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...