JELLY JUGGLING (reasons to be absent, part 1)

I haven't blogged as much in 2013 as I had hoped to.

I had grand plans.

I wanted to write about our first steps into taking exams. I wanted to write about how we have moved from a very autonomous, eclectic style of home education to a far more structured way of life. I wanted to document it all, day by day, week by week.

But it hasn't happened. And the longer I left it, the harder it was to come back to blogging.

I've noticed that I'm not the only one to have had a quiet blogging year. Other regular blogs that I used to visit have been strangely silent. My guess is that many of those families have children about the same age as mine and, like us, have found that life gets in the way of documenting life.

If you thought life was busy home edding small children, just try starting on the whole GCSE/IGCSE route. It eats up your time, invades holidays, nags at the back of your mind whenever you think you might have a moment's peace and, yes, becomes all consuming.

It's rather like taking exams yourself, except that when it's you taking the exam, you know how hard you've been studying and how much (or little) you know. Dragging someone else through the exam process, when all you can do is spoonfeed information in one end and catch it as it falls out the other end is  somewhat like juggling jelly. All day. Every day.

I have spent the whole year thinking about jelly, wondering how I can improve jelly, Googling jelly-sites for improved jelly recipes, investing in jelly-is-us resources until there is no more room in the jelly cupboard.I have not wanted to post photos of jelly, or report our progress in jelly juggling all year.  My life has been consumed by jelly. I am totally jellied out.

But things will improve. They are improving. I will not ever, I think, enjoy jelly. But perhaps I will become accustomed to it. I may even grow to be a better jelly juggler.

It's all been leading up to this...

Tomorrow ds1 takes his first ever exam.

This morning I woke up feeling like I'd been booked to give a poetry reading to a group of 20 Hells Angels.

The two are not unconnected.



Since September, ds1 (age 14), has been studying Chemistry with a group of home ed teens in another county. Each week we've driven over an hour for his 2 hour class.

Before joining the group we'd done quite a bit of basic chemistry. Mostly we'd used the Ellen McHenry chemistry downloads (which, incidentally, are fab). When we moved on to IGCSE-level work at home we found out that doing stuff from a textbook with your mother is darn tedious.

If I'd had the energy to make it interesting and hands-on, I would've, but I didn't. And with the best will in the world I'm not going to. So the chemistry group has been a godsend. Ds1 has had plenty of larfs with kids his age, and along the way he's learned heaps too.

It's been a steep learning curve. Less than 3 years ago he was still writing his letters backwards, putting capitals in the middle of words, and had to concentrate just to spell his own name. He'd had some help with his 'dylexic' symptoms, but when we started chemistry he'd never written more than a short sentence. And very rarely ;)

When we started I knew ds1 would have to work harder to prove himself on paper than many other teens. If reading text is hard...and writing is hard...and spelling, punctuation, grammar - and just remembering what you were writing when you're halfway through your sentence - is hard...then however bright you are, exams are going to be hard.

When we started IGCSEs he didn't know how to title a page, where to put the question number, how to mark points on a graph, how to label a diagram or even how to draw a straight line with a ruler. Sure, he had lots of knowledge and skills, but unlike in school, where you have to do the tedious stuff every day until it is engraved on your brain forever, he'd found no need to learn this particular skill set.

And then there was content. CONTENT. (There was so much of it I have to write it in capitals.)

And learning how to apply that content.

And then, towards the end, there have been exam skills to learn -  jumping the hurdles of the mark schemes...the art of educated guessing...how to tick those exact boxes. It's been a long hard slog for him, and exhausting for me.
 
And the worst thing is that it feels as if everything we have done - everything we have ever done in our home education - has been leading up to this moment.

Ridiculous, of course, because there is so much more to life than exams. Exams are hoop-jumping. Box-ticking. They are not truly representative of  the worth of a human being and they do not demonstrate the extensive skills a person may have.

But exam results are visible proof that we (I) have done a good job. They are something the rest of society looks at and judges.

They are tangible things we can hold up and say 'There! See! I told all along we were doing fine!'

They are the equivalent of blowing a large fat raspberry at all the doubters who ever questioned our decision to home educate our children.

