"But where are your resources?"

She came into our home like a breath of fresh air. Pragmatic, idealistic, and keen to help. All my worries about the health school disappeared as she explained the way she would work: she wanted to build my son's trust, she would visit him twice a week and leave work to be completed in between, she would pitch the work not to his intellectual level (high) but to his anxiety (superhigh, meaning his confidence needed to be built up more than he needed to be stretched). She was in short like Father Christmas. I rather expected sleighbells, and a ho-ho-ho.
But then a shadow crossed her face, as we chatted about the work I had done with my son. I explained how we'd started working together when he couldn't move his legs or sometimes even his hands, and spending days lying on the sofa doing nothing except watching telly. "But this must have been really hard for you." Well, yes, it was. It's better now he is improving, you have no idea how much easier it is to educate a child who can pick up a pencil without complaining. She picked up the exercisebook filled with laborious sentences about Pokemon. (This is a painful experience for us both. I am not sure whose aversion is the strongest, his to writing or mine to those blasted Pokemon cards I am having to tolerate in the house). "OK, you have this book. But what else? I mean, where are your resources?"
And this was a sticky question, because if you're talking books or teaching materials, well, actually, I haven't had any. There is of course lots of useful stuff out there on the net, and I have hunted down those sites that offer limited free access with the single-minded determination of a labrador after food. Then there's the library, of course, which is great. But there really hasn't been the option of buying lots of courses, books, memberships to websites, etc, or signing my boys up to hundreds of snazzy daytime classes to get them "out of the house" or "socialising."

And do you know what? I'm rather glad.

I didn't feel glad, when the health school teacher asked me. I felt sort of awkward, and defensive, and shabby. I looked at our homemade efforts. The cardboard geology board game, and the cardboard tangram, and the homemade flash cards. Suddenly they didn't seem inventive or ingenious, they just looked, well, dull and brown and rather flimsy. They wouldn't last long. They didn't look attractive. But they were the best we could do, responsibly, for now. I thought of the conversation we'd had with our family budgeter. (We're not poor or in debt or financial trouble, but like most families with a stay-at-home parent we have to be careful, and it made sense to take up the offer of budgeting advice when it came from our GP practice). I'd explained that we needed to adjust the family budget to include spending on educational resources. She nodded supportively - education is a sensible need, it is not as if we were wanting extra dosh for gambling. So she bent her head, and looked down at our outgoings and incomings, and after a moment she beamed as if she had very good news, and announced that she thought it would be safe to spend an extra ten dollars per fortnight. Five pounds, for you Englishers. I'll be honest, at the time my heart sank. That's not an awful lot of stationary, website subscriptions, homeschooling classes or books. Especially in NZ where the price of books makes diamonds look like a good deal. (The International Adult Literacy Survey shows that one in five NZ adults operates at a high level of literacy. I guess the other four had parents who knew the cost of books. "Son, you put that down right NOW and turn the telly on, you want to bankrupt us with your reading habit?"). So I felt bad again when the health school teacher asked me, because it was a sore spot, I felt guilty that I wasn't spending far more, supplying them with crammed bookcases and an equally crammed extra-curricular timetable.

But now I have had time to think about it, I'm actually rather glad that we've started out this way. If we homeschool medium-term, it won't be a problem. There is a government grant which will provide for precisely that, good books and/or a couple of extra-curricular activities to season the weeks at home. And in the interim, well, I kind of think back to the days when I studied theory of drama, and was very taken as a young woman with Grotowski. A Polish bloke who had an experimental notion called Poor Theatre. It didn't mean Poor as in no money, of course. It was a wholly subsidised artistic program in which Grotowski and his actors were funded to experiment by the Polish government. But it did mean that they systematically stripped away all the extras from the theatrical experience, the building and the make-up and the costumes and the script...until they reached a point where they could go no further, because the one thing they could not take away from theatre was the actor's encounter with the spectator.

Now I rather think that there is little point in homeschooling if you are going to bust your budget or exhaust your energies trying to replicate all the advantages of school. My boys can learn that homeschool means not going to school when you are traumatised or in pain, but they also need to learn that it may mean working on a porridge-sticky table because Mum hasn't had a chance to clean that morning. (Possibly because she has spent the relevant time messing around on Facebook). And it does not mean a classroom full of gaudy enticing resources, or access to piles of expensive computer programs. It means doing what's possible, with what's possible, in the space and time that is possible. With me there to help them, if they want and need it. Because you see, the one thing I don't think you can do without in childhood education is someone there with you, accompanying, guiding, mentoring, supporting, empowering, strewing, introducing. You can call it many things but basically it is teaching. The encounter between the learner and the teaching material is unavoidable. To produce/supply/explain that material, you need an adult. That adult is me, and they need to encounter what I bring them, just like the spectator needs to encounter the actor for there to be a moment of theatre. So, if I'm teaching and they are learning, then that's education, and everything else is icing on the cake, means to an end. Sure, it's lovely when Father Christmas turns up, with offers of help and resources. Ho ho ho. But Christmas doesn't last all year, and I have no idea how long the health school will be available to fund us. We need to focus on the basics. Teacher and student. That's it. That's what you need. Everything else is stocking-filler.

