It was just me and my eldest today. Not unusual, except for the fact that he was walking. One brother was at kohanga, the other at SN holiday club.
I had some GrabOne vouchers (for those of you who don't know me well, our entire family social life revolves around what deals GrabOne and GroupOn have got this week. I am the social and online equivalent of a US grocery-coupon addict. My children will grow up to think that this is how everyone makes vital personal decisions. "Will you marry me?" "I dunno, let's check if GrabOne has any bridal flower deals this week.") These vouchers I had been keeping for a month, they were for the Butlers Chocolate Cafe at Sylvia Park. So off we went. Two slices, two chocolates and hot drink, all pre-paid.
So far so frugal. But then a spirit of wild adolescent hedonism overcame me. Tomorrow my husband will be paid (unless there is something about his disappearance to Canada that he's not telling me). There was the grand total of twenty-three dollars left in our general account, that is to say it was available for everyday spending. "Do you want to go to the toy shop and get a toy?" I asked. I explained he had twenty dollars, and that if he wanted something more than that, fine, but he couldn't get it today).
He was very happy with that idea, and we went down to Whitcoulls. (He wasn't walking by then, was back in the wheelchair). Inside, he saw the book section and dived towards it. He'd found the BeastQuest series that currently dominates his reading. "Can I have this?" It was nineteen dollars-ninety nine. "Sure."
I like playing bountiful mother. He sat and browsed the other books for a while, then we wandered towards the checkout. There was a holiday craft activity, using one of those artsy multicoloured pens that look so cool when they are demonstrated. We were not in a rush, so we joined in. After a while I decided that it would be a nice toy to possess, thinking in particular that it would be fun to use to teach him about intrusion in geological layers. (Yes, I know, I don't get out much). We wandered down to the ASB branch, where I transferred ten dollars across from the "Doctors" account, deciding to trust that no one would get ill in the next twenty-four hours (or if they did, I could borrow from the "Repairs" account, trusting that if we then ALSO had a burst pipe that the plumber would be prepared to wait for payment for twenty-four hours. You get the picture). Then we went back and bought the pens.
The complicated layers of calculation made me think, suddenly: ooh goodness if I am going to be educating him part-time at home, this could get rather expensive. We don't have a budgeting account for "Random stuff that might be useful if he has a particularly bad week and I run out of free stuff I have found on the Internet." I started running through areas where we might cut back slightly, in order to afford this: and then tried to justify to myself the fact that I couldn't find any by telling myself firmly that it was a lot of nonsense, that I didn't want to spoil him, that it was more important that he had my time and attention than toys, and all that sort of stern-frugal-mother-talk.
I'm good at that, and it generally works, but my resolve faltered a little a while later, when we were up on the top of One Tree Hill, sitting side-by-side looking at the glorious view, and I tentatively raised the subject of how he was finding it, doing some work at home.
"Well I've been doing more at home than I have at school," he said, with a little tremble in his voice. It was true, the last couple of weeks of term had been particularly bad and he'd missed a lot of school days (so much so that I had forced him despite the acute pain into school on the last morning, it was such a disaster that after an hour the teacher and I agreed we should give up and send him home). OK, I said. Do you miss being at school? He nodded.
I won't ever keep you off school when you want to go, I told him. If you can get yourself down the steps and you choose to do that, you can always go in. But if you are too sore to manage that, or don't want to try, that is when you can stay at home. But you choose to do that, if you are too sore. Do you understand that? It's your choice, every morning. I'm not the one keeping you away from school.
He nodded again. Then he asked me if we could go and play in the school grounds over the holidays (you can do that, here in NZ). Yes, of course we can, I said. As long as you can get there. On a good day.
I sat beside him and looked out at the view. I'm such a shabby second-best, I thought to myself (once again irritated with prevailing medical opinion which holds that a child who is in too much pain for school must inevitably be a habitual truant in the making). I am so much not as much fun as your mates in the playground, with whom you run and argue and make clubs and hide. I am so much not as interesting as your teachers, who have the advantage of whiteboards and educational computer programs and carpet time and assemblies and music activities...there's just me. Me and a few ideas you have asked to learn about. Reluctantly, when I pushed you, because really you wanted to be left alone with your pain. I can't take you out and about, I can't join you to homeschooling groups, I can't do hands-on learning in the kitchen or garden. There's just you, on the sofa, and me. With no money to spend on resources and a paucity of time to prepare. As opposed to a whole school full of trained staff dedicated fulltime to making sure you spend time in an enjoyable, healthy, and sensible educational way. I really can't compete. No wonder you miss school.
