School ‘Refusal’ – School Can’t

Going to school is a big expectation that society puts on children (and parents!). Most children cope with this expectation, and go along with it. But what if they can’t?

Dr Ross Greene has a philosophy that underpins all of his work – ‘Kids will do well if they can’. He means that all kids (and adults!) want to do well and meet expectations (of parents, bosses, adults, peers), and if they are not meeting those expectations, it is because they can’t, and not because they won’t. If they have the skills required to do well, then they will. If they do not, they behave maladaptively – ‘acting out’, being explosive, refusing to go to school, being aggressive, hiding away, shutting down, self-harming or worse. For some of us, this ‘lens change’ is a big adjustment, but those that see the rest of the world with this philosophy in mind start to see solutions to the problems kids experience.

The ‘school refusal’ story is one we hear over and over in the home education community. It’s an important story, and one that is not told often enough in the wider community. Parents get blamed – by schools, family, friends, and professionals. Each family is individual, but there are common threads in all their stories. We must accept that neither the child nor the parents are to blame. Overwhelming anxiety underpins the inability of children to go to school.

Everyone in this situation arrives at it with a different journey, but, in the words of Jon Kabat-Zinn, wherever you go, there you are.

What can families do if they find themselves in this situation? One option is to withdraw the child from the mainstream school system, and register for home education. There are many ways of managing family needs around home education, including working parents, single parents, and other children going to school. Unfortunately, there is not enough knowledge in the mainstream education system about what home education is, and what it isn’t. This oftentimes means that it is not suggested as a valid option for families to explore.

Home education, especially after a period of deschooling, allows children to rediscover their love of learning, to find what works for them and how they want to direct their own learning. Autonomy is a wonderful, empowering experience. They can pursue their interests, in a calm, relaxed environment, make connections with other families in the home education community, and interact at a level that suits them.

The constant stress of being told they are ‘falling behind’ just exacerbates children’s anxiety. The concept of ‘falling behind’ is a concept unique to the school system. Home-educated children can work at their own pace, on content and ideas that resonate with them, and are relevant to their lives and interests. This removes the pressure and reduces anxiety associated with learning.

Children are hard-wired to learn. Their innate love of learning is often eroded by the constant expectations of a system in which they do not fit. It is a system that measures them against standardised expectations that do not recognise each child’s uniqueness and developmental timeframe. It is a system that insists it knows best when children are developmentally ready for concepts they are not necessarily ready for.

Our ultimate goal is to have life-long learners who are enthusiastic, know themselves, their limits and their strengths, value their own abilities and those of the people around them. Accepting that some children can’t go to school respects their limits, their individual needs, and says to them, ‘I get where you are right now. I can meet you there, and together, we can make anything happen.’

Bandages, sparkles and echo chambers

Note: This essay was written during Melbourne Lockdown 3.0 (in September 2020), when Melbourne famously went from 700+ Covid cases per day to donuts (zeros), and eliminated Covid from the community. It has taken me a while to get enough distance to publish it

I have a bandage on my hand. I burnt myself last night, pulling dinner out of the oven. I don’t usually put that particular pan in the oven. I was wearing a mitt on my left, but I needed to steady the pan, and automatically reached for it with my right. I had previously chucked the other mitt to one side in a fit of pique. Turns out, metal at 200 degrees hurts like fuck.

I have a friend I would usually call. We share recipes, for food and for ‘Mummy’s Mad Mixtures’ (to paraphrase my kids) to heal, and to soothe.

But I can’t.

There is distance between us, because I am not sufficiently angry – at the government, at restrictions, at other people’s mistakes, at the fact that Melbourne is virtually a ghost town.

Like everyone else in Melbourne, I am hurting. I am hurting for all our losses – lives, drives to the beach, barbeques, walks with friends, jobs, businesses – but most of all, I am hurting for the loss of human contact, hugs, and friends.

I never knew I was a Hugger. I mean, I knew I loved a hug from friends on saying hello or goodbye, but until now, I had no idea that I am a Hugger with a capital ‘H’ and a fair amount of underlining. It should be written in lights, with purple lettering and maybe some sparkles. I don’t think that even this would get across the gravity of my situation. I feel that perhaps I should have a sign somewhere on my person, that reads, ‘Here stands a Hugger’, with highlights of some kind.