Which is good because my middle son has completely fallen apart this week. He seems to have lost his social confidence overnight. He had a bad experience at school last week and somehow it has knocked him for six. He's like a pre-verbal toddler again, locked in his little shell. He doesn't need resources. The textbooks and extra-curricular activities will keep. But he does need some therapeutic input, someone to encourage him back into the happy sociable place he was a few months ago. In short, he needs me, my time and attention. And that's something that can be supplied in abundance.

As long as it doesn't impact on my Facebook habit, of course.

Probability problems

Probabilities. We have been covering that at home. Not much, not in a structured way. But I noticed my eldest son cursing that he could not get that right on his Mathletics game, and wandered over to help. (I also hyperventilated a little, because I am nervous of maths like you are nervous of poisonous snakes under your pillow).

My standards have been set extremely low for maths. I have checked the national standards that he should be meeting at the end of this year. Every time I showed him a problem from the list, he was able to solve it instantaneously. Oh, OK, I thought; I don't have to worry.

But I do, it turns out, because he now hates maths. Not, it seems, the maths we have done at home. We've taught him the probabilities he was struggling with. It took about five seconds. Then in another five seconds we explained that that was the childish way to do probabilities, and that there was a mathematical language for this kind of thing. And that you can use percentages, and that you can develop the idea of probabilities to a higher level, probably, than he would encounter for a few years at school. All this took an hour or so, not because my husband and I are incredible teachers but because he is a bright kid and there is a natural progression there. So far, so good.

But institutional maths is a different story. He's fed up with it. On one of his infrequent visits to school he discovered that there is a kid in the class who has done more worksheets than he has this year. In vain do I point out that this kid has not spent vast tracts of time sick at home,or in hospital. He gets that, he agrees, but he then tells me that he just doesn't want to do maths the school way, he doesn't like the worksheets any more. Right. Sigh. I start to regret having invited him to open up to me with his true feelings about school. He also hates writing. Well, I knew that already. I thought I had the solution for now. I explained to him about how he would need to write in exams when he was older, and he didn't need to be beautifully tidy but it needed to be fast and legible. I point out that when he came out from England he was already doing nice joined-up writing, so why is he now insisting on capitals? "But the other kids make fun of me when I do joined up writing, they say stop doing your fancy writing," he complains. And he insists on doing his dictation in capitals. I let him. The point of now is to work out what's going on, not try to fix everything overnight. But it's tempting to shout, and tell him to pull himself together.

Probabilities. The probability was that it was a lack of confidence, that he wasn't a very neat writer. But it turns out to be the opposite: it is that his friends at school thought he was too good at it, and as kids do decided to bring him down to their level. The perennial high-achievers' problem. I am relieved, in a way, because this problem sounds as if it might be easier to fix. But I am irritated, too: is there anything about his education that is actually going well, where he is working to his own satisfaction? No, it turns out, not really. He's a bundle of nerves, an eight-year-old worry ball. He thinks about probabilities, all the time, in a muddled sort of way: if I do well at this people may laugh at me, so let's play it safe and do it badly. I am not the best in the class at this anymore, am I the worst? He could use some probability-type thinking about his pain, too: to think about what may or may not may not happen.

So I bit the bullet, the way I have been desperately trying to avoid for the last couple of months, and said casually to my husband that I thought we ought to homeschool both boys for six months, until one was toilet-trained and the other in less pain.

I waited for the obligatory family argument (you know the one about money, and mollycoddling the boys,and not teaching them about the real world, and weird homeschooled kids).But fortunately my husband is a sensible man, and none of that happened.
After three days of thinking it over he said to me that he didn't think homeschooling for six months was actively dangerous. I took that as wholehearted approval. (Like I said, I have low standards).

Then we got a mysterious phonecall from the paediatric department of the hospital. A paediatrician who had never met our son had decided that she would like to sign a form admitting him to correspondence (hospital) school. Since we'd been trying to arrange this for months, this was good. I go to talk to school and we agree that this is a good solution - he can study their curriculum at home, I can supervise but it will give me a bit of time to focus on the huge educational problem that is my middle son. Who is clearly missing large tracts of what is said to him, and is clearly struggling with aural/auditory processing problems: who is slow to answer direct questions but who always knows the answers if you give him space and time. (I rather suspect this is behind many of his apparent social problems). Who is delightfully compliant, unless he feels under pressure, when he will refuse to comply or give the wrong answer on purpose. Who is doing well at reading and sums - because they are visual - but is struggling at the more abstract level of classroom language understanding, to the extent that he currently thinks his class is going on a trip to Antarctica. Yes, this boy needs some time and space and intensive engagement. It isn't just about the toilet training. He guesses the answer to a lot of verbal questions, relying on his understanding of probabilities to surmount that he can't understand. Sometimes his guesses are obviously, comically wrong - like Antarctica. Or the time when we went to the planetarium and he genuinely believed he had been in space. More often, I suspect, he guesses well enough that he gets by. But he won't for long. I have no idea what I am going to do about all this, but I know I can't leave him vaguely misunderstanding and floundering in the classroom.

So it is correspondence school for my eldest, and homemade curriculum for his brother. In which I guess I shall talk extremely slowly and clearly and spend lots of time waiting for his replies. I hope this is going to work out. I can already see a few problems ahead. The equivalent for my eldest son of finding those sneaky pillow-dwelling snakes. For one, the probability is extremely high that correspondence school will insist on seeing some writing, and will also be teaching maths by supplying him with a set of worksheets.