M is for Misery. M is for Mad

Reading. There is nothing good to say about this. Unless you are one of those fortunate home educators whose child leaps from the womb reading passages aloud from Dr Seuss. No doubt some do.

For the Grit family, learning to read is torture. It is so much torture I have torn out my hair and stabbed myself in the thigh with a fork. Today, both at the same time. These are pain displacement strategies, designed to transfer the focus of my whole mind towards the sharp burning sensation in my right leg, and away from my mouth blurting out: The word is MAD! It is MAD! MAD!!! MAD!!!

So you school-choosers may wonder why we do it. Why don't we package up the little darlings in black and white and post them out the door every morning at 7.54 into a cosy 4x4 to drive the fifty yards to the school gates?

Well, the reasons are complex. And we are too poor and mean to go private.

Perhaps it has something to do with the thousands of kids who fail to fulfil themselves in the school system, who turn out of the gates disaffected, illiterate, miserable, dangerous. Hey, we can achieve that at home, we don't need a school to do that for us.

Maybe then we are bolshy trendy gits who are naturally inclined to be anti authoritarian, even though we are the first to call the police at the first whiff of trouble.

Perhaps it is because I bear the battle scars of a shortened teaching career in a secondary classroom. The words Never Again are tattooed on the inside of my forehead in my own blood. Shall I write about the kid with an air rifle pellet in the eye, forever blinded by a classmate? Or the street philosophy of Luke who carried a hammer? Or the economics education provided by druggie James who was good for a fiver's worth of heroin wrap before school? If not, perhaps Sheila, pregnant twice before age 17. But perhaps not here.

I could select, as fair reason, our local school under special measures. I would probably end up stabbing myself in the thigh out of rage, despair and frustration when Squirrel, Shark and Tiger arrived home from there too.

Perhaps we do this home education thing because of Dig, who was shovelled off to boarding school at a life-time most children are learning to wipe their own bottoms, which is reason enough to be put off school for life. That would be good, because then all of this would be his fault.

Anyway, all that reasoning is academic here. And so is the reading. At age 8, Shark is more or less going under her own steam, and can read stories with long words, so long as the print is not too small. She is easing herself into small print with Herge and Tin Tin and can nearly sound out Iconoclast! and Bashi bazooks! so she is mostly excluded from Grit's lament here.

Squirrel, by contrast, is not reading well. She is reluctant to pick up books because they are No Fun. She cannot sit still long enough. She has an urgent need to jump up and down and be a horse.

Tiger is trailing, significantly. She stares at words with confusion, and confounds us. We thought there are two ways it could go. She will learn to read, or she won't learn to read. We reassure ourselves: the latter is impossible, because we won't let her not read. It is inevitable, we say, as if night follows day. Dig, with unjustified optimism, exclaims Look on the bright side! I answer, There isn't one.

We're working through it. Slowly. But we never assumed Tiger would be able to read some days and not others; read My Mum is Mad fluently on Tuesday and then stare at the word MAD on Friday in bafflement and impatience while her mother stabs herself in the thigh with a fork in perfect reason.

Well, we know we will get there.

But today we are exposed, thrown into the public gaze from our protective covers and left adrift at a museum workshop on Crime and Punishment. It seems all the little schoolies can read, Dostoevsky probably. I tell myself it is a self-selected group; the top-of-the-class primaries, and druggie James and uptheduff Sheila aren't here. We are. The non-reading, sulky book refusers who, when faced with a workshop script of crime and punishment, stare straight ahead while everyone waits, like they're thinking the best way to be a horse is lift the back legs first.

I have no answer to the misery and pain involved in teaching a child to read at home, except that it is all exhausting stuff for which you need nerves of steel, teeth you can grind and thighs which do not feel pain.

And of course, unlike you fortunate school choosers, home educators have no-one else to blame.