Monster & Teeny

When I fell pregnant with Monster I read a lot of parenting books. Actually, no that’s a lie, I bought a lot of parenting books, most of them sat, unread, on a bookshelf dedicated to self improvement alongside titles such as ‘make money from home- 100 tried and tested business ideas for making millions from your spare room in 20 minutes a day’ and ‘men are from mars, women are from venus, women cry, men don’t read maps, sod it let’s all go to the pub’ and ‘how to win friends, influence people and take over the world’. You know the sort of thing . Anyway, I had lots of parenting books and what I tended to do was read the blurb on the back, maybe read the index of chapter titles and then dip into them here and there. If I liked what I read and it was inline with what I was already doing I’d congratulate myself on my sound parenting techniques and recommend the book to others to read. If I didn’t like it or it made me feel inadequate or grated for whatever reason then I’d sell it on Amazon marketplace. You can probably guess where Gina Ford ended up That’s the same discipline I used when talking to other parents really, if something worked for me and Monster then we carried on doing it, if it didn’t then we discounted it as not right for us. This meant we had a fairly eclectic mix of parenting with fairly strict meal time and bed time routines but very little in the way of worrying about him staying asleep through the night in his own bed, I was fortunate that Monster was a big baby and remained fairly chubby so although I took him to baby clinic every week it was more through fear that he’d be the child on Jerry Springer as a toddler weighing as much as the average 10 year old rather than because I feared I was not feeding him enough, and because I was actually a very conscientious feeder back then, lovingly cooking, pureeing and freezing food in ice cube trays using the wisdom on Anabel Karmel I knew I was doing everything right there and he wasn’t big due to a diet of coke, burgers and icecream aged 9 months.

When I fell pregnant again with Teeny I got lots of books about sibling relationships - ‘Sibling Rivalry, Sibling Love’, ‘Three shoes, one sock and no hairbrush’ and ‘Face it your toddler is going to loathe your new born on sight, you won’t want to be leaving them alone in the room anytime soon any more than you’d trust your pitbull to babysit!’. Again I read snippets, got the idea that my plan to focus more on Monster and his reaction to his world being turned upside down whilst meeting Teeny’s basic needs but not worrying too much about stimulating her with nursery rhymes and monochrome pictures for 6 hours a day was the way to go and carried on with that plan.

When we started looking into Home Education naturally one of the first things I purchased along with a laminator, hama beads and loads of box sets from The Book People was most of amazon’s catalogue of Home Ed titles. The only one I really read was Free Range Education, the rest ended up back on amazon marketplace having sat on that same shelf of the bookshelf marking me out as a proper educated home educator for a couple of years. But I work one and a half days a week at our local library and when I was still quite new there I checked out to see whether there were many HE titles available to borrow - more with the intention of making a fuss about not having a wide stock holding if there wasn’t to be honest, but I got in all we had in the subject to have a look at. Most of them were old and dusty having come out of our nonfiction reserve store but one of them looked fairly new and interesting, despite knowing I shouldn’t I still judge a book by it’s cover and this one looked pretty too so I kept it and kept renewing it while it sat in a corner of the bookcase waiting for me to have a proper look at it.

This week I have indeed had a proper look at it, and while I intended, in my normal ‘manual’ browsing manner to cast an eye on a few pages throughout I’ve found myself totally engaged and engrossed in it. I’m reading every single word and nodding a lot. It’s totally anecdotal, based solely on the personal experience of one family home educating their two daughters, written very personally and almost like reading someone’s blog, there is no ’science bit’ or pompous air of telling me how I should be doing anything, just a very frank account of their HE journey during a period of their lives, their feelings about education and family generally and how it all works for them. What I am enjoying most about it is that it is a celebration of their children as individuals, not being compared even to each other let alone the rest of the world, not fretting about what they can’t do, but cheering what they can, finding ways to facilitate their learning, accepting that they are very different people even from their parents and accepting that it is those individual children who know better than anybody else what they should be learning about next. The book is And The Skylark Sings With Me by David H. Albert . I’ve not read any of his other titles, although I will aim to do so once I’ve finished this one, but if there is one thing I’ve learnt about gurus it is that they will always fail you so I’m not about to start following his ideas to the letter but here are a few passages I’ve read in And The Skylark Sings With Me which have moved me to write this post:

About his 20 month old daughter who professed a desire to learn the violin: 

 "Nothing would have come of this except that every day, sometimes twice a day, for the next three months, Ali demanded that she wanted to learn to play the violin. This sounded absolutely crazy to us. Did they make violins that small? Could a teacher be found who would be willing to teach a toddler still in diapers? Would a bad experience turn her off from music-making for life? Would she learn anything that would be of value?

