOW or reading TV Tropes, or we'll watch a comedy show together. We've played a couple of games of chess (slightly bad-tempered on her part because she normally beats me easily when she's not so groggy). Not much talking because resting her voice helps. And I've pottered around the house, catching up on washing, baking bread, and taking it pretty easy myself.

Which is great, because the book I have on the go at present is by the editor of The Idler. Tom Hodgkinson's How to Be Free is a gentle anarchist polemic calling on its readers to reject the trappings of the career treadmill and modern consumer society and instead learn to live cheaply, locally and with a renewed joy in simple pleasures such as being with friends and family. It's certainly not perfect. For instance, its viewpoint is very much that of a male journalist who can easily freelance, it's a bit too reactionarily anti-TV and his portrayal of medieval society is a tad naive, verging on the rose-tinted. He also seems to think that the Diggers were protesting against Tudor norms, which would be a Civil War and around 50 years off the mark. But the general drift is still inspiring. It's made me appreciate all the more the down-time at home. And it's set me determined to get out into the garden at the first opportunity and to grow some more of our own food. The question is, will dd come along and help to dig? Jury is firmly out on that one ...

Tiger parents and results culture

There's been something of a press furore about Prof Amy Chua's claims that the methods of ultra-strict 'tiger mothers' are superior to our lax western ways. Quite apart from the gross cultural stereotyping in such claims and the title of her book, it's upsetting to read her confident assertions that bullying and belittling children is the only route to success. Dd just achieved A grades (of which even a so-called 'tiger mother' might approve) in the IGCSEs she sat in November, without any such coercion. She simply chose to study a couple of subjects which she liked in a format that she was comfortable with. She didn't have to miss any sleepovers or TV or games. She didn't have to do anything. Ultimately, will a particular IGCSE grade really matter? Probably not - it might conceivably mean a few less hoops to jump through for a very particular range of careers. Even so, in real life, people are valued for a myriad things other than such ephemera. But at least she has the pleasure of having achieved what she set out to do, without having been berated or disparaged or forced to conform to someone else's vision of what she should be.

Lionel Logue and credentials

We've just got back from a trip to York where Friday's rain forced us into the cinema. Lucky us - because we got to see "The King's Speech", which deserves all the plaudits it's currently attracting. Brilliant performances from all and a fascinating story of adversity overcome.

What prompted me to write about it here, though, was the scene just prior to the new King George VI's coronation, in which various members of the powers that be challenged speech therapist, Lionel Logue because his techniques were self-taught. Logue was an Australian actor-turned-elocution tutor who had learned in the wake of WWI to help shell-shock victims to recover their voices and their confidence. But, to the chagrin of the British establishment, the man who was helping their new king overcome his stutter was working from experience rather than from qualifications and credentials. Of course, those with more formal qualifications had advised their patient to smoke more because it 'relaxed the larynx' or stuffed his mouth with marbles and ordered him to speak, because that was the received wisdom of the time. I suppose that these were the guys with qualifications because regurgitating received wisdom is often the surest way to pass an exam. Instead, Logue watched and listened and developed his techniques through empathy, experimentation and observation. And in this case the unqualified person won through because he was capable of learning from experience.

Who'd have thought a costume drama about a turbulent period of royal history could include such subversive educational matter?

Exams, Awards and Shopping

It's been an ... interesting couple of weeks. Dd had her first bash at some IGCSE exams in English and English Literature. She'd wanted to study for these and, English being one of those qualifications that employers always like to see, I was quite glad for her to do them. An autonomous decision, though it does make me wonder if either of us has really deschooled as yet. Despite having quite a long drive through the rush hour to reach the exam centre, all went well on the first 3 papers. Sadly, the last paper is much more of a concern. The questions on poetry left dd with little choice but to deal with poems about imminent death and bereavement. Not ideal for her, having so recently lost her gran. Not ideal, I suspect, for a lot of teenagers (there must be a fair proportion each year who are coping with grief). We've requested special consideration (and presume others will have done likewise) but it did seem very insensitive of the exam board to set questions which left no really viable option but to analyse the most morbid poems in their anthology. Ah well, time will tell what effect it had and at least we're not worrying about our position in the GCSE league tables.

