Golf and the world of home education

I think the world would be a better place if everyone played golf like this. Those tedious golf championships on tv would take a fraction of the time and we could have some good ole sleepy Sunday films on instead.

[By the way, in the world of Home Education this is not called 'cheating'. No, it is called 'using your initiative', or 'thinking outside of the box'...or 'doing it quick so you can get to the ice cream van'. ]

I've been thinking recently about the concepts people have of home education. So many seem to think that home education equates with 'school at home'. Of course there are a number of home edders who do home educate like this, particularly in the US where it seems there are two sorts of home edders: the structured home schoolers, and the autonomous unschoolers.

But in the UK there are many, if not more so, of home edders who do not do 'school at home'. And there are many who have a sort of eclectic mix of home education methods, constantly in flux, somewhere between 'school at home' and a totally child-led education.

For the record, we do not do school at home. We tried. We failed. We didn't conquer. (We chose another path).

But, what you might ask, do we do?

Well, there are days when I do not know what we do.

There are weeks when all I remember is the mounds of washing in and out and in and out, and the muddy footprints, piles of sand and dog hair down my hallway. There are weeks when I can't see beyond the boot rack and I despair over flat fruit cake and cry over lumpy mash.


There are weeks when my children whizz through the kitchen on a mission to something or somewhere, grabbing food on the hoof, hardly stopping for breath (and certainly not to grunt anything as civilised as 'hi') before they disappear off to something 'important'.

There are weeks when learning just happens, in its own wonky unpredictable way, without me teaching, interferring, guiding, enthusing or doing any of those things that are supposedly 'essential' for children's education:

And there are weeks when I am needed, on hand, that very minute, every minute of the day. 'Now Mummy!' they yell alternately from the bottom of our twenty million metre long garden and the highest point of our roof

'Come here!'

'Watch me!'

' Help me with this!'

' Look at this!'

and I'm pulled back and forth like a tired overstretched bit of knicker elastic.

And there are weeks when we play around with experiments from http://www.thehappyscientist.com/ and make sparks out of plain old aluminium foil:

And there are weeks when we go pond dipping

(It was this big, honest)

(no it wasn't, he's a liar)

(who cares, I have a great hat)

And there are weeks when we have fun at museums:

or listen to stories, or play with friends

There are days (not often weeks) when we (I) get the maths books out, encourage the kids to copy out poems to improve their handwriting, use 'Sequential spelling' in some desperate attempt to instil some sort of spelling sense into them.

What will happen to you little children if you can't spell? I wail.

How will you survive in the world without knowing your nine times tables? I wail.

We'll use spellchecker and a calculator, they wail in return.

And I say, fair point, and decide we should instead go out and do important things.

Like flying kites:

and playing golf (our own way):

and seeing the world with fresh eyes: