How teachers treat their students

Hello again,

I thought I'd try to let you in on some thoughts I've been - er - thinking.

I belong to a few groups, and regularly people join to say that they and their child or children are HAVING TROUBLE WITH SCHOOL. It's rarely about school stuff like little Piers can't 'get' Geography. It's often about how their children are treated.

In case you are in any doubt - and if you've been kind enough to read my blog in the past you probably won't be in any doubt - I don't think that schools, in their present form, should have anything to do with children.

As I've mentioned, the Geography, History, Languages, etc. aren't often the cause of concern. The teachers and how they react to one, a few, a bunch or all of the pupils in their classes are.

Now, it's many many years since I was at school (as a young person) and only a few since I was in an Adult Learning GCSE class to support my daughter by taking the course with her. During the science course, I was shouted at, by the teacher. Normally, I can establish a reasonably good rapport with people who are imparting their knowledge to me. I had done so with this teacher. But she shouted at me for putting two sheets in one of those plastic files the wrong way. 

Yes, I got it wrong. But I was already pulling them out to flip them over and start again.

I looked at her and I thought, 'I no longer allow anyone to so disrespect me for committing the heinous crime of making a simple and undeadly mistake, especially one I'm already about to correct'.

I nearly challenged her.

Something stopped me. The wild, stressed look in her eyes. The exasperation on her face. The response to the too-much-all-the-time that teachers are faced with.

So I kept quiet. I forbore to let rip at her during the class. I made a choice not to correct her.

Later, I did have a gentle word, and she apologised as one adult to another because we respected each other and were, largely, equal.

What happens, though, to young people who are 'slagged off' in a class full of their friends, schoolmates, enemies and who are not equal and not able to have a reproving word after class.

What happens when the balance of power is totally unequal? As in school. All day long. Every day.

Teachers should never abuse their power, not to seduce, nor to reduce those under their care because they will never know what type of damage and what sort of anguish the children in their power may endure.

When you get a parent who is responsible for providing an education to his or her child or children, the sheer knowledge that parent has about his or her offspring can inspire and improve every day they learn. I'm not saying it's always easy, but I am saying it's very likely to be respectful.

Respect for the learner is surely a building block of learning success.

That's what I've been thinking about during these rainy days of autumn.

A little bit about Harry Potter and the home educated Weasleys

I like the Harry Potter series. It's interesting, and also is a hugely successful series spanning the globe with its impact. I also like that the children of the Weasley family, a major part of the whole Potter phenomenon, were home educated before they went to the wizarding school, Hogwarts.

Harry Potter is very lucky to know the Weasley family. He is mothered by the constantly caring and loving Mrs. Molly Weasley who is one of the few to give him presents on his birthday. She knits him sweaters, treating him like the other boys in her family of six lads and one daughter.

But Mrs. Weasley is not just a traditional motherly and comforting character: she has immense skill with her wand and vanquishes one of Lord Voldemort's most evil lieutenants - the vicious killer Bellatrix Lestrange.

Arthur and Molly Weasley have raised seven wonderful children at The Burrow, their cosy smallholding where chickens and gnomes roam. The boys are all individual and are all successful in their own chosen fields. Bill is a curse-breaker for Gringotts Bank, Charlie is a dragon-tamer, and Percy works for the Ministry of Magic. The twins, Fred and George, start a wildly successful wizarding joke shop and Ginny Weasley is the youngest daughter, competent witch, and last child of the family. Eventually, she marries the heroic Harry Potter

So, they did well, these Weasleys.

And why not?

They were loved. Their parents loved them enough to carefully and assiduously create a home and a life wherein the children felt safe and supported enough to learn.

And that, in home educating families, isn't fiction.

Days of identity crisis

Identity and crises are two words that seem to travel together a lot these days. Maybe they always did.

I struggle to think back to which identity I adopted or displayed when I was in my mid to late teens, and shrink a little from the knowledge of the people pleaser that I was then.

That set me wondering whether or not I went straight from school (which I hated) to university (which I mostly loved) because I wanted to go or because it was a first in my family and my father particularly was pleased that I was going.

