Sisters

There was one person who did not enjoy the Kid's school holiday last month. Her little sister was distraught. 48 hours after we'd waved goodbye to the departing coach, she came to me, lip trembling.

Rock-a-bye baby,

Pussy's  a lady,

Mousie has gone to the mill,

And if you don't cry,

She'll be back by and by,

So hush-a-bye baby, lie still.

This was the nursery rhyme from which she choked out a few words, tears spilling down her face. "Mousie a mill?" She repeated this frequently for the rest of the week. Nothing we said could console her. I am sure she thought her beloved sister would never return.

Of course, she was pleased when The Kid did come back. But from that day on, she has not stopped worrying that it will happen again. She is not happy to see her sister go off to school. "Mousie gone a mill?" she asks, sometimes crying. "Mousie need come home."

During her long tenure as an only child, The Kid guarded her status jealously. At three, she realised it was possible for her parents to have another child, and warned us that such a move would not be acceptable to her. This sentiment was repeated often over the following years. Being the parents, we suited ourselves, and when she was nearly seven she acquired a small sister she called "The Yuck." I couldn't say I hadn't been warned!

I had heard from other home educating parents that their children shared a very close bond. This seemed hard to believe. It struck me as unlikely that children who spent plenty of time together would be especially fond of one another. Surely they would be sick of the sight of one another, and fight relentlessly? Still, that was the common wisdom, and it offered a glimmer of hope.

Unbelievably, it happened. The Kid never did turn into one of those "little mothers" who fetch nappies and beg to look after the baby. But the two girls did develop a deep affection for each other. Perhaps the age gap was big enough that each had her own clear place in the family. Perhaps The Kid's home educated friends, who generally liked and helped their younger siblings, were a good influence on her. Perhaps having access to her mum for many hours of every day meant that though the baby demanded the lion's share of my attention, the leftover scraps of attention still added up to plenty of sustenance for The Kid. After all, she was home to take advantage of the baby's long contented mornings and peaceful midday naps - and not, like schoolchildren, home only to suffer the mad morning rush and the evening "witching hour" with a grizzly baby and a family all tired, hungry and short-tempered.

Now, at the school gates, The Kid often dodges my hugs, like any self-respecting ten-year-old with an audience. But she always rushes to her small sister, scooping her up and swinging her around in wild joy. After the ups and downs of a day at school, The Kid seems to find it a relief to fall into the arms of the one person who has always adored her unconditionally.

Parent teacher meeting

I don't know what I was expecting, but this wasn't it. The teacher continues to be lovely and there were no unpleasant shocks at the meeting, but it was an awful lot like going to the GP! In and out in ten minutes, stay focused, no time to chat, the next parent waiting outside the door.

Like everyone at school, Mrs B sized up Small Fry, enquired about her age (three), and assumed she'd be joining her sister at the school next year. I said no, her sister had got a lot out of home education and I expected she would as well.

Mrs B said The Kid had been quiet at first but had regained her confidence very quickly. She had friends, smiled a lot, was helpful and worked hard.

She showed me a bit of The Kid's handwriting, saying how much it had improved with practice since she started school. "It's still painfully slow," she said, "but she'll get better." Painful for whom, I wondered - for my daughter or for the teacher? She praised The Kid's imagination and expression and I said yes, I'd always encouraged her to get her ideas out in any way she could because I didn't want fears over handwriting or spelling to prevent her expressing herself. I don't think Mrs B and I are quite "on the same page" about that: she seems ambivalent about my daughter typing some of her longer essays on the computer.

We moved rapidly on to maths, where The Kid has said that she's on a similar level to most others in the class. Apparently many of them complain of the tedium of the work, though at home she tells me she gets a certain satisfaction from doing repetitive tasks which require only diligence, and little thought. To my great surprise, arithmetic is her favourite subject. I think it may be no bad thing that my daughter finally is being made to absorb the multiplication tables, but I do wonder whether it will really stick. Can her classmates really be as bad at it as she is - considering she has only recently even tried to learn the times tables, whereas presumably they have been working on them off and on at school for years and still don't know them? I mention a few fun maths ideas which my daughter has enjoyed doing at home, which do not rely on computational skills. Mrs B feels that such topics are best held out as a reward for those who have mastered the boring stuff.