Thankfully, the day after this rotten exam paper we travelled to London for an Awards for Young Musicians workshop where the young people who'd received this year's scholarships were presented with their award certificates. Dd got to catch up with some friends she made at last year's event, had a masterclass with a lecturer from the Royal Academy of Music and, along with the other young musicians and with the facilitation of Charles Hazlewood, helped devise a collaborative, improvised piece of music which they'll be performing at the Royal Festival Hall later this month. All really exciting stuff. It was utterly inspirational to hear 9-year-olds just starting out on their musical journey alongside 17-year-olds who were ready for conservatoire; and for rock drummers, jazz saxophonists and folk fiddlers to be mixing with orchestral harpists.

A complaint among several parents at the awards event was the lack of support - even obstruction - they received from their children's schools. Some parents were on the verge of their children being disciplined because they'd taken a couple of days off from mainstream lessons in order to perform in international music festivals. Forget the prestige, they might only achieve an A rather than an A* in double science. Surely this way madness lies? It was telling that out of 50 award holders, at least 3 are home educated.

Best of all for dd, though, was the opportunity to go shopping. Especially in Camden, where the quirky, the funky, and the completely off-the-wall are the norm. This, more than anything else, was the ideal antidote to all the exam stress of the previous week.

Children Missing Education???

There's been a lot of concern in blogland recently (eg here, here and here) about mission creep, especially in the way that policy guidance and local authorities are now approaching home education from the viewpoint of Children Missing Education.

Only today, I learned of a local home educator who had challenged her LA visitor when this official mentioned home education and Children Missing Education in the same breath. Apparently, the LA officer very quickly backtracked to the position of "It's not you, of course, your provision's wonderful, but there are others ..." (etc, etc). But it's not about a single insulting instance, it's about the way that the two terms are becoming increasingly linked in the standard, unexamined parlance of government and local authority officials. In the minds of stressed workers, whose minds are probably far more obsessed with whether or not they will have a job next year, it just becomes easy to lazily and unquestioningly use one term interchangeably with the other.

And this is dangerous. Like other stock phrases like "You're making a rod for your own back" or "If you don't listen to me it'll end in tears"(there's a great list here), if you repeat a thing often enough it becomes accepted as right and proper. The less we challenge the nomenclature, the more at risk we are.

Our children are not missing education. There are plenty of children in schools who, for one reason or another (undiagnosed special needs, bullying, shyness about voicing bewilderment) ARE missing education. But the assumption is that only those outside of school need to demonstrate that education is indeed taking place. Once again, home educators appear to be seen as guilty until proven innocent. Only months after Badman, it looks as though we have a new fight on our hands.

Colour Vision Envy

Dd got to try her hand at watercolour landscapes yesterday, at an art group for home educated teens. All these young people came up with rich and evocative blends of sky, sea and land simply by applying swooshes of colour to a page. Dd didn't enjoy it - being a sci-fi kind of gal, she thinks that only monochrome and bold graphic lines will do. This made me absolutely green (how much of the world we view through coloured lenses) with envy. She was casually dismissing something that I'd love to be able to do, but, as a colour blind person, I find incredibly challenging. (Remember these little tests from your school days? It was my first intimation that adults don't necessarily have all the answers when the school nurse was adamant that I must be faking my inability to discern the numbers hidden in the dots because "girls can't be colour blind". Wrong!!!)

Guided by a very talented home ed mum, all those at yesterday's art group could see colours in the world around them and then mimic these by blending paints on a palette. Yet dd complains that "watercolours just aren't for me", while I look on in awe at anyone capable of negotiating the colour wheel.

I hope she opens her mind to it all, but I guess that's the way things go when your child has freedom to choose - they're not necessarily going to place the same value on those things that seem deeply impressive to their parents.

Writing with reason

Dd is spending a lot of time thinking about bashing out a novel in the space of a month. This is the target set by NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, which argues that one of the things that prevents most of us from becoming really creative writers is that we're overly aware of our "inner editor" - a mean little English teacher who leans over our shoulders and tells us that we can't possibly continue until we correct this bit of grammar or that clunky plot device.

