Preaching to the converted

See this reconnect kids with nature?

 

I think it's a fear adults have. 

 

But maybe the entire school-choosing population should heave a sigh of relief. I mean, we home educators have been carrying forward the whole nature-experience and practical-skills learning thing for years, what with bat boxes and ditch digging; defiantly calling all this mud and wood an education.

Maybe too, the entire venture should be campaigning for longer school holidays, greater opportunities to footle about with den-building, less kid-tick-box-supervision all round, and also for protection of the green belt.

Antidote to the London commute

Tours of Berko - castle, playground, and picnic basket.

Photoblog Winslow

I am driven to be kind. Saving you petrol money and probably a plane journey to come and see Winslow, Buckinghamshire.

Here it is.

But William was born somewhere here. 

William Lowndes, son of Robert and Elizabeth, who travelled to London to seek his fortune.

 He became secretary to the Treasury, whipped the Bank of England into shape, 

and helped bring in the National Debt in order to pay for wars with France.

George Osborne can blame him for the mess we're in. It's all the fault of William Lowndes of Winslow. 

Winslow is the sort of small market town in England where, if we are honest, not much has happened.

In fact, the most exciting event could be King Offa handing over the entire lands of a couple of peasants and a pig, to the monastery in St Albans in 792.

Then there was the opening of a shop on the main road selling witch stuff. She sells pentangles and fairy dust.

And the Church! St Laurence Church. 

Apparently Laurence was tied to an iron grill over a fire and slowly roasted to death; 

a fate dealt to him after giving the Prefect of Rome a bit of lip in 258.

Oh yes! Winslow also boasts one of the hidden buildings of England. Properly it belongs in a curiosity book on the secret places squirreled along England's ancient highways and byways; places you would never find in any normal guide book. The keys are held at the estate agents, so don't forget to return them.

Keach's Meeting House. Seventeenth century Baptist chapel, and secret place for dissenters, the illegals of the time. 

Keach became a baptist preacher at Winslow, but he was bigger than the town (which in 1688 was not two peasants and a pig), 

so the church gave him Southwark instead. But they built and named this chapel after him. Nice.

The church, by the way, holds cloth from the coronation of George VI, 1936. I bet I am making a cloth historian happy now.

What else? Hmmm. There's the Lowndes manor house, which is private and we can't tour. Not apparently, like the good old days. With unnerving ability to home in on historic locations of England, I park the bashed up Grit mobile in front of it by accident.

We find pub history here too; pillory lane; wooden posts from the medieval market square; and bricks. Lots of bricks. The size of which matters at various times in England thanks to the brick tax of 1784.

Sadly, we can't blame Lowndes for that. He brought in the window tax instead.

That could be it for Winslow, although I should just mention the day truly belongs to our Blue Badger, a lady our home ed group regularly hires to tell us secrets about our own localities. She is wonderfully unruffled by everything home ed. Including the lovely Fizz, who arrives barefoot and painted in red soil.

Winslow. I can happily recommend it, if you are passing through. But probably not requiring a plane journey or an urgent drive along the M1.

Ampthill

Spend the morning by accident in Ampthill. I haven't visited for maybe twenty years. I don't remember the Waitrose.

But it's a charming little town isn't it? So many people smiled and said good morning to me I wondered if I'd actually lived here at number 32 for the last 50 years with my cats and my piano and I just forgot.

 

Besides the Waitrose, it has a wonderful antiques emporium, a wine merchant, beauty parlour, interior design shop, and an artisan food merchant, so let that combination place it properly on your gentility scale. 

I don't think I can live here. Once they find out about my taste for the car boot sale they might not have me. 

But there's a delightful craft shop. I bought a stock of lovely lizard paper, so you can expect a reptile notebook soon. You won't be able to visit after August because she's closing down. The global economy touches us all, and Hobbycraft doesn't help; neither do the online orders you can place for your silver sparkles and A1 board. 

Isn't this just the problem with small towns off the main run, whose claims to stardom are few and far between? 

Instead of driving past them at speed, leaving them as small towns of unwandered England, I resolve to find myself more often forced by circumstance to need a cash point and a packet of biscuits.

Edgehill battlefield tour

Did I mention my new passion for taking Shark, Squirrel and Tiger to walk the battlefields of England?

Here, only the pictures. I'm not pinching the knock-out narration of our excellent, hugely knowledgeable guide. Although at some point I may be lucky enough to re-enact the battle formation game.

Now, for the stories, you must simply find the walks, and brush up your boots.

Brilliant and depressing

Shark, Squirrel and Tiger join a GCSE Geography workshop at the Field Studies Centre in Essex.

I cannot fault it. If you are looking round here for support on the Geography IGCSE, then it is 100% on target. The workshop is highly organised, clearly structured, flawlessly delivered, with all points an A* candidate needs to make carefully laid out and indicated. 

Even more remarkable, the teacher leading our session was superb and - despite the fact that she must deliver this workshop a hundred times to know the script by rote - maintained interest and liveliness, and brought all the equipment safely back to base. More than I ever managed to do with 32 copies and a drawn out six weeks to plod through The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler. Give her a pay rise.