The loss of hugs has been hard. Familial hugs are great, don’t get me wrong, but a hug from a non-spousal adult is a different thing altogether. I wait, with bated breath, for the time when I will once again be able to enjoy that feeling of being wrapped in a friend’s arms, with warmth, and love, and mutual caring.

There are friends that I don’t know if I will ever get to hug again. I am not being dramatic here, even though it comes across that way, I know. We have been lost to each other, at least for now. They have followed a different path, and some are angry that I will not travel the same road. There is distance, even when we do talk. And talking is now rare.

I try to hold space, not judge, and to listen. But their rage and recriminations at All The Things abrade my already raw feelings. Some are more subtle in their condemnations, in their anger and in disavowing the decisions, and numbers, and the very human mistakes. But they still shred my heart, and so I have switched the noise off – turned the knob to silent, and looked away.

If I was stronger, perhaps I would write that blog from my perspective – all about precautionary principles and the scientific method, about treatment trials and adaptive management. But I’m not that strong, and I don’t think it would change anything, anyway. I have retreated to the few friends who believe as I do – that none of us have all the answers, that life is complex, that we all live in the grey, that everyone is entitled to an opinion, but that people are also entitled to information that is accurate and not on the agenda of some big orange covfefe an ocean away.

We are, all of us, in our echo chambers.

I wonder how long it will take, or if it will happen at all – will they accept my insufficient anger? My anger would not change anything, it would only grow my discontent. I cannot be angry for weeks or months or years. I do not have it in me. Perhaps their anger, like my burn, will fade with time, and this will all be some distant memory. Perhaps, when we are old and our kids are grown and living their adult lives, we will sit together and reminisce about the year we spent fighting shadows and breathing through a mask. Or maybe we will not talk of it at all.

I wait, and I wish that I could call my friend.

Infinite Sky

Tags

Child development, Child-led, Education, Home education, Homeschooling, Learning

Imagine, if you will, that you are a child.

You are intensely curious about the world around you.

As you grow, you explore the world around you, you follow your parents and family around, and learn about how the world works. You observe what happens when you drop things from your high chair, and experiment with different materials – do carrot sticks fall faster than mashed peas? What happens when you flick the peas at the wall? How does sound travel from a parent when they are happy compared to when they are frustrated? And why do they take so many deep breaths? And does that work? Should you try it? So many observations, hypotheses and experiments, every day. The world is full of learning opportunities!

You learn from every activity you do, every day. You are wired to learn, and nothing can stop you. Sometimes, you learn things that adults don’t want you to, but that is also part of growing up.

You start to speak, which is one of the hardest things you will ever do. This usually goes pretty well, and is helped along when people speak to you throughout the day. Luckily, your mum and dad somehow innately already know this, and they chatter to you endlessly, and you chatter back. Sometimes, you will start to speak really early, and surprise everyone, sometimes you will wait a bit, perhaps until you think you have it down and can master the skill. That’s ok, it happens in its own time, or sometimes not at all, and that is ok too. We don’t all need words to communicate.

When you find your words, whatever they look like, you ask a thousand questions a day – “Why are the curtains blue?”, “Who made the curtains?”, “Why do we have curtains?”, “Why is the window seethrough?”, “What is glass?”, “Why did we paint the window sill that colour?”, “What is puce?”, “Who made the paint?”,  “What’s in paint?”, “Can you eat it?”, “Why not?”, “What would happen if you ate it?”, “Have you tried?”, “How do you know?”, “But HOW do you know?”, “What’s an emetic?”…… And on and on, ad libitum, ad nauseum…

Finally, you are old enough to go to school. But your parents have decided not to send you, or maybe they do, but then you all decide that school is just not for you.

You continue to learn as you did before. You are still intensely curious about the world, and you love learning. You keep asking your questions, making your observations and hypotheses, and running your experiments. Your questions change as you grow. They expand to include topics you never even dreamed of, and they become more complicated as they expand. You learn at your own rate, when you are ready, and without the constraints of what someone else arbitrarily thinks you should be doing at any given time. Your learning is not linear, but organic, with pieces of the puzzle filling in as you explore and question.

You can learn however suits you best – by doing, or reading, or listening, or watching, or a combination of any of those. Learning is multisensory, and you can discover what works for you.

You are more curious about some things than others, and that is okay, because we all have our interests. What’s important is that you are learning how to learn, and how to question information, and how to decide if it’s valid, or if you need more information.

