Me and My Big Ideas, part 2

More from the discussion I mentioned in my last post: a description of unschooling, written for a broadly skeptical audience.

The basic premise of unschooling is that children - indeed, all people - are naturally curious, and that if they are allowed to pursue their (often intense) desires to acquire information and master skills, they will, if you like, "arrange" to learn everything they need. Adherents of unschooling believe that learning in the context of an immediate desire - often to do something, i.e. to apply the knowledge acquired - is most likely to be effective and lasting.

The key point of contention here, obviously, is in that phrase "everything they need". Unschooling is a child-centred approach, based on granting intellectual autonomy even to very young people. The idea is to refrain from disrupting the course of a person's curiosity-driven exploration of the world through the imposition of a curriculum, a timetable, and a schedule of academic milestones. Instead, unschooling families facilitate that exploration by providing a stimulating intellectual, social, and cultural environment - and, indeed, by providing or arranging for any formal instruction that the child requests.

That's where I'll have lost a lot of you, I suspect. Most people believe that there are certain things that all children must be taught. But opponents of non-traditional education models, in my (limited) experience, have a tendency to beg the question of whether it is, in fact, possible to define a set of information and skills to which it is desirable that all members of a society be exposed before a given (and ascertainable) age. They further beg the question of whether teaching methods arising from the traditional school model are, in fact, the best way to achieve this aim. [I repeat my plea from my previous post: if you know of any writing addressing these questions from first principles, please point me at it!]

I'm neither a logician nor a trained educator (though my parents are both academics, as are my aunt, my uncle, and many more living relatives, as were three grandparents, a step-grandparent, and at least one great-grandparent, so I'm pretty familiar with the education world, at least in Ireland), but my reading and observation have led me to conclude that there is another way of looking at it. In the first place, if it is indeed essential to know something, can we in fact avoid exposure to it - or at least to its importance? If we could trust children to identify what skills and knowledge are important to them, and facilitate them in acquiring these, would they not necessarily cover all the genuinely essential material?

In the second place, even if we agree that there is such a set of knowledge and skills, how can we be sure that traditionally based teaching methods are the only/best way of making sure that everyone gets it? Let's leave aside the fact that a proportion of children, despite attending school, never acquire basic literacy and numeracy - which I think most people would agree are about as "essential" as it gets. That's a clear social problem, to which some fairly clear remedies can be applied after the fact. But more subtly, I believe that many, many children leave school without in truth having mastered the curriculum. I'm not talking about failing exams - that's the obvious example - I'm contending that a significant proportion of students in a traditional school environment will tend to acquire not the skills and knowledge on the curriculum, but rather a set of more or less effective strategies for passing the various scrutinies and tests and getting out of there. (This applies less to students whose personal interests mesh well with the curriculum on offer, but as one of those students, I can testify that it's a factor.) These students, having passed the tests, are considered to be successfully educated. If you pause to consider your least favourite subject at school, and ask yourself what proportion of what you learnt during those classes has stayed learnt, you may get what I mean.

(A personal example: I was reasonably "good" at maths. I took Honours maths in the Leaving Certificate, which (certainly at the time, and I believe still) is generally considered one of the "hardest" subjects. I did well at it - better than I expected. However, I had only the sketchiest understanding of complex maths, then or now. I rote-learned enough to be able to approach most exam questions and left it at that. Maths, as an intellectual field, wasn't where my interest lay. Meanwhile, I have a very good grasp of the "simpler" subdivisions of maths, most of which I learnt by osmosis while indulging my passion for needlecraft: creating sewing, embroidery, patchwork and knitting patterns from scratch, which I did obsessively from the age of 6 or so, involves a fair bit of tricky calculation, percentages, geometry, as well as spatial awareness, technical drawing, and so on. Point is, if I were into, I don't know, aerodynamics - designing the perfect paper aeroplane, say - I'd probably have absorbed and retained more calculus.)

