What school year is your H.ed dc

[morethanpotatoprints]

Is it just me, I suppose it is, who really grits teeth at this question?
I can quite understand those who don't know we H.ed as school after all is the natural default for most families.
What year would she be in? Grates me even more.
maybe its because dd does a lot of activities through the LA and all the other dc attend school.
I don't even know why it bothers me so much. Maybe its because people tend to assess kids ability by school year, don't move to senior groups until secondary etc.
There have been at least 20 times just this last week and I know the next few days will be more as its concert and competition time.
it's strange how then if you don't tell them they ask age and then tell you what year they'd be in.
Ok, what funny retort can I use tonight? I have said I don't know before but the people looked like

The question doesn't bother me, but I can see why it might bother you. When people ask us, they are usually just making conversation. It's one of those standard small talk questions-to-ask-parents: what school do they go to, what year are they in, how do they like school, which GCSE options are they doing... you could tell them you don't know which year your dd is in and then quickly shift to some different small talk. Another motivation for people to ask me about my kids' "school years" is to find out whether we might be interested in a particular choir / martial art / drama club or whether we can recommend something for them - the organisers do often specify eligibility by school year instead of age.

I could think of a few comebacks though if you want to emphasise that you don't want your dd to be categorised in that way:

"Oh no no, no school year, she doesn't GO to school. She's home educated!"
"Home education doesn't really work that way. She isn't in a class having to do the same things as everybody else, so she doesn't need a year group as such. She just does whatever is right for her as an individual. She could be working at one level in maths and a totally different level in English." I'd then witter on at length about the freedoms of HE until the questioner glazed over and looked for an escape
"What year would she be in? Oh, I don't know, I guess that would depend which country we were imagining she went to school in."

The thing is, school is so much the default that most people, even if they know HE is legal, still picture HE as being 'similar' to school. So they would assume that you would do "Year 3" work with a child of that age, even if they have some vague idea that you might go about it in a different way from what a school would do.

It's the point of comparison that they have, because it is the norm, and quite possibly you're the first person they've met whose life doesn't revolve around the same default position.

Hi, just come back to thread after seeing dd in a concert.
She started singing and people gasped, she played an instrument and exactly the same. I'm not boasting, I really don't like it as she's not the only one who gets the attention.
The questions are endless, I'm sure they are trying to put her into a little category and maybe me and dh.
Its because it doesn't matter how old she is, what school she goes to or doesn't.
The worst question is "what year would she be in?"

That's strange. Most people we're acquainted with assume we don't know about school years and to what age they correlate ( I do, but I have to work it out and count on my fingers ) And if they're talking about somebody else, they tend to (kindly) translate the age of the children they're discussing for me.

They only ask if they don't know we home ed.

I'd say it doesn't apply to us as we don't follow the NC and school years. Or something along those lines.