Flexischool to feral

I must be helpful to a new home educator, so forgive this moment of thought. (Normal service will be resumed shortly.)

One of the difficulties people in the home ed world seem to have (and probably not just in the world of home ed) is how to label the stuff we do. Like the Autonomous vs Structured tag.

I have fretted about this myself. Is la famille Grit autonomous? Structured? School at home? Free range? Eclectic?

How many times have I heard myself explaining what position we adopt in this wild spectrum, not to people outside the community, but to people inside it. Yet I never think I got that label exactly right.

And it's easy to make the same assumptions about each other. One week you might observe Tinkertop casually kicking a chicken carcass about a car park while mama looks on tolerantly. Then I'm thinking, Aha! Note the non-coercive parent approach. Must be autonomous. Mama is probably respecting Tinkertop's expression of violence towards the dead chicken as some sort of emotional response towards the avian world. 

But two weeks later I could probably catch Tinkertop hunched over a desk with a maths worksheet, mama scrutinising her from afar, holding a pack of 12 pencils in a threatening manner. Then I might think, Aha! Note the coercive parent approach. Must be structured. Mama is probably organising Tinkertop's entry into the GCSE exam right now.

The reality is, once we withdraw Tinkertop from school to do it the alternative way, we never really know what the alternative way is, until we do it. So you try everything in every direction.

Through trial and error, by picking a way through all options, choices and approaches, you come to see what fits with Tinkertop's brain, character and emotional state. It may be a way that simultaneously allows you to manage the days, cook dinner, consider the rest of the tribe, and attend to your own needs. As if you needed more pressure, you might find yourself trying to position your family group in a face-saving way within the expectations of the wider communities in which you all move - and present yourself so the unaware school-choosers who are watching this whole sorry performance don't ostracise you on the conclusion that you just proved yourself irredeemably nuts.

That experience of home ed becomes the very close way you come to know your own child. And is possibly one reason why home educators become picky and prickly if they feel they're being given the wrong sort of interpretation. We're still working and thinking through all the approaches ourselves.

So my conclusion is, as you get started, I wouldn't fret too much about the labels; neither the ones that are given to you, nor the ones you feel under pressure to use, especially if they come with a whole package of ideas that you don't automatically subscribe to. Be free to try what you like, how you like, when you like.

And now I can leave you to draw your own conclusions about Squirrel's activities of the day.

Hello, Mumsnetters

As the entire world approaches that calender date on which children wait to be sacrificed to Gove's Global Datasheets of Branded Academic Performance Structures Phase I, I know from the secret statcounter that some of you parents are considering alternatives. (There is always a spike about August.)

Geology walk to Coombs Quarry

To wit: 'making the most disastrous mistake of your life', 'setting up your child to fail', and 'beginning on a path that will deny Tinkertop her life chances, remove from her opportunities of a professional career, and separate her from her friends forever'. Probably also she will become an anarchist member of that evil underground network bent on destroying all humanity, and led by our hero, Grimly Feendish, aka Home Educators.

Thornborough Bridge, built in the 14th century, 

the only surviving medieval bridge in Bucks! 

Imagine the travellers who crossed this way.

I cannot help you take your decision. All children are different, la? If Tinkertop threatens to go bonkers, breakdown, or chuck herself under a bus on September 4, in the absence of her rational thinking, then it is you, responsible parent, who weighs the options, costs, benefits, and consequences.

 WTF? Who signed off this repair?

Time to become the nit-picking little building nerd 

I truly am, and send a note to English Heritage.

What I can do, is give you what I do. Probably across many posts (apologies). Otherwise, I only have wrods of experience for the new-to-home ed:

1. Find local home ed groups; talk to practicing home educators, face to face. Meet as many as possible, all over the place. Yes, you will meet people who are bonkers. Some will be wary of you, some want to sell you tuition services for profit, some happily include you in the panda-themed party they're having that afternoon. That's life, not home ed. Be grateful your first introduction is not being locked in a toilet with the hippy who protests against the exploitation of cotton pickers and passes you her favourite bottom wipe. She knitted it herself from the hair of the family goat.

 Calming, no?

2. Are you suffering for the cause yet? Not enough. A next step is to attend home ed meets, visit the haunts and habitats, and generally discover how they know where to go. It may involve wellies, sticks, and a dog wearing a cardigan. Or tea and Bibles. Or watching a kid see if a pile of salt on the kitchen table can be ignited. Relax, broaden your mind, wait for it all to make sense. It never will. Probably why I enjoy the company of souls in this community. (But I am also comfortable with my own contradictions, denials, excuses and hypocrisies, so I am not much of a judge.)

 The river here would be an excellent place

 for the kids to do a river survey. 

I am all up for that. 

Anyone want to come along?

3. Open your eyes to education in everything, not just what school taught you. You have to do this with grinding relentlessness. Say, when you stand forlorn before a museum display that is basically a pile of old rocks, a joyless mound of dusty plastic fish, and a non-functioning video about newt warts. The lot will be guarded by an elderly woman who wants to do her very best for you. She may pin you down so she can find the worksheet that Doreen made in 1985. She is sure they have a photocopy of it somewhere. But even here we can find an education! There must be something about communities, social values, museum funding, and English politeness formula as you try and beat a path to the tea shop.

 Soil! I like soil.

4. Redefine the word Success. Tinkertop not made it out of bed today? Success. The pom-pom making workshop that ended in vomit? Success. The giddy heights of the stick-and-glue group where there is an almighty fight over the single Pritt Stick? Success.

Ah, woodland.

5. Don't feel bad, even when you feel marginalised. Oh yes, it will happen, even in happy home ed land.  One group may feel all wrong; you sense an ugly bad-tempered truce in another; a third resembles total chaos. The fact you weren't invited to the library group, and now you're sure they're telling you something? Keep with it: you and Tinkertop will be comfortable somewhere. And let's celebrate. Expect these divisions; they are made of ideologies, philosophies, religious beliefs and politics. You wanted to join a community of people who stand up for what they believe, don't do things just because someone tells them to, and rarely agree just for the sake of conflict avoidance, didn't you? Society needs strong minded people, and you'll meet a shed load out here.

In the quarry. 

Here you can find shells from the time 

this land was a tropical beach.

6. You must be prepared to face out the incomprehending others. Like those who think Tinkertop should be at school; assume she has been excluded; or there must be something socially wrong with her. They may make comments about how you must be mad/desperate, or your motives are suspicious. Maybe you are needy and weak. You never knew you were capable of murdering your own family until now, huh? I guess you'll develop your favourite reply which isn't fuck off delivered under your breath.

And the perfect spot for a picnic 

with a bit of ice age art.

7. You may have to get to grips with exam culture. Or not. The illegal flexischool, or not. But educationally, you and Tinkertop can sort out a route that is suited to her, and her specific needs and interests. Like the wise woman said, life is not a race. Tinkertop can find her own way, be inspired by courses for which she needs qualifications, aim to be in the place she wants to be. So what if she does it on her own path? It is for situations like this people invented the expression There is more than one way to skin a cat. (Apologies to Tiddles.) You have to help pick a curriculum, negotiate an exam centre, and pay the invigilator. For info, join the high volume, informed and intelligent home ed exams yahoo group.

 I love this gate. 

Whoever made it, I thank you.

8. You have to know the law. At some point, it will be unavoidable, maybe when you need to articulate your philosophy, choose whether to have visits, or avoid court. I could give you a quick legal thingummy, in case you fear an EWO will test your knowledge of English Educational Law 1947-2009, and you don't have the gibbering Tinkertop on hand to demonstrate the mess made by conventional schooling, but the law is not my first interest and anyway, other sites give you the gem.