I wonder whether most of these kids will ever get that reward, and whether they will still be in a fit state to appreciate it when they do. If football-mad children were only allowed to do drills, never being allowed to play an actual game until they'd attained advanced skills, would many of them stick with football? Arithmetic is useful, but few people feel a passion for it. Perhaps this is why so many people dislike maths?

When the teacher said that perhaps next year my daughter would be doing more exciting maths at school, the time seemed right to mention that she may not be around then. No one at the school has ever asked why she'd left home education behind in order to start school, and so we've neither of us told them that this is a trial period for her - or for school, I should say. But everyone has been very welcoming to both of us and I have no wish to drop a bombshell on the last day of term.

She took the news well, but advised me to encourage The Kid to stay on. Going to secondary is such a big change for children, she said, they really need to be well prepared. In her opinion, my daughter needed social experience at primary school in order to move up to secondary with confidence. I pointed out that she was a very confident child who was used to being with other children and had settled into primary school with ease, so why would she not do likewise at secondary? And that if primary was so different to secondary then why would five more terms at a small village primary school be a good preparation for a big secondary school? Our time was up, and off I went, only later realising that I had failed to say that I doubted she would spend much (if any) time at secondary school anyway!

Familiarity breeds contempt

And what does the Kid, that most social being, dislike most about school?

The other children. Apparently they are boring. I cannot remember her ever having described a person as boring before. Unpleasant or annoying, maybe. But not boring.

I quizzed her on this. ALL sixty-odd children in the entire school are boring? Had she given them a chance, tried to discover what's interesting about each of them? What about all those playdates in the early weeks - she seemed to like those children well enough then, so how is it that they had metamorphosed into boring people?

They WERE interesting, she said. But now she has spent so much time with them, they have exhausted their usefulness, told her all their interesting facts. In short, they are used up.

I reminded her that of the many friends she has known for years, with whom she has spent great long days. She didn't get bored with them. How is it that she never used to get bored with her friends, and now she does?

She thought about this, and suddenly she had the answer. "I didn't used to see them every day," she said. "I saw them once or twice a week. In between times, they went off and did stuff without me, and next time I saw them they could tell me about it. And they didn't learn exactly the same things as me. Three of us might get together and talk about Henry the Eighth, and each of us knew something DIFFERENT about him. That makes a good conversation."

People fear that home educated children will feel left out when they socialise with schoolchildren, that they will lack common ground. But if my daughter's experience is anything to go by, it seems that too much common ground is a bad thing. Nothing remains to be said. I suppose prisoners who share a cell for ten years get bored and annoyed with each other too.

Perhaps this is why gossip is so rife in workplaces and schools. People are together so much that they have nothing interesting to say to one another any more.

I had a sudden and alarming thought. "What about me and your sister?" I asked. "You've spent a lot of time with us. Are we boring?" There was a long and telling pause.

"Well..." she said. "Well. Not always. You did thirty years of stuff before I was born, and you're still telling me all of that. Someday you might run out. But by then maybe I will have moved out. I can put up with you once in a while even if you get old and boring."

And her sister? We had been talking over the top of Small Fry's head, as she continued to chant as she had been doing for some minutes: "Looka me! I wearing a PINK hat! Looka my pink hat!" The Kid hugged her and told her it was a lovely hat. Small Fry beamed and looked adoringly at her. Then the Kid answered me. "Yeah, she's boring sometimes. But anyone so cute can get away with being boring."

What we've been missing

Last night we went to a great talk featuring the mathematician Marcus du Sautoy. The Kid had a good talk with Marcus afterward, and came home all fired up about advanced mathematical topics, speculating on whether maths will be part of her future career, and showing signs of becoming his groupie.

This is one of the few events I've taken her to lately. We used to go to things like this all the time.

This morning, it was very hard to drag the Kid out of bed for school after her late night. She's in one of the lowest maths sets at school. I've no idea why that is - perhaps because her times tables are a bit shaky after all - but for the time being she's probably best off there, contentedly totting up her columns of numbers.

