Homeschooling: Reality Check

This is not a blog about the weekly fun we have home schooling. This is a blog about the reality.

I saw some people on twitter today claiming that what parents are doing is NOT home-schooling. We are not writing the curriculum. We are not writing the lessons. We are not researching the resources. We are simply delivering what the teachers have devised, and that is different. Less.

So, here is our case study in lockdown education. Before I begin: I cannot fault either school for their care about our emotional wellbeing during this, and I really appreciate the absolute horror of trying to deliver half a term of work remotely. This is not criticism, just observation.

Our kids are in two schools. Jim is eleven. He's in a specialist autism school, in a small transition class of mixed age and ability. The school give every child an individual curriculum, based on their needs and interests as far as possible. Jack and Alex are both in a mainstream primary school. Jack is in year four, and Alex is in foundation.

Jim's school provide a weekly curriculum on Monday afternoons. This is a seven page document, including learning outcomes, ideas for activities, and is holistic: it includes objectives on communication, social development and autism-specific psychology. We are also sent resources. His teacher does a face to face tutorial once or twice a week, and phones me weekly as well. She is in constant email/messaging contact. The school have provided Jim with a 365 login and Teams, so we have the software necessary to do the work.

Jack's school send out a loose timetable every two weeks. It includes set spellings, and then a choice of activities to do across the week in topic, english and maths. He gets nine choices in each, and has to do eight of them: I let him choose which one to bin off. There are no additional resources provided.

For Alex, we get one sheet which includes links to the songs they use in school to teach phonics, and a few recommended activities. Alex will do ABSOLUTELY NONE OF THEM. He LOATHES the sheet. He REJECTS it.

Jim's timetable is the most completely presented, although it still requires a fair amount of me doing lesson planning. He asked if he could learn about Japanese art recently: he's really into cherry blossom. So I told his teacher, and I started looking up Japanese art resources (as did she). I bought paint and brushes for him to do his own. He's also doing castles, and I ended up writing my own powerpoint to teach his whole cohort about the history of castles, because I couldn't find anything that went into the right amount of depth for his age.
What I find difficult about Jim's work is deciding what lessons to do when: what's going to overwhelm him? What's he going to struggle to settle down with? Last week he was asked to make a plan of his bedroom, and then his local area: autistic kids can really struggle with spatial navigation (the idea of where your body is in space and time). This simple task really upset him because he didn't understand why he couldn't write down what he knew.
Every session begins with Jim listening to an audiobook and then doing comprehension questions, but this is the only work he can do entirely independently. Everything else requires my presence and guidance: this is why he's in a special school.

Jack's timetable is, to a certain extent, determined by him. He chooses one activity from each section on a Monday and Friday, and two for every other day. I try to make sure he doesn't front load the week with stuff that's easy because then he's gets steadily grumpier throughout the week. He is fairly independent, but so easily distracted that I have to monitor him throughout. He gets really upset if he gets things wrong, and will give up at the first hint of difficulty.
The difficulty with him lies in getting him resources. Sometimes the suggested links from the school don't work, sometimes they're in a format he can't engage with. Sometimes he just doesn't understand what he's being asked, and needs extra. Sometimes his timetable asks him to do ludicrous things: "Think about your class reading book. What do you think happens next?" He hasn't heard his class reading book since mid-March: how on Earth is he supposed to remember the plot?
I find teaching Jack the easiest in terms of planning, but the hardest in terms of motivation and interest. If you're not interested in rivers and pollution, and half the activities are on that, it doesn't give you anywhere to go.

Alex is simply against learning at home. Tom is supposed to teach him, but he's working from home doing remote support (ironically, for schools), and that takes precedence. So AFTER I've finished teaching his brothers, I try and teach him a bit of writing. He has really poor pen control and in school, had daily speech and language and occupational therapy. I don't know what they were doing, so I can't replicate this, and just have to wing it. I tell you now, when you have an autistic child and have just had a year of non-stop intensive diagnostic assessments, courses, and meetings to plan his ongoing support, to suddenly have to wing it is really disconcerting and frightening. WHAT IF WE MESS HIM UP FOR LIFE?

