T-Bird Anni Rides Again

need to get the ranty bit out of the way first really….

EIGHT HOURS??????  Now, I know that 8 hours includes the person traveling to and fro, and their paperwork once they are back at the office etc but really, 8 hours????  What on earth do you talk to an LA inspector about for that long????

And don’t get me started on it being okay for parents to waste our precious time preparing our year in advance plans and other such crap rather than educating or caring for our families or the fact that they arrogantly assume that these annual inspections will instantly cause our children to get better GCSE results than without their interferance….. No, am stopping right there, it’s all already been said, probably much more elequently and besides, it’s all pie in the sky because if there is any justice in the world, they won’t get it passed into law before this bunch of imcompetents get voted out.

Moving on… I played out at Oulton yesterday whilst Duke and Aprilia had a quiet day at home, aparently she Ed City-ed a bit and did some other stuff (don’t have a shrugging smilie so please imagine one here)  I was very busy and you really don’t want the gory details!  

Today I had a bad sewing day, one downloaded pattern produced a very dodgy result which got lobbed petulantly into the rag bag and the (not very) little black number looked something like okay-ish when I finished it but wasn’t "hanging" quite right but figured a good wash would sort that.  Alas, although it did soften the fabric to a much better drape, half the ***** seams frayed out because I forgot how badly this fabric frays and didn’t do a good enough job on the sewing (bad girl, that will teach me to cut corners won’t it!)  I’m hoping it’s salvagable and that throwing it back tghrough the wash a few more times will beat it into submission without it falling apart!  It’s back to the drawing board for a dress for Aprilia though.  Aprilia, meanwhile, watched Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus on TV and proved to me once again that she can actually read reasonably confidently these days as long as there aren’t too many lines at one time.

I have read with interest your intended plans for those of us who home educate our children.  I would like to make a few comments about those plans.

With respect to the compulsory registration of all home educators, I am sorry, but I fail to see what this would acheive.  Well, no, that’s not entirely true, I do know three things it will achieve - a huge public expense which this country can ill afford at the moment, another database to go astray and a feeling of persecution in those it applies to.  I certainly don’t see why this registration has to be done in some public building, that just seems a waste of time and yet more money in transport costs, you see, most of us are fairly internet savvy, I’m sure we could fill in the appropriate data for ourselves, much as we do for tax returns and electoral registers.

No other section of the community needs to do this.  Vegetarians don’t need to line up at a school canteen to register their children (and in theory there is a small chance that a vegetarian child may not be provided with a diet suitable to their age and activity levels), children who attend places of worship of every kind do not have to line up at a pre-selected church hall be registered (and again, in theory they may come into contact with all sorts of radical and separatist ideas there) children who do any number of potentially concerning activities don’t have to line up at the local scout hut to register just on the off chance that one of them may fall foul of disaster.  So why home educators?  Are we really such a scary bunch?

So we shall move onto the next issue.  That of providing a one year plan of our intended study.  Now, to be fair, I could, possibly, do this.  Unlike many British home educators, I am not autonomous, well, not currently, I do reserve the right to change my mind if autonomy becomes an educational method that suits my child in the future.  I could, therefore, say that over the next 12 months we will be making use of SonLight’s Core 2 with a few side trips into other great British and American literature and supplemented with a balanced array of workbooks covered literacy and numeracy.  I am not going to be any more specific than that, because my crystal ball is in for repair so I’m really not sure what else we will do.  But I reserve the right to abandon SonLight should the books not be up to their usual standard or should my daughter suddenly have a burning desire to do a multitude of lapbook or poster projects instead.  I reserve the right to take 2 years to finish Core 2, or 6 months, depending on how we go.  She will still be kept busy, she will still be learning, just perhaps not in the way I thought we may be previously.