So, if for the sake of argument we were to propose that neither (a) a pre-ordained curriculum nor (b) curriculum-based, age-segregated, timetabled, scheduled, regularly tested instruction is necessarily the best way of a given child's acquiring an adequate education, well ... what's the alternative?

To which I say, go and read your John Holt and unschooling.info and the essays on the Sudbury Valley School site, and then get back to me if you have any questions :-)

I fully accept that there are people for whom the "guided" curricular experience is a positive one - one poster to [this discussion] spoke of being grateful that she was "forced" to read ... was it Shakespeare? That's not my personal experience: I viscerally resent what school did to me both intellectually and emotionally (there - cards on the table time - but please bear in mind that this is the Irish education system in the 1980s/90s - of which terms like "monolithic", "lockstep", "one size fits all", etc. are, I'd argue, ENTIRELY appropriate!). Further, the unschooling approach clearly works best when parents are educated and committed themselves. As I said in my previous post, there are surely children for whom the traditional school system is the best option available. It seems to me, though, that rather than engaging in holy war over pedagogical principles, we should be striving to ensure that each child has an opportunity to access the optimal educational model for that child.

There's also the question of parental values. Frankly, I can't see my husband and myself being able to be "good", supportive traditional-school parents, given how we feel about traditional school (again, please note, this is the Irish system I'm talking about: your mileage almost definitely varies). Children pick up on these things, and it couldn't but cause tension, which wouldn't be fair. If there were a Sudbury-model school in Dublin, we'd have enrolled our foetuses. As it stands, we'll be unschooling them (um ... not the foetuses ... you know what I mean) unless and until they ask for a different model, and we'll be trusting them to know what works best for them.

So (if anyone's still with me), how does unschooling work in practice?

Well, take reading, for instance - which is usually one of the first topics to come up in discussions of unschooling. It is the case that children frequently learn to read without ever being formally taught. The way it usually works is that either they realise at a certain point that the ability to read would be of enormous benefit to them generally, or they encounter a specific obstacle to their pursuit of another passion that would be solved by knowing how to read. Either way, they become passionate about acquiring the skill. (Supporters of unschooling, as I've said, argue that the point at which that passion strikes the child is the time at which learning will be most effective. Anyone who's watched a very young child really working at a new skill must give at least some credence to the effectiveness of this approach.) Children use several strategies to acquire the skill of reading, ranging from asking someone to teach them to picking up clues from context and working out what a handful of words mean, then building it up from there.

Oisín, our [43]-month-old, has learnt, by himself and by asking questions, to read most letters and numbers up to about [10] or so. (We had a long discussion about zero at the dinner table one evening, which quickly got very complicated.) He can read some words - the Google logo on Niall's T-shirts, for instance, his own name, and the names of some characters from Thomas the Tank Engine. I suspect he can read more than I'm aware of, but as I have no investment in his learning to read at this point (except inasmuch as it'll mean I don't have to read the Reverend W. Awdry's turgid and reactionary oeuvre!), I've no desire to test his skills. I don't know how I'd feel if I had one of those children who don't decide to apply themselves to reading until they're nine or ten. That might be trickier.

Unschooled children - certainly the younger ones - don't generally study traditional subjects, on the grounds that the world is not divided into discrete packages. Instead, an eight-year-old's interest in (say) knights and castles might lead to explorations in social history (how Medieval people lived), archaeology/palaeography (how we know about these things), politics (feudalism vs. democracy), architecture/engineering/military strategy (how they built for optimal defensibility), and so on. Meanwhile, her six-year-old brother might be into gardening - exploring botany, crop rotation, common local insects, and flower arranging (not to mention getting gloriously mucky).

As children mature, of course, their interests and desires for knowledge become more and more complex. In later years, organised learning, classes, curricula, etc. become more appropriate - provided the child can access them freely. Children who want to attend university can arrange to take the necessary tests - there are plenty of correspondence courses available, for instance.

