First day of term. And ho hum, sore legs, my son can't get out of bed. This is problematic because it means I can't drop the youngest to kindy. A kind friend offers to stop by so that I can get the middle one to school. Usually he'd catch the school walking bus, but it's cancelled because of the heavy rain. This is the important bit, remember that.
I come home, and prepare myself for a day of doing it back to front - there is no way the three-year-old will let us do the sort of focused stuff I had planned, so I tell my eight-year-old that he will do his main school this afternoon during toddler nap time, and all I want from him at some point in the morning is either Mathletics or spelling. He picks spelling, so I log him onto the free spelling website I have found. This simple process takes me about ten minutes and several computer reboots, during which time I compose a new Cumulus' Law of Home-Schooling: if something can go wrong technically, it will. I suppose I should be grateful that it wasn't going wrong in front of thirty children, just one.
The morning is cold, grey and depressing. Nick Jr blares from the TV and I can't imagine how the homeschooler is managing to concentrate on his spelling games. He is angry with the computer, he shouts at it "I can't do any of it right." I quickly check online, and realise with embarrassment that I have accidentally set the level too high for his age - he's in Year Four in New Zealand, but that does not equate to Fourth Grade US. Two years ahead. Oops. No wonder he's frustrated.
After the promised twenty minutes we do a test. He doesn't want to use his specially new bought clipboard and pens (ungrateful child), but wants it on the computer. I let him type his answers. He pecks them out, hunched over the keyboard. When I check, he's scored 100 per cent. Our moods both lift. OK, I think, the online program is obviously a good one. Phew. We can do this.
Then the physio rings. She is planning a meeting with school to arrange making things easier for him there, but when she talks to me agrees that there's not much point when I can't get him in. She asks "what is the structure of your day at home?" I describe the commode, the pushing him down the hallway in the buggy. She goes quiet. Then she says. "It's that bad?"
I tell her that I am using education as pain management, to give him something else to think about. She agrees that distraction is a good idea. Then she says "but you can't just distract, kids need to do, the things that they are supposed to do..." I know she is thinking, but not saying, he needs to go to school.
After lunch I put the little one for a nap. Then I spend a quiet five minutes setting up the kitchen table with a map, some magnets to stick on it, and a few notes I have made of the work I plan for us to do together. His legs have improved, so he's able to join me in the kitchen.
I am rather looking forward to this lesson. I have a sort of idea in my mind of homeschooling as a high-minded series of conversations, where I introduce worthy and thought-provoking themes in a fun yet weighty way. We will chat, as friends, only he will respect me as his tutor. At the back of my mind I see myself as a sort of kiddie-friendly Oxford don, offering him the privilege of a personal tutorial. This is the plan.
We start, and immediately I realise that he is high as a kite. Having been unable to walk all morning, he now can't sit still. He is keen as mustard, but it is like talking to a jack-in-the-box.
"Can we do this? What's that there on the map? Can I play with these?" He is all over the place, asking questions without listening to the answers, spinning magnets, thinking of new things to do. "Are we going to bake today? Baking's educational."
I slow down, remind him kindly to sit still and calm down, continue, stop, tell him to pay attention a little bit more firmly, continue, lose my rag and yell at him....
somewhere in the middle of all this we are meant to be discussing the idea of home education, and the different ways in which you learn at home and at school. He is not really interested until I ask him what happens when a teacher has to teach lots of children, and some of them understand the first time, and some not at all. "I get bored. And I hide my head inside my clothes, like this." He remembers a project he did last year about nature. "But it stopped, stopped stopped! And we never did any more and I hate that."
I am trying to make sure that he is getting a balanced picture. So I ask him about things that he can do at school that he can't do at home. "Play with your friends at playtime?" He grins, and moves that into the "both home and school" section. "You are my friend," he says. "I can play with you."
Er, yes, I say, hoping this does not mean he is expecting me to start spending those precious few moments when I am not teaching him playing Skylanders and Pokemon. Then I wonder if this lesson is going quite the way I want it to. I wanted to just introduce the idea that we might learn differently in different contexts, not find out all the stuff he doesn't enjoy about school-style learning. But I can't unsay it, or unlisten to what he's telling me. We move onto geology, and spend a happy half-hour drawing diagrams of layers of rock forming mountains with the snazzy multi-coloured pens I bought at the toyshop. This is a definite hit.
Oh goodness, I think with alarm, what if he falls in love with homeschooling? This is just meant to be a temporary measure, a response to the days of pain. I would have to LISTEN to him, and withdraw him from school; and I like school, and I think it's good for him, etc etc. I comfort myself with the thought that hopefully he is partly telling me what he thinks I want to hear, and then - relieved that he can now move - we drive down the road to fetch his brother.
As we drive through the gates of school, he says "It is hard being cooped up all day." I couldn't agree more. Then he says "I miss being able to play with my friends." I agree that that is hard, with a sigh of relief that he hasn't turned off school completely. This evening I make a cunning suggestion. If he has a day like today, where he starts off in a lot of pain but gradually improves, why doesn't he just go in for an hour or so in the afternoon? That way he'll get to see his friends.
We agree it's a good idea, although I can see he's nervous that this means I'll start to pressure him again to attend when he's in agony. We'll play it by ear.
I think again of the physio's hint, that working at home is not enough, is inadequate somehow. I wonder if she is right. And then the jinx hits: I suddenly realise that the entire strategy on which I have based this plan is flawed. I have been thinking of one child at home most days (usually my husband can take the littlest to day-long kohanga). But now that it is winter, I won't have the car. I won't be able to get the wheelchair up the drive safely in the rain. So far so normal, but what is not the same as summer is that the school walking school bus doesn't run when it's raining. And it's Auckland, there's a lot of rain in winter. If my eldest can't walk, I won't be able to get my middle one to school.
I look at my middle child. You are absolutely lovely and I adore you, I think. But please dear God not dealing with two of you at home needing an education. I know that the hyper afternoon session was because I couldn't do the focused work in the morning, when my son is steadier. And this was him at his easiest, with one-to-one attention. I can't imagine trying to teach him anything with another child in the room. Less of an Oxbridge tutorial and more of a bearpit, then. I compose a second Cumulus' Law of HomeSchooling: Just when you think it can't possibly get any harder, that's exactly what it does.
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