You probably miss health, too, I thought. Six months ago, your world was looking so much better. You were on Ritalin for the first time, and your ability to manage life without stress and anxiety had soared. We were all happier. Suddenly, it was as if you had grown up. I felt a surge of optimism. The hard years were over, I thought. Then this happened to you. The crippling pain that left you unable to walk for months, then seemed to recede, and now recurs, up and down, like a cruel tide covering the sandy beach of your play. Oh, it goes down again. We get days off. But it always comes back again, regular and insistent. Destroying your ability to be a kid like others, just as you were being given the help to enable you to integrate successfully. Gee, thanks God.
And as I agonised over the wreckage of his healthy run-about childhood, I made my peace with the fact that we are going to need to spend money on stuff to do at home. Yeah, it might mean fewer frozen yoghurts from GrabOne. He might even get used to the idea of a toyshop being not just for Christmas and birthdays. He might, shock horror, start to expect these things. But jeepers, the pain in his legs has pretty much robbed him of school, of daily friendships with his peers, of the daily joy of running about and playing outside. The least I can do is find a way to manage to buy him a few educational toys.
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Sunday, April 28, 2013
Kaleidoscope time
I am far too dyspraxic to be naturally arty-crafty. I have been known to start hyperventilating when I am faced with a complex Lego instruction manual, coupled with the trust and expectation in the face of a sweet wide-eyed child who just knows that Mummy will shortly produce the working underwater-StarWars model of which they have always dreamed. So I am somewhat proud of the fact that two years ago my eldest and I made a sort-of-working kaleidoscope. Without killing each other or anything. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't easy. I lost several years of my life in the process. (Then I saw the spotty teenagers in charge of the kids club at a caravan park effortlessly do the same, which kind of ruined my proud "exceptionally good parent" moment, but anyway). The thing is, I KNOW HOW A KALEIDOSCOPE WORKS. If I ever get back into the clerical jobmarket, I am damn well going to put that onto my CV.
And after everyone's kind and helpful comments yesterday, I decided that I would damn well find a way of describing my attitude to part-time homeschooling/sick child schooling/finding a way of turning that telly off occasionally. (And yes, I KNOW, telly can be educational, but if I hear any more Teenage Ninja Monster soundtrack I may just start eating pizza and slaying with a numchuk myself). I decided that it was like a kaleidoscope. You know when you are a child and Santa brings a cheapo kaleidoscope that inevitably you break, and all the coloured bits of glass fall on the floor, and you sigh and think "Is that all that's inside?" Because the kaleidoscope felt so magical? And you're heartbroken to find that it's just a bit of cheap glass? Hmm, maybe not such a cheerful analogy after all.
But I kind of like the idea of cheap glass beads being transformed into something remarkable and surprising by a couple of mirrors, the multiple reflections spinning in different directions and creating a magical moment or two. That's how I think education should be anyway, the "gasp" and "aah" moments where a topic looks different because all the pieces of knowledge fall together in a new way, or you see the same stuff from a different and exhilarating angle. And the great thing about a kaleidoscope is that you need lots of mirrors to make that happen, to turn the dull beads into something fun and interesting. Not just me, sitting at home with my sore child, wondering if he really needs to do his spelling practice today or if I can escape to something more fun like the washing-up. Not just school, which is always going to be difficult for a child who is missing so much already and having to do some of the rest through a wall of pain. Not just the educational TV or computer games, which have their place (particularly in allowing me guilt-free time to do the washingup) but are not really a substitute for being able to run and walk and play outside. But perhaps a mixture of all of it, might create the right atmosphere, the right mixture of reflections, for learning to take place.
And in case that sounds a bit too upbeat, let me point out a few reasons why me doing homeschooling is still a very very bad idea.