It's noteworthy to me that most of the people who hold that children need guided instruction, timetables, etc. deal virtually exclusively with "schooled" children. Many adherents of unschooling believe that it's possible to "kill", or at least seriously derail, a child's natural curiosity and love of learning, through injudicious application of traditional teaching methods (e.g. the implicit demonisation of mistakes and failure - see John Holt on this). If that's true, then it very possibly follows that the children these people encounter do require such traditional approaches if they are to learn anything useful. But I'm not convinced that they are the only way.

I have no conclusion [...] but I hope I've provided some handle on the subject of unschooling and managed to avoid offence or overweening intellectual arrogance. None of either was intended, I assure you.

Me and My Big Ideas, part 1

This is a post about me. A while ago, I participated in a lively discussion elsewhere online about home-education, and someone asked about unschooling. I found I had ... quite a lot to say on the subject, and I've decided to repost some of my thoughts here.

This first post is about why I have reservations about the mainstream school model.

I was traditionally schooled, and according to the traditional paradigm I was a very successful student. For complex reasons, though, I wasn't great at fitting in socially. Unfortunately, I didn't complain about this situation. Instead, it's not exaggerating to say that I more or less "removed" myself from school, emotionally, at the age of around eight, and thereafter participated only to the extent required to wring optimal academic approval from the authorities. Because I was consistently top of the class at most things, and not too bad at faking what passes for "normal" peer interaction in the peculiar atmosphere of the school day, nobody - as far as I know - attempted to address what was, in retrospect, really quite a serious psychological/social problem.

In recent years I've read Ivan Illich (Deschooling Society) and John Holt (How Children Fail and How Children Learn), among others, and I've become enthusiastic about the Unschooling movement (see this Wikipedia article for an overview, or the unschooling.info site for some rather more polemical approaches).

I don't dismiss school out of hand - for many children, in many contexts, it may present the best available opportunity to learn - but certain fundamentals of the currently mainstream model simply don't make pedagogical sense to me. Segregation by age, rigid timetabling, imposed curricula (as opposed to curricula negotiated between learners and teachers), a schedule of academic milestones: all of these things carry clear logistical advantages, given the spoken and unspoken goals of the institution, but I can't see that they are in the best interests of a person's education, per se. I can't make a case for it actually mattering if a person understands quadratic equations before or after memorising the principal rivers of South America, or reads Hamlet before or after discussing the causes of the First World War. And yet, in the context of school, it is made to matter. That strikes me as twisted.

(I like Ivan Illich's phrase "irrational consistency". You take a shaky premise - e.g., "it is vital that every seven-year-old can subtract" - and you behave as though it is true, and you make it a rule, with consequences for breaching it, and you do this over and over again with different premises, and gradually, you drift away from any kind of reality-based moorings. And you don't allow the powerless subjects of this experiment to make any kind of effective complaint about the situation; instead, you make it clear to them, whether explicitly or implicitly, that this is the only way things can be, and that mental pain, fear, intense boredom and OH GOD the GUT-SCRUNCHING waste of TIME are just part of the deal, so get used to it. *pant, pant, froth* Excuse me, am I ranting?)

For many people, these factors are not deal-breakers (and let me say, I have enormous respect for anyone who enters the system with eyes open and a mission to change it for the better). For me and my husband, for all sorts of reasons related to our own negative experiences in school, they are. We won't be sending our children to school as a matter of course, and we are (well, I am) seriously considering trying to set up a school on a radically alternative model - something along the lines of Sudbury Valley (my goodness, that's a spiffier site than the one that blew my mind open in late 2000!) - which, given the homogeneity of the Irish education system, will be no small undertaking.

All that said, I'm a naturally equivocal person, and I'm oddly uneasy about holding such a one-sided opinion. Therefore, if you read the above screed and thought, "How can she say that? She'd never say that if she'd read X!", can you please let me know what X is?