The answers to the foregoing questions are: Yes, Yes, No, and empathically Yes….Ali had now given us two of our most important homeschooling lessons, both of which carried over into all aspects of our learning adventures: first that we weren’t going to be able to do everything ourselves, and hence would have to learn how to find other resources; and second, that we were going to be experimental in approach rather than be governed by someone else’s narrow conception of "age- appropriateness…

We learned another lesson too which lead me to risk beginning this book with our family’s musical adventures. I am aware of course that music is not every child’s cup of tea, and our experience around it might be sufficiently foreign as to make it diffficult for some readers to relate to easily. But the point is that music turned out to be, regardless of our own expectations, something both our children are passionate about, something intimately entwined in their earliest notions of their unique identities. Our kids taught us that our task is to seek avenues for whatever inward leadings they exhibit to blossom, and to find ways for our children to become who they already are, or were meant to be"

About why this family homeschool when they are real supporters of public and community institutions otherwise:

"It is a marvel of American democracy to observe citizens tax themselves to support safe and adequate water supplies, to build adequate roads and sidewalks, to construct adequate sewage disposal facilities, and to maintain an adequate public health infrastructure.

But education, we are persuaded, needs to be viewed differently. While the public school mission of an adequate education for all children in a democracy is a noble one, especially when we recognize how far we as a society are from achieving even this, from my perspective as a parent, the goal of an "adequate" education for my children is by definition "inadequate." Children are not the same as sidewalks; entrusted with the total development of human beings - each with their own personalities, gifts, capacities, and ever-changing learning needs - responsible adults could not but come, I believe, to the conclusion that "adequate" simply isn’t good enough.

If we start from that premise, it soon becomes evident that what we have come to question about public education is not so much is actual practice, which varies quite widely from place to place and school to school, but it’s universally accepted mission. This has little to do with "good" versus "bad" teachers (I’ve known plenty of good ones in the conventional sense of the term, and, on balance, there are probably more who are well-intentioned than the other kind); educational "enrichment" (why would any parents suffer their children to undergo the "unenriched" variety?); curriculum reform (when hasn’t there been curriculum reform?): or funding for schools, computers, or teacher salaries….But on the whole, from our perspective, these considerations are beside the point. In challenging public education’s mission, at least for our children, we implicity call into question the entire administrative structure of school buildings, scheduled school days and hours and vacations, age bound grade bands, classrooms with prescribed numbers of children assigned, predetermined currciula, and arbitary though strictly defined schedules for testing and evaluation. Taken together these serve as the bureaucratic engine by which adequate educations are more of less efficiently produced; our experience indicates they have next to nothing to do with how children, how humans, optimally learn. Since "adequate" rather than "optimal" education is the public school mission, even given occasional protestations to the contrary, this shouldn’t seem particularly surprising."

There will be more, I am so far into chapter two and would happily sit and type all I’ve read so far out, such is my feeling of wanting to share this. Every so often I read a blog post, hear a Home Educating parent or child say something or witness something in my own home which makes me want to paint banners and march urging everyone to do what we do. I know most of the time that what we do suits us and that is all I need to consider but my current reading is giving me passion, enthusiasm and joy anew for this journey that we are also making. 

For some reason, although I obviously knew it to be the case, it has only really occured to me in the last week or two that Teeny would be about to start school in a couple of weeks time. Teeny has never been going to go to school, we started looking into the idea of Home Education while she was still a small baby and long before she reached 2 it was what we were going to do. With Monster the day that would have been his first day at school passed pretty much without note although I did have some feeling that now we were ‘proper’ ‘official’ home educators .