As well as all the above, home schooling is RESOURCE HEAVY. Jim's school provided him with one, A4 unlined exercise book when they closed. Jack was provided with one, A5 lined exercise book. Alex was given nothing. I asked Jim's school to provide a lined book as well, which they did. But that's all we got in terms of physical resources. Here are some the main resources I have to use every day:
Pencils and coloured pencils
Exercise books
Paper (coloured and plain)
Printed worksheets (printer, ink, paper)
Felt tip pens, liner pens
Modelling materials and PVA glue
Wipe clean whiteboard and pens (for Alex to practice writing)
Audible (for Jim's comprehension work)
Microsoft 365 (provided free for Jim, not for Jack: thankfully we have a work account)
Two separate computer systems with 365 and video call capability
Poster paint and brushes
My phone (for making youtube videos)
The internet

Then there's the endless sea of online resource: Twinkl, Bitesize, Youtube, WhiteRose Maths, The Maths Factor, Time Tables Rock Stars, Mathletics.

We are extremely lucky because our income has not changed since lockdown started, but you need MONEY to run a school at home, and you need TECHNOLOGY and to be IT literate. I can't work while 'school' is in session because Jim uses my laptop and Jack uses the desktop. So after a full morning teaching the kids, I have a full afternoon of work. A lot of their suggested activities are 'optimised for tablet'. We do not have a tablet, and I'm not about to go and buy one, but I also keep wondering if I should.

Is this homeschooling in the sense that I am developing the curriculum? Well, not exactly, but I would argue that I am the one who decides how the curriculum is delivered. I am the one being three teachers in one person, teaching three separate curriculums, for three hours, every single day. I am responsible for getting them to work, for trying to keep them vaguely up to speed. I decide what they do every day, and when they've done enough. I do the marking, I decide what needs more work and what's good enough.

And then I turn back into Mummy, who looks after them, feeds them, reassures them, breaks up their fights, cleans up their mess, and reads them to sleep.

I'm an intelligent, academic woman, who (unofficially) tutors university students, and lectures other adults on history, and I do not feel remotely qualified to do this. It is stressful: a Sisyphean task that feels endless and unrewarding. The most reward I can expect is that my children will not be too far behind when school resumes.

There are HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of parents doing the same thing worldwide, in differing circumstances, hoping against hope that they are doing enough. Nobody claps for us, because we are doing what we absolutely have to do, from the comparitive safety of our homes. We have a choice: teach or do not teach, it's up to you. We do not yet trouble the national discourse, although I wonder what the news will be on education in a year's time.

It is the hardest thing I have ever done.

Soph's School of the Mad: Week Four

First things first, Jack turned nine! You remember the cake we were making?

Look at it! A glorious specimen. Except...I put the cake carrier on the floor, in a secluded corner overnight to keep it out of the way of the boys. I forgot that our kitchen is plagued with ants.

And ants got into the cake carrier.
And THAT was bad.

And then it transpired that I had left the baking parchment on the base of the top cake. Mmm. Baking paper.

So, it was a catastrophe, but the bottom layer tasted nice!

Anyway. School continues. Monday was shit. Isn't it always? Five weeks of lockdown, and Mondays STILL feel wrong.We decided to bin off Andy's Wild Workouts and try Cosmic Yoga. A lovely, earnest, BENDY woman called Hayley did Pokemon yoga. Alex got right into it, when he wasn't just lying on the floor:

Jim had run out of school-set work, so we made a temperature graph:

I asked him, "what do you think would happen if you did this graph all year?"
"The temperature would just keep going up" he replied
Looking forward to our apocalyptic winter...

Jack was given a colourful floating drone thing for his birthday. It arrived on Monday afternoon. "Place your hand under the drone and watch it hover" said the instructions. It did not hover. It flew away. It is free now.

On Tuesday, Jack made a video explaining partitioning in maths. He is truly a genius. He also did a Warhol portrait:

Jim had a bad day on Tuesday. For about three years, he's had a phobia of bubbles. This has become so extreme, that we do not even SAY THE WORD in this house, but instead say 'the B word'. He was doing Cosmic Yoga with the cheery maiden, and she said bubble. Jim lost his shit and never really recovered. But Wednesday was much better. He designed a castle powerpoint about a trip to Castle Rising, and just about coped with having a video lesson over Teams. I mentioned his castle topic. He was asked to build a model in 'any medium'. How about...in Stronghold?