(For completeness of this record, I'll add that a participant in the discussion I'm referring to directed people's attention to the Framework of Educational Standards and Learning Opportunities in the state of Vermont. My initial response: I don't necessarily dispute the value of such standards in principle, but I'm very antsy about the likely institutional response to a child who fails to meet them to the desired schedule. If I learn (for example) to describe words in terms of categories when I am three, not six, I am likely to be bored and switched off in English class; if I don't learn it until I am seven, I am likely to sense from the adults around me that there is a problem - to experience "failure" where no failure actually exists, and possibly to identify myself as "bad at English". I realise it's not as simple as that, and that educators may even have thought about this issue and developed strategies to address it , but both of these negative outcomes seem to me, nonetheless, a clear risk inherent in the system as it stands.)

They teach each other

Emer is learning make-believe much faster than Linnea did, and it's because she watches Linnea doing it. She copies what Linnea does - hard-legged plastic animals prickle their way up my shin and down my thigh and across the vast plain of my abdomen. Emer says her animals stop for mama milk; Linnea tells me to stop talking and be a lake.

Emer went from half a dozen words in daily use to thirty or more in less than a fortnight. She's experimenting with little two-word sentences. She has hauled out all her old words (she used to learn a word, use it for a week or so, then put it away while she learned a new one) and is working on some more.

Linnea likes to read signs, when we're out, and responds incredibly badly to criticism - correction or criticism (sometimes it's hard to work out which I've perpetrated) can result in a total lockdown and refusal to attempt further academic-type work.

Emer doesn't always want to learn what Linnea wants to teach. Linnea is learning to cope with this.

I don't WANT holes in my eyes

[crossposted from elsewhere because I initially forgot this existed]
Today I had to make Linnea a model of the human eyeball and demonstrate pupil dilation in different light levels. I made a ring of my hands and showed how the iris works, and looked at "the dark inside my hands" and the light outside the window so she could see different pupil sizes. She was interested, made her own models, drew some diagrams, and said she didn't WANT a pupil any more because she wanted eyes with no holes in.

Right.

Nursery school

I have a difficult attitude to school, it seems. Recently we visited the local Montessori nursery
and it was so gorgeous that I decided to let Linnea go for her free place, one afternoon a week. We sorted out all the paperwork and after the half-term break, she had her first day.

That was Monday - it's Wednesday now.

First, I was afraid we were going to be late, so I chivvied her along. Then I was afraid we were too early, until I saw some other mothers. Then I was worried I'd done something wrong, like hung her coat on the wrong hook, and then I didn't know how to say goodbye appropriately.

Luckily, none of this fazed her in the least.

Then when it was time to pick her up I had to phone ahead to make sure I had the right time, and when I did pick her up I was anxious about going to fetch her from wherever she was.


She enjoyed herself enormously, I think, and everything is fine. But I need to work on my issues. I called my mother, and she says she felt the same when we were in school.

Not yet, we need a 3 first!

We were adding up - I must get workbooks soon, I am running out of ideas - and suddenly Linnea decided to stop using the little Cuisenaire blocks and skip straight to writing the numbers in, filling the blocks in afterwards.

She finds it frustrating that she can't write her numbers accurately enough.

I think I need to design or obtain worksheets with dot-to-dot numbers and letters, and do something about worksheets for doing sums. As I was drawing little boxes for her to fill in I vaguely remembered having something similar for school but I'm not sure where to get it; none of what I've seen in high street stores hereabouts is appropriate.

Twenty-five minutes of solid sums is as much as she wanted to do today. That seemed like a lot to me - I was getting tired of facilitating her.

Bounded

It's easy to see from the three-year-old's behaviour that she's happy with firm, reliable rules, clear boundaries, and regular mealtimes.

And now the one-year-old is getting in on the act; she visibly tests boundaries, is confused when they're not enforced, and depends on their being there for her physical safety (stairgates, for one).

The kids need reliability, it seems. And freedom. And boundaries. And open spaces.

And sometimes, a mother who will just close her eyes, wait, and quietly go grey while they learn something new, like how to climb the swing-set without dropping the teddy or the carton of juice, or how to get down an 18-inch precipice hands-first.

Make me another number game!

So, real live schooly learning is happening, but we haven't called it that yet. It's playing numbers. Me and my new laminator are making worksheets with number games; I'm going to rope Daddy in for the shapes one. Counting, writing numbers, reading numbers, linking counted items to written numbers, place value...