The sort of day a girl needs. 

Equipped with knife, sticks, ancient shells and soil, 

what could be a better way to footle through a Sunday?

9. It may be of no use to anyone else, but fortune cookie philosophy keeps me upright. Be imaginative to think of the choices; be brave enough to carry them out. Leave the life you planned; embrace the life you have. Eat more prawn crackers; why resist their crunchy charms? And always look for the easy laugh. There will be times when you need it.

Burial mound.

10. You have to be prepared to drive a car where you hope the police never have cause to look in the boot.

Now you could say, Do you know what? Having thought about it, let's not do it.

Need a guide to Prednisolone?

I have given in this morning to the dreaded pills, the Prednisolone.

Hopefully that means nothing to you.

However it might mean something to you people searching on chronic hives and angioedema, and you are really the only people who need this post.

The reason I have avoided these little beasties is not simply that I am a die-hard hippie who has so far handed over my mortgage to Doctor Quack and his magic herbal pixies, it is because Prednisolone comes with fearful side effects more suited to the atmos of a German expressionist movie from 1922. Let's just call them Nosferatu's Happy Pills.

See? Grit looks forever on the brightest side! I am chippy about medical miseries in my vague hopeless way, yattering off my stock of handy British phrases like never mind and mustn't grumble, together with my fortune cookie philosophy useful for all health matters, even though I mostly chant from little seeds grow big trees.

But with this powerful combination I am sure to be able to effect a cheery outlook on the range of medical possibilities the evil Prednisolone will now certainly offer me! And it is too late to stop me. I swallowed six already.

Let's try, anyway, making the best of a bad job.

Have you severe depression, bipolar disorder or manic depression? Prednisolone is the drug for you! Offers to make any mental condition worse, much worse, until you are in the cupboard under the stairs rocking backwards and forwards.

Nervousness, schizophrenia, mood swings and plain old being out of control of your reality? Yes, Prednisolone helps by letting you see things which aren't there! Personally I am looking forward to this one; I placed an order already for three naked men, a vat of champagne and a monkey.

Have you been in contact with someone who has shingles, chickenpox or measles? Even if they don't know about it yet? Like, they're just carrying around that infection, waiting to kill you? Because, yeah, on Prednisolone, if you catch it, for you, it's probably fatal. Never mind! You can take the monkey with you when you wind up screaming at your own funeral.

High blood pressure? Heart problems? Gulp down that Prednisolone, if only for your Sunday afternoon entertainment. Better than the TV when your super-pressurised blood shoots out both ears like oil from an unplugged well. Why not get the kids to photograph the moment for your GP's inhouse magazine, Medical Mess of the Month!

Stomach and intestines. Let's get grimy with the innards. Bloating, ulcers, perforations. Basically, your insides are going to resemble a colander after a few weeks on the Prednisolone. You can always be useful! Maybe you could be hung upside down and use your handy intestinal lining as a spaghetti strainer.

Hormones, you're in for a treat! Soon, passers by in the street will stop to wonder, Who is that girl? And how did she get that glossy chestnut brown on all her luxuriant facial hair?

Skin! The very reason I've been prescribed Prednisolone! Promises to cover me in purple lines, bruising, acne and wounds that don't heal! Yay me! A huge festering lump of drugged out pox!

But hey! Let's look on the bright side. The pills are teensy-tiny, and so easy to swallow.

It's just doable! (So let's not do it.)

This is one of those blog posts I really urge myself to read, because it contains words of wisdom.

For many months I have been deaf to wise words, but I note that it is only now I am beginning to hear them.

Admittedly, I find myself listening to wise words only when they have been dropped in a vat of water, thrashed ten times against a horse skin (horse not in it) and poured in a stopper-dropper craft bottle before selling to gullible idiots like me at twenty quid a pop.

I currently have this chronicness called puffyupandfalloffyitis the remedy for which the quack doctor (after securing my house and all its contents) has supplied to me. His thoughtful remedy is this: many splendidly large quantities of coloured pills the size of doorknobs to be swallowed throughout the day, supported by some self flagellation at times of your own choosing but it must be done with a fancy daisy.

Frankly, I am so tired of puffyupandfalloffyitis the bloke from the tyre shop could have told me my cure lies in balancing a chinchilla on my head while standing in a bucket of water at midnight and I would be asking him about his hourly rentals on chinchillas. Puffyupandfalloffyitis can get us sufferers down and desperate.

But the good quack doctor also said that leading a less stressful life can be helpful in my search for a final solution.

I recall that this has been told to my brain and body before!

Of course, then it was from one of those white-coated androids. My body and brain ignore such tellings, yes they do, because body and brain are about their important business with stuff like triplets, a Citroen Berlingo with a dent in it, a pile of dinner potatoes, and a great sense of responsibility to be bashed about like a hammer against a clock with an ultimatum.

But it is now these wise words should be attended to. Do less stuff. Do less stuff slower. Do less stuff slower and with more attention to the preparation and the mopping up. Do not overegg with wrangling thinking on the stuff which you must do slower while preparing and mopping up. Simply enjoy all the stuff just as you go.

In other words, body and brain, do not take the opportunity this week to poke the diary (let's say for the 34th September), and think Aha! I can fit into this day the workshop starting at 9am if I drive to Leicester at 2pm to join the talk at 4pm so we can do the play at 6pm and return at 10pm. If I wee in a bottle about junction 16 of the M1 I save the ten-minute stop at Newport Pagnell services, which makes it all just doable!

Frankly, body and brain, this sort of lifestyle should cease. It may be a contributory factor to your puffyupandfalloffyitis.

This camping trip should mark a turning point. And it will, body and brain, if you bother to read on. This trip, to the lovely Suffolk, with all the other hairy hippies in the happy fields, should remind you that idling and loafing are commendable activities. Footling and playing are goals in themselves. Staring at fields, skies, clouds and wavy grains, following whimsical distraction, surfing ideas, enjoying semi-random connections, so that one can begin thinking about plastic computer tables and drift away to imagining being a cuckoo dancing on a washing line, these are all truly worthwhile experiences.

Yes, body and brain. If you pay heed to my wise words, you may achieve your less stressful life.

Okay, only for the coming week. But then we will see if that indeed has any further impact on your horrible puffyupandfalloffyitis.

And know, body and brain, that whatever you choose to do, I resolve one summer to come blogless and shoeless in whatever state I find myself, to idle time away in the beautiful Suffolk countryside, staring at the sky and wondering if dancing cuckoos really do wear noisy pink tutus as they so indignantly claim.

Everything teaches us something

Undermined my own market by running a workshop on notebookery. I show the juniors a straightforward bookbinding technique: the pamphlet stitch.

Everything teaches us something, doesn't it?

1. I am mean. I tell my audience, you need never buy an overpriced notebook from a pointless gift shop ever again. Ten minutes at home in preparation, and you have a perfect bag/pocket sized notebook; unique, stylish, made for the event, day, or hour!

My generous-sided brain whispers to me, don't forget to add, Support your local gift shop! Buy other stuff instead! (Well, it would, if they sold other stuff that wasn't overpriced tat shipped in from Shenzhen.)

2. I provoke for no good reason. Yes, let's all be guerilla artists!

Our journey books indeed look beguiling and inviting, hanging from railings and trees at the local park. When it is dry.