Yaaaas, much better than pizza boxes and bogroll tubes!

Jim's school holds a regular community cafe. Children and their parents are invited, and the older children serve the food and take the money. It helps teach the kids to socialise, and the 'script' for going to a cafe, and lets their parents meet each other and see their kids in school - when your child goes to school by taxi, there's very limited interaction with the school itself. Anyway, these cafes cannot happen in lockdown, so we did one over video chat instead with Jim's teacher and another member of staff. The kids were in raptures at the idea of having tea and cake in the middle of the morning, and broadly speaking, it worked quite well. Except Jack kept being obnoxious, and Jim started picking his nose halfway through, and Alex came in and started trying to CLIMB INTO the laptop which is his new reaction to any video call.  Speaking of Alex, he can now write his numbers one to ten. They're not entirely recognisable, but they exist. And Tom continues to teach him French. Monsieur Daddy indeed! I try and save fun work for Friday, because I am not actually a tyrant. Jack's been really grouchy all week. He misses his friends, he's sick to death of Jim, and the weather hasn't been good enough for him to prowl about the garden - his favourite pastime. So, he looked at Lichtenstein and comic strips, and had a go at designing his own:

Boom! Jim likes food. He really, really likes food. We were talking about green food last week, and I told him about matcha tea kitkats. Three English pounds sterling and several days later, this arrived:

Three bloody quid! Robbed. Green, sweet, bit meh if you ask me, the Kitkat purist, but he loved it. For his school work, he was asked to write or film a news report. You know by now that my children will choose to make a video over writing any day...
He didn't disappoint.

And that has been a WHOLE TWENTY EIGHT DAYS of home schooling. We've all survived. Sometimes we've even enjoyed it. God only knows how much longer this will go on for, but on it will go. Enjoy the weekend!

Soph's School of the Mad: Week Three

Have you got kids in Key Stage Two? May I suggest you grow beans in a coke bottle? It took ours four weeks to become these ludicrous specimens. 

Anyway, school's back in session. What a fortnight I have had, doing absolutely fuck all in the garden, buying mail-order cheese, hoping nobody I love dies. You'll be thrilled to learn that Alex still believes homeschool is the devil. "Do you want to do school with Mummy?" I asked him on Sunday night. "No, I want to do school with MONSIEUR DADDY". Thankfully, Monsieur Daddy is still working from home. 

On Tuesday, we started the day with Jack kicking Jim in the bollocks during Andy's Wild Workouts. Andy never imagined his workouts would get quite THAT wild. Jack then made a poster about this. I'm not even joking. 

Jim's topic of the week is castles. Me and Tom jumped for joy. "LOOK" I shrieked. "LOOK AT NEUSCHWANSTEIN, THIS CASTLE IS RUBBISH FOR DEFENCE. THIS IS WHY BODIAM IS SUPERFICIALLY WELL DEFENDED BUT ACTUALLY JUST A RUSE TO HAVE A REALLY NICE MANOR HOUSE! SQUARE TOWERS ARE REALLY EASY TO UNDERMINE. LOOK AT CANAERFON! LOOK AT THIS MARTELLO TOWER! LOOK AT THIS TREBUCHET BEING FIRED!"

Jim, however, designed his own castle fortifications while  I went purple with over-enthusiasm. His castle has ten sides, ten towers, three-arrow-shooting auto-crossbows, and CROCODILES in the moat. "But what if the crocodiles escape and eat your villagers?" "They are TETHERED", he announced.

To which I could make no reply. 

On Wednesday, I went to the shops first thing. It turns out that going to the shops first thing, when possibly going slightly insane, is very bad for your bank balance. Very bad.

I discovered Alex can read French. Maybe he doesn't have a language disorder at all - maybe he's just French. Jack listened to this ABSOLUTE DIABOLICAL BASTARDISATION OF A CLASSIC:

And Jim drew his castle, complete with crocodiles:

There ain't no fort like a decagon fort defended with lions, spike pits, cannons and crocodiles.