The pressure on home educators to do a good job - that responsibility not to screw up our children's lives through choosing an alternate route - is immense. Even when we don't think about it, we think about it. It becomes an integral part of us. The need to prove, to demonstrate, to defend our choice. However wonderful our home ed day is, however much we or our child achieves, however happy we are with our education choices and beliefs, there is no getting away from the fact that THE BUCK STOPS HERE.

And that's a biggie.

Since we started GCSEs I've had lots of doubts along the way. I loathe the box-ticking world of GCSEs. I know it doesn't *mean* anything. I have enough certificates to paper a wall, but I'm far from a "natural" in the workplace. And, last time I looked, no job description requires you to pass exams for a living.
 
I ummed and ahhhed for a long time. I swung this way and that. But in the end I wanted - I want - to give him choices. Doing a few exams gives him those choices. He may never use those bits of paper, but at least when he's 16 or 18 or whenever, he will have the chance to take some different paths. Along the way I've developed a nice thick skin ;) to the criticism and judgements of our more autonomous HE friends as we've moved towards more structure and parental direction in our HE style. It's not all been plain sailing and when this exam is over we will need to restore some balance :)




Tomorrow ds1 is taking his first exam.

Hopefully I wont be reading poetry to a group of Hells Angels.

The various stages of panic when a home educated child becomes of 'secondary age'.

I think most of those who home educate can visualise themselves just about chugging along through the primary age. After all, anyone can do primary... [maths, english, science etc]. But I'm yet to meet a home educator who hasn't felt a teeny bit daunted when it comes to home educating a child of secondary age. 

My observations so far suggest there are several stages in the fear and realisation of having a child who is becoming of 'secondary age':

1. Your child reaches 11. A mildly-unsettling feeling begins to bubble. Your children's friends and peers are starting secondary school. They are getting homework that requires more than writing three sentences about what their pet dog did at the weekend. They are becoming children who study.
2. You shake off these initial niggles. You convince yourself that your child is a young 11. You tell yourself that the first year in secondary is when teachers try to find out what stage everyone is and get them to the same level. You've got another few years yet.
3. Your child reaches age 12 and grown-up panic sets in. 12 is far enough into double figures to feel real. You suspect that in school they would be doing proper work. You imagine rows of children competently writing essays. At this point you acknowledge that your cheery and confident child loves playing with lego, but can barely put a coherent sentence on paper.
4. Your child reaches age 12.5. Panic reaches maximum. You seek out reassurance. In times of a confidence crisis you can always rely on your home ed friends. They will, as always, tell you you are being silly. They will say that a child-led, happy, outdoorsy, hands-on education is the best thing in the whole wide world. They will reassure you that you are doing a great job.
5. You phone your HE friends. You text them. You drop by their house. They aren't responding. THEY AREN'T THERE. It dawns on you that their children have been missing from the usual 'run around the woods beating each other with a stick and yelling like a banshee' home ed activities. You phone again. But they are always out, or, if you manage to catch them at home, they are just about to go out.
6. You make further enquiries and find out that, secretly (although everyone else with a 12.5 yr old, except you, knows the secret), their child has joined numerous groups you've never been informed about and is doing IGCSE intellectualism on a Monday, IGCSE super-brain on a Wednesday and some sort of further maths-with-chess-genius on a Friday. Further digging reveals that in between getting their grade 8 for an instrument you didn't even know they played they've signed up for another 3 correspondence courses in subjects that the parent swore their child never studied. 
7. You cry.
8. You join the HE exams yahoo list and scare the pants off yourself.
9. You print out entire syllabuses of exams you can't even understand the title of and pore over them into the early hours wondering how to access the mysterious language they are so obviously written in.
10. You feed the syllabus sheets back through the printer to print out (on the reverse side) details of local colleges and their entry requirements.
11. You convince yourself that your child is sociable enough to get a job in McDonalds if worse comes to worse.
12. You imagine it will.
13. You eat chocolate, drink wine, insist on your child doing the workbook that has been sat on the shelf for the past 4 years. You swear to yourself you'll lose 20lbs and become teetotal, if only your child doesn't blame you for messing up their life.  
14. You blame your emotional rollercoaster on hormones. You eat more chocolate.
15. You start to get over yourself.
16. You gradually get your head together.
17. You find that the HE exams list starts to make some sense. In fact, you can almost face reading it every week. (You wouldn't actually dare post on it, and, whenever anyone on the list mentions that their genius child got A*s after only 6 weeks of study, you feel a strong urge to punch someone). But it is progress.
18. You get yourself connected with the people who are organised enough to be doing exam-type stuff. (Preferably someone with a super-human level of energy and the skin of a rhino. There are some in every county.)
19. You notice that your (now) 13 year old has matured. He may grunt, have B.O.,  and frequently makes innappropriate comments that only he thinks are funny. But he can actually hold a pen without groaning and sliding under the table. 
20. You start feeling guilty about not contacting your old friends who have slightly younger children.
21. You start dodging the resentful looks of those with 11-12 yr olds who thought you were an autonomous home educator and who now feel totally betrayed.  You never get to pick up their calls, because you are always out.