Staying on the subject of how I chose to educate my child, but moving on to your second recomendation.  I fully accept that schools need prescriptive guidance on what to teach.  A teacher has 30 or more children in her care for the vast majority of his or her working day.  Then there is marking, and meetings, and after school activities.  These people do not have the time to find a resource that would light "little Johnny"’s fire and engage him in productive learning whilst Young Tom investigates engineering principles and Tiny Tim curls up with his favourite book.  It can’t work in a normal classroom setting and no one expects it to.  

As to sitting on consultation panels, well, I’m sorry, we  have been shown very clearly over the past year exactly how you value our opinions.  I fail to see why I should waste time I should be investing in my daughter by sitting in meetings that will do no good.

And then we reach Number Seven.  I’m not quite sure how to address this whilst remaining calm and rational.  You see, I am at a loss as to how you think that this can possibly be legal or acceptable.  If I were a criminal, you would require a judge to sign a warrant to allow officers of the law, who had already developed some sort of case against me, or at least have some justifiable suspicions, to enter my home.  I am reasonably sure that the police do not routinely inspect the homes of known miscreants just in case, let alone calling on law abiding citizens just on the off chance that they may have something they aren’t allowed.  And yet, you are going to compel me to allow a stranger into my home for no other reason than I chose to home educate my child.  Not only that, once you have gained access to my home you intend to allow a stranger to speak to my child without myself or her father present.  As far as I am aware, the only justifiable grounds for speaking to a child without the parent present is where there is clear evidence of abuse, and even then a second responsible adult needs to be there.  This is not only offensive in its insinuation that abuse is to be strongly suspected in home educated children but against the rights of the child to having a reasonable expectation of privacy within the home and to chose who they speak to.

Finally, I would like you to clarify please, what exactly you mean by "anything else which may affect their ability to provide a suitable and efficient education.."  as I am very concerned that this will be used as a "cop out clause" for insisting children are placed into schools against their wishes when the family does not fit into some kind of acceptable norm.

no idea waht we have done for most of the week! 

There were worrying messages (blogged elsewhere) and thus a greater diligence about being sure I have petrol in the car and a fully charged phone in case of emergency dashes. I even programmed various destinations into the SatNav (2 hospitals and a home address) to make them easier to find if I needed to get going quickly.  It’s also precipitated a change in plans for the weekend as now I am doing Oulton on Saturday with Duke instead of Lola being there as she doesn’t want to be within range of certain paramedics in case she does something she won’t regret one little bit  so she is having Aprilia, taking her to Kung Fu, and then entertaining her for the day.  Aparently I’m less likely to emasculate people than she is….. I’m not convinced and, judging by the fact that Duke has already said we are going out to the far end of the circuit out of the way, I’m guessing he’s not terribly convinced either!

There has been  quite a bit of time spent in Jungle Jims and a trip to the library.

There was Rainbows which was a bit of a random meeting but seemed to go okay for all that (but I’m glad we have nearly finished Changing The World, it’s not been that exciting to be honest!)  and I got scarily excited to find we have a new "Henrietta" at the hall which actually sucks the dirt up rather than just evenly distributing it like the old hoover did!

There has been a bit of brainwork going on, we have just about finished the last bits of history for SL1, a bit of easy maths (yes, we are still doing the easy stuff to try to speed her up before going back to stuff she is more than capable of but takes for ever over), bit of reading etc.  I am going to do some random project type stuff for a while with her, got a few things I’ve downloaded here and there, we just need a break from World History for a month or so before embarking on SL2.  There has been much reading of Dark is Rising which is a bit of a harder story than Over Sea Under Stone but she’s just about keeping up with it.  I’m thinking we may ahve a Roman Mystery binge before we settle back to SL2 as well, we seem to ahve been reading them on and off for ages!

