Daisy has been providing lightbulb moments galore, in the last couple of weeks. We haven’t really talked about education much recently, so maybe I should summarise where we are.
I’ve known for some time that Daisy learns through conversation. It’s a fairly common phenomenon with home educated children (school educated children, too, probably, but their parents don’t seem to talk about it as much) – however structured or unstructured the style of education that a family chooses, it’s nothing compared to the learning that you stumble into while driving to swimming lessons or walking to the park. In recent times, we have engaged in in-depth explanations of the credit crunch, supply and demand, and the relative merits of renting versus buying property, in the car; we have established to the satisfaction of both of us, that she understands the mathematical principles underlying times tables, and that learning the answers is just an exercise she can indulge in if she likes, whilst walking along the river bank to the swing park; we have talked about group dynamics, empathy, what drives some people to need to be in charge, and what we can do help feel less defensive (that was in the car again); we have discussed heaven, hell, various theological positions on the subject, and I briefly summarised a chapter of Rob Bell’s “Love Wins” for her consideration.
I have to say, it’s my favourite form of education, though it’s almost impossible to quantify in any way that means anything to anyone else. It’s no way to PROVE she’s getting an education, but it’s the best bit of the education she’s getting.
Daisy is, as I believe we’ve discussed before, largely autonomously educated. In practical terms, this means I’m not prepared to have the necessary fights that would be involved to force her to learn particular things at particular times. In some ways, it would be nice to feel like I could, because, again, Provability makes me feel better, and makes the Difficult Conversations with people who don’t quite understand, that little bit easier. But since it takes me all my energy to get her into clothes in the morning, and to enforce some sort of regime of tidying up after herself (even just a bit, now and then, would be a start…), we have found ourselves taking a different route. What this means in practical terms, is that I fill the house with broadly educational Stuff, and vaguely hope that she’ll accidentally trip over something, and learn something.
On the good days, I recount the complex conversations that we’ve had, and list the museums and galleries and whatnot that we’ve visited, and note that she has, somewhere along the line, learned to read without my really being able to say when or why. And I feel good. It’s all working, I am not, after all, destroying her life with my hare-brained experiment.
On the less good days, I torture myself with how much time she spends watching CBBC iPlayer on the computer, and achieving, it seems, almost nothing.
Except that last week, I suddenly realised what she was doing. She is learning from the TV! Honestly! I know you and I were brought up believing that such things were only possible if you stayed up till 3am and watched the OU professor with the beard draw incomprehensibly on a blackboard, but she’s actually watching a fairly wide variety of programmes. She watches Blast Lab, and picks up science. She watches Horrible Histories, and learns about the past. She watches Newsround Extra, and Blue Peter, and learns all kinds of random and peculiar things. Recently, she’s been fixated on the Blue Peter woman who went to the South Pole, and the Sport Relief piece about the boy who walks two miles each way for water. The other day I found her watching a YouTube video I couldn’t understand, and it turned out to be Barbie: Thumbelina, in Czech. Czech! Apparently, it wasn’t easy to follow, but the dog kept running into a window, and that was funny. :-/
This probably doesn’t sound remarkable to you, but this was the nature of the lightbulb moment. We have been subscribed to Education City for years, and Reading Eggs for about eight months, and she loves the idea of them, but she never wants to do them. I’m not allowed to cancel the subscription, mind, but she never uses them, and I couldn’t work out why. And now I know.
Daisy doesn’t really want to be asked to engage with these things. She doesn’t want to answer the questions, and work to get the gold star, and constantly be expected to interact. On the other hand, she seems to learn very effectively audio-visually. She watches, she listens, she absorbs, if she doesn’t understand she plays it again, and she LEARNS. She learns so very much. In a sense, that’s what she’s doing when we’re having those in-depth conversations. I talk, and she listens, and if it doesn’t make sense, she asks a question, but if it does, she just soaks it in.
The other realisation of this week, is that she’s actually terrified of failure. That’s one of the reasons that she doesn’t enjoy the risk that she might NOT get the gold star for playing the game. She’s something of a perfectionist, and to cope with that, she wants to be in control of the goal-setting. It’s odd, because what I actually experience of her, is that she’s very slap-dash about things, which doesn’t sound perfectionist at all. Her handwriting is all over the place, and the effort I’ve made, over the years, to get her to take her time, use lower-case letters appropriately, form letters correctly, spell things right, have been rebuffed in short order on almost every occasion. Sometimes, I’ve interfered, and put her off doing whatever she was doing, which I regret immediately, but can’t fix by then. Increasingly, she’s learning to be sufficiently bad-tempered as to make me go away so she can carry on doing it her way.
But, for all that long, slow, frustrating process, she CAN read, CAN (sort of) write (as long as no-one else wants to be able to read it), she can count, add up, take away, these are skills she is developing. So what have I learned?
Daisy learns best from within her comfort zone. Attempts by well-meaning people to bully her OUT of her comfort zone, to the place where THEY think she should be, do not work. They make her dig her heels in. It won’t take very long at all, before they will make her quit the lesson altogether. For four months, last year, we had the kindest, gentlest, most patient piano teacher you could ever wish to have, but Daisy decided that the beginning of the process of playing with two hands at once, instead of one at a time, was too far out of her comfort zone. She melted down, more than once, refused to engage, and eventually quit.
We are currently facing the same problem with swimming. Last week, I was taken aside by the swimming teacher, and asked if I would do some work with her, during the week, on persuading her that the teachers know best, and saying “No” when they ask her to take the next step towards learning isn’t a valid response. She is not, they tell me, making progress, and if she’s not prepared to trust them and do as she’s told, she isn’t likely to.
The more I’ve thought about that conversation, since, the more I’ve felt, with a sinking heart, that they don’t understand how she ticks. Autonomously educated children do not, generally, do as they are told to, without question. She understands very clearly that water is a place people can drown, and they haven’t managed to secure her trust sufficiently to override that fear. She will do what she will do, and she will go no further.
Now, I am not concerned by her “progress”. I believe I am paying £4 a week for someone else to take her swimming, because I don’t want to. I also, autonomously educating nutter that I am, believe that if she hangs about at the pool with people who CAN swim (and I can’t, really – not well enough), she’s bound to pick it up eventually. That’s how she learned to read. When I pushed her, she resisted, HARD, but left to herself, she worked it out.
So the question becomes, does it matter if she doesn’t make progress, or at least, make it as quickly as they think she ought? Well, to me, not at all. I want her in the water, and not hating it. So does it matter to them? I don’t know. It crossed my mind, chatting to a friend last night, that they may well have targets. The swimming lessons are outsourced by the council, and it’s possible that the rate of improvement is a target they’re being measured on. If that’s the case, then we’re quitting. I can’t talk sense into people whose livelihood depends on Daisy exhibiting certain behaviours, if those behaviours turn out to be unnatural and unnerving to her. If, however, all they’re concerned about is my having a tantrum over her failure to make progress, then I can reassure them. I don’t care in the slightest. She’ll learn when she’s ready, and all I really care about is that she doesn’t start refusing to get in the pool.
