pondering

[madwomanintheattic]

so, we are (almost) considering he for ds1 (again), but this time i feel as though it might be the right move, and a good time.

any helpful beginner he weblinks/ books/ points to note would be useful!

by way of note, ds1 is yr 5 and we are o'seas (canada). school was great for the first couple of years because he had teachers who 'got' him (he's probably borderline as/asd, although add/odd have been mentioned in passing) and played to his strengths on an almost adult 1-1 basis, but for the last three years (and indeed the start of this year) he's been a bit of a square peg. finds it difficult to stay on task, is extremely disorganised, and as one of 30 or whatever, is just expected to keep up. cognitively, he can (he will instantly digest theory and will explain it all verbally in minutiae, adding hypotheses and wanting to test them/ whatever) but is having real issues with recording. anything. he also has difficulties with continence, and issues with anxiety, but it's all a bit chicken and egg, and we are still trying to unravel the puzzle.

to date i have been convinced that school is the best place, that he needs to learn to conform/ keep up/ demonstrate his knowledge as required etc - but i am wondering now whether it will be impossible for him to do this in the traditional classroom environment. and whether it might actually destroy him completely.

he's also middle kid. all are bright. dd1 is happy and content (she's in her 6th or 7th school in g7,(i lose count) but adapts easily and has lots of friends, and is taking part in the regional gifted programme and mentoring scheme. dd2 is also bright, and has cerebral palsy. she is pretty much friendless at school (g3 - she says the other kids can never decide what to play and just bicker and waste time and she'd rather go off and play on her own) but is enthusiastic and loves the teaching environment - very much a crowd pleaser. i suspect dd1 would not be interested in he, but that dd2 might decide it's a good idea if we decide to offer it to ds1. ds1 has asked previously for he (we had some he friends at one point).

we live in the canadian rockies about an hour outside of a city - i know there are he families in town, but don't know where!

as a desperate conservative, i lean towards the more formal side of he, but suspect ds1 would thrive on a less formal approach.

what do i need to think about, o wise ones?

we have parent/ teacher meeting on fri. if it goes as i suspect it will (he must conform and get a grip of himself on the organisational and recording front, no support offered) then we have some serious decisions to make. (i have been job hunting unsuccessfully. part of me thinks this might be karma - but a retrospective part of me wonders if i might be looking towards he more favourably as i can't find a job... even though it wasn't me that raised the suggestion... wwyd?)

apols for long and rambly post. lots of stream of consciousness trying to sort my ideas out and not drip feed!

I have no idea about how to deregister a child in Canada-or to find out how to find home educators, but I'd try googling home schooling and your province/city.-I'll bet something comes up! Home Educators are usually keen to be found by prospective home educators.

There is a thread here about books on HE and Websites about HE, but they all relate to the UK-because that's what we know about.

I think you should relax at first and let your child (and you) deschool for a good period of time -the wisdom here in the UK says 1 month for every year of school-but it took us much longer to get school out of our system.
Don't feel that you have to rush out and buy workbooks and other educational resources, settle first and find out what best suits your child, and then you can wisely spend your cash later.

Good luck!

mm, i've had a look around - there is a provincial he association, and a lot of resources online for the province (alberta) and canada as a whole, but it all looks to be run as a very overtly Christian entity, and in fact uses religion as the main raison d'etre for he in the first place. we are a broadly christian family (dad and uncles all involved with the church - random smattering of vicars/ wardens etc) but this isn't my primary reason for considering he, and it seems to permeate every aspect here... the he links i have found are half he/ half gospel (sometimes seemingly more gospel) and i'm a bit baffled!

i did find some interesting information though, which is that alberta seems to have some sort of rebate system going on where a portion of the school fees is given back to home educators (about £500 per annum) and they have some sort of 'blending' programme which seems to be very controversial...

i feel a bit helpless - all of my 'knowledge' is about the uk system, even though we've been here for two years now, so i feel like i'm trying to learn more about a system in order to get out of it!

the city looks to have great resources for he, though, which is encouraging. it's an hour's drive, but that could be great for longer days out.

thanks though - i'll try to find the links thread, even though it's uk based. it might at least be in terminology i understand!