After a two-hour soaking they are completely sodden, all the fancy bits dropped off, and nothing more than another pain in the arse for the litter-picker, who works, incidentally, on the minimum wage.

3. I am impatient. I will never make a primary school teacher. After five minutes I find myself shouting inside my head For fuck's sake! It's not rocket science! It's just a bloody stitch! How have you managed to mangle it up like that? You should have watched my sodding demonstration shouldn't you?

Actually, I may have shouted some of those in reality. (Fortunately, no-one cried.)

4. I am shamed. After five minutes I give up the attempt to teach anyone how to make a ruddy journey book. It is craft mayhem with sharp needles. I sulk, guard the card, suspect the juniors of using too much string, and become impatient at the dropping of a piece of paper. I am a miserable little bastard, in fact. My journey book is crap.

And all their journey books turn out far, far, better than mine, with more imagination than I ever bring to the task.

The Grit Lit Crits

Inspired by the Hay Lit Fes, Shark, Tiger and Squirrel, age 13, are now delighted to give you the first installment of their literary review The Grit Lit Crits.

Imagine the critics here sitting in comfortable repose, sank in beige sueded armchairs while looking serious and scholarly dressed in loose grey suits of a linen blend. And not shoving each other about for possession of prime top-of-the-staircase seat while dressed in old torn trousers and, inexplicably, a pink sunhat with an iguana pinned to the top.

Here we go, and welcome. (In the absence of an EngLit curriculum we haven't got anything else.)

Critics remain anonymous mostly because everyone talks at once in this house and I couldn't be bothered to try and sort it all out. Make of it what you will.

Chronicles of Ancient Darkness Series by Michelle Paver.
Shut up everybody. I'm talking. Mummy, stop calling her that wolf botherer. Her books are brilliant! She teaches us how to skin deer. And how to make bows and arrows. We have a plan. We are going to sleep in the garden and make nettle stew. [etc etc etc cut for brevity.] It is a pity about the cat.*

The Silent Pool by Griselda Gifford.
I liked it. No, not because it has a twin thing. I don't want you thinking I've got some sort of secret communication with my sisters. [All make noises Ugh Ugh Ugh!]

The Tudor Chronicles Series by Terry Deary.
He's alright. I said alright. If I want to read a good writer I'm not choosing Terry Deary. I said he's alright.

Where the Mountain Meets the Sea by Grace Lin.
I recognise what she writes about. Chinese dragons and stuff. What? What are you saying? Don't talk to me about your cultural perspectives.

The Wanderer by Sharon Creech.
It's all dying this and dying that. Someone has to die. If the parents don't die before she starts, they split up then they die.

The Witch Trade by Michael Molloy.
He's got hold of an idea and he's exploiting it until we've all had enough.

The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle.
It's got dinosaurs in it. How do you mean, What do they do? Are you expecting they drive cars and go to the cinema? [Fifteen minute interlude while we all debate whether a giant mongoose counts as a dinosaur.]

My Sister Jodie by Jacqueline Wilson
Small minded and pointless. Who cares who falls out with who and why? I hated it. Me too. Me too. Me too.

The Historical House Series by various authors
You learn a lot about the history of people living in this one house. It's good. My favourite. If you don't like history or houses you'd be stupid to read this series, wouldn't you?

Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson
She is a good writer. I like her language and she has a good story. I think J.K.Rowling nicked her ideas. And she doesn't have everyone dropping dead all over the place.

The Enchanted Forest Chronicles Series by Patricia Wrede
I'm not sure you can call them good. More like trash. But trash in a good way.

Wilma Tenderfoot Series by Emma Kennedy
It gets a bit repetitive and the plots repeat themselves. It can get annoying with these types of authors. I mean, I look at the bookshelf and there's another one with their name on it. We worked it out ages ago. Do they think we're stupid? I think it's a problem when an author made a lot of money with the first one.

The White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean
(Waving book animatedly while stomping downstairs) Read it yourself. I'm getting fed up of you asking questions.

[Light fades.]

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you, and see you in a week for another installment of The Grit Lit Crits. Remember, in this house, there is nowhere to hide.


* We are vegetarian.

Workshops for teenagers?

It seems to me that la famille Grit is now conducting a survey of KS3 workshops around the shires.

See? I even have all the lingo, what with those National Curriculum Key Stages 1,2,3.

I wouldn't have known what you meant a few years ago. But, you home educating parents, there is a disjunction from larking about in the fields with children aged under 11 and these secondary years. Not a culture change entirely of our own making. I observe two trends.

First, the seeping back to school of home ed kids about age 11. Several friends of the griblets went to school, some for the first time. They'd spent a fantastic time replacing the tedious school grind with a truly expansive, outdoors, inquisitive education put into place by outgoing parents, but filtered into the school-based service for the secondary exam years. Coming into our world are those children who may have coped with primary school, but for whom secondary is a harmful nightmare. So we are now moving in a slightly different composition of people.

Second, as we all look around for educational support, we're finding a decline in number and variety of workshops and activities we can pick up from museums, parks, councils, and libraries suitable for the home educated post-11-year old child.

At primary the home ed parent can't go wrong. You can keep Tinkertop busy with dozens of activities from pizza making to storytimes to archaeological games and den building. You don't need to travel about the country looking for those; you can find them in your locality. You don't need to buy the services of the educational supplies company, you can organise a group and pick up a phone. But there's only so much pond dipping you can do, right? The growth of your kids and the targeting of services means that by age 12 you're scouting for something different.

So with kids aged 13 we're looking for new stuff. But I'm finding museum and institution activities no longer offered for the interests of teenagers; they are now activities morphed into the formal, national 'KS3 workshop'.

The organisations offering these workshops are sure to make website promises that are drawn straight from the National Curriculum, and offer targets printed off from a government website. Which means they're already a step away from the concerns of teenagers. They're speaking to us not through their own voices and interests; they're addressing us though a nationally school-mediated voice rather than a local people-oriented voice. Nevertheless, we stick with it, book a session, and then find these workshops are truly of variable quality.

There is no guarantee of academic content at a 'KS3 workshop'. Parents of schooled children, you should know this too. When you fork out a tenner for the annual KS3 trip touted by the school as a 'valuable learning opportunity', know that it could all descend into 'D'you wanna touch a dead badger?' with your child enthused only to the purchase of a rubber egg in the gift shop.

So now the KS3 workshop is disappointing on both counts. First, in failing to be heard by the interests of teenagers and second, in failing to provide even what they offered for the content.

Old Grit observes an issue here for those educators working in all our dear museums, libraries and the rest.

First,  if you want to keep them involved in your disciplines, you need to consider whether you are creating workshops and activities that fit with the interests of teenagers. Please don't assume they all grunt and play computer games.

Second, you need to examine whether you really want to provide National Curriculum services for the government, or whether you want to do the thing you're interested in, have the resources to do, and the staff to help create it.

Third, you need to think it through, where you want these teenagers to go with you, when you run a session. What do you want to happen as a result of your activity? What do you want them to do and say about your outfit?

Finally, you need to make sure, absolutely sure, without exception, that you front your workshop with real, live, blood-fired people who care about, and are sensitive towards the nuances of both their audience and the discipline they're promoting. They won't necessarily come with a PGCE. In fact, that might be a hindrance.

These thoughts are all prompted because today we hit another teenage workshop at the Centre of the Cell, in Whitechapel. It promises KS3 science of the National Curriculum.