And Epping Forest is beautiful. I became totally distracted throughout.

 And look! I found nibbled flint, so there's some paleolithic digging to be done.

So yes, all encouraging, if Tinkertop needs to learn the practical measurement of river characteristics.

But the day told me more, too, in wider ways. What the learning culture is; how it relates to the exam process, how the school student is brought up to interact with their discipline. 

For that A*, do not deviate from the given answer one bit. Reproduce the bullet points. Supply keywords. Make the points concisely and accurately in the expected order. An excellent memory is needed, as is unquestioning compliance to the given answer, and the ability to pull off that pseudo-scholar trick: copy the teacher's answer in your own words. 

You can say this is a great advancement in the schooling and testing of 16-year olds, ensuring the high attainment of grades across the country. It is great for international tables and shows how England is producing truly world-class students. Look at the numbers of these A*!

Or it is a sad reflection on the times. By the end of secondary, it will not have been possible, under the present testing regime, to take the time to stimulate creative flair, originality, or independence of approach. Neither will the culture have seriously engaged with student-initiated work, genuine probing dialogue between student and teacher, nor exploration of problems from far-out angles or oblique perspectives.

But did not education go through a stage - post Plowden - when children were, within the schooling limits, invited to explore, make intellectual inquiries, given open-ended questions, and generally encouraged to work out how to achieve what they wanted to do? I can remember my project on dinosaurs even now! The further up the system you went, the less free-ranging that inquiry could become, and the PhD was like a straightjacket, but nevertheless, the spirit for your average school student was find out first, then see how you do in the exam at the end.

Now we are teaching to the exams from the word go. From primary - no, pre-primary - we have a straitjacket approach to learning. Play is restricted, free-range thinking discouraged, off-curriculum exploration labelled as time wasting and unproductive. Answers are delivered and repeated and routes beaten to achieve that A*, which is all that seems to matter.

So the workshop was totally targeted, focused, and delivered efficiently and more than capably. I recommend it for your exam focused Tinkertop. 

Even we are learning to play the game.

But still, I just hope there remain enough people out there who continue to obstinately believe that a child is not the sum of their grades, and that a questioning approach to the world - even if it earns a Grade D - can be a great reflection on a character. 

And who knows? In another 20 years, we might get Plowden coming round again.

Ha! Got it for 5p!

I am become a junk monkey, rummaging at the local car boot, up to my paws in a field where people gather once a week to swap each other's stuff.

You can find me there now, Sunday morning regular, grubbing about the 50p action movie DVDs, the endless curled up and dried out Jeffrey Archers, the old jumpers, a pound apiece, polyester and acrylic.

I have been wondering what leads me to these treasures, apart from the fantastic possibility I might pick up another plastic handbag for under a pound, or collect yet another candelabra with a wonky arm, or find that elusive knife and fork tray, the acquisition of which I would trade at least 25p.

Reader, it is the banter and the barter. I am thinking it is become the test of my older middle age, to have the stamina to go head-to-head in a battle of words with someone who is trying to flog me a used commemorative teatowel of the marriage of Princess Di and Prince Charles for the rich sum of 20p, when I retort that 10p would be a gift, especially considering the pan-shaped burn over Charlie boy's left eye.

Spurred on by this weekly testing ground for my trading wits (and by the fantasy, ignore the impossibility, that I will surely pick up a genuine Kwanpen handbag for one pound), I resolve now to continue my junk monkeying ways until I am aged 92. I shall drive a mean bargain then for the commemorative King Charles coronation teatowel, you see if I don't.

Wandering

Wend a deviant way home.

Thanks to my crap sense of direction. I become hopelessly lost in the borderlands betwixt England and Wales. The SatNav finally breaks down after weeks of threatening, and refuses to turn on. It is a cruel blow, and I take it as horrible punishment for my long and casual disregard of her instructions to turn right. I am especially bitter because recently I have tried to be good by feeding her electricity juice all night long.

Truly, I am in a bereft condition without her to remind me how wrong I am going. Now I have only my own terrifying map skills to rely on and my new navigator to shout at (Shark, aged 13), a combination which I expect to end badly. I drift around hopelessly, waiting to bump into some sort of sign that would allow a B-road to lead me out of darkness and into light.

But look on the bright side. Isn't it true of life, that if the route you planned is taken away from you in a moment as subtle as a baby's breath, the route you're given can offer you so much more than you ever expected? So many unforeseen surprises and unanticipated delights await you! That's what I tell myself as we head off back into Wales because I cannot tell east from west.

But look! A couple of hours on and we find Ledbury, a lovely town with real museums! I was delighted to discover it. I conjure the old streets for the pleasure of the American viewer.

 

Charming, no? And the museum, like all local museums, helpfully describing their artifacts with barely any reference to context or age. They are just sad and bashed up old things we value. (Find me a person aged over 50 who does not approve of that.)

Thus I can recommend Ledbury, with its historic streets, ancient centre, and magnificent Painted Room, a real insight into aspirational interior design of the 16th century, and a treat if you are driving about the countryside trying not to reenter Wales.