School trip

The Kid is back from her school trip, utterly happy and exhausted. It was a great opportunity for her, a five day adventure holiday. This is the only overnight trip during their time at primary school, and it happens once every two years, so it was great good luck that it happened to fall during my daughter's time at this school. The £240 which it cost did require quite considerable belt-tightening. I might not have chosen to cough up for it, if it weren't for the fact that every other child in Years Five and Six went and she would have felt very left out if she hadn't gone too.

It wouldn't suit every child to go on such a trip - or every family to have to shell out for it! - so that pressure to go might have been unwelcome if our circumstances had been different.

The trip sounds similar to private PGL-type adventure holidays, so I might send her on one of those someday... if we can ever save up that kind of money again!

The satisfaction of schoolwork

I used to hate schoolwork. Boring, boring, and again boring. To my surprise, the Kid says what she likes best about school is the work. Arithmetic is her favourite. She has been taught to add up columns of numbers. She is very accurate at this and finds it quite satisfying to fill up sheets with numbers and receive tick marks. "Sometimes," she says, "I like to be told what to do and not have to think too hard. It's relaxing. It's like colouring in." Well, knock me over with a feather. Perhaps I had better order her around more often!

I can certainly see great progress in her writing. With mandatory daily practice, in the space of a few weeks the stray uppercase letters have disappeared from the middle of her words, she usually punctuates correctly and her spelling has really come on - not so much through the word lists she is asked to memorise, as through writing certain common words so often in her essays. All the letters are now correctly formed and reasonably neat. Joined-up writing remains a mystery, but it's early days yet.

So, am I a convert to school methods? Far from it! Having seen that it's possible for the Kid to "catch up" so quickly on spelling and handwriting now, I'm more convinced than ever that it would have been senseless to waste her precious previous five years slaving away over it. I doubt she would have been ready or willing at a much younger age.

Moreover, her recent gains have been the result of one simple thing: plenty of practice. Who's to say that school is the only place to get such a heavy dose of practice? If she hadn't gone to school this term, at some point in her life she would have found it desirable to do lots of writing, and then it would have come together for her as it is coming together now. And if she never found it necessary to do lots of writing, then what difference would it make if she had poor handwriting and spelling?

Last year she asked me to buy her a maths workbook, which she whizzed through with relish. I think there will be more of those in our future. Once she comes out of school, I mean. I can't see her having the time to pursue recreational arithmetic while she's at school.

Tradeoffs

Kind people, of whom there are many at this school, keep asking me how my daughter is "settling in." It's a curious turn of phrase, that, suggesting that any dislike she may have of school will be temporary. Indeed, I've heard some people speak of children who take years to "settle in" to school. As adults, would we stick with a new job if it took us years to settle in?

Until yesterday I focused on the positives, expressing my pleasure and gratitude at the efforts everyone has made to be friendly to my daughter. The children include her in their games (in fact they seem to be fighting over who will take possession of her), the teachers explain patiently why one should leave a margin round an essay, the dinner staff show understanding in the face of her on-again, off-again vegetarianism.

But since The Kid seems quite constant in maintaining that she will leave after this term, it seems only fair to drop a few hints that school isn't entirely to her liking. After all the kindness everyone has shown us, it would be rude to drop a bombshell in December with the news that she is leaving, thanks very much, goodbye. So yesterday, when asked by another mum how she's settling in, I said that there were things she liked about school, but that she and I were both astonished at how completely her free time had disappeared since she began school. I gave examples of the hobbies she used to do, and the many new pastimes she wanted to try, all of which had been shelved indefinitely. I spoke of friendships on hold and library books returned unread, of the sewing machine gathering dust and the roller skates shoved to the back of a cupboard. And she said, lightly, "Well, I suppose there are always tradeoffs in life."

This took me aback, and I walked on in silence. I'd had a few good conversations with this mum, who seemed a very sensible person. Was I being overly dramatic? Did it really matter that my daughter had had to give up a few things she liked to do? She did have some fun at school, and she was learning some things. Was I being too precious here? Hmm. A tradeoff.

But no. She wasn't right. Suddenly I felt sure of that. The almost complete loss of a growing child's free time is not just a "tradeoff." It's more like losing a limb. Living in a society of amputees may make it seem inevitable and acceptable, but it just isn't.

I tried to find the words to express the magnitude of the change, and looked up at her. But she was already throwing me a quick goodbye over her shoulder as she turned off toward her house. Like her young daughter, she is a busy person.