Sometimes your ideas about the world are skewed, or don’t fit with reality. You might intensely believe that each minute has 80 seconds, or that all dogs are brown because yours is brown. Over time, you keep observing the world, and you realise that your picture of the world doesn’t fit with your observations – the digital clock only goes to 59 minutes, then ticks back over to zero, so is it broken, or do you need a new idea and understanding of time? You ask your parents, your older siblings, your grandma. You see these other creatures when you go on walks, and they are lots of different colours – black, white, yellow, spotty, patchy – and they might not look exactly like your dog, but your mum calls them dogs, and they are similar in many ways. So maybe not all dogs are brown.

So you make new hypotheses, you have a new paradigm and a new understanding of the world.

You learn incidentally from things you do every day, like cooking, and gardening, and shopping, where you bump up against maths, science, literacy, and so much more, all in context. You also learn from observing your world as you go – you discover braille from the sign on the public toilets, and you think about how other people experience the world. You wonder about how light bulbs work as you experience changing one for the first time, and you decide to spend the afternoon learning about them, then discover a whole world of electric currents, energy conversion, voltages, incandescent materials, vacuums, oxidation, patents, history, inventors, aggregate knowledge, experimentation, explosions, the judicial system, new technologies, geography….. The list is endless, and you end up spending days, or weeks, or months delving into it, and then become so immersed in one part of it that this takes you on another tangent altogether. Or maybe you just read the wiki page on incandescent bulbs and leave it at that.

You learn from conversations. You follow threads from frogs to hydrology to engineering, to trains, to distant lands, to weird deep-sea creatures and back to frogs. You cover more in a morning than you ever imagined. 

You have downtime, to read a book, and you learn to listen to your body – you rest when you are tired, you eat when you are hungry, and wake when you are ready.

Maybe your mum and dad worry about worksheets and sitting down doing book work, because that is what education looked like for them. That’s ok. You can do some of that, it only takes a couple of hours a day, and then you have the rest of the time to explore and build and play with your friends. Over time, your parents will make their own observations, and realise that you already learn all those things when you are cooking, and reading, and woodworking, and poking through the rockpools at the beach. They just have to let you be you, follow your lead, and help you explore your interests.

Your parents don’t have all the answers. No one person does. But you learn how to research, how to dive deep into the subjects that interest you, how to gain deep understanding so you can use it to evaluate what you have learned, to meld it with what you already know, and to come up with ideas of your own. You find mentors, your parents facilitate your learning and learn alongside you. It doesn’t matter what they have done in their lives. They are always able to support your learning, from walking and talking, to calculus and art theory. They don’t have to have the answers. They will just find someone who does.

You find resources through the web, through your community, through your local library. It doesn’t have to be expensive, and people are willing to help. Your community is a vibrant one. There are so many groups all over the place, and you find one that suits your family. You meet up regularly. When you’re younger, you go to the park. As you grow, you do more teenager-y things.

You are part of a community of lifelong learners and friends. You go camping together, you visit the museum together. Your parents, or theirs, organise classes. Maybe these go for weeks, maybe they are once-off. You explore the world with friends of all ages, and from all walks of life.

Your family does it differently from other families, but you have a common thread – you learn in the world, and in your community. You might only have a mum, or only a dad, you might live with your grandparents. Your parents may work, from home or elsewhere. They may share the time spent on your education, or maybe you’re mainly with one person. Maybe you spend a day every week at a friend’s house while your parents work. However it looks, you will learn.

You learn skills – physical skills, real life skills, like cooking and cleaning, gardening and fixing your own bike. You observe your parents navigating the real world when you all go to the post office, the bank, the shops.

But you also learn thinking skills, like critical thinking and questioning everything. You decide you want to go to university, so you follow paths trodden by mature age students everywhere. Maybe you decide to go to TAFE, which a lot of your home educated friends do, too. Maybe you decide to do your VCE, or not. It makes no difference in the end. You just need to want it enough, and you will find the path through. Countless others have before you, and you will too. They are plumbers, and artists, and doctors, and teachers, and lawyers, and vets, and circus performers, and farriers…. 

And as you grow and learn, you come to understand that education is not about the accumulation of knowledge, because you cannot accumulate all the knowledge and we have google. You realise education and learning is about curiosity, and asking questions, and exploring, and imagination, and creativity, and thinking, and thinking about thinking, and about all the millions of possibilities that we haven’t even imagined yet.

