sometimes it's difficult...

...not to feel a teensy weensy bit well, how should I put this, erm, smug when one home educates .... let me explain ... I see Mrs X, who is lovely, any day of the week, and I would enjoy a visit to her house for coffee, but I can't; I have kids all day long. She sends her boys to school and she does coffee mornings and charity afternoons and well, you know, even though I like her, and could fall into conversation with her, our lives are different. We have chosen different paths, and when she meets me struggling with kids in some awkward place at some awkward time, she probably feels smug about the school choice she's made and the school choice I've refused.

But today we share a moment's chat, about this or that; we mostly avoid the subject of education, and then by mistake, she mentions, she just happens to mention that in this half-term holiday her sons will not leave the TV alone. They stare at rubbish all day long, they will watch anything she says, and they do not even choose, they watch, endlessly, and well, what can you do? and she rolls her eyes as if to say, kids! eh! what can we do with them?

But she detects something is wrong, because there's a look on my face like er, well we don't have that problem. I could add that in the home ed world, we don't have this made-up boundary between school and leisure. We don't say between these hours you are learning, which means, by implication, that there are hours when you are not learning. To our home ed family, everything is about learning, and the children learn through their own interests and enjoyments. Then she inquires, and asks directly, so what do yours watch? and then I tell her truth because it is, and I say, well, Shark this morning asked to watch her new video.

Which was? Erm, Whale and Dolphin Identification. I'm sorry? Yup, that's right. It's basically a spotter's guide to the whales, dolphins and porpoises regularly occurring in the North Atlantic, North Sea and Mediterranean, which translates as something over an hour of a man talking about fins.


And at that moment it's just a teensy bit hard not to feel a little bit smug at Shark's choice, which is so clearly about her enjoyment of learning, about her finding out, keen to know, and not the construction of a half-term anti-learning posture which requires loafing around on the sofa watching MTV. So I try and make it better, and say sometimes we do Nemo, and Black Beauty, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and well, you know, it could have been worse, because now we are working on a project of crime and punishment, so Squirrel could have chosen the history of the British police force.