Jack is not a creative child. Well, that's not true: he's an excellent musician and has a brilliant imagination. But like his mother, he's not an artist. This fine picture is a representation of how sound travels, between a screaming man and a man with one huge ear:

As the kids say, this a BIG MOOD:

Friday, finally, and with a wretched intercostal muscle strain, I sat down with the kids. "LOOK AT THIS MUMMY" yelled Jim. "FUCKING OWWW" I yelled back as I tried to turn to look. We had a video lesson with his teacher, where Jim mostly demanded to look at her cat. 

Jack's timetable demanded we make a 'healthy meal' together. I looked at the freezer, and the reams of pizza and mini kievs that form several lockdown teas a week, sighed, and got him to help make his birthday cake. TOMORROW, HE IS NINE. Feel free to whataspp him video messages: lockdown birthdays are weird.

Alex promptly insisted on joining us. So far, his school work has consisted of him writing his name in huge letters on a whiteboard, then dotting his legs with whiteboard pen. He looks diseased. Anyway, he wanted to help make the cake, so I guess in about ten minutes, we'll discover if too many cooks spoil the broth. This cake is going to have a jam AND white chocolate buttercream filling. It's gonna be SICKLY AS FUCK. 

Anyway, I hope you all have a good weekend despite, yanno, everything. Don't fucking drink bleach - remember An Inspector Calls? Don't do it. 

Soph's School of the Mad: Week Two

So corona is a shit because, even in mild cases, you think you're getting better and then! lo! You can't breathe again.

But I am now, finally, better, and we can soon leave quarantine. It's also my birthday.

Nobody could be arsed on Monday. Alex threw a meltdown enough to shake the world, because I did not make his breakfast fast enough. "I HATE YOU, I NOT WANT TO BE A GOOD BOY, I WANT TO BE A BAD BOY! I NOT WANT TO CALM DOWN, I WANT TO CALM UP" etc. etc. For half an hour. Urgh. At least he knows his opposites.

He calmed down. I managed to get hold of a mini whiteboard for him to practice writing on, instead of the FOOT HIGH letters he keeps putting in his workbook.

Jack wrote about the Battle of Hastings, cackling like a loon about arrows in eyes. And Jim?
Jim had to multiply fractions. And divide them. With whole numbers. Fractions are bloody stupid. You have to TURN THEM UPSIDE DOWN TO DIVIDE THEM, FOR NO GOOD REASON. Jim's immediate, visceral response on seeing maths is to scream. He cannot help it, it's like his brain is scrabbling to escape his head. This is also my response, although I scream silently.

Could anybody be arsed on Tuesday? No, although I did feel *whisper it* properly better. I even LEFT THE HOUSE to fetch a parcel. I felt more like I was going into battle than going two doors down the road. I washed my hands, left my phone at home in case I forgot and touched it, got Tom to open the door to let me out, held my breath, touched nothing but my parcel and then ran home again to wash my hands and dettol my parcel. And, for the first time in a week, I WORE JEANS AND I DID NOT LIKE IT.

That's gonna be the real challenge when lockdown ends: wearing proper clothes.

Wednesday was a bit better. Jack wrote a whole play about a goblin. Alex named some FRUIT. Jim's new jam is PowerPoints. Gawd, that boy could write PowerPoint displays for a living. On Tuesday, he wrote one about the food of America, and on Wednesday, he wrote a ROAD TRIP THROUGH THE STATES BASED ON WHAT HE WOULD EAT IF HE WENT TO THEM. We started in New England and went all the way to Florida. The kid has a calling: eating until he bursts.

Eggs benedick anyone?

Jim's teacher phoned me on Wednesday, and I bemoaned the sheer wealth of resources without any guidance as to what level I should be getting him to work at. I've been recommended FIVE different maths apps. Only one of them (Times Tables Rockstars) seems pitched at the right level. Prodigy Maths is FANTASTIC, by the way. 

Thursday started like this:

It vaguely improved after we learned a cafe down the road DELIVERS FULL ENGLISH BREAKFASTS, so the kids got sausage sandwiches for lunch and Jack did this thought provoking piece of art based on modern life:

Brought a tear to my eye.

