Well, we’re back from the dreaded inspection. Thanks for all your supportive messages. It took place in an atmosphere of great civility and friendliness, and utter disrespect for the law! Antonia did wonderfully, especially considering that they subjected her to two hours of schoolish tests. She was a credit to homeschoolers everywhere. She was polite, friendly, forthcoming in her answers. Even to stupid questions like “how many friends have you got?”, which I think she took to be a maths problem. Later, in general knowledge, the tester really pressed her quite hard to see if she couldn’t think of the name of just one artist. Names are not her strong point. She didn’t freak out totally as she would have in the past. Instead she fixed the inspector in the eye, with a knowingly ironic expression on her face and said “OK then, me!”. I was so proud (wipes away tear)!

She did fine on the actual tests. She has ‘one of the’ typical homeschool child profiles. She reads well enough to draw admiration from a tester who wasn’t particularly out to give us positive feedback. I dare say she writes slower and spells less well than the reading might have led them to expect, we just potter along slowly with writing in two languages. Just fine with all the rest. I doubt the tester knows just how fragile her French comprehension of some of the questions was. Some of her answers that seemed ordinarily eccentric or reticent for her age were due to incomplete understanding as I later found out. So no worries about their perception of her learning… they’ll find something to bitch about if they’re looking to, but they can’t call her uneducated. But the tester could hardly believe that she had no siblings, and spent a lot of time trying to figure out how much time she spends outside the house. Now, I know that it’s a rare afternoon that she spends at home, but you wouldn’t have got that impression from interviewing her, and I had been entreated to silence.

You could say that all was pretty reasonable… except that 30 minutes after we left, we were driving along and suddenly Antonia began wailing with terrible stomach cramps. We had to make an emergency stop in a dive of a bistro. After using their toilet for quarter of an hour, I just ordered a couple of drinks, but what I hadn’t packed in my emergency kit was some loose change. We waited for Mike to come and bail us out. After that she was fine, we went to a restaurant, I got her that medal she wanted and she got to watch Harry Potter all afternoon. All the treats she requested, and boy did she care about getting them. I could go on about the psychology of all that, most of which is barely positive, but we all just did what we needed to do.

Since then, she has been feeling proud of herself, obviously, and also letting out plenty of agression and nervous tension. She’s been making the beautiful moral narrative drawings that she used to make just after she left school. They’re full of violence, sorrow, fear, love and justice. They are truly amazing, but… they reflect something going on inside. Less positively, she isn’t quite the sweet easy-going Antonia we’re used to yet. She had a massive row with Mike at lunchtime over whether her lunch was to be served in a bowl or a dish!!??! She had a massive row with me at the park because I took a slightly different path from her, and failed to call her and tell her ‘which way she needed to go’!! Everybody is a bit tired, ratty and niggly at our house just now, for various reasons, but everyone will be fine, and we’re getting back to the real business of homeschooling.

I said the inspection took place in perfect disrespect for the law. That is because it is the teaching that is supposed to be inspected, not the child’s level of achievement, and certainly not their achievements in relation to the school curriculum. But that’s all they wanted to check. They did not allow any time to look at her work, or to interview me. They also have big blinkers on and have not got a single, solitary clue what homeschooling is all about. The tester asked Antonia “who corrects your work?” and she had no idea what to say. I tried to explain why not, but the tester let me know politely that she only wanted Antonia’s answers. I was pleased with myself for preparing a document with examples of Antonia’s real work and a little explanation of my educational philosophy and methods. I left it with them, and if they don’t read it, at least they can’t say they don’t have it.

I should emphasise that they were friendly and polite, very, very sweet to the children, and I really believe they were not setting out to ‘fail’ any of us. But they sure wanted to retain total control over the situation. Maybe I should wait till I get the report before I jubilate, but in fact, I think they were just much too busy to trouble to get a clue what to do about three homeschooled children, once a year. They have to do something, and they chose to use the method that seems simplest to them. Overall, in our department (county?) there are far more homeschooled children than three, and we’re getting a variety of experiences. None of them have been really negative so far, but few of them have been genuinely respectful of the laws relating to homeschooling. We’re cogitating what if anything to do about it. Their approach would be sort of tolerable, as long as it’s understood that they can’t actually fail anybody on the basis of it. Because they haven’t looked at what they’re supposed to looking at! I wonder if they do understand that? But if they don’t envisage ever failing anyone anyway, why can’t we all just sit and chat about the kid’s work over a coffee/orange juice!!?

Enough about inspections for now. I’ll post about the report when it arrives, and any militating we decide to get up to.

Tomorrow our homeschool gets inspected by the board of education. They sent us a letter one month ago, summoning us to their offices downtown at 9.00 am. They informed us that they are going to start by ‘testing the child’s knowledge’, followed by an interview, and that we should allow an hour. Oh, and that we could bring in examples of the child’s work if we wanted. It wasn’t long before I found out that at least two other families have an appointment for the same date and time. It is pretty certain that they are going to give the children a test based on the level of middle-of-first-grade in the public schools.