It's great fun and frees her to think about churning out words rather than obsessing about quality. We've also discovered a cool new writing group for local teens, where she's met some really like-minded people. I love it that she's found spaces where she can express herself and that she has the freedom to really throw herself into these activities without worrying they might get in the way of her homework. Remembering my own schooldays, I'm still at a loss as to why educators believe it's an efficient way of learning to pile on hours of evening busywork, often only to reinforce how little they've actually understood during their lessons in school. I'm sure that some would argue it at least encourages a work ethic, but if so it's an ethic based on threat of punishment rather than for its own sake. You could dutifully plough through a worksheet or you could really be playing with ideas. I know which sounds most like real intellectual activity!

Loss and first steps to healing

I've not blogged all this month because one of the most terrible things I could imagine happened to us early in the summer. Very suddenly, after a short bout of what looked like a relatively innocuous illness, we lost DD's gran. My beloved mam, who was also my best friend, died and our world changed overnight. The shock has been so appalling that in all honesty I don't think we're grieving properly even yet - none of it seems real and every now and again I catch myself about to pick up the phone to tell her some news before reality strikes me, hard, and right between the eyes.

Because I knew that we can't afford, psychologically, to spend the bank holiday weekend in the house amid all our sadness, we took some tentative steps towards healing by spending some time at Belsay Hall. Beautiful surroundings and a gentle walk through glorious scenery helped to blow out some cobwebs from our weary souls. There, English Heritage is currently hosting an exhibition of art called Extraordinary Measures, which is very striking in its use of Belsay's magical environment.


We were particularly taken with street artist, Slinkachu's photographs of miniature figures which he'd placed around the grounds to take their chances in the face of the public, animals and the elements. The tiny models provided a wry commentary on what we humans do for days out: groups of people queuing for portaloos, or standing awestruck before a monument that was in actual fact an upended cigarette butt.

Mat Collishaw's The Garden of Unearthly Delights was housed in the Great hall of Belsay Castle. This installation was a mesmerising thing of utter beauty but also very dark and cruel in its message. It consisted of a zoetrope which conjured images of dancing butterflies, birds and imps playing in some mythical garden. But, unnervingly, the nasty little imps were up to no good: coshing fish, snails and other creatures seemingly for the pleasure of violence alone. Perhaps Collishaw sees himself as the Tarantino of the zoetrope?

I can't post images of the copyrighted artwork itself, but have included some photographs which we took on the walk through the quarry gardens that link the Georgian neo-classical Hall with the medieval castle, all dappled light and cliffs and ferns and ancient trees. The pathways looked to be likely homes for fairies and imps, be they Disney good or Collishaw evil, and added to our sense of being in a mystical place. It felt like the ideal place to be, with the dull ache of our loss nagging away at us, but enjoying the beauty in which my lovely mam, DD's fantastic gran, would have exulted.

Sticks and stones ...

There's been a fair old bit of name-calling in the comments section following this excellent article by Alan Thomas and Harriet Pattison.

It set me to thinking about the predictable pejorative terms that are usually thrown our way. Do I personally know of any home educated children (or home educators) who fit these stereotypes? Actually, no, we're a fairly normal bunch. But what happens if we consider some historical examples?

Those who perhaps conformed to one or two stereotypes

Hot-housed: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

In a world of their own: Agatha Christie; Hans Christian Anderson; Beatrix Potter; William Blake; Margaret Atwood; Walt Whitman

Opinionated: Abraham Lincoln; George Washington; Thomas Jefferson

Eccentric/hippyish/yoga fanatics: Yehudi Menuhin

Obsessive/single-minded: Sir Ernest Shackleton; Joan of Arc

Evidently, some people could turn perceived problems to their advantage. The world would be poorer for the loss of their eccentricities.

Now for those who clearly subvert the stereotypes

Self-centred: Albert Schweitzer; Florence Nightingale; Thomas Paine

Middle-class: Charlie Chaplin; Louis Armstrong; Irving Berlin

Only good at one thing: Leonardo da Vinci

Poorly socialized/shy/lacking in confidence: Whoopi Goldberg; Noel Coward

Divorced from the real world: Alex Issigonis; Frank Lloyd Wright

Undisciplined: Douglas MacArthur; George Patton

Okay at arts but weak at science: Benjamin Franklin; Thomas Edison; Sir Frank Whittle; the Wright Bros; Michael Faraday; (the list of home educated scientists is very long!)