I can't work out how to do place value without some tools. Rods, bricks, that sort of thing. I must find a source.

Oh - and the name of the number 0 is "Zero-nothing." I find this almost as cute as "The dark is brilliant, isn't it, Mammy?"

Teaching moments

Without my meaning to, O and I seem to have picked up the habit of teacher/learner-style interactions. I'm not entirely certain where the impetus comes from, but my feeling is that it's from him. I'm running with it (though trying to avoid being too teachery - rereading How Children Learn at the moment).

O is really into facts. He loves geographical stuff, placenames, where people live, looking at maps, his globe, and so on. His obsession with farms and animals has given way to an equally intense interest in trains (thanks, Thomas and Friends). He asks questions constantly when we're reading, and just randomly when things occur to him. I think he's realised (a) that there's an awful lot of interesting information out there, and (b) that one of the most efficient means of accessing it is to ask us. "Look it up on the Internet!" he's taken to saying.

So, in the past couple of days, I've looked up beavers (carefully!), planets, "do pigs have chins?" and "what do mice eat?" (he wasn't at all interested in the results of the first two searches, I think because too much time elapsed between his request and the first opportunity to get to a computer). At bedtime tonight I agreed that we'd look up hot air balloons tomorrow, and possibly Mount Rushmore as well. (We were being the stone faces of George Washington (him) and Thomas Jefferson (me) at the time. There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this.)

It's not all one-way information. Yesterday we had a discussion at dinner about the distinction between pasta and noodles, during which we found Italy and east Asia on the globe. Regarding Asia, and how far away it is from Ireland, he remarked, "Aeroplanes can fly anywhere, so you could use an aeroplane to go there."

I think I'm recording this because it seems to be a new phase, and one that's closer to what the mainstream might think of as "learning" than most of what's gone before. I can see the shape of an unschooling life more clearly from here.

It looks good to me.

All the big kids go to school

This morning, Linnea informed Rob that Ernest and Buttercup go to school. No, they don't. But she's sure that all Big Kids do, and they are both bigger'n she is, so...

Thing is, they're our main contact with the Home Education community! Also an excellent source of childcare and isopropanol.

There's a lot out there about school.

Lately, I 'ave mostly been...

Learning, obv.

Mainly, learning stuff I didn't know my kid could do. Like rearranging the jumbled letters of words to get the right spellings. She did "apple" for a friend recently.

And she counts. And plays complicated role-play games with numbers. And draws eyes with pupils, irises, and lashes. She repeats words accurately when asking strangers to explain themselves (today's word was "concentrating" as in "Look! Look at my am concentrating!") and likes to help women dress and undress their (usually sleeping) babies.

The baby kid - minnaun, máis é do thoil é - is learning to signal aye and nay, and said "Hello" to me today. It's a word she hears often enough, I suppose.

Restraint

I'm thoroughly committed to unschooling, but my own upbringing (academic household, interaction with children very focussed on teaching and testing - though I doubt they'd put it in precisely that way) and rampant perfectionism (working on that) occasionally undermine my practice. Over the past few weeks I've been finding it hard to ignore the Oyster's latest phase in pronunciation, whereby he speaks much less clearly than he was doing a couple of months ago. He swallows syllables, drops consonants and homogenises vowels. We still understand him (most of the time), and so I don't consider it defensible to try to persuade him to speak more distinctly.

Defensible or not, however, I've cracked a few times. For instance, "tell a story about..." is currently pronounced (approximately) dalladawbow, and I've once or twice found myself trying to pretend I don't understand, or stalling over starting the story until he says it "properly".

Doesn't work. It doesn't achieve its (ostensible) primary aim, which is to make him realise that he's speaking indistinctly and correct himself; it also doesn't achieve its (ostensible) secondary aim, which is to make me feel better. Instead, he gets frustrated, and I concede that I know what he's saying. Oh well.