The workshop session is, basically, play a load of computer games in a pod suspended above a laboratory. It hit the presentation, commendably showing aspiration and imagination, but despite the science/medical students hanging about, still relied on computer games rather than the excitement of actual human interaction to prompt thought and provoke discussion. For us, it failed to send our teenagers buzzing home, enthused by debate, fired up with ideas, and imaginatively placed at a different point from where they'd started.

Mapping it out

So yes, meanwhile, hello. Grit's day is a home education blog.

It is Story of our journey. Proof of something that happens when you don't send the kids to school.

Look at it this way. Home ed doesn't mean you have to put your alien bat monsters under the patio by Day Two. Your home ed approach won't (necessarily) end in court. The week need not conclude with you stretched out in the morgue. Even though this option sometimes feels preferable.

And I know that saying these things can be helpful. I see how Grit's day is occasionally passed round the home ed circuit like well-thumbed cheap porn. Especially when I say something rude, provocative, or super practical useful.

Useful stuff like, Just relax! Go with the kid flow! When the kid flow is against you, bite your knuckles, find strength where you can, and beat the crap out of Mr Fluffles the toy otter, or whatever proxy you keep for that purpose. Do not be ashamed of anger, frustration, and resentment. Go about the objective in another way.

See? Super useful wisdoms; empathy borne from practical experience.

In that vein, while I'm here, and if you're new, my advice is always the same. Find your local home ed groups. Suss them out. They probably divide into Godly, school-at-home, philosofikals and, increasingly, the educational services support company, bringing in tutors at a higher rate than you could supply them, and run at a profit.

Choose which suits your family or pass yourself around all groups, if they'll let you. And remember. Tribal allegiances are just the same in home ed land as at the school gates, only with added fury and the occasional madness. You'll meet people who make you feel sorry for the local authority staff, and you'll meet people you're itching to punch in the face.

Anyway, now I have laid out my territory in my helpful way, Grit's day serves another purpose. The most important to me. It exists because it is my damn strong arm righteous evidence, compiled for when the local authority woman demands sight of an education.

Na na na na na. No you're not coming in. No you're not seeing Squirrel, Tiger, or Shark, not unless they ask to see you. I'm showing our education this way. By a map of Scandinavia, from our fortnightly mapping group.

Otherwise, we're busy. Shark is off with her sub aqua buddies, slogging her way through maths, Latin, geography, camping and fish, with her eyes on university. Don't cross her unless you want your face tongue-lashed off with her particular brand of fish-based contempt.

Tiger is a bag of nervosa, barely unable to function in a crowd, so home ed hasn't changed her. Stay away, that's my advice. Unless you look like a horse. She is determined to thrash Shark with the Latin and enjoys the art, film studies and horse-end that the kind mama grudgingly pays for on a fortnightly basis. Better than mama is horse, horse, horse.

Squirrel is Squirrel. She has a pet rock and ignores me. She will ignore you as well. Along with the Latin that Lingua Latina tries to insert into her brain, the Astronomy I have paid for, and the Maths I insist on. She will ignore it all and pursue her own Squirrelly tendencies which probably include sorting gravel and sieving soil. One day it will all come good. Either that or no good.

So there. Grit's day is helpful, cheap, and always educational.

Careers advice

The Geology Festival! Prompted by Squirrel, who fancies a career in geology. If it means someone pays her to map a Philippines beach.

I totally support her. I already bring to her chosen area my great swells of parental enthusiasm and a pile of rocks on the hall landing. Given that formidable start, I'm sure I can be just as good as a careers adviser at school.

This is my advice.

Get to know the people in the world you want to enter. This is what I sagely tell Squirrel, my mini proto-geologist. Half the finding-out work will be done for you.

This is not a case of who you know, not what you know, this is common sense. I tell Squirrel, go mix with them, and suss them out. See if they are the people for you. And at your age, they will look kindly on you, and talk to you, probably in a slightly patronising manner, but this can help you learn about stuff they know, find out what lives they expect to lead and what sort of people they like to be with. You merely have to listen. If you then decide their love is your love, these people are your people, it will make your progress much easier. As you travel through your chosen field, your professional will become your personal, and I bet you end up marrying it. Trust me.

This, then, is the wisdom after a day-long slog through the Geology Festival at UCL. I offer this to all. Not shale, lava and sandstone, but four main geological human types.

The elderly gentlemanly scholars. These mild-mannered rock watchers live in geological time. Their backs are bent from years of angular pebble sorting and their speech is inevitably soft and gracious. They are used to hours of soothing discourse with woolly mammoths. Instantly recognisable, the elderly geologist has spent so long studying glacial fluvial that the white cap upon their heads has actually become real snow. They now enjoy their remaining centuries classifying minute specimens of upper, middle and lower chalk, while hand-writing the labels because the typewriter age passed them by.

The middle-aged dynamic! Looking like 1970s sociology lecturers, the present incarnation of trend-setting researching geo-types hang around with their other middle-yeared chums, the Raiders of the Lost Ark look-a-likey archaeologists. Maybe allowing into their gang the cool Cox-styled physicists who whisper stars, moons, and planet earth to all the groupies. Yes, these are the people driven to show that granite is saucy! Limestone is sexy! Conglomerate is trending on Twitter! (But Woman of the Shires beware. The social rules of the Old Guard still apply. No throwing your panties about when Prof Iain Stewart takes to the lectern.)

The rocks and minerals sellers. Geology is global employment and geology is a grand-scale business, how true that is. At one end it's oil-gas-and-frack-it with side-dealing in government-to-government mining, drilling and rare-earth-mineral-contract swapsies, and at the other end it's flog you a bit of string with a lump of coloured quartz hanging off it. The sellers are everywhere, pimping rocks and adding two zeroes to the price. Beware. They often travel in disguise, and may wear suits. (However if Squirrel manages to get herself a job exploiting oil, blowing up rocks, or mapping volcanoes, then I might change my tune about some aspects of this exploitative, environmentally-suspicious business. Especially if it comes with a free two-week visit to see her in the Philippines.)

The enthusiasts. Aha! Fumbleinthedark amateurs like Grit! People who look at a rock and see not science and cash but slow-played dramas of permanence and transience; whispers betwixt mountains and sand grains; poetry of earth and space. Providing much-needed consolation and repair to the damaged human soul. Warning! Thousands of us rock-mad enthusiasts roam your land, thieving your craggy hillsides, pocketing your pebbly beaches, and scouring your gravel paths for crinoids. Then we drive carfulls of our loot home, where we dump mounds of it in the hall, up the stairs, all over the floor and on the windowsills.

See, how helpful I am, sorting out the social milieu of the geo-types for Squirrel's practical employment! I bet this is much better careers advice than offered in school! You like reading? Hmm. How about a librarian.*

Now have a tooth. The tooth is from some prehistoric marine thing. Shark bought it today after syphoning several hundred pounds of cash out my bank account to pay for it. She is so in love with its deep sea echoes, you might feel the love busting out the monitor screen.

*The complete advice to me, offered in 1974.

Aunty Grit is so helpful and kind

I received an email this week, and because I am kind - honestly, I am! You don't have to bribe me with a bottle of Hendrick's or anything! (although clearly it helps) - I thought I would respond.

Well here goes. Yes, it's something home educators are not usually allowed to talk much about.

Loneliness.

We know that if we confess in public anything like being lonely, it can be used against us in all manner of unhelpful ways, supporting dangerous judgements how our cursed misery is the result of our self-inflicted social isolation, our exclusion, the imposition on our children of this cruel, inhuman life, missing out all their normal friendships and all normal relationships. The type of life that sees a child locked up in the house for hours and hours and hours, to wither in strange solitude with only an unhinged mother and the sneering cat for company.