1) I've been studying online blogs on this subject assiduously, and I have been reliably informed that the only way I am going to get the time to do homeschooling well is to drop my housekeeping standards and learn to live with a messier house. Hello ladies. I ALREADY have a very messy house. I dropped my standards about eight years ago. Actually, I never had any housekeeping standards but it didn't matter until I had kids, with their snot and toys and biscuitcrumb-spreading gifts. What I've never got the hang of is cleaning up after them. So essentially, what you are telling me is that the only way I am going to get the extra time to do homeschooling is to move us into a rubbish dump. Well, I guess that's one way of solving our home accessibility problem.
2) According to the unschoolers, in order to be an effective H-educator I should drop all insistence on bedtime and the like, and just let them chill, you know, hang out in the evening, until they learn to listen to their bodies. (I am not completely sure how they are going to learn to listen to their bodies when they can't learn to listen to me yelling "Will you please FRIGGING GO INTO YOUR ROOM AND SLEEP!" but possibly I'm missing some of the subtleties of the argument here). This is kinda difficult when I can never tell if son will be well enough to send to school, in which case school might understandably be peeved that I've let him stay up until three a.m. Also I really don't like my children when they are tired and cranky. They don't like each other much either, so there'd be a lot of blood. But then again, bedtimes are a frigging nightmare at the moment (especially with husband away in Canada) so perhaps I might drink less emergency-calm-down whisky if I adopted that approach.
Note: er, actually, I am getting quite tempted by some of the unschooler ideas. It's a bit of a shock, like finding out that you were quite comfortable as a spiritually self-centred non-church attender but but that actually you might want to be a vicar if you thought about it enough. Not that I am thinking autobiographically here at all, oh no...
3) I'd have to know stuff. About art and music and engineering and, and, and. And I don't have time, and I don't have the spare money to spend on purchasing alternative curriculae. Of course this argument against homeschooling got blown out of the water somewhat tonight. I'd put my eldest to bed early, because at the time he could walk, and if he can't walk later on I can't move him, and my husband is in Canada, so we have this horrible halfhour of him dragging himself inch by inch down the corridor...so I just grabbed him at about 6.30pm and said "You can walk, go to your room now and get into your bed. You are not allowed to go anywhere except the toilet and not even that if you think you are feeling sore, I'll bring you the commode."
(As you can see, I am a natural laissez-faire unschooler type).
He very sensibly and responsibly got into his bed and wondered aloud if he might be allowed to do some Mathletics, the computer maths programme supplied by his school. I brought him the laptop. About an hour later a strangled scream came out of the bedroom. I rushed along the corridor, assuming he needed painkiller.
"Mum have you got ArtRage?"
"Huh?"
"Artrage, have you loaded down ArtRage?"
He was almost incoherent with the urgency of the question. I ascertained slowly that ArtRage was an art program you could get online. He must have done it at school sometime. We checked and there was a free version. I did the loading-down thing, and he settled back on his pillows with a sigh of relief. Then he decided he needed me to upload a map of NZ so he could copy that. I felt rather as if I was being confronted with a complex Lego manual, but after ten minutes of hyperventilating and sweaty palms, I managed to accomplish it for him. An hour later, he called me in again to show me what he'd made.
School gave him the tools. I managed to find what he needed online. His own imagination did the rest. Kaleidoscope time, the three different mirrors making a complex pattern that gave him what he needed, to have fun and try something different. It's the first time I've seen him do spontaneous art in months.
He was so painridden tonight that when I brought him his toothbrush in bed, he didn't want to do his own teeth, I had to do them for him. But he didn't ask for painkiller. Kaleidoscope time. It can make the ordinary seem magical. Who needs magic, you might ask? Clearlly, we do. I saw the Holy Grail tonight, my kid in pain who didn't ask for painkiller because he was occupied by something fun and interesting.
Of course, that DOES make it harder to argue against part-time homeschooling...
And after everyone's kind and helpful comments yesterday, I decided that I would damn well find a way of describing my attitude to part-time homeschooling/sick child schooling/finding a way of turning that telly off occasionally. (And yes, I KNOW, telly can be educational, but if I hear any more Teenage Ninja Monster soundtrack I may just start eating pizza and slaying with a numchuk myself). I decided that it was like a kaleidoscope. You know when you are a child and Santa brings a cheapo kaleidoscope that inevitably you break, and all the coloured bits of glass fall on the floor, and you sigh and think "Is that all that's inside?" Because the kaleidoscope felt so magical? And you're heartbroken to find that it's just a bit of cheap glass? Hmm, maybe not such a cheerful analogy after all.