(I'm reminded of an incident from my mother's childhood, when at the age of six or so she suddenly developed a lisp. My grandmother - not the world's most laid-back parent - was terribly worried by this, and had my mother Seen At Once by the finest speech specialist in the land. Whereupon it turned out that a girl in her class had a lisp, and she thought it was really cool.)

Anyway. At dinner this evening, we had a genuine misunderstanding. We'd been talking about a book, and the Oyster, at a pause in the conversation, said, "Mama help O. with vweeding."

"Yes, I'll help you with reading when you're going to bed," I said.

A few minutes later, he repeated, "Mama help O. with vweeding."

This time, I wasn't so sure that I knew what he meant. I asked him if he meant "reading", and he said, "No, vweeding."

Then I got it. "Oh, feeding! Sorry, love, I thought you meant reading."

"Feeding," he said - perfectly enunciated. It was the first time I'd heard him do a successful initial "f".

So I fed him a few forkfuls of not very cohesive quiche.

Then at bedtime, we were settling down to read The Snail and the Whale, and the Oyster remarked, "O. says ’nail."

"Yes, that's right," I said. "You find it easier to say ’nail than snail."

"Snail," he said. "Snail." He grinned, clearly very pleased. We congratulated him.

I'll be interested to see how this one unfolds.

Propaganda

We've joined the Irish Home Education Network, and I was sitting on the sofa today reading an article in the newsletter that was making me unexpectedly rageous about the idiocies of mainstream schooling.¹ I came to the end of the article, and N. caught my eye and raised an eyebrow, and I said, "So, school, yeah? It's all bad."

Whereupon the Oyster, who is two and seven months, exclaimed, "School is not all bad!"

Radzer: OK, no, it's not all bad, all the time, but I don't like school.
Oyster: Mama doesn't like school. N. likes school.
Radzer: No, N. doesn't like school either.
Oyster: He does.
Radzer: N., do you like school?
N. (who happens to be the most equivocal person in the history of humankind; expecting him to make a definitive statement - much less a condemnation - is a non-starter): Hmmm. Well, I'd have to say that, on the whole, I find myself unable to enjoy a positive relationship with it in all its aspects.
Radzer: That means he doesn't like school.
Oyster: Tell a story about O. was on the school bus with all the other children, and Eddie was driving it!

So I did.

I wouldn't mind,² only this is a boy who watches next to no TV, and whose pro-school book collection is (as far as I know - there have been a few grandmother imports recently) limited to I Am Too Absolutely Small for School (featuring Charlie and Lola), which makes me gnash somewhat because it's about the older male teaching the younger female that she's All Wrong, so I don't read it much.

And yet somehow, the propaganda has found a way in. Already. Sigh.

¹ It was about a trip by a group of home-educated children to an exhibition called "Planet Aqua", where the staff spiel was clearly designed to disguise the educational material so that the children would learn something in spite of themselves, and about how this view - that you need to trick children if you want them to learn - is endemic and unquestioned in our society. Full of anecdotes about people saying "X is great - they don't even realise it's educational". Nothing startling or new, but it pushed my buttons in a big way.
² Lie.

What did you learn on the Beeb today, dear little child of mine?

"There was food in the kitchen of our rocket, and there was plates, and a table, and a bathroom, and a other room, and a dining room. Oh no! You agotten your space boots! There! Now, Emer's space boots. There! There. That's a only thing for a frog."

Dressed in saggy, soggy nappy, and a sleeveless vest (undershirt for Americans): "You watcha me do my ballet?" Then she held her arms out in fourth position and her legs were - well, sort of like a plie from second position but with the left foot raised, very Indian Dance looking. Then she did roly-poly arms, then a drumming move. "My have two - three moves!" she declared.

We cruelly made her have a new nappy anyway.

In The Night Garden is a new CBeebies TV show, made by Ragdoll, who also made the Teletubbies. It is entirely incomprehensible, impenetrable, and dreamlike, and Linnea adores it so much that I have managed to find time to have her watch it four times in a day. Twice.

It contains the phrase "Isn't that a pip?" which is apparently good, though in my lexicon to give someone the pip is bad.