And so to today, my birthday, and nobody can be arsed to do anything. However, Jim has been learning about the presidents this week and this is why we should Vote for Jimmy:

All hail the new leader.

Now go away and enjoy Easter, because it looks very much like this madness is going to run and run...

Soph's School of the Mad: Week One

We survived.

I mean, except that we're in isolation. Please pelt food at our house if you're passing. We'll return the favour when we're no longer plague-ridden.

It happened on Monday night. I hadn't been well on Friday or Saturday with a dreadful sore throat and viral symptoms. I felt better Sunday, felt mostly normal Monday. Alex had a brief fever on Sunday night, but recovered without incident. And then, while waiting for Johnson to lock us down, I coughed. A dry cough. Just once.

Then I coughed again.

And then some more.

O Shit, I thought. But, but, but, but, but I've not got a fever. It can't be coronavirus.

By Tuesday afternoon, I'd realised that yeah, this breathlessness, tight chest, and dry cough was probably coronavirus, fever or not. I enquired of 111 online, who told me to basically shutter the windows and dig a trench for the bodies. This is how the peasants must have felt when they first discovered a buboe in their armpit. I regretfully informed people I'd been in contact with, like Typhoid Mary, then went to bed to cry.

I have mild, atopic asthma, so I'm quite used to having a tight chest, particularly in summer. What I am not used to is not being able to hack my lungs up. When they say the cough is dry, they mean it. There's no wheeze, no movement to begin with; it's very odd. But you've probably all got it by now too, so you know this.

However, an unexpected bonus is that I've now got Tom at home to be my TA. Alex insisted on calling him Mrs Daddy, and actually did some work with him. No relentless howl of "I HATE YOU", no trying to break his pencils in half while I shriek "STOP IT, I'VE ONLY GOT THREE LEFT", no crying. A blessed relief. Wednesday, I was unwell, but Jim still managed to make this lot:

All the things you can reluctantly make out a buffalo.

Yesterday was also a moderate success. Alex learned about the planets, and then drew them:

Who knew Mercury was a black hole??

Such skills, very art. Jack got quite tearful because he did all his fun choices early in the week, and only had writing to do. One of his jobs was to write all the clock times in the house in digital and analogue form. Jesus, the wailing. You'd have thought we'd asked him to CREATE TIME. But Jim. Lawd, Jim. He had to make a dream catcher.

It went as poorly as you can imagine. First the wool was "too horrible to touch", then he couldn't be arsed to wind it round a disc. Then we could not work out how to create a star into the middle of it. Then we couldn't fit the supplied beads onto the supplied wool and gave up. Fuck it.

Looks more like a summoning circle than anything...

I saved all the easy work for Friday because I AM A GOOD MOTHER. HONEST.

Jack had to make a model to show the sun, a producer and two consumers. He was wracked with horror over the idea of modelling it out. "Just do it with the garden and playmobil?" suggested LifeHackMummy^TM: This was the slightly appalling result:

I'm not sure what the man is doing to the bullock. I'm not sure I want to.

Perhaps my favourite thing this week was Jim's advert for a magic cupboard. The whole premise of his ?racist? book is that the boy has a magic cupboard that brings toys to life. Jim...produced this entirely unaided:


And on that highlight, have a lovely weekend in the sun, in your OWN GARDEN, regularly WASHING YOUR FILTHY HANDS.

xxx

No Plan Survives First Contact With The Enemy

We live in unprecedented times, so the blog is back.

Sophie’s Homeschool Diaries

Friday 20th March. Jimmy’s eleventh birthday. The day normality ground to a halt. The schools...The schools closed.

Our household is low risk, but we have so many people around us who are high risk (notably my niece, who’s having chemo and my elderly grandparents) that we have no childcare at the moment, and are effectively self-isolating.

Theoretically, Jimmy should have remained in school as he had an EHCP, but this didn’t happen.

Theoretically, Tom should have been sent home as well to aid me in my quest. This didn’t happen either.

Jimmy’s teacher phoned to give me the terrible news. ‘Try not to panic’, she said, ‘I’ll phone you on Monday’. I’m not panicking, I thought. I’m in hell. There’s no point panicking about being in hell.

“LOLZ GIN”, shouted the other mothers. They can fuck off.