But I kind of like the idea of cheap glass beads being transformed into something remarkable and surprising by a couple of mirrors, the multiple reflections spinning in different directions and creating a magical moment or two. That's how I think education should be anyway, the "gasp" and "aah" moments where a topic looks different because all the pieces of knowledge fall together in a new way, or you see the same stuff from a different and exhilarating angle. And the great thing about a kaleidoscope is that you need lots of mirrors to make that happen, to turn the dull beads into something fun and interesting. Not just me, sitting at home with my sore child, wondering if he really needs to do his spelling practice today or if I can escape to something more fun like the washing-up. Not just school, which is always going to be difficult for a child who is missing so much already and having to do some of the rest through a wall of pain. Not just the educational TV or computer games, which have their place (particularly in allowing me guilt-free time to do the washingup) but are not really a substitute for being able to run and walk and play outside. But perhaps a mixture of all of it, might create the right atmosphere, the right mixture of reflections, for learning to take place.
And in case that sounds a bit too upbeat, let me point out a few reasons why me doing homeschooling is still a very very bad idea.
1) I've been studying online blogs on this subject assiduously, and I have been reliably informed that the only way I am going to get the time to do homeschooling well is to drop my housekeeping standards and learn to live with a messier house. Hello ladies. I ALREADY have a very messy house. I dropped my standards about eight years ago. Actually, I never had any housekeeping standards but it didn't matter until I had kids, with their snot and toys and biscuitcrumb-spreading gifts. What I've never got the hang of is cleaning up after them. So essentially, what you are telling me is that the only way I am going to get the extra time to do homeschooling is to move us into a rubbish dump. Well, I guess that's one way of solving our home accessibility problem.
2) According to the unschoolers, in order to be an effective H-educator I should drop all insistence on bedtime and the like, and just let them chill, you know, hang out in the evening, until they learn to listen to their bodies. (I am not completely sure how they are going to learn to listen to their bodies when they can't learn to listen to me yelling "Will you please FRIGGING GO INTO YOUR ROOM AND SLEEP!" but possibly I'm missing some of the subtleties of the argument here). This is kinda difficult when I can never tell if son will be well enough to send to school, in which case school might understandably be peeved that I've let him stay up until three a.m. Also I really don't like my children when they are tired and cranky. They don't like each other much either, so there'd be a lot of blood. But then again, bedtimes are a frigging nightmare at the moment (especially with husband away in Canada) so perhaps I might drink less emergency-calm-down whisky if I adopted that approach.
Note: er, actually, I am getting quite tempted by some of the unschooler ideas. It's a bit of a shock, like finding out that you were quite comfortable as a spiritually self-centred non-church attender but but that actually you might want to be a vicar if you thought about it enough. Not that I am thinking autobiographically here at all, oh no...
3) I'd have to know stuff. About art and music and engineering and, and, and. And I don't have time, and I don't have the spare money to spend on purchasing alternative curriculae. Of course this argument against homeschooling got blown out of the water somewhat tonight. I'd put my eldest to bed early, because at the time he could walk, and if he can't walk later on I can't move him, and my husband is in Canada, so we have this horrible halfhour of him dragging himself inch by inch down the corridor...so I just grabbed him at about 6.30pm and said "You can walk, go to your room now and get into your bed. You are not allowed to go anywhere except the toilet and not even that if you think you are feeling sore, I'll bring you the commode."
(As you can see, I am a natural laissez-faire unschooler type).
He very sensibly and responsibly got into his bed and wondered aloud if he might be allowed to do some Mathletics, the computer maths programme supplied by his school. I brought him the laptop. About an hour later a strangled scream came out of the bedroom. I rushed along the corridor, assuming he needed painkiller.
"Mum have you got ArtRage?"
"Huh?"
"Artrage, have you loaded down ArtRage?"