Growing Girls

We are teaching Linnea femininity. Not quite the submissive, learn-to-be-a-devoted-wife-and-helpmeet kind of femininity, but she's definitely keen on being a girl and on all things girlish.

It's all about hair. She doesn't have a great deal of hair - she has almost none, in fact, three years old at the end of April and never a haircut needed - but what she has she wants girlified. Her cousins have blonde curls in bunches, wispy fringes held out of their eyes with clips, cute and feminine and utterly impossible for Linnea.

I got her some little snappy clips, but they slid out of her fringe. I got her some smaller ones which worked a little better. I figured out how to achieve bunches that last long enough for her to admire them in the mirror - twizzle the hair into a bunch over her ear by swirling my finger in it, then use toothed, bulldog-style clips (with little flowers on) to hold them in place. Cute.

Today she had a birthday party to go to, so I tried one last thing. I got her a narrow little hairband, the horseshoe-shaped kind covered in fabric.

Frankly, it looks dreadful. But she feels so girly!

Home education as distinct from home-schooling

I don't like the phrase "home-schooling" because I don't like the verb school unless it's applied to fish. I don't much like "training" either, applied to children.

I home-educate. That is, I offer my children opportunities for learning, and sure enough they learn. Linnea finds opportunities to learn that I hadn't seen coming; that's what being two is all about! I provide a safe environment, up to a point, and plenty of interactions with people who are not exactly the same as us. We have books, a kitchen, a garden, and pets. We have television and radio and art materials.

When my two-years-ten-months-old daughter, just the other day, walked into the room with a sippy cup of water, with the lid on, I asked my guest "Did you fill that for her?"

No, he hadn't.

Later she walked in with some bread and butter. The butter was not exactly spread, more daubed; we discovered that that was because there were no knives readily available and she used the handle of a teaspoon.

I am so proud I might die.

Elastics

I learned to play elastics at school. We had two games: infants played "England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, inside, outside, off the rails" and older children played "Frenchies," which had no rhyme but a series of jumps up to ten. Both were played on two parallel elastics, usually made by having a child stand legs-apart at each end of a loop.

One: Straddle the nearest elastic. Do not jump off. This is the only number where you don't jump off afterwards.
Two: Jump in place (one) then straddle the other elastic (two).
Three: Both feet in the middle, both feet on an elastic, both feet outside.

Four: One foot on the nearest one, one foot on the other one, both in the middle, both outside.

Five: First jump onto the nearest elastic so that your right foot is underneath and your left foot is standing on the elastic. Then jump forwards to the other elastic, left foot underneath and right foot standing on the elastic. That's one and two. Jump back (three), forwards (four), and back again (five).

Six: Straddle the near elastic. Jump up and cross your legs and land. Turn without raising your feet. Repeat on the other elastic. This one has a mini-rhyme; it's "hot cross buns."

Seven: Stand with your back to the elastics. Put your right leg back, hooking the near elastic with your ankle so that as you step back it slides up to your knee. Put your right foot behind the other elastic, so one is behind your knee and the other is in front of your ankle. That's one. Now jump and swap legs repeatedly for two 'til seven.

Eight: As for three, it's centre, on top, outside - each jump to the centre is counted. NO pausing allowed.

Nine: As five, start by jumping to the near elastic with right foot under, left foot over. Jump to the far elastic while turning 180 degrees, but you'll be glad to know that you don't also have to swap feet. Always jumping in the same direction, do nine of 'em! Pausing is frowned upon.

Ten: Looks very simple. Straddle the near elastic, then jump 180 degrees to straddle it again. Count ten jumps, either always jumping in the same direction or changing direction after 3, 6, and 9.

We used to play these alone, too, using chairlegs to hold the elastics. And there were degres of difficulty; the elastics moved up from ankles to knees to thighs - even waists for some people - and then started again at ankles on a narrower guage.

If anyone over 12 can do them all, please let me know.