I’ve plodded on through my OU work, succeeding in very nearly catching up but being horrorfied to realise that I need to send my next TMA in next Thursday, which means having it finished on Wednesday before last post and I’ve not started it yet due to a complete inability to get my head round it…. I know what I need to do, I need to read a whole ***** novel and pick out quotes about a couple of techniques, I just can’t quite manage to work myself up to wading through it all and am seriously considering asking for an extension or just saying I’ll skill this one (which I mustn’t do, any score should be better than no score and if it’s really bad then it will get removed at the end anyway and subbed for whatever my average is for the rest of them) 

Meanwhile, Aprilia has had a barking cough that turned into a sore throat and a sniffy cold which has made her sleeping even worse than it was.  Biovea have assured me that they have posted the melatonin adn that if it’s not arrived in a week or so to get back to them again.  I can’t help but feel that really taht is not good enough, especially as it appears that I’m not the only one waiting on them (and beleive me, if the post mark is anything other than the day they say it was posted I will be expressing my displeasure)

I am fighting off a sniffy cold which, inevitably, is going to hit with full force this weekend when I am busy both days.  Ah well, better this weekend than next when I am at Brownie Pack Hols again… thinks… must buy enough Ding Meals for Duke to feed him for the weekend!

I’ve just tried to post a comment on this latest article about home education, which, fair enough does end on a positive note, but does have some inaccuracies within it but come up with a small problem.  Even after joining LiveJournal in order to be allowed to post, it still wont’ let me!  I’m cross i am!

but really, what posessed me to do an OU degree? 

Sigh, you will bear with me on this won’t you? 

I’ve just not got going with this one, I do usually go all gun ho at the beginning but this one has had me wobbling from day one.  I’ve not got the set texts on tapes, just the course books so the utterly huge volume of reading (full novel every 1-2 weeks plus the course text to go with it, and you are supposed to read each text more than once, first time to get familiar with it, second time to really study it) expected in the first half of the course (the second half is much lighter on teh reading) is down to me, well, okay, you know I’m just not going to do that don’t you?  But all that hunting on LibraVox has taken time and it’s not the exact versions and doesn’t have the right page numbers obviously.  Niggly but being of wobbly nature it creates a sort of inertia, I know that I’m a slow reader so I wait for the tapes only to find I don’t get the stuff I need and rather than just getting on with it I wibble.  tut. 

So, now TMA 1 is due on 5th March and I reach for the books to find what format they want this year (every course seems to like stuff presented differently, drives me nuts but at least if they are nicely prescriptive you know what to send) and find…. nothing.  A bit of vague wooly stuff about waht they don’t want but you have to plow through the "sample TMA" to see what it is they are after.  Hmph.  Nother minor niggle I know but just more to make me bothered about the whole thing because I like a bit of clear guidance. 

And of couse I’m paranoid about getting delayed with the TMAs because this year I don’t have the facility to send TMAs via the web which gives you right down to the last seconds before the deadline to get it to the tutor, I have to post it, meaning I need to post it at least 1 day before the deadline.  Now, most normal people would therefore just get on with it and be sure to be done in time.  Me?  Time pressure makes my brain freeze. 

REally, what on earth posessed me to want to do a degree         Oh yeh, to show people I can and to show Aprilia that if I can she bloody well can too.  Better get on with it then… off to curl up with the MP3 player of Pride and Prejudice then…Normal service will resume soon

You see, dyslexia doesn’t actually exist, it’s just because my child isn’t being taught by synthetic phonics.  Which is odd really as last time I looked Jolly Phonics is in fact a synthetic phonics scheme and we laboured our way through that for 2 years.  In fact, the reading instruction in My Father’s World is synthetic phonics too and we are plodding through that at a slow and steady rate, interspersed with Stile (also phonic) and the LA part of SonLight (which, would you believe, is also phonic)  So, erm, I’m obviously such a c**p teacher that even with several solidly synthetic phonic systems at my fingertips, my child is still not reading at a level she "should" be for her age and IQ.