He was almost incoherent with the urgency of the question. I ascertained slowly that ArtRage was an art program you could get online. He must have done it at school sometime. We checked and there was a free version. I did the loading-down thing, and he settled back on his pillows with a sigh of relief. Then he decided he needed me to upload a map of NZ so he could copy that. I felt rather as if I was being confronted with a complex Lego manual, but after ten minutes of hyperventilating and sweaty palms, I managed to accomplish it for him. An hour later, he called me in again to show me what he'd made.
School gave him the tools. I managed to find what he needed online. His own imagination did the rest. Kaleidoscope time, the three different mirrors making a complex pattern that gave him what he needed, to have fun and try something different. It's the first time I've seen him do spontaneous art in months.
He was so painridden tonight that when I brought him his toothbrush in bed, he didn't want to do his own teeth, I had to do them for him. But he didn't ask for painkiller. Kaleidoscope time. It can make the ordinary seem magical. Who needs magic, you might ask? Clearlly, we do. I saw the Holy Grail tonight, my kid in pain who didn't ask for painkiller because he was occupied by something fun and interesting.
Of course, that DOES make it harder to argue against part-time homeschooling...
Saturday, April 27, 2013
Perfectionism
I am not a parenting perfectionist. Oh, OK, I am. I spend nine-tenths of my day worrying about my children and the fact that I am not doing enough for them. The last tenth I spend planning grand projects that we will never get around to. Then I berate myself for not having done them. I have a mind that works fast and the problem with this is that in the space of about twenty seconds I can move from "goodness it is nice to see my son reading" through "but is that the right kind of book? he has only read that book series for about six months" into "I am a total failure as a mother because I have not set him any more challenging literature" to "he will leave home and blame me PERSONALLY for the fact that he has not yet read The Secret Garden." This absurdity is followed by the thought "Just be grateful that he's reading AT ALL," and then in swift succession "But he never does any drawing, shouldn't I be encouraging him to stop reading that blasted series and do some drawing?" "If I make him draw he will just draw stuff from that blasted series." "What about introducing him to something wonderful like Chinese calligraphy, shouldn't I do that with him this afternoon?" "My goodness I know NOTHING about Chinese calligraphy what kind of mother am I?" I can find fifteen different ways to blame myself for being inadequate in the space it takes someone else to think "Good, children quiet, time for a quick cup of tea."
In short, I am really not the kind of person who should be doing home-schooling. I just don't have that inner serenity and belief that it will all be fine, you know, you just need to throw your children into the open air with some paints and get on with it and before you know it they will have produced a masterwork. No, I am wriggling at the moment like a worm on a fish-hook. My neurotic thought pattern runs like this
1) I have no idea what I'm doing. (Fortunately he doesn't know - yet. I have this mysterious air of calm certainty that I put on for his benefit when I say cheerfully "Now, turn off the telly, we're going to do a....an educational thing.") I am not even quite sure why I am doing it. He's a bright kid, he will survive educationally even if he skips a couple of years of school. But I have a strong aversion to the idea of leaving him to sit on the sofa for those couple of years. Trouble is, I don't have a clearer idea than that. I have no grand game-plan or theory about what Home Schooling should be. (I'm pretty sure most theories of homeschool don't include "send him to school whenever he can stagger down the stairs unaided") This obviously means I will be a failure because all the Home Schoolers I know are super-confident. And they know that school is bad, or unnecessary, or something. Whereas I rather like schools. They have cake sales and everything. I'm also rather in awe of teachers, and I certainly don't think I can do a better job. I wish I had a grand theory of why Home Is Better. I don't, I just don't have a ramp.
2) The fact that he's going to school when he can is obviously great, because a) it means that he gets to socialise with his peers and b) if I do anything disastrous by homeschooling him, such as I accidentally unplug the neurons in his brain that deal with reading and writing, well the school will notice that I've made him illiterate and pick up the pieces for me. But it also makes it dashed hard to design a curriculum. Do I try to teach him anything? What if I teach him the wrong thing, or the right thing in the wrong order? It's all very well if you are fulltime HE, but I might accidentally teach him fractions before multiplication, or verbs before nouns, when the teacher wants to do it the other way around. And then the world will end. Obviously.
