Teacher-speak

Teacher: 'So what do you notice about..?'

Audience attempts to notice something.

Teacher nods: 'Hmmm, that's an interesting comment [it obviously isn't], anything else you notice?'

Audience silence followed by more desperate attempts to notice something.

Teacher (with a 'helpful' voice): 'Take a look at the second stanza..?'

Audience still clueless, looks desperately at the two members of audience who have acquired secret knowledge of literary jargon in the hope they will blind tutor with said jargon.

Teacher: 'That's a good way of looking at it...but...is there anything else..?

Member of audience: 'So, are you trying to get us to say..?'

Teacher: 'I'm not trying to get you to say anything, there's no right or wrong answer'

Audience gives up.

Teacher: 'Well perhaps if I tell you ...'

One member of audience realises that of course there IS a required ANSWER and that it's taken 17 people a whole agonising 15 minutes to be led to THE ANSWER, during which anyone who has contributed to the class discussion has made a rectumhole of themselves by muttering apparently irrelevant drivel.

90% of audience go home thinking what a wonderful teacher they've just experienced.

One member of audience (who at some time in the past opted for the red pill and dropped out of the matrix) realises that the class has been exposed to teacher-speak, and feels hugely patronised and rather depressed as a result.

And what can we learn from this story?

1. No matter what teachers say there is always a RIGHT ANSWER, i.e. the one they want you to say.

2. Until you say this answer, you're going to be WRONG.

3. To disguise the fact that there is a RIGHT ANSWER, and that the teacher knows that answer and is deliberately keeping that right answer from you, every time you say a WRONG ANSWER they will say things like 'yes, good try' and 'nearly' and 'I hadn't thought of that one' [they had, just thought it was stupid and irrelevant] and 'that's an interesting thought' and 'hmmm'.

4. If you hear any of the above phrases, you have been exposed to 'teacher-speak' and should immediately seek out a decontamination chamber, consume alcoholic beverage and exorcise yourself through some online ranting.

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:

Creativity in the classroom

Interesting post here from John Lehrer's science blog about creativity in the classroom.

A snippet (for those to lazy to read the whole thing):

"Look, for instance, at daydreaming. It's hard to imagine a cognitive process that's less suitable for the classroom, which is why I was always castigated for staring out the window instead of looking at the blackboard. In a culture obsessed with efficiency, daydreaming is derided as a lazy habit or a lack of discipline, the kind of thinking we rely on when we don't really want to think. It's a sign of procrastination, not productivity.

In recent years, however, it's become clear that daydreaming is actually an important element of the creative process, allowing the brain to remix ideas, explore counterfactuals and turn the spotlight of attention inwards...

...Of course, daydreaming is less helpful when we're supposed to be learning our multiplication tables, or studying for a standardized test. In such instances, the lack of focused attention is a classroom failure, and not a potentially useful state of mind. The danger, however, is that we're teaching our kids a very narrow and stultifying model of cognition, in which conscientiousness is privileged above all.

The solution, I suppose, is rather banal: we really do need arts education in our schools, if only to give kids a break from this one-size-fits-all model of thinking. Because sometimes we need to daydream. And sometimes we just need to let it all out, even if we haven't raised our hand. "

So, next time I take a wrong turn in my car because I'm daydreaming, I can just put it down to having a very creative brain.

I don't like to be smug but...

...'Schools are churning out the unemployable'

according to The Sunday Times, February 21, 2010

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article7034975.ece
[Apologies to all those who send their children to school, but I AM going to have a smug Home Educator moment. I deserve it. I earned it. Just bear with me while I make rude signs to Mr Badman et al. and his cronies while quoting from the article...]

"...Sir Terry Leahy, the chief executive of Tesco, put it bluntly. Too many children have been leaving school after 11 or 13 years of compulsory education “without the basic skills to get on in life and hold down a job”. He said 5m adults were functionally illiterate and 17m could not add up properly. “On-the-job training” cannot act as a “bandage or sticking plaster” for “the failure of our education system”.