No, it's too difficult. I can't catapult myself back far enough. I have to trust that university life was what I had to experience.

University, for me, was what school should have been. Within reason, here was this smorgasbord of lovely yummy subjects spread out in front of me, ready to be tasted and savoured. What bliss.

Of course, some subjects like Organic Chemistry, I just wasn't ready for. And the further you went up the course ladder the less likely you were to change your direction which was always a problem for me because I desired it all. Desperately. I loved all the subjects, hard and soft, big and small. I would have lived at University forever and been happy, but you're not supposed to do that unless you become one of the permanent denizens like lecturers or professors.

I hope young people will find university full of rich experience like a tasty fruit cake, but fear that life has moved on to colonise the dreaming spires with the performance management type of thinking that dominates almost everything these days. The hysteria about marks and competencies. The hours of form-filling. The rules. Oh, the rules.

Rules rule Brittania.

I wish we could wave the rules and have each of us just be great in our individual and personal way.

Phew! University

What a stressful three weeks we've had. A result that was supposed to come out on August 22nd didn't. AQA sent out the wrong results and took a week to correct their mistake.

Since then, all kinds of hassle. The result was that E has gone to a university 300 miles away, and she is now skyping and texting instead of talking face-to-face in the flesh and it's so difficult. I hope it gets easier, but I suspect that things will chug along until she makes the two-train and one-bus journey home for a weekend or for the Christmas break.

It has taught me a lot.

Turns out she has been (and still is) one of my best friends and a deeply sensitive and sensible counsellor.

She has been there for me as much as I ever have been for her. 

She has made me so proud.

When I look back over my shoulder at her journey I am amazed at her courage, fortitude, determination and diligence.

Around the area, I see other women that I know have watched their youngsters fly/drive/take the bus/hop onto a train away from their homes to start their real adult lives. Just as I salute the young people, I put my psychic arms around the grieving mothers. You are all astounding human beings. Every last one of you.

May your journeys be full of love, laughter and light.

Holiday

Two adults. One is researching on the internet. The other is hanging wallpaper.

Two young people. One is writing, replying to emails. The other is hanging wallpaper with the adult who is hanging wallpaper.

Holiday.

It's much nicer for us, as home educators, not to ask a school headteacher for permission to take our children out of school, subject to the headteacher's approval, of course. Nicer, and somehow fitting, because they are OUR children. They belong not to schools but to families.

Home educating families get the best deals on cheap holidays because they can go anytime.

Another one of the million reasons to home educate.

Discovery

We've done something different the last few weeks.

We've gone outside our boxes.

We've expanded our horizons. You might say we've landed on new planets to discover new things.

How have we done this?

As a family, we co-operated and hosted some students who were learning English as a foreign language.

They chose us as the family they wanted to spend some time with.

I hope that they learned some English from us. (I know that they did). No doubt they discovered also that our family values learning. That my young people are well-mannered and helpful, and that we all care about each other, and we all care about knowledge.

And we made friends with three people we probably would've never met if we hadn't opened those boxes and tried something new.

Not bad for a few weeks in summer, was it?

George Stephenson

"George Stephenson, known as ‘The Father of the Railways’, was born in Wylam, on the banks of the River Tyne, in 1761.

He had no formal education and only learnt to read at the age of nineteen. He was a gifted young man, and it was he who invented the first successful steam engine, ‘The Rocket.’

The highlight of his brilliant career was when the nearby Darlington to Stockton Railway was opened in 1825, a train of eleven wagons, Stephenson driving the locomotive himself.

In 1824, George and his son Robert formed a successful business in Newcastle constructing locomotives and other engineering works. Apart from working with his father on locomotives, Robert was renowned for his work in civil engineering and was responsible for the construction of many famous bridges. He died in 1859."

http://www.borderreivers.co.uk/Border%20Families/Surnames/Stevenson.htm

George Stephenson was a gifted young man who didn't learn to read until he was 19 years old.

Imagine that going unnoticed in a home educating family these days.

And yet the guy was brilliant. He invented the first successful steam engine. Then he and his son formed and ran a successful engineering business in Newcastle upon Tyne.

Good old George (and Robert, of course).