Square-Eyes

She's been watching "A Bug's Life" over and over and over - sometimes twice a day. She talks about it, in little snatches. She refuses to let me skip the scary parts. We discuss them as best we can later on, never in the middle of the night when she wakes homesick and ill, but often in the daytime when we're out walking or indoors playing or reading or doing boring household stuff.

It's got some pretty big themes; it's fairly obviously about The Oppressed Majority, which is nice because I've been reading various books about South Africa lately, and my aunt has just come back from Zimbabwe. There's also a little bit about small weak children growing up into big strong adults; she's not sure she wants Emer to get big but she's intermittently keen on the idea that she will herself. And she likes it when the grasshoppers (oppressive minority) get their come-uppance but doesn't like the grasshopper-on-grasshopper violence one leetle bit. She'd prefer honour among thieves.

The biggest thing, of course, is violent death - squishing and being eaten by birds. I'm never sure how I feel about her watching things with or about explicit death.

It's strange that something I feel so guilty about - parking her in front of a screen for hours so that I can cope with the rest of life - is so obviously interesting and stretching for her.

Small narcoleptic

I heard a sad story recently. Some friends of ours - part of my husband's old college gang - have a five-year-old daughter, who went to school last September. At a party, I asked her mother how it was going, and got a long and worried response.

I don't know this child well at all, but I gather she's always been extremely shy. Indeed, her parents decided, for this reason, to wait until she turned five to send her to school. She has a more outgoing younger brother, and in situations like playgroup she's been able to rely on him, to some extent, to get by socially.

Now she's at a standard-model school. Academically, she's fine. But a few months into the term, the teacher came to her parents, worried. Every time the class is asked to do less structured group activities, such as art or PE, she falls asleep. Her parents had noticed that she seemed more than usually tired, all right, and prone to sleeping during the day. But they'd put it down to the big change, and they hadn't realised that it had become so frequent at school.

And what are they to do? It's genuine sleep, not put on. Her mother, telling me about it, used language like "it took us a while to figure out what she was up to" - apparently thinking of it as a trick, more or less. She didn't have a solution.

I said vague things about being sure that it would sort itself out eventually, and how actually, when you think about it, it's a perfectly natural reaction to an overwhelming situation, and how she obviously isn't comfortable with full-on peer-group interaction, and really what you'd need would be a very small class, where she might be better able to get used to it at her own pace, but sure, where would you find something like that, and so forth.

It seems obvious to me that a mainstream, age-segregated, thirty-strong class is the wrong place for this child - and equally obvious that it would take a lot more than strategic sleepiness to make her parents consider any alternative. All I can think is that she's come up with a strikingly intelligent short-term response to her problem. Falling asleep is such a total, personal withdrawal - and such an (essentially) unobjectionable thing for a small child to do. But of course it will do her no good at all in the long term, because of the situation in which she has been placed. She will just have to learn to cope, somehow. I'm sure she will. But I wish she didn't have to.

Secret Skills: Games

One of the things that really makes me believe in child-led education is how much stuff she knows that I haven't taught her and was unaware she knew. The reading is one thing (she's never let me catch her at it again but has occasionally known things I only knew because I read, eg, a sign) and another is playing Jenga.

Yup, my 2-years-9-months-old plays Jenga, removing bricks from low down on the stack and putting them carefully on top in order. She's quite good at it. She also plays Snap, but doesn't believe that the Ace of Hearts and the Ace of Diamonds are a pair. She thought the Ace and Two of Hearts might be, but wasn't happy about it. Perhaps we'll stick to her TV character cards in future.

Jigsaws are, of course, old hat, but we haven't allowed her to try Rob's World's Most Difficult Jigsaw Puzzle (Clownfish) yet. She lost interest in Snakes and Ladders quite quickly, so a really tough jigsaw mightn't be her style. She's keen on Mousetrap. I often find traces of complicated games set up - she makes gardens of her Lego and builds animals and people to live in them, for example, or buildings.

And then there are the voices. She has several, enough for a whole host of characters, and she doesn't do any of them if she knows I'm listening.

Secrets!