NotSheep

I wrote in a previous post about a lack of structure not working for us; I wanted to expand on that a bit.

The first reason we have structure is George. He doesn’t handle loose, routine-free living very well. Mornings are generally the hardest time for him - until the normal daily routine starts, he’s lost. If “lost” meant “wandering about wondering where he was”, that would be okay - but it doesn’t, it means he’s grumpy and having meltdowns over anything that doesn’t go precisely as he wanted it to. I’ve seen George fall apart over the t-shirt he wanted to wear not being on top of the pile in his drawer. It didn’t matter that it was the third one down; he had a vision in his head of himself opening the drawer, picking that t-shirt from the top of the pile, and putting it on.

So for George, knowing what to expect is very important. His day has to have a routine in order for him to function well. So mornings go: get up, clean teeth, get dressed, go down for breakfast, whoever’s on clean-up for the day does it (I’ll explain that in a minute), we settle down to to do a bit of “work”.

The importance of all this to George was really brought home to me a few days ago. I was in the bathroom when I heard George about to lose it. I called him and he came storming in (the lock on my bathroom door is purely for decoration :roll:), stamping his feet and rolling his eyes and looking furious. I can’t remember now what the trigger for this was; it was something minor anyway (and would have been recognised by George as minor, had it been later in the day), but he was screaming and every muscle in his body was tense.

He’d already cleaned his teeth, so I told him I’d deal with whatever the problem was once I was out of the bathroom and that he was to go get dressed and go down for breakfast, then gave him a quick rundown of the day’s plans: after breakfast we’ll do a bit of work, then we’ll be heading into town later for you to go to trampoline…” etc. And as I said “we’ll do a bit of work”, I could actually see him relax. His shoulders moved away from his ears, his facial expression became more calm, his breathing became slower. Even to me, even after years of knowing he needs structure, it was astonishing.

So that’s reason number one. Reason number two is me. I have a slightly obsessive personality (stop laughing at the back). I tend to get involved in a project and want to keep at it until I’m ready to stop. I am really not good at being interrupted. I know the whole five-children-thing doesn’t fit too well with the whole no-good-at-being-interrupted thing, but there you are. Anyway, I think that for autonomous education to work, at least with younger children, there needs to be an adult around who’s willing to respond to things as they come up, minute by minute. And that’s really not something I think I could do without feeling very negatively about it. (And heh, as I wrote that sentence, Jack demanded my attention three times LOL) So rather than either ignoring or resenting my children, I make sure that one of my “projects” each day involves doing stuff with them. Of course I could do that in ways other than “schoolwork”, but “schoolwork” is actually very good for it. We read together, talk about stuff, explore how things work and what we think, etc - all good “quality time”. It doesn’t work like this in a classroom - too many children, too much pressure and too little choice - but it works very well when you do it with a small group, and you’ve time to stop and work out what the different bits of the word “chlorofluorocarbons” mean

Of course while five children is a small group, it’s still quite a few children for one family, and that’s our third reason for having some structure: with five children, it’s easy for one to get left out when it comes to time and attention. In our family, the two most at risk of this are, I think, Freddy and Jack. Freddy is less than two years younger than George, but while George is intense, Freddy is much more laid-back. While George is creative, Freddy is practical and down-to-earth. George demands attention; Freddy just ambles along doing what needs to be done. Having a plan means I don’t get to the end of the day and realise that his needs have been neglected. For Jack it’s a bit different - he’s not really doing anything “academic” yet, and so he’s not really involved in that bit of the daily plan - but he’s also very, very good at doing things that get him into trouble. Some days it seems like every five minutes I’m going “argh!” at something he’s done. It would be very easy to get to the end of a day without ever having said a positive word to Jack, to get to bedtime having given him nothing but negative attention. A bit of scheduling means that there are specific times when I sit down deliberately to have some positive time with him - which is directly beneficial for him, but is also indirectly beneficial for the rest of us, since it seems to (slightly) reduce his need to drive us all batty the rest of the time

Of course much of this applies to life in general, not specifically to home-education. Since my previous post about home-ed, I’ve been exploring exactly what “autonomous education” means (mainly via IM with a friend), and I think I might write another post on that subject, not because we are autonomous (I don’t think we are) or because I’m an expert on autonomous education (I’m not), but because it’s an interesting and complex subject to explore.

I mentioned clean-up duty and said I’d explain. Each day, a particular child is on “clean-up”. What that means is that that person is responsible for certain tasks: emptying the dishwasher (which is run every evening at bedtime), clearing the table after meals, feeding the animals, helping prepare lunch. Barney, George and Freddy have two days a week each, Jack does Sundays, when it’s likely there’ll be an extra adult around to help. It doesn’t involve a lot of work for the child doing it, but it makes a huge difference to me that I don’t have to do it all, and anyway, they live here, so they should be helping keep the place running!