You realise that education has nothing to do with walls. It’s about infinite sky.

Welcome to home ed.

The Greatest Gift

Tags

Advocacy, Autism, Choice, Conformity, Personal growth, School, Self-belief, Strengths-based model

 

We came to home education like many others, carrying scars from a school system that was eroding my child’s self-esteem, and our sanity. School, though short-lived, had been a time fraught with stress, anxiety, and the regression of everyone’s skills, not least of which were mine.

As an autistic adult, I had come to learn so many things that many neurotypical people take for granted – effective communication skills, the art of diplomacy, negotiating group situations and the art of Zen. These were gradually eroded as my child went crashing through the cracks of the school system, despite our very best efforts. This is not the story I’m going to tell you, however, because it isn’t mine to tell. I will say that school did not suit my eldest child, and leave it at that.

Everyone’s education story begins at conception, and some will say even before that. Ours was a joyful journey until we hit the school system, which I now view as a bump in the road that set us back significantly. It is now joyful once more, but it was a hard road coming back. I felt guilty for the longest time for inflicting school on my child, but just as he loves driving on the jarring, corrugated bit of dirt road near our house because it makes his voice go funny, I now see the positives in our jarring, corrugated school journey.

I don’t know that I would be the home educator I am today without it. Would I change it if I could? Yes, for my child’s sake, every time. But not for mine. While so many of my skills regressed as my anxiety and stress levels peaked, my advocacy skills were honed. I became some weird sort of yoga machine that relied on my forty-five minutes every morning at sunrise to get through the day, and I became fit and strong. My meditation expanded to include minutes in my days that were previously given to other things, and I learned the true value of sitting and being. These things were necessary for survival.

And I got to see first hand what happens when a child butts up against a rigid, inflexible system. I never want to be that for my child; for either of my children.

I run a group for almost 550 parents of autistic children. I hear so many stories, constantly, about children who are dragged into classrooms crying and resisting, parents who have to negotiate with children to go school, children who are learning to hate education and I wonder, why? Why are we doing this to children? How have we managed to convince parents that the only way their children will “get ahead” is to go to school? Parents have had their voice, their self-confidence and their belief in their intuition eroded by a society and a system telling us that we don’t know what is best for our kids, that the raising and educating of our children is best left to “experts”. We are often sent off with a pat on the head at best, or at worst gagged, scorned, lied to and ignored in the school system. Professionals tell parents that if they home educate, their child will meet a “bad end”, that they will end up antisocial, unemployable, and locked in their rooms all day. The reality is that 60% of autistic children do not finish high school.

I started running home education information nights last year for this very reason – to dispel the myths that are constantly perpetuated about home education, especially as they pertain to autistic children and adults. I believe so strongly in advocating for autistic children in school, and I do not know if I would have such strength in that conviction if we had not been there ourselves.

The reality of home education is that it has, over time, repaired the rifts that were beginning to show in our family. The fabric of our lives was starting to fray around the edges, and as I stood there, seemingly helpless, looking at it, I could see how the whole thing would unravel before me unless we made a change.

Home education has provided us with time and space to be ourselves, to be together, to be united in common ventures, to be in nature, to be excited and quiet and productive and lazy, and to just…. be.

It has given us the space to be autistic, without judgement, without need for conformity, without ridiculous, arbitrary goals that someone else has set and deems important. It has given all of us the opportunity to take our strengths and run with them. It has given us all deep, abiding friendship, community, caring, self-worth and appreciation for who we are and what we bring to the world.

Living and learning together is the greatest gift a parent can give a child, but it is not as great as the gift that the child gives the parent. As parents, we get to watch them discover, enquire, expand their confidence, grow their self-esteem and that innate sense that they are worthy, that their opinion counts. They give us purpose, a sense of self that is not just tied to ‘self’ but to ‘other’. It is a connection with other humans that is precious and rare. They give us personal growth and self-awareness. They show us ourselves, perfectly flawed human beings that we are. They give us the very best years of our lives, and what could be a greater gift than that?

Minister’s Gambit

So, after a less than edifying meeting with the Education Minister yesterday, I wrote him a letter….