Some random quotes on this (as stumbled upon arround our most informed and truthful internet…. I didn’t even open the Wikipeadia pages)

 

 

There are two simple reasons for being confident about the false nature of dyslexia. International comparisons and the fact that so called dyslexic children have no more trouble learning to read than other children, if the appropriate teaching methods are used. (Stringer, accessed 2009)

Which is all fine and dandy but you know, even Dyxies usually finally learn to read when they have heard, seen, felt and done enough to internalise the information.  Some of us even get reletively fast at reading.  We are, however, still dyslexic.  And as for international comparisons, genetic conditions can be funny like that.

 

I was going to extensively quote from this website however, the way the site is produced means that when I try to copy and paste it into here it screws with my fonts and formats which just drives me nuts so I shall refer to it on a point by point basis instead and paste in sound bites 

"Myth 1" - There is no way of differentiating dyslexics from other poor readers (Profs.Elliott /Stanovich ‘The Dyslexia Myth’)

Sorry, I can’t find the actual research offered by Elliot and Stanovich but the website linked to doesn’t not say that this is so but merely suggests this as one of 5 current theories.  As the actual definition of dyslexia is a marked difference between the subject’s reading ability compared to what would be expected from their general inteligence it does seem to imply that it is only a portion of poor readers who should be "labelled" as dyslexic.

"Myth 2" erm, actually I couldn’t quite untangle the squigly mass of poorly constructed argument here.  She is trying to refute the neurological basis for dyslexia, as demonstrated in various clinical trials where MRI scans have shown that dyslexics and "normal" people use different areas of the brain when reading.  She doesn’t refer to any clinical evidence to the contrary but says (I think) that good teaching will produce good readers (which, incidentally I don’t dispute, is will, eventually.)

"Myth 3" "Unless the child is profoundly deaf, mute, or grossly mentally disabled the most likely reason why they can’t read is ‘ABT (ain’t being taught!) (Miskin) or dysdidaxia (a problem with the teaching) (Macmillan p134)"   U-huh, thank you for those kind and thoughtful words.  I feel so much better about my failure to teach my child to read.  

Myth 4 is about the statistics of how many etc and seems to be responded to with an open ended quote and actually I really don’t give a hoot about the numbers.

"Myth 5" in which she refutes that the main "disabling" elements of dyslexia - poor short term memory and organisational skills - are actually part of dyslexia at all, because some people who can read also show these signs.  Cough… I can read, I’m still dyslexic.

"Myth 6" on genetics "As there is no operational definition or indisputable way of diagnosing dyslexia it is impossible to find ‘dyslexics’ for a scientifically valid study. This means that the results of all the heritabilty studies and genetic models of dyslexia are invalid."  However, using what most psychs will state as the accepted definition of the condition, studies have been conducted in several different locations on a collectivly large sample of individuals taht all independently located the same gene in dyslexics which does not appear to be present in non-dyslexics. (studies at CArdiff and Oxford university and the National Institute of Health in teh US)

skipping a few myths here (either because I can’t be bothered or because they are Aunt Sallys, deliberately set up to be knocked down)

"Myth, erm, not sure what number but anyway"  "If dyslexics are taught to read using a genuine, synthetic phonic, remedial programme such as the Sound Reading System, their ‘dyslexia’ WILL disappear."  No, the reading part of their problem will be lessened to the point where they are capable of getting by quite happily in the real world.  This is good.  This is not a cure any more than insulin injections "cures" diabetes.

"No scientifically valid tests are available that can differentiate dyslexics from other poor readers;"  depends on how we are defining the condition doesn’t it.