Aware of only limited social and ethnic groups: Margaret Mead; John Stuart Mill

Locked away indoors: John Muir; John Burroughs

Elitist: John Barry; Hanson; Will Rogers

So there are famous people who may reflect some of the common assumptions about home education - but those I've found appear to have developed these supposed shortcomings into definite advantages. Far, far more seem to demonstrate that most of the common prejudices and lazy assumptions are massively off-the-mark.

Sticks and stones may hurt my bones, but words ... sometimes just become too predictable to argue about.

Learn Nothing Day .. again

Well, yesterday was our second annual attempt at Learn Nothing Day. This is the day when you do your level best to avoid learning anything at all - to prove just how near-impossible it is to avoid discovering something new every single day.

Dd was at an orchestral rehearsal in the morning, but they were running through music that they already knew. You could use some sophistry to argue that this constituted practice and building muscle memory rather than learning anything new. So far, so good. But then another member of dd's section told her about a wonderful bit of music practice software. Dd learned there was something she was quite excited to download. Only a few hours into the day and we'd already blown it.

Meanwhile, I learned that recipe kits from certain major supermarkets are rather more time-consuming than cooking from scratch (though I have to say that the resulting enchiladas were delicious).

Later on, dd visited a close friend recently returned from a very frightening spell in hospital. She had to learn how to negotiate that difficult transition period where every-day common-or-garden friends become a really important mutual support system. Her friend was really quite fragile and dd was at a bit of a loss regarding how to talk to her on a normal, relaxed level while acknowledging the things she'd been through. In the end, I don't think they did that much real-world talking, but their Sims characters did this by proxy. Sometimes videogames really help.

While dd was out, I spent some time on the web. Inevitably, I drifted to sites that help to clarify the realities of becoming freelance: I've just been made redundant from my job of 3 years. Must admit, this is both scary (financially) and a huge relief (in terms of sanity).

On a sad note, late in the evening we learned that snooker legend Alex 'Hurricane' Higgins had died. Seeing the clips of his glory days brought back a rich sequence of memories - he was the reason I actually bothered to buy tickets to snooker tournaments back in the 1980s. Of course, (like his compatriot George Best) he was mad, bad, and dangerous to know but he brought much-needed colour, character and excitement to a sport that is fundamentally two people in smart clothes bashing a few balls around a table.

We didn't actively set out to learn and what we did discover doesn't appear on any curriculum that I know of. Yet, clearly, we failed miserably at learning nothing. Which, I guess, is the whole point!

Scareware

Dd's laptop has a virus and is currently in the care of a nice, kind PC doctor. The virus is a piece of "scareware", a trojan which adopts the guise of anti-virus software (AV Security Suite). It informs you that your computer is being attacked and then links to an extortionately expensive software package which purports to remove the threat (which they'd created in the first place!). The main hint that it wasn't genuine was the number of big typographical errors on every page.

This happened to our family's "digital native", so she spotted that it was a scam straight away, but I decided to post about this in case it alerts anyone else who might be too busy to stay alert to these cons. I reckon that I might just have absent-mindedly clicked on the links and possibly made things even worse.

Meanwhile, dd, sans laptop, is catching up on a lot of reading!

A Two-Tier Education System?

There's a much debate in the media about Michael Gove's proposed free schools. Now, I've no particular axe to grind on this policy. After all, why set up a school with all the capital expenditure and systems and contracts of employment that this implies when you can really individualize your child's education by stepping outside of the system altogether? It seems unnecessary to bring in yet another type of education factory, even if it is a tiny bit more small scale and artisanal.

But I am absolutely stunned by the sheer hypocrisy of the likes of Ed Balls in suggesting that the creation of these schools will "create a two-tier education system". What planet is the man living on? Oh, sorry: he's living on the planet where his family are safely within a decent catchment area, where schools might not be exciting places which encourage genuine learning but at least you're likely to get through to the age of 18 without having been beaten to a pulp for being ever so slightly different.

The reality for those of us in the real world is that the education system is already deeply tiered. There are lots of wealthy people who can happily tout their egalitarianism by keeping their children in the state system because they can afford to buy a house close to decent schools. The rest of us have to put up with education factories which fail 50% of their pupils. DD could have ended up in a comprehensive where the proportion of pupils gaining 5 or more A*-C GCSE passes is 43%. The school down the road, nearer to the more expensive houses, achieves 84%. Now, meaningless as GCSE league tables are in the wonderful world of home education, for a large sector of this country passing the requisite number of exams is the definition of gaining an education. In that case, I'd reckon a system that permits one catchment area to achieve almost double that of its poorer neighbour is already two-tier.

