Homeschooling?

I started this article this morning at 6.30 when I was just having breakfast, listening to last.fm, and thought I would share two quick, education related things that happened yesterday.

The first one was a professional studies session on 'homeschooling'. As part of the PGCE, we have professional development for an hour a week and generally somebody from the school comes in to tell us about how to get a teaching job, consider special needs or approach A-Level teaching. So all in all very mainstream stuff. But behold, yesterday, the schedule came up with the interesting idea of 'homeschooling'. As you can imagine if you have followed this blog for a while, I approached the session with a keen interest to hear about the school's provision for children who can not/ do not want to come to school and who are online affiliated to and supported by it. Of course I was wrong. Homeschooling in fact related to the idea of liaising between home and school, so talking to the parents/ guardians whenever their child had done something great/very bad. While this was interesting as well, it was really not the glimmer of hope I was after and I felt clearly mislead by the term homeschooling. Although the homeschooling I had imagined is not illegal in England, it is still fairly uncommon. Currently, there are around 50,000 children who are educated at home.

The Easter holidays are now approaching faster and faster and I have decided to go up to Scotland for a seminar on European Democratic education. My flights are booked and hopefully I will be able to learn a lot which I will also be able to use able to use for my AERO workshop in June. I can't wait to see all of the lovely people at the conference again and wish I could stay more flexible with my plans for next year so that I had the option to just stay in the States. Unfortunately that is not possible due to general life admin (including the need to book flights in advance) and the dream might have to wait for another year.

The second education related thing that got me thinking yesterday was my first parents evening. A friend of mine who is doing the same course described it recently as 'speed-dating'. Everybody wants to hear something truthful but on the other side you really want to try to get along. In Germany, parents evening is only for adults while in the UK, students go together with their parents. I have to say that I approve of the UK version and it's nice to be able to talk to the kids one on one as well. Meeting the parents was fascinating and in a lot of cases explained a lot! A little, stroppy boy from my Year 8 class for example was clearly not even half as bad as his aggressive and defensive mother! I was there with the lady who normally takes the class as unfortunately I had only taught this group of kids three or four times and listening to her talk with extreme care and political correctness was really interesting.

I am not a parent and so can not imagine what it must be like for somebody else to criticise your own child. It was however very nice to see how a lot of parents clearly wanted to help their children. Funnily enough there were two sets of German/ Austrian parents and they were especially interested in how they could support the learning of their kids. Both groups mentioned that the amount of vocab learning is much smaller and that the expectations are much lower than in German speaking schools. This is really fascinating as I have not been in contact with German schools in a while and sometimes forget how much work we actually had to do for our language lessons- and I had English, French and Spanish in my last two years. At my school, the kids are barely given any homework in comparison and although I don't believe in homework being the answer and hope to inspire intrinsic motivation, maybe the parents were right and the standards are quite worryingly low- and nobody realises.

On a quick, film-related note I met this amazing young director last week at Screentest and I just asked him to come along to Cam*Era to talk about his work. It is very inspiring to actually find a really good young film maker amongst hundreds of good, but not remarkable ones! The quality of his film 'Who's afraid of the Water Sprite' is outstanding and I can really recommend to have a look at the trailer of his new film 'Bovine' here.