Talk one more step in that direction, and with the political wind blowing in the wrong direction and at a brutal strength, it'll be compulsory social training for the lot of us home educating Norma No-mates. The mothers will be whipped into shape via an Oliver James article about how clinically wrong in the head we all are, and the children will be sent for compulsory companionship down at the local comp.

Better let us say nothing about that curse of loneliness, and stress instead how fantastically busy we all are with our home educating social calenders!

But of course these states of loneliness, friendship, companionship, sociability, clubbiness, they aren't all unavoidable destinies that come with your chosen way of life.

Home educating does not necessarily result in loneliness, as school does not necessarily result in sociability. How many school children complain they have no special friends, no group that lets them in, or that they spend everyday avoiding Jessie and her gang?

In truth, it matters not a jot what you do, whether you home educate or not, nor whether your child attends school, flexischool, or whether they reluctantly attend the miserable anarchist home ed co-op knitting group that meets once a month in the scout hut. Everyone, all of us, feels lonely at points in life, because it's human.

We all feel it, and you do too, unless you are a lizard in human form. I bet you feel it most keenly between one state and another, say when you change route drastically, jump from the frying pan of school into the fiery pit of home ed, and suddenly lose those familiar routines and social networks, but are yet to build new ones. Or when your happy-to-be-home-ed 11-year old suddenly grows up to announce they don't want to play stupid baby games with the 9-year olds anymore! They want to chill with kids their own age and type. When you look around and realise there aren't any 11-year old girls called Tinkertop who like drawing wombats left in your area. They all moved back to school last September. Except one, and you had a blow up with her mother about a plant pot.

Look at it this way. Loneliness is part and parcel, comes and goes, feels keenly there and is far away. I know that, because last time I looked, I had no zip to let the lizard out. But it's a human thing, so it comes with a human reaction. Whether it's me, or my kids, who say I want friends to play with, we check out the lists for social meet ups, make an excuse for coffee, tag along somewhere, invite someone over. We'll make an excuse, create an event, find a group, send a pleading email, make a new connection, attend a meet up, offer a date, make a suggestion, and say yes, let's do that. I recommend all those approaches.

But of course this is grit's day. I accept things don't always go to plan, and sometimes my advice ain't worth the keyboard I typed it on (the letter r is dodgy).

Maybe you can feel better when I tell you that this weekend we didn't visit the space centre, we didn't go to see the battle at Hastings, we missed the talk at the art gallery, we never saw the play, I never sent the email, and I lost the number of the geocaching group.

We all stayed at home stirring the miserable stew that is our own family. Dig collapsed in a travel fugged heap. I grew bored facing the laundry. The little grits acted like kittens locked up, left in a house all day long. They intermittently stalked and cuffed each other, fought, snarled, sloped off to sulk in a chair. Minutes ticked by before they'd come again, batted each other with paws, hit each other with cushions, claws, feet, and finally wreaked vengeance with a plastic frog. Then one squealed, another went off in an arched huff, and a third howled with the frustration, boredom and loneliness of a ruined day.

I console myself. Next week I have several appointments for us all, and they are sure to be social.

'How do you teach it all?'

Of course I cannot answer in the street!

Not even in the time I am standing in the Co-op queue waiting for Doreen. Have this instead. Make yourself a cup of tea.

1. Announce to Tinkertop, I am your teacher.
Yes! This course of action is best pursued if you are slightly unhinged. You need only engage a supersonic energy drive, construct a timetable, demand homework, introduce a uniform and replicate school-at-home for this one to work perfectly. Ignore Tinkertop's pathetic pleading. Chain her by one leg to the desk if necessary. While you are forging ahead, preparing, teaching, marking, assessing, planning, resourcing, you will also need a servant/dogsbody/cook/housekeeper to take on all your other life responsibilities.

Personally, not an approach that can work chez Grit. Apart from lack of a willing servant and the combined force of three kids who help each other slip the chains, the sight of a timetable blows up my head.

2. Click BUY on 458 internet curriculums.
Common solution to late-night home ed panic. The very arrival of a curriculum through the post - guaranteed to lead Tinkertop through all stages in Maths, English and Build-your-own-fridge - consoles the home educator as effectively as a cuddly blankie, a bottle of gin, or a face full of chocolate. Even when you actually open the parcel to the promised land of structured learning, then decide to stash it in the cupboard because it's too difficult, it continues to work magic. You can push off and do what you want, safe in the knowledge that one day Tinkertop will announce she wants a GCSE in Fridge building. Now you'll be in that cupboard! Ta-Dah!

Not an approach that works here, although I have tried. I did succumb to a Parts-of-Grammar board game that makes no sense and no one likes. (But I keep it in the cupboard, just in case.)

3. Use people in your local community.
Perfect for primary education on the basis that everyone can teach us something! Yes, that includes Doreen with the dodgy leg working the Co-op tills. Decide on a next-to-nothing tuition budget and see how far you get. Try the toy library, scrapstore, library storytime, arts and crafts events at local heritage centres, tours of museums and galleries, community festivals, cultural events, walks and talks groups. Then try the fire station visit, police talk, tour of the gurdwara, behind-the-scenes at the supermarket, the lady who fits the glasses at the opticians, the bloke who runs the canal enthusiast club and the local bundle of eccentrics who will be delighted to show a crowd of home ed kids the skills needed for clog dancing and chinchilla balancing.

A strategy that has worked well round here for years!

4. Ingratiate yourself with the insanely busy woman in the home ed group who organises stuff. 
Butter her up, say how marvellous it is that she organises workshops for Maths/Physics/Verb conjugation and how much Tinkertop loves them, even when Tinkertop defiantly sits sullenly with her arms crossed and a face like a slapped arse. Keep going. Remind Tinkertop (while holding her pocket money in one hand), that this tuition is organised, relatively cheap, and you can tick verbs and socialisation in one swoop, for which all you need do is smile and never ask of the PTA woman of your nightmares, Are you on acid?

Of course I routinely try this approach. It invariably ends badly. One of the offspring refuses to have anything more to do with the infinitive, or the woman on acid puts Crispin back in a more demanding scholarly environment where people take verbs seriously.

5. Share the load. 
Coerce a bunch of co-operative parents to each offer to teach something. Whatever is their special skill. Can be an excellent approach if your chums offer PhD Chemistry, Practical Archaeology, Theatre Studies and Maths. The additional advantage is that you get to crow that the whole tribe is raising your child (sounds vaguely ethical, hippie-friendly, and somehow morally righteous).

Works for us, after a fashion. Although I have noted the approach isn't so effective if the only skill set the parent group can raise is fibbing about watching Jeremy Kyle, scoffing bourbon creams in secret, and getting the TV to work.

6. Buy the services of a private tutor.
A useful approach if you are sick of pushing water uphill on the maths. Lower the cost (and the stress) by admitting your defeat and dredging together a group of parents who are similarly prepared to give up with the simultaneous equations. Then you can share one private tutor between eight of you at a satisfactory cost.

An approach with many attractions. The hazard is, your offspring might stare at the tutor with undisguised loathing while the tutor does the same to you.

7. Join a flexischool scheme. 
The advantage is, you can use school teachers.

The disadvantage is, they are school teachers. Teacher training is geared to taking students in a class of 30 through a painfully lengthy process with tortured testing points for extra box-ticking purposes. (However, I still reserve my right to dump my offspring in a flexischool scheme at a moment's notice. Even if the offspring hate me and I end up teaching the stuff at home myself.)