The children dutifully brought home books and boxes of stuff to do, while I hastily scrabbled together a couple of project books and pencils from the shattered remains of Asda’s stationary section.

My ex-husband arrived, with a Twinkl login, jogging bottoms for the kids, a massive chocolate cake, and handwash. For the first time in nearly a decade, I was grateful for his existence.

I sent the older two to their dad’s for the weekend, and retired to bed to cry over the last packet of Lockets. Mother’s Day weekend my arse.

Day One, 23rd March: No Plan Survives First Contact With The Enemy

Monday. 7:20am. My ex-husband rolled up in his van to deposit two overtired, overstimulated blonde children on my doorstep, before rolling away again cackling about seeing us in two weeks. Urgh. Then Tom went to work. Double urgh.

I had warned the children before the schools were closing that we would have a routine in place. All the boys are neurodivergent. Jim’s got autism, Jack’s either autistic or has ADHD or both, we don’t know yet, and Alex has autism plus a language disorder. If there is no routine, they all go to shit, flapping uselessly around, or staring at Dangermouse for seven hours straight. Not on my watch.

The routine is simple. They have breakfast and get dressed. They do PE with Joe Wicks. They do their work in the morning, at the dining room table. When the work is finished, they go and play. They are allowed fun screens after lunch, provided their work is done (so I can get some work done). At teatime, screens go off and they go and do something else. Like eat a packet of dried herbs because that’s all I’ve got in. Boom, educated.

Or at least, that was the plan.

But no plan survives first contact with the enemy.

So day one. Alex got thoroughly overexcited at the idea that a woman called Jo was coming to our house to do PE and insisted on putting his PE kit on. He was somewhat disappointed when permacheerful Essex dickhead Joe Wicks appeared on our living room TV and put us through a thirty minute cardio workout. Limbs, limbs everywhere. Jack enthusiastically joined in, Alex stared at the screen, jumped around a bit and then absconded. Jim acted like he was being RACKED. “I CAN’T DO THIS, I AM TOO TALL”.

Too tall.

PE complete, we retire to the dining room table, where I spent twenty minutes shrieking “WOULD YOU JUST WAIT A MINUTE WHILE I WORK OUT WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON”. Jim’s school have sent a massive box of stuff home to work through, complete with resources. I set him up with an audiobook of The Indian in the Cupboard, which I’m sure is racist, and get Jack to start a coronavirus diary. Then I turn my attention to Alex.

Alex then has a meltdown because I asked him to write with a pencil, when there are FELT TIPS in view. Alex cannot write. Alex cannot draw the number eight. He cannot. He hates me. He tells me at length how much, how deeply, how resolutely he HATES me. I ask him what sentence he wants to write “I HATE MUMMY” he says. Dutifully, I write it out for him to copy. This upsets him more. “BUT I LOVE YOU MUMMY” he says, and then writes I love Mummy. Except he writes it all over the page. Well, at least he can hold a pen now. There is felt tip everywhere. He manages to do some maths, by counting bastard felt tips, and then reads his tricky words. None of the links to youtube videos in his home learning sheets work. None. I give him up for a bad job and send him off with freight trains on Youtube.

Jack has enthusiastically written his coronavirus diary, and asks for more work. He has to do a grid of types of animals and draw some examples. Jack, who has spent the last weekend with his dad’s seven thousand rabbits, cannot remember what a rabbit looks like. “LOOK IT UP ON THE BASTARD COMPUTER” I yell.

You see, I am trying to do maths with Jim, who has finished listening to his ?racist? story and has answered some questions on it. Jim’s attitude to maths is “If I don’t know the answer, who cares?” I can’t do maths. Dyscalculia as a child is bad enough, but I’m an almost thirty-five-year-old wannabe academic, and it’s bloody awful. So, I have to look the answers up on a calculator. I make him do five questions, and then get him to do times tables on TopMarks.

Then Jack goes on TimeTables RockStars while me and Jim look at his science project: plant a load of fucking seeds. THERE IS SOIL, EVERYWHERE, BUT THE SEEDS ARE PLANTED AND ON THE WINDOWSILL. LONG MAY THEY GROW.