A CBI survey revealed that literacy and numeracy were not the only problems.
More than 50% of employers complained that young people were inarticulate, unable to communicate concisely, interpret written instructions or perform simple mental calculations...

...The DWP has made it clear: work is where the inflated claims for our state education finally hit the buffers. At every stage we have a system in which the expediency of politicians and the ideology of the educational establishment take precedence over the interests of pupils.

We have children who can barely read and write scoring high marks in their Sats because it makes the school, and therefore politicians, look good. We have exam boards competing to offer the lowest pass mark because it allows heads to fulfil their GCSE targets. We have pupils pushed into easy subjects at A-level — which excludes them from applying to a top university — because it benefits the school. And we have universities that offer a 2:1 degree, as the IT company director put it, to “anyone who bothers to sit down and take the exam”. "

Catch-up

Well, I've come back from a weekend away at the Cheltenham Literature Festival and already I feel like I'm way behind with my blogging.

My intention is always to write a little each day. Something short, philosophical, whimsical, meaningful, or just plain funny. Why don't I? Well, you know how it is...places to go...people to see...and all that stuff. So I leave it for a few days...and then I have just TOO much to put into a blog post and I can't decide what to write which makes it even more difficult to write anything. You know, I always swore I WOULD NOT be one of those people who just posted up annotated photos of my kids doing things, on their blog. Hmmm...


So, here's another one of my jumbled blog posts dutifully titled 'catch-up'.

Recently my kids have been doing what some people term 'crafting'.

Last week dd and ds2 were doing 'simplified' patchwork at a local home ed group.When I say 'simplified' it was just that the patches were first ironed on to backing material using that bonding web stuff . This held them in place while dd could hand sew them in wonky blanket stitch. (Still, not bad for a nearly 6 year old who's never really sewed before).

ds2, on the other hand, took to the machine...

And the boys have been doing warhammer. Well not really warhammer, but making the scenery for warhammer. The other day they were sawing polystyrene chunks in the conservatory. Have you seen how far little flakes of polystyrene can travel around a house? Bit of a vacuum cleaner job that was...

Here's ds1 being creative:

You know those educational maths 'games' that you see in educational catalogues, and end up buying because, well it seems like a good idea at the time [especially when you are just starting out in home education and haven't quite got your head around the idea that home education has nothing to do with 'school at home']. And then the game ends up sitting on a shelf for years because it's designed to be used in a classroom and just doesn't really fit into anything you would do at home. Well here are my kids using one of those games this week:

It's a number bonds (to 10 or 20) version of dominoes (triangular pieces). In some ways it's a nice set - quite tactile and attractive. But as a game it's rubbish. Nobody wins. Ever. Ever ever ever.There is never a time when you can't use your tiles to complete your turn. So basically whoever goes first, completes the game first. [yawn]. And the only form of entertainment, as my kids have discovered, is to find out what weird animal shapes you can make with the tiles, or to bully your sibling into putting their tile in a particular place. That's not to say they didn't enjoy using them (they did, briefly, this once), but I just wonder what the people who design these sorts of things think about when they make them. I guess they're just thinking...'hmm what can we make that looks like a game, but is actually just another educational classroom tool and some teacher will think is a good idea.' Well I fell for it. Once.

We've been doing quite a bit of maths recently. Conventional workbook-type maths. It makes me feel glum that we approach maths from this angle. I wish I was more maths enthusiastic, seeing the joys of maths in everyday activities [if I had a penny for every time I've heard a home edder say 'don't worry about maths, it's everywhere in every day life' I'd be a rich woman by now]. Science, yes. I see science in pretty much everything. We never have to 'do' science because we are always doing science anyway. Maths? Nope. If I do see it, then I don't appreciate or find pleasure in it. Yet I know others who do. I guess it's just about what floats your boat. Maths is like a very heavy load in my ship.

I guess when you home educate there are always going to be gaps in your child's knowledge, their experience. Unless you are going to farm them out to other families for a few months at a time to absorb the world from a different view, I don't think it's something you can totally avoid. But then, I don't suppose school kids have gapless knowledge either. Should I worry..? Probably not.

dd, contemplating the life of a sandwich