8. Get the kids to teach each other. 
Ignore Tinkertop and Moonbeam. Let them get on with it. The theory is, kids teach themselves, so your job is to run about satisfying their need to learn Ancient Greek (and not, you pray, run about preventing them from roasting Tiddles over the fire they have lit on the kitchen table).

Of course I have tried this child-centred approach! It works fine. For about half an hour. After the expert in marine biology becomes a tad too competitive with the expert on horse maintenance she may pin her down to beat the crap out of her. Meanwhile, the expert on rocks is off with the fairies and is conversing with a pine cone. (You may have better success, depending on your genetic mix.)

9. Demand support from your local council.
If you have had enough of conventional school but are not convinced by home education, this is a possible approach. Get the council to pay for tuition. You might even wangle a tutor for Tinkertop at home. Of course your child might also need to possess a serious long-term illness, disability, or an ongoing school issue, while you will need a track record of single-mindedly terrorising all local authority staff to get out of them exactly what you want and it's not called home education.

Not a strategy used at Grit's. Say the same for all dealings with administrative types, wrestling with fund-holders, having ambitions to set up a free school, or interacting with any official from any local council any second more than necessary.

10. Redefine the words teaching and learning then call it an educational philosophy.
The perfect option if you are a home educator. You can define education how it suits. You don't have to teach in one way, nor in any way that a person familiar with school can recognise. You do not need to adopt the role of an authority taking control of a discipline, nor divide a subject into parts to assess. You can say I don't know, let topics segue one into another, stop to allow time to talk, pick up non-conventional areas to learn about, and find someone who can speak knowledgeably and passionately about something they love.

Works well. I would like to say all of our home ed life can continue in this blissful state, but as we begin to imagine ourselves staring down the barrel of the exam years, I am minded to say, if you are just starting out with your five-year old, don't set out with the thought that you must teach it all. Indeed, with your five-year old, don't fret and struggle to teach much at all. Just relax, enjoy it, and let learning take its course.

Touch of number 4 with number 6 for the costume workshop: private tutor and organiser with much more efficiency than me.

Advice to the home ed beginner

Find your nearest groups.

That's it. You'll find more than one: this community can offer you the religious groups, the secular groups, the autonomous wing, the structured, the gifted, the Asperger's, the primary, secondary, the playgroup, the muddling-along-in-the-middle groups, the travelling, the odd-balls, the flexischooled and the two-fingers-up-at-the-LA groups.

That's for starters. The people you'll meet swilling between them will range from the scarily strictly professional to the completely off the trolley bonkers.

They offer a fantastic range of support; and each and everyone of them can teach us something.

I defy you to locate one crazier than the woman I met, two weeks into our home ed decision, when I find her, and me, locked in a toilet together.

Shark, Squirrel and Tiger were aged four. A friend of a friend invited us to a party for school refusers. Where Squirrel needs to wee. I usher her to the large bathroom, where the mad woman is already attending to a trouserless toddler stood by a washbasin. She carefully wipes his bum with a woven cloth, rinses the limp stained rag under the tap, wrings it out, and hands the dripping fabric to me.

Welcome to home ed. Did you not know that it comes with an ideological objection to the consumable paper products industry?

But this is what strikes me as fantastic about home ed. Not that you can be as wacky and wild as you like. But that in this community of individuals you are sure to meet people who put their principles into action. They live their beliefs. If they come to believe the environment is better off without toilet paper, well they can work without toilet paper. Thousands of people already do. Can't you give it up too, for the sake of the planet?

Aren't people like this remarkable? I assume a person's principles are created from what they imagine is a force for good in the world, and not a result of a blow on the head (although there probably is a group for them too). And they will have thought it all out; they'll be more than happy to share their knowledge on the destructive bleaching, dying, and embossing methods used in toilet paper manufacture while they remain utterly blind to the way you're scrabbling at the lock.

But every situation teaches us something, and not only check the toilet before you go in. What it is to live a principle. What it means to put beliefs into practical action. What hazards and benefits might follow; the consequences of following your commitments.

I like to imagine I'm a better person for meeting the mad woman in the toilet. From her I began to learn about the huge diversity of people in this home ed world, how they will readily give support, expect very little in return, and share what they have, willingly.

They offer something else, too. It's practical experience. Something which is always welcome. Every one of us parents is good for something: whether it's an in-depth knowledge of environmental law, teaching a musical instrument, doing practical household maths, mending bikes, discussing power and politics, or walking the dog. With an open mind, a great tolerance of others, a willingness to say I don't know, let's find out, and a readiness to share, there's no stopping any of us. Home educators use their brilliant diversity as a source of strength and support, and you can find it all, as much as you want, starting from your local group.

So that's my advice, if you're just setting out. And take your own toilet paper. That, too.

Cut your cloth

Aunty Grit! You have a lot of experience in throwing someone else's money about. I have a question for you. Can home education be expensive?

Dear Reader, I can answer Yes. If you spend a lot of money on it.

Or, No. Not if you spend not much money on it.

If you are mean, like me, then home ed is cheap! Probably cheaper than state school. Certainly cheaper than Stowe, Westminster, or Roedean. Unless you count the loss of a second salary, in which case, home ed is the most expensive private schooling you can buy.

It all depends how you count it, right?

I mean, if you move house to put your child into a school with a preferable league table position, do you count the relocation in your schooling costs? And when I load the kids in the car and take them to see a field in Leicestershire, do I count that as education? Or doing something interesting?

So you spend what you do. It depends what your child wants, and what you can provide (after you've deducted the cost of a bottle of Claret).

There! Question sorted!

Now, back to reality. Shark wants a fish tank. Some foolish woman (not me, surely) said she could have one (maybe I was drunk).

Anyway, I look at the price of fish tanks (no wonder I drink). Have you seen the price of these things? FOR A FISH? A fish that costs 90p! To live in a house with doings that comes to HUNDREDS?

There is only one solution to this dilemma (or two, if you count the steadying glass of brandy). Find the cheapest way possible.

1. Ask our home ed 'hood. Any hand-me-downs? (Nope.)

2. Freecycle. (No doing.)

3. Dumpster diving. (Local council bastards have sealed off the best hunting grounds for miles. Apparently too many of us were crawling over the bins nicking stuff.)

4. Local newspaper small ads; charity shops; jumble sales etc. (Fish tanks are obviously rare.)

5. The fishy friends community and ebay. (Well, a bloke is offering a tank in Brighton, but the petrol cost to collect it would wipe out the benefit.)

6. Car booty. Yes! So I'm told. Tinkertop buys one a month for her obsessive collection of stick insects, worms, crickets and creepy things.

So it's off to the booty!

Where we did not find a fish tank. (Tinkertop got there ahead of us.) But we did find 14 new teenage fiction books, two pairs of leather boots (one adult, one child), one Victorian salt cellar, a collection of sparkly jewellery, a stack of hamster housing* and one inflatable frog.

All for less than twenty quid! The fun, boundless. I account for it under the heading Education, but that's just me. (And the celebratory Sunday lunch G&T afterwards, I account for under the heading, Drinking.)


*Strictly speaking, the hamster housing cannot be counted in the total. The hamster housing was free. Shark, Squirrel and Tiger stood in front of it discussing whether the hamster would like it for what felt like hours. The stall holder simply bagged it up and gave it to them. The cost of them blocking the stall was obviously greater than the 1.50 he'd been asking.