3) My son will hate me for having made him weird and unsocialised by homeschooling him. He will not remember that the reason I am taking this route is that he lies on the carpet in tears, almost retching with the pain of trying to push himself down the stairs of a morning (thank you, Ministry of Health, for deciding that he doesn't need a ramp). He will only remember that he wanted to spend the whole day watching Teenage Mutant Ninja and I said No, we are doing to do a...a...weird THING that I have invented. Called sitting at the table, oh no you can't really sit at the moment, you are in too much pain, well lie there then, no you can't have more painkiller, I'm going to test you on your spellings instead. He will probably write a misery memoir called "I was in pain and she made me spell 'miscellaneous.'" And for the record, HE chose miscellaneous as a spelling he wanted to learn. But he won't remember that either.
4) I am overpreparing and overthinking this. This is a weird one. Because, on the one level, of course I am, because I've never had to teach a child before, and I have no idea how to design a lesson or a course, or even how to choose a useful curriculum. So it is hard work. The reason for this isn't academic prowess, it's that when I started out trying to teach him the lazy way ("oh, I was an academic, I taught at university level, how hard can this be?") I ran out of material and inspiration within about a day. He's a sponge, he just soaks stuff in, he understands it instantly and then what do you do? So I started looking up books to teach him from, and reading them in the evenings, and watching my small amount of free time disappear. Never mind, I think, I am enjoying it. But then I feel guilty that I am enjoying the studying too much, and that I am in some weird way meeting my own needs not his by doing this. (Rationally, I think this is unlikely: if I REALLY wanted to teach myself NZ geology there are easier ways. But neuroses are of course not rational, this is part of the point).
5) This is all a total waste of my time because in a month or so he'll be better, fixed, right as rain, he'll be back in school and I'll be irrelevant, feeling a bit silly for having thought so hard about all this. Well, actually, that's not so much a neurosis as a fantasy. Chance would be a fine thing.
Against all this neurosis and gloom, there have been some interesting moments. Like today, when my son put down the blasted series to which he has been superglued for six months, turned to me and said, "this book has a volcano in it, I think the way that rocks melt in volcanoes is like this." And because I had just spent an hour sorting out in my head the difference between metamorphic and igneous and sedimentary rock, we had an interesting conversation about it. Of course what I COULD have said is "please don't ask me about this now, if we talk about it today then that is a whole hour of one of your sick days I can't use up teaching you about rocks. Just go and read your book." But, even novice-and-sceptical homeschooler that I am, I had this sense that my child turning to talk to me of his own volition about a topic was a GOOD THING.
And I guess that's the first thing about homeschooling that I am learning, that you can have a plan and you can do some preparation but your child's mind and interests and all that will ultimately, you know, do their own thing and take their own direction. So be flexible and be prepared for the unexpected. And optimistic. And don't be a perfectionist. And don't listen to your negative neurosis. Better, don't have any.
Hmm. I might be able to manage flexible.
In short, I am really not the kind of person who should be doing home-schooling. I just don't have that inner serenity and belief that it will all be fine, you know, you just need to throw your children into the open air with some paints and get on with it and before you know it they will have produced a masterwork. No, I am wriggling at the moment like a worm on a fish-hook. My neurotic thought pattern runs like this
1) I have no idea what I'm doing. (Fortunately he doesn't know - yet. I have this mysterious air of calm certainty that I put on for his benefit when I say cheerfully "Now, turn off the telly, we're going to do a....an educational thing.") I am not even quite sure why I am doing it. He's a bright kid, he will survive educationally even if he skips a couple of years of school. But I have a strong aversion to the idea of leaving him to sit on the sofa for those couple of years. Trouble is, I don't have a clearer idea than that. I have no grand game-plan or theory about what Home Schooling should be. (I'm pretty sure most theories of homeschool don't include "send him to school whenever he can stagger down the stairs unaided") This obviously means I will be a failure because all the Home Schoolers I know are super-confident. And they know that school is bad, or unnecessary, or something. Whereas I rather like schools. They have cake sales and everything. I'm also rather in awe of teachers, and I certainly don't think I can do a better job. I wish I had a grand theory of why Home Is Better. I don't, I just don't have a ramp.