Teeny’s home education has been a truly autonomous one to date. She learnt how to write her name from me writing it out for her, upper case so she could type it into a barbie.com website to play the games. It was a small step from losing the piece of paper I write it on and her managing to type it without the paper to one day just writing it. She can now do it upper and lower case and knows the names of the letters in her name and what sound they make. She also knows Monster’s initial, M for Mummy, D for Daddy, N for Nic and a couple of others. Bu we’ve never done anything formal, unlike Monster who had a but of 100 easy lessons and sporadic workbooks back in the day when I worried about such things . That sounds flippant and of course a child learning to read is not something to be made light of but I am now firmly of the opinion that like potty training, sleeping through the night, being able to let me out of their sight and various other landmarks of development that some people feel the need to push children into by various means actually reading is yet another skill they will learn when they’re ready - I think it can be learnt, not taught.

All of the things I fretted about as potential issues with Monster have, over the years, shown themselves to be not issues at all. Worries about him struggling to socialise, having people to socialise with at all, talking to people, having interests and passions, wanting to know about stuff, engaging with people, asking questions, being motivated and so on have all proved unfounded. I know at not even seven there is plenty of time for future angst and I am sure it will not all be plain sailing but I regularly stand back and watch Monster from a distance, in various situations and not only feel proud that he is my son I also see him as walking, talking, living proof that Home Education, and specifically the brand of it we follow is utterly right for him. I am frequently complimented on what a lovely boy he is; a polite, happy, interested child. I think he’s a great advertisment for autonomous education.

So in the same way as we don’t have a picture of Monster on his first day at school and I’ve never sewn his name tapes into school uniform we will soon have passed the landmark date that would have marked Teeny heading off into a different world and simply have carried on doing what we already do. We’re hoping to mark the event with a meet up with other Home Educating friends on the actual day but other than that nothing will change here. I won’t feel the need to do anything different now we’re ‘official’ or fret about keeping records of work incase the LEA catch up with us. In short we will continue with our own personal tried and tested method for learning - living life.

So what am I wanting to thank you for? Well, it is mostly through reading blogs of other Home Educators that I gained the confidence to leave things alone. It was reading blogposts of people with 7, 8, 9 year olds who were struggling to read and suddenly it all clicked for them, knowing those children now at 9, 10, 11 and seeing them with their noses stuck in books. Reading stories about teenagers doing inspirational things, reading about how if you can only manage to ‘trust the process’. I have had the luxury of using those going before us as case studies. If someone had told me 3 years ago that my nearly 7 year old wouldnt be ‘reading’ Id be horrified - it would have been enough to send me headed straight for the nearest infant school signing him up straight away. But having read about other people’s children not reading at this age and then knowing that it was a mere matter of weeks from this point to happily reading chapter books when it all suddenly clicked gives me the confidence to remain hands off and let things take their natural course. I distinctly recall reading one of Joyce’s blogposts (on the blog before, the blog before this one!) about her daughter, how she clung to her still at 3 and later, and crying because she could have been describing my 3 year old Monster. I remember celebrating online with Merry when Fran clicked with reading, being thrilled for Jules when Joseph read the word ‘cash’ on an ATM cashpoint and being generally inspired by the older children of Alison, June, Sarah and Gill.

I remember struggling with Monster as a new born when I realised that actually life was never going to ‘get back to normal’, what was going to happen was that we were going to find a whole new normal. A friend told me, in calming, comforting tones that ‘it will get easier, it will get better’ - balm to my troubled, sleep deprived, shell shocked soul. I have since repeated that mantra to countless new mothers myself. I remember someone agreeing that having a toddler and a newborn baby was indeed bloody hard work but that it was for a finite period of time and then it all improved. And that is what the early incarnation of the early years blogring did for me. It gave me the luxury of sitting back and reading about the angst and trials of others, way before I needed to worry about such things myself and it meant that by the time I would have been revving up to start worrying about them I already knew I didn’t have to, because it had all come good already for the children of those people so I was safe in the knowledge that it would indeed come good for me in due course too. And you know what, slowly but surely it is. So forgive me if I don’t give the passing of Teeny’s first day not at school a second thought but thanks to all of those who’ve gone before and come out the other side, it really doesn’t feel like we’re doing anything other than getting on with our lives.