"In countries which have a transparent alphabet code and synthetic phonic teaching methods (e.g. Austria, Germany) it is rare to find people who are very inaccurate readers and spellers i.e. dyslexic in the English-speaking world’s sense of the word"  Well, I’m sure that there are lots of answers to this one.  Thalassemia is pretty rare in the general "white" population, as is sycle cell anaemia, they both exist though don’t they?  Funny thing genetics, you can get little pools of a condition in some populations and not in others.  But even in these countries where it is rare to find inaccurate readers, there are some aren’t there?  Surely those few mean that there is more to it than teachign?

and finally, lumping all the proven and less well studied "cures" or means of assisting dyslexics including coloured lenses, fish oils and Dore "None of these cures or remedies are based on good empirical evidence"  Well, I can’t speak for the Dore method, I don’t have a few thousand £ to try it out.  I can’t say for sure on fish oils but I’m sure if your diet is lacking in whatever is in them then they will help something.  I can speak for colours.  I’ve seen it in my own ability to read.  I’ve seen it in my child whose face suddenly lit up as she was able to suddenly "see" the words properly.  I’ve laughed about it with other "sufferers" when we have compared notes on how the words misbehave for us.  It’s real.  It’s not dyslexia though, it’s Meyers Irlene or Visual Stress or whatever this week’s buzz word is.  It’s an associated condition, and it can stand alone from dyslexia but usually it doesn’t. 

And whilst I’m being catty about the site, it hurts my eyes, all that really close packed text in suddenly different sizes.  But I do like the colour.

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I know I was a little more blunt than is polite on a certain thread but really, I was thoroughly hacked off with the pompous dual standards being displayed and retaliated!  Shame on me I know but I’m only human you know!  But now I’m in a position where I would love to defend my honour by pointing out that actually I never was, nor particularly intend to be, as promiscuous as she seems to think I must have been in order to come to the defence of others who choose that particular path.  Claiming to not have got personal and yet referring to a whole section of the community as "slappers" just doesn’t seem right somehow, nor do I consider it apropriate to lump them in with molesters and predators, or is she so naive that she assumes we are all good little married girls now we are home edding mummies and thus she wasn’t risking offending anyone?  And really, whilst I’m being grumpy, I would much prefer it if she spelt my name right!  I know!  It’s a silly way of spelling it but I don’t care, it’s how I spell it!  How irrational it that then?  Quick someone feed me chocolate!

But you know, one thing is really confusing me…. it’s this bit 

(Anni) Come again?  If I'm hungry but all that's in the fridge is 

mouldy I don’t eat it anyway just because I’m a greedy pig and food is food regardless of if it’s going to make me ill.  So why should a woman necessarily go ahead and have sex with a high risk person just because he’s there?  Not all promiscuity happens in the uneducated unwashed masses!
	
(J) If ever I was going to get religion, now would be the time. Lack of food kills, lack of sex never did. Geez priorities! I have no problem with promiscuity - only with how it affects the world at large. STAY AWAY FROM THE RELIGIOUS MORALS ALREADY!!!!! Holy silvery fish Batman - people really will read only what they want!

Where in taht  did I mention religion?  And I didn't say *starving* I said *hungry* as in it's been more than enough time since I last scoffed adn would like to do it again!  And whilst I'm asking questions, how does pasting a bit of text from ThunderBird make my font shrink to half size??????  Sigh..... where's that chocolate again.....

Am tracking down camping equipment but the bread crumb trail to one particular item seems to have been lost…… I know it has to be in the garage, unless of course, it’s been left outside the garage at some point and stolen, but

it’s not in the section supposed to hold camping equipment (which is currently full of computer type junk that Duke is going to do something with at some point aparently) ,

nor is it where I found the tent (under a lawn mower and a bench saw which have combined to deposit all kinds of **** all over the bags)

or even where Duke found the box of camping kitchen stuff which is supposed to be kept somewhere clean (but a quick trip through teh dishwasher has cured that small problem - the kitchen stuff, not Duke…… not sure he would fit in the dishwasher…..)

which only leaves the scary, head high pile of ***** at the front of the garage for it to be buried under.  Alternately I can go and spend £70 on a new one, which if the weight of ***** on top of it has cracked the lid is still a posibility, cos no way no how am I spending a week under canvass with loos taht are locked at 11pm and no portapotti!!!!