2) The fact that he's going to school when he can is obviously great, because a) it means that he gets to socialise with his peers and b) if I do anything disastrous by homeschooling him, such as I accidentally unplug the neurons in his brain that deal with reading and writing, well the school will notice that I've made him illiterate and pick up the pieces for me. But it also makes it dashed hard to design a curriculum. Do I try to teach him anything? What if I teach him the wrong thing, or the right thing in the wrong order? It's all very well if you are fulltime HE, but I might accidentally teach him fractions before multiplication, or verbs before nouns, when the teacher wants to do it the other way around. And then the world will end. Obviously.
3) My son will hate me for having made him weird and unsocialised by homeschooling him. He will not remember that the reason I am taking this route is that he lies on the carpet in tears, almost retching with the pain of trying to push himself down the stairs of a morning (thank you, Ministry of Health, for deciding that he doesn't need a ramp). He will only remember that he wanted to spend the whole day watching Teenage Mutant Ninja and I said No, we are doing to do a...a...weird THING that I have invented. Called sitting at the table, oh no you can't really sit at the moment, you are in too much pain, well lie there then, no you can't have more painkiller, I'm going to test you on your spellings instead. He will probably write a misery memoir called "I was in pain and she made me spell 'miscellaneous.'" And for the record, HE chose miscellaneous as a spelling he wanted to learn. But he won't remember that either.
4) I am overpreparing and overthinking this. This is a weird one. Because, on the one level, of course I am, because I've never had to teach a child before, and I have no idea how to design a lesson or a course, or even how to choose a useful curriculum. So it is hard work. The reason for this isn't academic prowess, it's that when I started out trying to teach him the lazy way ("oh, I was an academic, I taught at university level, how hard can this be?") I ran out of material and inspiration within about a day. He's a sponge, he just soaks stuff in, he understands it instantly and then what do you do? So I started looking up books to teach him from, and reading them in the evenings, and watching my small amount of free time disappear. Never mind, I think, I am enjoying it. But then I feel guilty that I am enjoying the studying too much, and that I am in some weird way meeting my own needs not his by doing this. (Rationally, I think this is unlikely: if I REALLY wanted to teach myself NZ geology there are easier ways. But neuroses are of course not rational, this is part of the point).
5) This is all a total waste of my time because in a month or so he'll be better, fixed, right as rain, he'll be back in school and I'll be irrelevant, feeling a bit silly for having thought so hard about all this. Well, actually, that's not so much a neurosis as a fantasy. Chance would be a fine thing.
Against all this neurosis and gloom, there have been some interesting moments. Like today, when my son put down the blasted series to which he has been superglued for six months, turned to me and said, "this book has a volcano in it, I think the way that rocks melt in volcanoes is like this." And because I had just spent an hour sorting out in my head the difference between metamorphic and igneous and sedimentary rock, we had an interesting conversation about it. Of course what I COULD have said is "please don't ask me about this now, if we talk about it today then that is a whole hour of one of your sick days I can't use up teaching you about rocks. Just go and read your book." But, even novice-and-sceptical homeschooler that I am, I had this sense that my child turning to talk to me of his own volition about a topic was a GOOD THING.
And I guess that's the first thing about homeschooling that I am learning, that you can have a plan and you can do some preparation but your child's mind and interests and all that will ultimately, you know, do their own thing and take their own direction. So be flexible and be prepared for the unexpected. And optimistic. And don't be a perfectionist. And don't listen to your negative neurosis. Better, don't have any.
Hmm. I might be able to manage flexible.
Sunday, April 21, 2013
Not in the plan
OK, right now, get away with all your happy thoughts and inspirational feelings about how lovely it would be to home-educate, if you had the temperament and the patience and the time. I have NEVER wanted to H.E, in fact I wrote an article when my eldest started school about how relieved I was and how lovely the school were. I am both EXTREMELY resentful at God, fate, the government, whomever we want to blame for this situation, and that I want to send my child to school. I'm not actually even strictly speaking a home-schooler. I'm the mum of a child who is enrolled at an excellent school, Go check out their site if you want to see a place that is superb at educating bright children with special/additional needs, which both my elder children are.
But my eldest has a sort of vague thing wrong with him, that causes acute pain at times, lots of the time, and makes him unable to walk or even crawl. We live in a house which is perfect for us in every way except that we have steps, in and out. When he is in too much pain to crawl we can't get him down the steps. He can't get to school. This happens...more than I like.
So I can leave him on the sofa all day, watching children's TV, or I can try to educate him a bit.
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