the deschooling aspect is terrifying tbh. i feel like i need to know exactly what i'm doing, and be ready to leap right into it.

that sounds as though i'm really anti-religion, which wasn't my intention. just slightly concerned that my rationale and ethos might be very different from everyone else's!

that deschooling link is brilliant, btw. thank you!

it also cemented the reasons we are looking in this direction. for example, he spent about 3 hours with us standing over him trying to get him to do his homework (his current teacher believes in 'Perseverence' with a very capital P (which i understand), and is extremely didactic about exactly what she expects to receive. his homework was to research the history of the hygrometer, build one himself, and do all the labelling/ make a diagram etc. but the 'research' was a list of questions (5w's and h). having struggled with one of the 'w's, he then got 'distracted' by different types of 'ghetto hygrometer' and whether we could make them all (his sister has long blonde hair, a pre-requisite supply for one of them), but because his homework was very strictly dictated, he couldn't afford the time to follow what he wanted to learn about (and you could see he was genuinely excited about it and could have gone on for hours) because the pressure was on to do what he had to do, rather than learn more by doing what he wanted to do. he would have learned far more about hygrometers and humidity and i suspect gone off into meteorology...

that probably makes no sense. but i found myself thinking 'this is ridiculous. we are actually narrowing his actual learning to fit in with what school says he has to perform'.

i haven't mentioned any of this to ds1 yet. but rather tellingly, i found a piece of half-finished schoolwork in his file this morning all about 'flexibility' (it looks as though they are discussing personal characterisitics) and a list of questions about who they know who is flexible, who isn't, why it might be a good thing, why it might be a bad thing. for the 'who is not flexible' he had answered 'mrs x' (smart cookie for recognising that, possibly not so smart for writing it on the paper she's going to mark), and for 'in what way would it help that person to be more flexible?' he'd written 'broaden her mind'.

i put it back in his file.

i am frankly terrified about the meeting tomorrow, now.

I'm asking on my FB to see if I can come up with an unschooling contact in Canada.

There's another Unschooling website you might enjoy- Joyfully Rejoycing might well resonate, it does with me.

I also LOVED Grace Llewellyn's Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education- a book written for teens to read, but it showed me, the possibilities for an unschooling life.

Why are you terrified of tomorrows meeting?
I'd strongly suggest writing down all of the points you want to make, and the questions you want answered, before going in, both to marshall your thoughts and to help you in those awkward moments when you are asked if you have any questions and you are flummoxed by what you have been told.

Hi Madwoman
Im grinning at that last bit "Mrs X is not flexible" and "needs to broaden her mind" :o
Thats just the sort of thing my ds (10now) would say. He has AS and I took him out of school 2 years ago as he was experiencing similar problems at school as your son is.
It sounds to me like your middle child would thrive and flourish whilst being HEd. Intially its scary because you feel you have to justify yourself to everybody (including the people your child cant bear) but you can be Mrs Perserverance with a capital P too. :o
Its really scary initially but in time you'll feel happier. Dont worry that everyone else's rationale for HEing might be different. All of us who HE have different reasons. The key thing is finding families: children and their parents who you enjoy spending time with.
Dont panic about buying resources and stuff - initally just enjoy spending time with your children doing whatever they want to do.

I hope all goes well - Im sure if you decide to go for it you will get on very well :)

I found a Canadian Unschooling Blogger
I'm Unschooled. Yes I can Write and there are links to 'Yahoo Groups and Online Communities' in 'Links and Resources' on there

hth

Not Canadian, but there's a short video by Alan Thomas on Informal Learning/Autonomous HE/Unschooling that you might be interested in. I helped organise that video-we filmed HE kids and parents that day at HesFes last year

thanks, both.

today's search (including those great links, julie) was much more fruitful in terms of ethos - yesterday i only seemed to find the overtly christian associations which gave me a slightly unnerving picture of the scene here. and it seems that i do naturally incline towards the unschooling scenario, which is an eye opener in itself (i am, in fact, mrs conservative incarnate). who knew?

dh and i are both going to the schools tomorrow (first time ever usually it's one or the other) so it will be interesting to see what impression he gets as well (he was the one who mentioned he out of the blue earlier this week, which as mr conservative incarnate, i am still astonished about.)

dd1's goal setting first though, at 8.45 am!

madwoman-how did the meeting go?