Either way it was fun

Because I am given to commit acts of mild provocation in the daily course of my normal life, have some pictures that make it look like we teach kids how to pray to Mecca.



Okay, I admit the tee-shirt and crayons give it away.


They're really drawing pictures of animal cells on bits of white fabric.




So it wasn't one of those favourite accusations - brainwashing with religion - after all.

But everything else you suspect about home educators is true.

Grit, Minister for Grit School, in Grit Land

People of England, I have decided something important.

I shall become Minister for Grit School.

Yes! It is time. I am called to power. Soon, I shall wield swords of truth and righteousness and gallop about in proper shining armour.

I am led to this destiny by your own Nick Gibb. (Minister for Schools, if you forgot.) He is my mentor and, by his brief appearance in Hong Kong this week, has taught me much.

The lessons I take from Nick (I think I can call him that) are as follows:

1. Know your job.
Obviously, if someone comes to Grit's house and says Hey Grit! You are a great Minister for Grit School! Can you promote British schools abroad? I would do a proper job. I would answer, British schooling system? It is THE BEST IN THE WORLD.

It has to be, right? It's a free-flowing system that means people like home educators can decide when to join in, and when to piss off. Okay, it could do with some tweaks, but basically it lets us all muddle along together to produce reasonably open-minded kids who are doctors, lawyers, artists, and office managers! How cool is that? Schools and parents in partnership!

What I wouldn't say, EVER, if I was a proper minister, is that British schools are CRAP. Nor that we are falling behind; being 'out educated'; or that we must follow Chinese schools for our business and economics lessons to get us proper jobs in finance.

I know how you can yell these things in England, sure! You have to! You have an electorate to hoodwink. But I would not say these things overseas! Especially not while under the banner of the British Council, cultural wing of the Foreign Office, whose job it is to big up British education and entice those rich foreign students back to the needy shores of Blighty!

So I would be better than Nick. I would be polite, visit the schools, eat the nibbles (without spitting out the peanut husks), and I would say 'Britain and Hong Kong? We are ONE.' (With all due respect to China, obviously).

2. Learn some facts.
Of course I wasn't invited to Nick's reception last night! The British Council don't let in people like scrubby-grubby Grit to touch the cloth of your most important Ministers! I merely hear about the shindig!

But Nick still teaches me wisdom. He teaches me to make sure, as Minister, you know all the facts and figures. This means I would not sit like a goldfish without oxygen while a member of the team leaps in to cover my ignorance about student numbers in higher education. Honestly! We don't want the Redwood and Welsh national anthem scenario all over again, do we?

3. Show some cleavage.
As I see it, the problem with Ministers for Schools generally is that they do not exude enough sexual suggestion.

I would rectify that. I would put on some sexy heels, pull the skirt up a bit, show a little cleavage, walk a bit wobbly, and go all giggly on the arm of my counterpart, the Hong Kong Minister for Schools. I think the evening would go a little better after that. Just my suggestion.

4. Listen.
I can see how any minister could be star struck by the size of Hong Kong's exam results.

But if they could start listening to the way Hong Kong schools reforms are going, they might, instead of bleating on and on about scores, tables, testing, accountability, show more careful attention, and develop an ear for some tentative ideas about the need for creativity now swilling about in Hong Kong educational circles.

Any listening minister might then understand how the Hong Konkers are aware that their system is generally perceived to be all rote-learning and miserable; maybe even how they might be seeking to do something about it. Perhaps Hong Kong education officials are a mite stung by the criticism that Hong Kong kids have enormous grades but zero personality? (And that observation comes from Singaporeans, for goodness sake!)

5. Say thank you.
So, in the unlikely circumstance that I have put up a crap performance, dissed British schools, banged on and on about how crap we are in the exam tables, ignored the damage limitation that has gone into overdrive, and pissed everyone off. What would I do?

I would quietly acknowledge a few shortcomings, and I would be grateful. I might even say thank you. I wouldn't call for heads to roll. I wouldn't blame everyone else. I wouldn't strut around like a self-important tosser.

6. Raise my profile.
This is a lesson I'm taking from all Ministers, everywhere.

I would be really, really, disappointed if I came all the way to Hong Kong and no journalist gave a toss! Even The Telegraph can't be arsed!

I would want all you people in England to be at home admiring me, and maybe even talking about me as a successor to my boss!

Surely I must acquire some column inches somewhere with my education programme! Surely I can do something positive for that?

I know! I shall run my first press conference! As Grit, Minister for Grit School in Grit Land!

But first I must finish off the Jack Daniels, call the British school system a load of crap run by a bunch of ponces, say that all poxy teachers should be accountable to parents (when really I mean the government), then fall down the stairs by accident-on-purpose to qualify for a free helicopter ride round the harbour.


PS. If you want newspaper and student views of the UK and HK Higher Education systems, go here and here. The SCMP couldn't be arsed.

I have what you're looking for

I have been round the Document of Accusation again, aka the Statcounter. This is an activity I engage in once a week to see how less popular I am than last week. (Plenty, so all is healthy.)

However, these features I note.

First, grit's day now enjoys a truly global audience. People flung apart - from USA, India, Brazil, Canada, Scotland, the UAE, Australia and Milton Keynes - join here daily, at this insignificant blog, in the hope of satisfaction.

Mostly for brains sucked out, text to write on a tombstone, hot aunties naked, bali men naked, hot bali men with sexy aunty naked, and outdoor survival in rural fenland.

Pigeon grit is no longer a search term. I think the 12 people who needed that information have now excluded me from their visits. Thank you.

For all the rest of you dear earth-wide readers who up my global count, I am pleased to accommodate you. You probably arrive in expectation and depart in disappointment.

The second feature I note is how grit's day remains a continuous source of inspiration, encouragement, discouragement and DO NOT DO IT advice, particularly for home education.

When someone is inquiring about home education from England, they mine this blog. Really, really explore it from all angles. They leave me blinking in the flashbulbs with my hands covering my doodah.

Quick guide to answer your three latest inquiries.

No, home educators do not have to mark a child's work.
Not unless you are high on worksheetery, or your child is enthused by red ink. If you choose to home educate, you do not have to show any inspector, LEA official, or any jobsworth that you mark work. No-one is required to ask you to keep a mark book of your child's work. They shouldn't be asking for test scores, grades, results, or evidence mark books, unless you are on some local provision or flexischool scheme where you have already agreed to supply this. In which case you'll know about it. For all normal home ed days, no marking of anything is required of you.

No, home educators do not have to be teachers, nor show any type of certification.
You do not have to have a degree in education, nor a PGCE, nor any certificate in child wrangling. Nor household management, food hygiene, or keeping yourself clean. It is sort of expected that if you choose to home ed you have thought about it, considered your own capabilities, tolerances, and interest levels. There are no grades you need to demonstrate of yourself to lead your children into life and the community. You do not need certificates to prove you can parent, either.

Yes, we socialise.
Home educators do not lock up their children in airless rooms. We do not avoid social contact with other people. We do not pump our kids foie gras style full of Evangelist Bible Studies. (Okay then, maybe one or two families do that, among 200,000, so probably below the indoctrination levels of your normal school-going population. Anyway, you can bet the situation will correct itself come aged 13 when the kids rebel and cross over the forbidden line into normality or Satan worship.)

I hope that is helpful. I should start a surgery, where I am open to home ed questions you have. (Only probably don't ask me anything that is actually useful to have answered.)