Legal power to dictate exam content (article)

Yet another interesting article about the education system...

'Ed Balls seeks power to dictate what textbooks GCSE and A-level students must study'. The Guardian, Thursday 19 March 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk:80/uk/2009/mar/19/education-ed-balls-books

"The schools secretary, Ed Balls, is seeking a new legal power to dictate the basic content of every public exam in England, in a move that would give him or any future secretary of state the right to decide which books children must study at GCSE or A-level.

The law would allow the government to set "minimum requirements" for qualifications. One senior exam board source said it would give ministers "mind-boggling power" over exams if it got on to the statute books.

Opposition MPs will attempt today to remove from the apprenticeships, skills, children and learning bill the clause that gives the secretary of state control of basic qualifications content. Guidance published alongside the bill says it could be used to specify "which authors' works needed to be studied for someone to gain a GCSE in English".

Ministers insist the power would be exercised only as a last resort, to preserve the teaching of Shakespeare, for example, if there was a suggestion it should be scrapped from the curriculum.

The bill will break up the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority into Ofqual, an independent exams watchdog, and a smaller Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency (QCDA) responsible for qualification design. Announcing the move last year, Balls said it would protect the exam system from political interference, as Ofqual would be independent of ministers while the QCA is answerable to them.

But the contested clause, which has gone unnoticed in the sprawling bill until now, has raised concerns among exam boards and opposition MPs, who fear it will in fact strengthen ministers' ability to interfere with the exam system for political gain.

David Laws, the Liberal Democrat education spokesman, said: "What is taught in schools should not be dependent on the whim of some here today, gone tomorrow politician. And the idea of Ed Balls or Gordon Brown determining which parts of history children are taught, or which books and poems they should read, is a rather frightening one.

"This revelation simply serves to highlight that while the government is pretending to be creating a more independent system of qualifications, curriculum development and oversight, what is actually happening is that ministers are retaining huge powers to meddle in both what is taught and how standards are measured."

The parliamentary committee scrutinising the bill is due to debate the clause today. Ministers promise that the power would be used only in "exceptional" circumstances, and that the law makes it explicit they cannot interfere in grading, assessment or structure of exams.

In a letter to the Liberal Democrats, dated 14 March and seen by the Guardian, the schools minister, Sarah McCarthy-Fry, insisted the effect would be to limit their interference and protect the exam system. A memorandum of understanding is promised, to set out exactly when ministers could use the power.

However, exam boards fear that the measure is too broad. Bene't Steinberg, head of public affairs at Cambridge Assessment, the parent company of the exam board OCR, said: "Cambridge Assessment believes that teachers and academics are the best people to decide what goes into a qualification. However, if politicians must keep their hands on the levers of qualifications, this clause needs checks and balances. The government has explained that it will only use the power in exceptional circumstances and in line with a defined process. We don't see why that should not be put into the act and made law to protect future generations."

McCarthy-Fry said: "There is currently nothing in law to stop ministers intervening on anything in relation to qualifications so, by establishing an independent regulator of qualifications that is accountable to parliament, ministers are actually putting limits on the influence they can have.
"Ministers will rightly have no role in grading, assessments or standards. They will only use powers with regard to the curriculum in exceptional circumstances - for example, intervening to ensure Shakespeare remains a core part of what our children learn." "