"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.