Dear Education Minister,

Until yesterday, I viewed you with an element of compassion. It is in my nature. I felt for you, because I thought that as a man with a lot on his plate, you had to listen to advice from people with less than our whole interests at heart. I thought you had just chosen poorly, and that surely, if you were meeting with us, we could exchange some ideas, knowledge, and expertise.

Because you know, we have expertise and skills in spades. We are experts in our children, we are experts in child development, we have wicked serious skills in negotiation, articulation, organisation, seeing the wood as well as the trees, we have patience and we have compassion. A lot of it. We are experts in home education.

When you invite us into your office, cut our time short and do most of the talking, you insult us. I was disappointed, and deflated. But in the crusty dark before dawn, after an admittedly restless sleep filled with dreams of what could have been, I feel…determined.

Once again, I see time stretching before me, when my children get less of me than they deserve, than is their right, in my mind at least. And so, we try not to wear ourselves to nubbins as we adjust to your latest move on this giant chessboard of politics.

It’s tedious. It’s unnecessary, because yesterday I had an open heart and no agenda other than to connect with another human being.

I am social. I love interacting with other humans. We’re social creatures, and problems are best solved collectively. When one party steamrollers another, however, they surely cannot be surprised that when the other finally peels itself off the bumpy, grotty tarmac, they are scuffed, possibly a little broken, flat, disappointed in the preceding events and a little determined. We refuse to disintegrate like a little dust beneath the heel of the Government’s boot.

I know we are inconvenient. I know we are headache-inducing. I can imagine that we are a Problem that just needs to Go Away.

But we cannot just quietly go into the night. We cannot just abandon children, even if most of them are unknown to us, and not technically ours.

Here’s something we all need to remember. Children are ours, all of them. They are ours to care for and nurture and protect as a collective, even if we don’t know them. Because they’re our future, and we’re theirs.

And so today, amid the chaos of thirty-odd children playing together in the chilly autumn air, we will make plans. We will find a way to be heard. Because that is all we want. And because it’s what we all deserve.

Quantifying intelligence

I was recently asked if I was as clever as my son when I was his age. I stood there, stirring spoon in hand raised in mid-stir, and stared, lost for words. How does one begin to answer this question?

I finally answered that I don’t think my general knowledge was as broad as my kids’ at the same age. This is a paltry answer, but “yes” or “no” would have been no answer at all.

Our obsession with intelligence, its measurement and the subsequent conclusions we draw about human beings baffles me.

Intelligence is not fixed – how can it be? Our brains are not steel boxes that are rigid and unchanging over time, excepting for the occasional dent. They are living organs, they grow, they change, they develop and are in a constant state of flux. Even if you have what Carol Dweck calls a fixed mindset, and you believe that intelligence is innate, that we are born clever or otherwise, you must surely acknowledge that our mental agility and ability, our cognitive functions and our ability to perform on an intelligence test will vary with how much sleep we have had, with our stress levels, and with many other factors, not least of which is our willingness to participate in an intelligence test in the first place. An IQ score doesn’t allow for how bored we were doing it, or how distracted, or whether the tester gave us time to process and formulate our answers.

And yet, intelligence is not a fixed thing. It is not a number that remains the same throughout our lives, our childhood or adulthood, throughout a year, a month, a week, or even a day. We improve our “intelligence” through practice and through hard work. We all have innate skills and talents that we find easier than other things, but we must still hone them through practice or they remain mediocre, and languish unfulfilled. I find writing a pleasure and (when my muse has not fled for the hills) pieces can develop almost effortlessly at times, but I have practised (a lot) and continue to do so. If I don’t use these skills for a while, I become rusty, I must wipe the dust off my keyboard and write a string of clunky pieces before the words once again begin to flow. And even then, some days everything I write is uninspired, but at 11 pm when I am about to go to bed, phrases start pouring into my head and sleep is postponed as I furiously write it all down. I have a beautiful friend who is a dancer and who works in a very similar way.

An IQ test measures how efficient we are at that point in time, that morning or afternoon, at doing… IQ tests. It does not measure our artistic abilities, our ability to put words on a page in a pleasing arrangement, our athleticism, our observation skills, our flexibility, our communication skills, our ability to take others’ perspectives, our patience, our sense of humour, our passion for transportation systems, our listening skills or our emotional intelligence. It certainly does not measure our compassion or our ability to love and to empathise, which are surely the most important traits a human being can possess.