More exciting than the battlesite of Mortimer's Cross. Like everyone else, I navigated towards that in vain.

However! My shonky directional skills redeem the day by leading me to Croft Ambrey iron age fort, hidden behind the National Trust's Croft Castle.

I would link to evocative and haunting imaginings of this dramatic hill-top site, but the descriptions seem to be mostly clinical reports of its dissection and excavations. Yet it is a site which provokes in me a thoughtful wondering of the people who lived here; I put that down to the rare atmosphere and quiet beauty of the place. Telling me, the SatNav can stay in the cupboard. Some discoveries are worth getting lost for.

The Hay-on-Wye Lit. Fes.

Sadly, it was unavoidable. Ever since The Hat burst into the house last June, brimming with the latest noos from the chaterati. I thought, I simply must introduce my little grits to a proper middle-class mouthful, if only to elevate them from mama's vulgarities, gleaned from the gutters at roundabouts and junctions.

Reader, I have learned a few things. Take waterproofs, for one. Honestly, the weather should be given an ASBO, pissing on my middle-class aspirations. It ruined my fantasy, to wit: tottering the streets of winsome Hay-on-Wye in a delightful cream linen-and-silk Boden combo, clutching my Folio editions of classic nineteenth-century novellas translated into Latin.

Also, do not bother booking advance tickets for speakers, unless you are with the Friends, or your life depends upon seeing Author X (in which case, get psychiatric help). The booking office never posted my tickets, and you can buy them there anyway. The young woman at the box office with the extreme hair vaguely addressed my left ear when I complained they'd had a month to send me tickets and I'd paid one pound fifty for the significance of a stamp. There's lots of adminstration she murmured, looking spectacularly uninterested.

In fact, all the staff are a bit like that. The young man who heard my winge about the pointless wifi smiled charmingly from behind his ruffled hair and Aran sweater but similarly demonstrated complete indifference. After a while I began to suspect all the staff were English Literature students from Surrey finding something to do in their year off before they began the publishing internship with Random House.

That is the next thing to learn about the Hay Festival. It sounds rather obvious but the people who go there are from the middle class. This is not true in the home ed world where you can meet the hippie-alarming to the I am a doctor and my wife is two doctors at the same workshop on space rockets. So if you are looking for a festival that cuts vertically through UK society, then probably do not choose Hay. It is safe, predictable, comfortable, and non-threatening.

Which leads me to the questions given to the audience at the end of the speaker session. Well, I can imagine a middle-class fight breaking out over an aggressive statement about an apostrophe. I began to be caught up in the moment at one point where I had a half-arsed question to ask from a feminist perspective. I'm jolly glad I kept my mouth shut; I would have been shamefully upstaged from the Cartesian radical dualist perspective, which shows how it all quickly descends. (But I might go next year, just to see if I can ask a question from the covalently-bonded phenomenologically-placed epistemological perspective.)

Finally, you may as well leave all your ipods, ipads, satnavs and anything at home, because Hay-on-Wye has serious connection problems. It is like being in their nineteenth century. Evidence: Standing watching the drips patter off the awning, waiting for the next session, covertly listening to an elderly gentleman struggle with his mobile phone to have the following one-sided conversation: Hello, Dahlia, is that you? Is that you Dahlia? Oh dear oh dear oh dear, Dahlia? Are you there? Dahlia? I'm shortlisted for the Rathwarlinson-Buxtomony Prize and I was wondering if you could help me out with the communications for it. Oh dear. Are you there? Dahlia? Are you there?

Hay-on-Wye Lit. Fes. summed up in three words. Rain. Books. Yurts.

On the way...

Of course we have to see a field just outside Evesham en route to Hay-on-Wye.

Battlefields are my new enthusiasm.

That character streak, incidentally - the peculiar focused pursuit down any new randomly-selected rabbit hole of interest - I blame on Gritty Papa. Throughout a long and varied career he defused bombs, ran a chip shop, built a boat, did a stint inside, abandoned us, came home again, and variously became involved in theatre, birdwatching, engineering and bricklaying. Those were the highlights.

Anyway, I have to see Evesham. It is distinguished in that one of my historical boyfriends, as Shark flippantly calls them, was mortally wounded and dismembered here. Simon de Montfort, father of your English parliament. Shark may be right; I am a tiny bit in love with him, probably because he followed through in what he believed.

But the landscape looks idyllic now, doesn't it? Pathways trimmed by white blossoms and Queen Anne's lace (let's not call it cow parsley and prickly bush). Tiger kept fretting, of course, because Evesham battlefield is now on private land, and I'd already been thrown out a car parking slot by one of the villagers who claimed she needed the space 'to back into'. I didn't respond in a particularly generous tone, true, but Tiger has to toughen up on these matters. You can't go around the world being put off by people in uniform, people with desks, and village ladies with stern faces and shotguns.

Enough of all this. It's not getting us anywhere. A bit like the Evesham battlefield walk, when we had to turn round and retrace our steps. But at least I can say, we were there. You can read about it, here.