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.