PS. Today, for the ongoing visitor delight of Hong Kong, was the dreaded Coastal Defences Museum. For myself, I managed to throw in the Law Uk Folk Museum and a tram trip. No marking was done, and no certificates required. Being out and about in society while Squirrel tries to extract a packet of biscuits from a Cantonese-speaking cafe owner you can count as social contact.

Thinking of a career in teaching?

Give school teachers some sympathy. Really! They deal with so much crap!

Remember, I have perspective. I did that job.

But I was very naive! No-one told me the truth about teaching before I began. Well, as everyone says I am very helpful, here are ten areas to consider before the interview for that PGCE course.

1. Imagine the worst kid behaviour you can.
Double it. Welcome to your classroom, Monday to Friday.

Sad but true. Schools have plenty of kids who are social-work caseloads, but on an educational course you are specifically not being trained for this, so you'll be caught between a rock and a hard place.

For example, Tinkertop looks cute, but this can hide a foul-mouthed monster. She'll front up to any challenge (like please sit down), then start a fist fight and tell you to fuck off. All in the time you set aside to welcome her to GCSE Macbeth.

Unfortunately, her parents might behave much the same. If you meet them, Tinkertop suddenly makes horrible sense. You will sadly realise your job might not be about dreaming up fun ways to bring Macbeth into the everyday, but is a depressing daily trial of crowd control and form filling.

My advice is pick your school intake according to whether you like social work or teaching.

2. Prepare to suffer for the good kids.
Some great kids go to school. Not only the bright ones. The charming, funny, quirky, a delight-to-be-with ones. These mini people keep you sane. They are probably the reason why teachers stay on teaching. Some kids you know will go on to achieve amazing things with the subject you love. They are your reason to work. They share ideas, are wise in their own ways, and are just utterly brilliant.

But then you realise why they are doing well is because they are working or supported at home. Look at all the disruptions to the day, and the way the hours are divided and timetabled into unproductive short fragments. Kids have to find a sane place to go and recover, or simply go and teach themselves. This is called home.

Kids of all and any ability was one big reason why I wanted to teach. I enjoy their company. That sounds painful and naive but it is true. Unfortunately, this leads to trouble.

3. Face the suspicion that your motives are dishonest.
You really want to work with kids? What are you up to?

Especially if you're a man and the kids are young. Or if you are a good-looking man and the girls are older.

People can't quite believe you want to teach because you see school as a meaningful career. (Unless you are a male in a suit who wants to be a manager. Then it's okay.)

But cast your eyes over the daily newspapers and it's not surprising people suspect you. Every week there's a teacher who's a murderer, deceiver, thief, liar, adulterer, child abuser. You have to get used to that, but be on the safe side. Never touch a child, never ever.

4. Remember, you can't pick your senior management team.
You'll either get a great management team, or a lousy one. If the latter, you will find yourself unsupported in the classroom, no matter how hard your department head works to remedy matters.

You will be powerless to do anything about poor management. Sometimes, when the management is really bad, they will demand you implement change and then set about frustrating your ability to do it.

Then you are doomed, pure and simple. Decisions will be made that you are not a part of; you will be treated as if you are merely another cog in the machine; you will be patronised, ignored, and probably bullied.

If you have a great department team, hurrah! Let's hope none of them leave! They will support you, even against the senior management. However, on the times that your colleagues all meet in the pub after work, then creeps in the fear...

5. Think, how will it read in the Daily Mail?
Teachers in the pub? Oooer. One is nicked for drink driving, smashes up the car, assaults someone?

You can't escape the brush, and say that people make a mess in their lives regardless of what job they do. Teachers hold a special place in the national psyche. The media will be part of your job. Want to do something that is slightly off-beat? Someone will whisper, How will it read in the Daily Mail?

Associated with this, is the miserable realisation that you must daily face representations of yourself which are nothing more than crappy sexist stereotyping.

Take women teachers portrayed in TV and film, where the visual exploration of fantasies and power dynamics are controlled by men. Films of student-teacher sex fantasies do not help you, not one bit. You will be hot, or not.

If you are hot, boys will try and look down your front, and make sexual jokes in your hearing. There will be innuendo, suggestions, and your physical space will be violated on a routine basis.

If you are not hot, you will be given scant respect in the classroom, your teaching ability will be questioned, and those year 11 boys who are being brought up in a culture where a woman's intelligence means not much at all, will simply walk out.

And the Daily Mail will imply that you deserved it, because you are a predator.

6. Plot your exit strategy if you have a weak head teacher.
The direction that a headteacher brings to what is a hierarchical and disciplined system is significant, and the impact in the school culture, enormous.

If they are crap, they might issue sudden directives about attainment with no infrastructure to support them. The senior management won't help because they're looking to protect themselves upwards, not downwards.

The result is, you might feel adrift and alone. And when you face Kirk with a hammer, that is a very lonely place indeed.

7. Prepare to watch your educational aspirations shrivel.
The saddest experience for me. Yes, I am a weedy theoriser / philosopher, I confess.

I also came to realise that if you are to develop any ideas within a school you must have a welcoming environment and a supportive team. Then you can genuinely innovate, challenge the way things are seen, introduce new ways of doing things, try out creative approaches, or basically have any vision at all.

Failure of some of those ideas must be part of the package. But failure is not the measure by which schools want to be judged. If your feeble head teacher is terrified of parents and the Daily Mail, you're stuffed. At best, even the most timid of your ideas will invite scorn. Sadly you might conclude that schools are anti-intellectual places geared to mediocrity.

8. Watch good colleagues leave in joy.
Some teachers in the staffroom you might adore because they are intelligent people who are fantastic fun. They provide balance, perspective, rationality.

Then you discover they are leaving. They believe their talents can be put to better use elsewhere. They go on to have great careers in office administration, and still claim that leaving the classroom is the best thing they ever did. Dispiriting.

9. Be aware how everyone pulls rank.
Schools are places designed to divide, order, rank, and create hierarchies. They are also places of judgement. This applies to kids and teachers. You will be placed in a category, given an identity and a label, then measured, ranked, and treated accordingly, like it or not.

Develop strategies from the start. My advice is make friends with cleaners and office staff. If you are attentive to the cleaners, they talk about how lovely you are to the infrastructure staff and that filters up, so slowly you build a reputation as a good classroom teacher who likes order. Any school loves an image like that.

Similarly, whatever paperwork the office gives you, deal with it immediately and hand it back, even if you fill it in wrong. The secretary will fill it in for you. You will be first to get that paperwork in on time and enjoy a reputation for being conscientious when really you are nothing of the sort. You are a manipulator. It's also called surviving.

10. Know that your own professional newspaper can happily treat you like an idiot.
As a teacher, I read the TES many times. Obviously it has self-serving views and advertisers to protect.

But the TES is not really useful if you are any thinker; they appear to cling to the same worn-out agenda that you might be fighting against. Indeed, their views can seem stuck with old interests and oft-repeated ideas. They can appear as if they are worshipping monoliths in the past.

Admittedly, these days - from the other side - I can laugh and know that of course the TES distorts events; of course it employs Sun journalists to hopefully whip up a bit of interest in its tired old pages.

Maybe it shows what they really think of their readers. I can believe they think their readers are not capable of much independent thought if they're teaching. You are, after all, cogs-in-the-machine and classroom fodder who must keep an eye to how your actions can be judged in the media.

But the TES I suppose knows this simple idea: you have to be kept in ignorance.

If you knew the truth, you probably wouldn't want a career in teaching.