Happy holidays

Perks of home educating include not scrambling to get up every morning, teaching fractions with cereal and cake and holidaying whenever we want. There are plenty others of course but these are some of our favourites.

Having just come back from a lovely, sunny, warm and out of season trip to Turkey I appreciate just how lucky we are. Lucky that we have been able to achieve this sort of holiday for the very first time. That we were able to be with all of our children. That we have our own business that now lets us make these choices and allows us to work on the beach!!

But coming back and wading through the washing and settling back to normality has my head thinking in a "oooo, but what are we doing, learning, planning" way. Struggling with supporting the teen with exams we don't quite believe in and thinking we must do SOMETHING because we've been doing NOTHING for months.

We must have learnt something on holiday? A trip to a new country. Well there's a new language we've all been trying to get our heads around. And staying with our new Turkish in-laws means we get the full submersion technique! Learning with pointing and hand gestures is fun. But we also learn also about the history of the language and the country. What it means to live in a country straddling east and west. While there the news grew much more serious for the people living along the border with Syria and thoughts turn to the young men that now form a part of our family as well as theirs that have yet to complete the required national service. Of course we have not written these things down. What they have seen and heard will vary with their ages. What they retain will be different too.













I'm hoping their memories will be as happy as mine full of sunshine, history, food and the warmth of people only too happy to share their home, family and time.


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Oh, I don't know.

So I bought the text books, set books, York notes, paper, pens.

The teen requested them. He has a plan.

We've made ourselves available to support and encourage.

We shall attend open evenings, meet with teachers and check out Alevel syllabuses.

But I really don't know about these bloody GCSEs.

It seems that now he HAS to read The Great Gatsby he doesn't really want to. Instead of enjoying where the story might go he's looking at every single passage waiting for the next metaphor to show itself and trying squirrel away minute details in case it's important later. While away on holiday he read every other book he'd taken and a couple of his brothers too. He read approximately 40pages of Gatsby. This is the boy who has happily read Dickens for fun, waded through Hardy for kicks and would spend hours and lots of cash in a secondhand bookstore coming out arms full of old poetry books.

And it's not just the English lit course. The maths is fine, it's a case of working through it, he finds it easy and it gets done. But it's not fun. It already feels like a waste of time. We know it's just for show. He doesn't want to study maths and he knows all he is likely to need to be able to live. The geography too, picked because of all the restrictive courses the GCSEs provide it looked quite interesting. He's now not so sure. He really can see for himself the "learn this bit, remember this bit, regurgitate this bit in exam" nature of them.  But he needs to make up the numbers. Or so he thinks. And we don't know really. Local anecdotal evidence says that some tutors welcome students who are interested, studious, enquiring and enthusiastic. Others look at you blankly as if they'd never ever heard of such a thing as home educating and now they do know are wondering why on earth you'd do such a thing to your child and also why do you think you could possibly think you'd get on their Alevel course without 15 GCSEs.


And so we're playing the game for now. Talking to colleges, going along and hoping to find that one person who will actually talk to him and ask what's he's reading, writing, doing and then listen. Hoping that maybe just four GCSE results,  a portfolio of work and recommendations from music centre teachers might just swing it.

But right now I'd like to say stuff the exams! Take a chance on a kid who just likes to read. Because in the end no one cares how many bloody GCSEs are on your CV.