We make judgements about people based on a number, and we ask them to take that number forward into their lives, which can be profoundly affected by a measure that is fluid at best, and deeply flawed at worst. We decide who can go to school where, based on a number. We decide whether people are “gifted”, a term I am deeply opposed to – we are all gifted in some way, and we need to find ways to take our gifts and run with them. For this, as children, we rely on the adults in our lives to see our gifts, to nurture them and to tell us it okay to be different and to be gifted in our own unique way. We should not have our gifts dismissed just because they do not help us score well on an “intelligence” test that provides a very narrow definition of intelligence.

Many of us let our IQ define us, our children, our friends. People are labelled as “gifted”, “twice exceptional” or “intellectually disabled” and the temptation is to stop looking past that label to the unique, amazing person beneath. We are all exceptional. We affect our own and other’s view of ourselves, of our children. We often limit our options because we let a number define us. Worse still, we limit our children’s options because we let others define them by a number. You can only be called “clever”, “intellectually disabled” or something else so many times before it will affect your self image and how you view yourself. None of these labels are helpful. They put limits on us, and foist roles on us that exclude other avenues that could, and should, be explored. They tell us that intelligence is a fixed character trait, when nothing could be further from the truth.

And they tell us that what is prized the most is our ability to score well on a test that cannot capture the essence of what it is to be human.

This crazy little thing

There’s this crazy little thing called Government that we all need to survive…. It has only recently occurred to me that our country is only a democracy for one day every three years (okay, two if you include State elections). The rest of the 1,094 days (give or take a few), we are effectively a dictatorship. Yes, I’m apparently slow on the uptake.

My disenchantment with politics and the political process is by no means new, but my disillusionment has grown to epic proportions.

The Victorian State Government recently released the draft Education and Training Reform Regulations (2017), a horrifically biased and scary document, especially as it applies to home education and children with special needs in school. I will not go into detail, as there are already adequate summaries available on what the proposed changes entail and what they will mean for home educating families.

I have recently discovered the ineffectiveness of our system. I call it a dictatorship because having your voice heard on an issue, let alone effecting any change, is monumentally difficult. I should know. A group of us have been working hard at it.

When I recently called the Department of Education and Training (DET) to find out when the new regulations would be tabled, I was informed that the plan was to table them a handful (and I mean less than four) days before the current regulations sunset. I questioned that – what if the regulations are disallowed by the Scrutiny of Acts and Regulations Committee? Or by the Legislative Council? And how can scrutiny happen after the current regulations have sunset?

Apparently, all is well. The current regulations will sunset. The new regulations, which we have been vehemently opposing, will come into effect. According to DET there is no way that they will be disallowed. (I’m getting a tick in my eye just writing this). This is because, and I quote DET here, “The regulations will have already been through so many checks and balances” by the time they are tabled.

I was stupefied. Really? I was unaware of these gatekeepers of people’s freedoms and rights, especially in relation to being heard by the Government Machine and its rusty cogs.

So, I pressed. What checks and balances? Could they enumerate them for me so I could contact these esteemed and worthy institutions which would safeguard our right to fair, consultative and supportive regulations? Well, here they are:

1. The consultation process that occurs with stakeholders before the draft regulations are written. Oh, whoops, they forgot to do that. Despite being reminded by the Home Education Network. Despite receiving submissions from home educators. Must have slipped their minds that home educators are stakeholders in…. home education, and that therefore their opinions, knowledge, expertise and concerns must be taken into account. Never mind. Onward and upward….
2. The Office for the Commissioner for Better Regulation. I must admit, I have never been so grateful not to have a mouthful of tea. Ever. I would have sprayed it all over my lovely Lenovo. Um, yeah, Anna Cronin. The esteemed, trustworthy, honourable and effective Commissioner for Better Regulation. Who in her letter certifying the draft Education Regulations misquoted, misinterpreted and misled. Quite appallingly, in fact. I think she must have read a different set of documents and mistakenly rubber stamped those instead.
3. The submission process. Well, as a community we made over 400 submissions. I would be surprised if they change much other than the decoys they have inserted. That will be their “compromise”. I await their responses to my eight submissions with bated breath. The very Department whose questionable standards have lead many to home educate are writing the rules on home education. Yep. I told you, I am disillusioned and jaded.
4. The Governor’s Council. I was excited about this until I realised that this “check” is performed by the Premier and his Ministers. Need I say more?
5. The Scrutiny of Acts and Regulations Committee. I really, really hope this is not true. DET told me that SARC just rubber stamp everything. I want to believe that a committee composed of a majority of MPs from the Government will be fair. I want to believe. I want to. Very much. I know there are good eggs on the SARC. But are any of them from the Labour Government?? Will they, for the first time in the 18 months since the current Government came into power, stick their necks out and go against their party?