Now the thing is, the law is not very specific about how the homeschool inspection should take place, but it does say that parents can choose whatever educational method, philosophy and progression that they like. It makes it clear that it’s the teaching that is being inspected, not the child’s achievement. That makes me unhappy from the start about the way the inspection has being set up.

Clearly, they believe they can adequately inspect my teaching by setting my child a school curriculum-based test and by looking at concrete work produced by her. I don’t agree with this. Their test is likely to be largely irrelevant to what we actually do: there’s no reason why we should have covered the topics covered in schools. We certainly haven’t covered the techniques that children are taught in school to get the answers to the types of questions that are asked in schools. And in any case Antonia isn’t studying at the equivalent of mid-first-grade level in most subjects. All that is our right.

I feel that learning two written languages is a big task, that we don’t have the same imperative to do lots of writing as schools do, and that being made to produce lots of writing would spoil my child’s fun in learning (what a concept), and slow her down. I particularly need them to acknowledge this, because it’s the one area where Antonia is ‘only’ at grade level, more or less, and I really expect her to slip below grade level for several years, as she deals with another language and in any case writes less than public school kids. That’s our right too.

As for showing work, our nature or city walks, our science experiments, our reading, and especially our conversations don’t leave this kind of trace – but I do have photographs and records and I’m taking a selection of them in. A lot of the other homeschooling parents use Montessori type manipulatives – I’m sure they have even less to show than we do.

If the inspectors had come to our homes, as most of us would prefer, and as the law encourages them to do, they could see the materials, the environment and the kids using these things normally. If they ask to see something in particular, it’s easy to pull it out. And if they asked my dear sweet daughter what she does all day and she said “nothing” or “play” they would have before their eyes the evidence that ‘playing at nothing’ consists of painting, constructing, miscellaneous experiments, manipulatives, writing and figuring out sums, etc…

Apart from that, their procedure is just not nice. I will say nothing of making us get up a couple of hours earlier than usual and dragging us downtown during rush hour. It’s the test situation that bugs me. I know that some areas in the US use testing for homeschoolers. But tests administered to 6-year olds by strange adults in a strange place? With neither the educator nor the student ever having had access to a sample test, or even a rundown of what’s likely to be covered? Does anyone think this is developmentally appropriate? Or appropriate for exams at any age, anywhere?

Developmentally appropriate or not, it isn’t appropriate for my daughter. She has a history of responding badly to test situations and of being very uncomfortable if she thinks she has to perform. She tends to freeze, literally, or burst into tears. She has a bunch of other strategies that she can and will use unconsciously to avoid giving an answer. She’s only just started to talk to French adults if they are her friend’s parents, and if the conversation is on her own terms. She usually still ignores questions that they ask her. Despite being globally at or above the level of their test, she may be psychologically unable to answer their test questions, or indeed any question.

If this turns out to be the case, I fear they will decide to blame it on homeschooling. They don’t get to see how much progress she has made – in psychological resilience, I mean. They don’t get to see that she is happy and confident in her normal environment, having made sure that they only get to see her in the most stressful circumstances that could be devised. They may even decide that she actually knows nothing. I have found myself unable to prepare her mentally for something that she genuinely isn’t ready for. Last night she asked me what would happen if we ran away, locked ourselves in our house and hid. That’s a fair indication of her state of mind, and it’s scary for a parent who has past experience of her nervous meltdowns.

Really she just shouldn’t be put through this inspection… and if I said it didn’t make me angry I would be lying. It’s true that I didn’t write the inspector a detailed letter explaining all this. That, I suppose, is because I don’t trust them enough to let them in on my concerns. I suspect them of being hostile to homeschooling in principle and quick to blame any and all difficulties on the parent. Maybe that’s a mistake on my part. But I can’t help feeling that they should have remembered that some parents pull their kids from school because those kids are fragile and failing to thrive in some way. And they should not subject any child to situations that a child psychologist would deem potentially stressful and inappropriate for the age. And I think most child psychologists would. It’s obviously not the best thing for me to be entering the inspection situation in the frame of mind that I am in, but there you go.

Still, I’ve done what I can. I’ve produced a portfolio/report that I think would allow them to inspect what we do adequately – if they read it! I’ll rustle up a few books, and a small portfolio of math/writing type things that were manifestly done by Antonia without adult help, in case she really proves unable to do the test. I’m packing a treat for afterwards, the favourite soft toy in case things get really desperate, a change of clothes (yup, it could be that bad!), and a drawing book. I found in India that drawing helps her handle stress. Oh, and I’ve promised her a medal. That’s what she asked for. I’ve been wondering about getting one that says ‘Homeschool Inspection Survivor’ on it, but I’ll probably go for something a bit more upbeat.