Another Canadian HE friend on FB, made contact-not the one I was chasing, and has given me some links for you-mostly British Columbia Based-but she says people there will help you find links, she's sure.

BCHSA
BCHLA
Home Learning Victoria
Vancouver yahoo group
Wendy Priesnitz

and another two links for you-you'll have home schooling contacts everywhere!

Home Based Learning in Alberta

hs-ca · A support list for home-based education

And a Yahoo group for Canadian Unschoolers!

thanks julie, that gives me loads to look up! apols for not replying sooner - we were doing some renovating in the basement and it knocked out our wifi for a few days (i'm just getting over it , but it was long enough to have lost my entire 'threads i'm on' - bizarre!)

the meeting with the teacher was interesting - we were supposed to have 15 minutes, but she kept us for an hour and fifteen minutes, at the end of which she burst into tears, told him how wonderful we were, but that he wouldn't realise it for a long time, and then took herself off to recover. it was a bit... surreal.

i would say she has him pretty well pegged, and also recognises that he doesn't 'fit' very well with conventional schooling, and that it isn't a wilful or deliberate thing, he's just wired very differently. (she said that a lot). it turns out that her own daughter was similar-ish at this point (and she thinks she herself has some of the same traits) and went off the rails in her teens, dropping out of high school and flying off to another city - although she's back, all grown, successful/ jobs/ kids etc now, she knows it was really not inevitable. she's calling him 'attention diverse' rather than any other label at the mo, but realises that there are probably a number of 'labels' that he could potentially meet diagnostic criteria for. and she also knows she's constrained by the numbers of kids in the class as to how much she can realistically offer him in terms of differentiation and autonomy.

she wants us to go off and think about it all - she wonders whether moving him up to grade 6 would provide enough of a challenge to trigger a work ethic (i am unconvinced - i think he would still happily do the stuff he is interested in, and would still not 'fit' any better) but is also happy to keep him in g5, where she 'recognises' his differences and can try and work with them. she wanted us to think about the school options obviously. she's very keen on 'habits of mind' (hence the perseverence) and is trying to instil them into the class... she's also offered potentially moving up for different subjects so that that might stimulate him in certain areas.

so we've had a crazy busy weekend (reno, friends here to help with reno) and no time to digest it properly yet. i ordered a couple of books on thursday from amazon which are here, so i need to read some of those this week to try and work out how i think he'd fit into he, and then have a sensible discussion with both ds and dh. ds knows what the school options are and he knows he's supposed to be thinking about them...

i do think christmas is a sensible decision point - if we come to it before, then so be it, but in the mean time i'm going to try and find some local he-ers (great links, will be following them up!) and finding out a bit more about the scene locally... i don't want to rush anything!

the poor girls also had their teacher meetings on friday they were much shorter! but now i've got lots more paperwork to complete for dd2 as they are re-coding her back to 'severe/ complex' and referring her to the outreach service. (her coding seemed to have been downgraded in the transition between schools) so today she gets her netbook in class. yay!

Wow, that is surreal. I don't think I've ever heard of a teacher responding in quite that way. It sounds like she cares about your son a great deal. How lovely of her.

it was, but very strange! we just mentioned the he as an option in passing, didn't really focus on it (no time lol) but as i'm going back over the conversation in my mind i wonder if i should ask her specifically what she thinks about that... (it seems a bit bizarre, essentially asking a teacher if she thinks one of her students would be better off out of her class, particularly as she's clearly trying to do her best by him!) i feel a bit like i'm seeking approval, which i know is unnecessary and more to do with my own ego, probably.

well, today i will mostly be drinking tea and reading john holt, john taylor gatto, and a couple of specifically unschooling books to try and reassure myself that i'm not completely off the wall.

long chat with dh last night. he's pretty sure he would be best for ds, but i'm going to let him read all the unschooling stuff before we get deeper. he's worried that ds will feel singled out, and undermined further, as at this point we won't pull the girls out.