So, here I sit, jaded, disillusioned, tired, but very, very hopeful. Let’s hope the rusty old wheels can squeak into action, and stop the Government giving complete power to an Authority that is hostile to home education. Let’s hope that power is not deferred to a process that is beyond parliamentary scrutiny. Let’s hope that this crazy little thing called Government will work in the favour of justice, fairness, and human rights.

I’ve been…. absent. OK, maybe slack :P

It has been a while (ahem) since I last wrote a blog post. In the intervening time I have been inundated with Uni, homeschooling, life challenges and most recently with opposing some ridiculous draft Education regulations.

So here I am, starting up again. I barely got started last time when life smacked me upside the head with a pacemaker and some other fun activities to keep me occupied.

I’m back, and I’m adding a new focus (while keeping the old one). You’ll likely be seeing some posts about home education (AKA homeschooling) as well as autism. Bear with me. This is my life and one of my loves.

And so here it is… My restart post. Ta-DA. Not much to look at, I grant you, and brief. But oh, so worthwhile the discovery 🙂

Oh look at me… I’m being autistic

Tags

Advocacy, Autism, School, Support

Today was my first day back at uni in my Masters level teaching course. I was sitting in a maths lecture, and we were using materials to explore teaching fractions concepts. The mature age student sitting behind me was sorting her bits of paper by size and putting them in rows. She turned to her partner and said, “Oh look at me… I’m being autistic!” and then laughed herself silly.

I am no longer offended by such remarks, but I have to wonder what the experience of autistic students will be in her class? I want to tell her that being autistic is so much more than lining things up.

I have written an essay titled A Room with an Autistic View for friends to share with their kids’ teachers to help them understand what it is like to be a student in class. I will be sharing it with my fellow preservice teachers in the next couple of days. Wish me luck…

Letter to the mum of a newly diagnosed boy

Tags

Autism, Diagnosis, Self-belief, Self-care, Strengths-based model, Support

A close friend of mine is facing the arduous road to an autism diagnosis. I say arduous not because of the outcome, but because of the emotional hits you take on this journey. I want to help her remember along the way that her boy is much more than the sum of his challenges. The road to diagnosis is so very hard to overcome. The problem is that we are forced to spend so long focusing on our children’s deficits, and we are left feeling bereft, inadequate and overwhelmed.

Years after receiving our diagnoses and having to walk this path, I am a firm believer that we need to focus on our children’s strengths, and work with a strengths-based model rather than the deficits model that is more widely employed.

I also believe that we need to better support parents in their journey along this path, and to help them remember all the beautiful things about their children.

A couple of years ago I wrote a letter to the mum of a newly diagnosed boy who I met through a mutual friend. She was struggling with it all, and I recalled that feeling well. I’d like to share it with you (name changed to protect identities etc).

Dear Abby,

We’ve only met once or twice, and we don’t know each other very well, but we know a lot about each other that counts.

When my boy was first diagnosed, I remember feeling completely overwhelmed. I wondered how could I be responsible for giving him what he needs. I didn’t even understand what he needed, much less how to give it to him. Information was sparse from health professionals, and I sat there reading and reading late into each night, and not feeling any better prepared to deal with the road ahead.

I doubted myself, our ability to cope with this and felt scared and swamped by the demands on me. I was physically and emotionally exhausted by the time we reached diagnosis – I had a new baby, I was my son’s kinder aide, I was alone with the kids 12 to 14 hours a day, every day, and both our families were completely and utterly unsupportive.

If I could give my then-self one piece of advice, it is what I give you, now: you are enough as you are. You don’t need to be anyone else. You are everything your child needs. All the skills you will need to give him the life he deserves you will learn slowly, piece by piece.

It is a marathon, not a sprint.

Above all, your boy is still your boy. If you take this piece of him away, he will be someone else entirely, and that would be a tragedy.

Love, hugs, and support.