For real equality of opportunity, we could look at the implications of Paula Rothermel's research, which highlights these two surprising features of home education:

Socio-economic class is not an indicator of achievement levels: whilst the home-educated children outscored their school counterparts, those from lower socio-economic groups outperformed their middle class peers. Figures indicate that at least 14% of the parents in the home-education sample were employed in manual and unskilled occupations.

In this study, parental level of education did not limit the children's attainment. At least 38% of parents in this study had been educated at comprehensive schools and at least 21% had no post-school qualifications. Whilst 47.5% of parents had attended university, at least 27.7% of parents in the study had not.

So children with parents of lower social class and lower parental education levels (children who everyone knows tend to have lower attainment in schools) actually do NOT suffer any lower attainment when educated at home.

In which case, I can see there's only one way forward for those who'd like to see the end of a two-tier education system: get the children out of the schools which have become hothouses for accentuating social difference.

Getting my blog mojo back

I've had a bash at redesigning this blog in the hope it'll encourage me to blog more. Time will tell whether or not it's worked. For now, I'm enjoying the brighter colour scheme. Apologies to those of you who (unlike me) aren't colour blind ;-)

Johann, I'm Only Dancing

Yes, that IS the name of the latest CD by Red Priest . Yesterday we did a 100-mile round-trip to see them at Swaledale Festival . It was a really worthwhile journey despite lousy weather which dampened the Dales' bucolic charms, especially for poor gran who was struggling to negotiate the puddles with her bandaged leg.

This group is just spectacular. All brilliant musicians who specialize in historic performance, they take the spirit of the baroque at its most literal and, where necessary, happily reinvent and improvise. This was really evident in this tour, where a recorder-led quartet is taking on the work of Johann [geddit?] Sebastian Bach, despite the fact that Bach didn't compose for recorder. And it's absolutely marvellous stuff - familiar old warhorses like the Brandenburg Concertos, Toccata and Fugue in D min, and Badinerie take on a completely new life that's genuinely exciting while retaining a core of authenticity (the Swingle Singers it ain't!). DD is, of course, a very serious young recorder player and was lucky enough to be sitting directly in front of recorder genius, Piers Adams. She watched his technique like a hawk and every time he picked up a different instrument, I could see her mentally building her new shopping list.

But, above all, it's the spirit of fun and the interaction between the musicians that stays in your mind - sparkling talent demonstrated with the lightest of touches.
Playfulness is the word that springs to mind - the sheer pleasure of being really good at something, experimenting with and enjoying it for its own merits, rather than following tramlines towards a safe definition of standardized recognition. Pretty much an analogy for educating otherwise - no wonder we love this group!

Election day

Well, I voted. I didn't spoil my ballot paper with scribbles or "None of the above" (my default position since Iraq dispelled all my illusions). The party whose policies chime best with my own (increasingly anarchistic) views didn't field a candidate in my constituency, so I was left with a choice between the big 3 and the scary ultra-right. So I voted for the party/candidate on the ballot paper that looked likely to do least harm. Who knows, maybe millions of other disillusioned old party loyalists might have done the same?

Weirdly, I've come to the realization that I've become a single-issue voter: I really want a hung parliament because a government that has to heavily negotiate over the big things is less likely to try and mess with home education. Selfish? Probably. But ... look at the alternatives, none of them too pretty!

Dd observed the voting process and was shocked at how quickly a voter's duty is discharged. She's looking forward to staying up to watch the results - gonna be a looooooong night. All the older HE kids seem to have really discovered politics this time around. Who knows, we may have a future prime minister among them?

Meaning from movies

Today, dd and I watched the feature film "Gandhi". She was visibly shocked at the scene depicting the Amritsar massacre. Afterwards, she summed up passive resistance in one comment: "They didn't give the British Empire what it wanted - rioting and violence - so it was obvious to everybody that the rulers were unjust".

So good to see how children can grasp historical meaning without being presented with a textbook list of easily digestible bulletpoints.