Jack has to make a graph of his running times for a week. He runs around the grass in our garden. It takes eight seconds. I chuck him out of the house to run around the close, and he’s almost run over. This takes thirty seconds. That’ll do. We do some spellings. Jim runs shrieking from the room when I suggest he might like to join in with the spellings.

I decide I’ve had enough, and get tidied up. Then I read the first chapter of Treasure Island to the kids, with as much eighteenth-century menace as I can muster. Not Alex. He’s still watching freight trains on Youtube in his PE kit. Halfway through the chapter, Tom phones to say he has LOCATED PROTEIN in Corby Morrisons and I nearly weep with relief.

And now I get to go and do some actual work this afternoon, while they watch TV and build dens. Woop.

Quite Accomplished Now Really, If I'm Honest

When I started this blog, it was specifically to chart my educational progress with the Open University and the ranting was just a nice side-project.

I decided to sign up to do a degree in October 2011, thinking maybe I would be able to get a better job with a degree. I started my first module about a month later. I had zero confidence. I had zero self-esteem. I had just come out of a hideous breakup, left my job, had two very small children and I didn't know what else to do with myself. My first module started in February 2012, when my (then) youngest was ten months, and my eldest was thirty four months. Neither of them were at preschool at that point. I lived on my own. I was bored. I was angry. I was determined.

So I worked. I worked nonstop for four years to achieve my undergraduate degree in June 2016, with first class honours. During that time, I got divorced, remarried, had another baby, got my eldest diagnosed with autism. Uni was the basenote through those four, strange years, always there to focus on when everything else was going to shit.

July 2016, I was awarded my degree, my kids finished school for the summer. What next? What next? I couldn't bear the thought of having nothing to do, and Alex was only just one. I had developed a all-consuming passionate hobby in family history, and decided to have a stab at a history masters to professionalise my credentials.

Three days later, Mum got ill. You know that story. You know how that ended.

But I carried on. I could have stopped. Nobody would have been surprised if I'd deferred. But I needed the framework, I had to have something that wasn't mourning, something I could do that she would have loved, that I could do in her memory. As time went on, it stopped being about Mum and started being about the people whose deaths I was studying, it started being about bringing long forgotten processes to light, it started being about something more useful than a mere grief process.

From May 2018 until January 2019, I worked like a demon, reading everything relevant, spending hours researching Every Single Woman in the Assizes in Northamptonshire in a Thirteen Year Span to make one pie chart. I started to pull it together. My dissertation was titled Infant Death in the Coroner's Court, but it was about women and mothers, childcare and illegitimacy, and the juxtaposition of working-class women in a court of men. It was about the deliberate exclusion of women from judicial process concerning them, judicial process where their lives were at stake. It was about how limited networks of men developed in cities, to judge and govern the lower classes. It was about gendered space. It was about how we used to live, and how we used to die.

I had my mum in mind while I wrote it, and I thought of her experience, and how she might have been treated had my brother been born one hundred years earlier, and how she might have been treated had he been born even ten years later.

I passed. I passed with merit.

This masters is for me. 

For my mum. 

For the women whose stories I was privileged to tell in my dissertation. 

For my kids who, I hope, will understand why Mummy never stopped wanting to learn. 

I couldn't have done it without my beloved husband, who never read a word of it but patiently listened to me bellowing on about it most days. Or without my in-laws, who looked after Alex while I went to the library every week to transcribe the relevant data set. Or without my sister, Jess, who DID read every word of it, and provided feedback as well as being a soundboard for me sorting out arguments in my head. My siblings, my Dad, my friends, random people in the library, who have listened to me blarting on about dead babies over the last year  - you're all saints, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

I couldn't have done any of it without the OU, and my tutors, or without the expert guidance of Peterborough archive staff, and the Coroner's Society historian. Or without my Learned Friends, especially Dr B.

You've all been the most magnificent cheerleaders. I am so grateful. I graduate in June: I didn't bother with my undergrad graduation, because Mum was about to die, but this time, I will.

What happens next? I don't know. I don't want to stop, but I also recognise that I  might have to. I've developed a business from this, and you can find me at Sophie Michell's Family Research if you want to HIRE ME, as I am now OFFICIALLY a professional historian.