Homeschool

The Homeschool is a strange phenomenon, butt of many TV jokes, and it is a concept I certainly don't support.
Here though, it seems pretty well organised and there are networks that link people who home school, floating teachers who coordinate things. Now, now, I didn't say 'floaters'.

Today we had home-schoolers in and they were nice, well adjusted kids, previous groups have ranged from nutty as fruitcakes through to strange pigeon boys and girls.

But even the well adjusted ones are not socialised properly, they lack something.
In some ways I admire the parents who take this on, because when parents constantly whinge about state education, you should be able to say to them,
'Well fuck off and do it yourselves then,' and these ones have.

On the other hand, they are kind of making their children abnormal. By not allowing them to suffer the slings and arrows, they are treating them like orchids and guess what, when the rarefied atmosphere disappears, the orchid dies.
Kids need a bit of rough and tumble, they need to be able to make friends and know how to deal with enemies. They need someone to make fun of them when they wear a ridiculous woolly hat that their mum has made them out of hemp dyed with nettle juice. They need to have the piss taken when their strange little foibles emerge, because at some point.... they are going to have to join back in with the game.

And on the subject of strange kids, the picture on the front of magazines at the supermarket checkouts is Canadian embarrassment, Celine Dion and her son. Except that.... Celine Dion's son looks like a girl. Not just a girly boy, no, you would argue up and down that this was a girl. Still, on balance, he-she doesn't look as strange as his-her mother.

This afternoon we had a school that just had 'Christian' in its title. Well, way to go, we have Jewish schools, Muslim schools, they're allowed to say it, why not Christian ones?
As I was pointing out how the poisonous bog laurel grows in amongst the medicinal Labrador tea, one little boy muttered ominously,
'Like Satan.' Well, quite.

At almost the end of the day, I found myself up the tallest step ladder I have ever seen. It was made of wood and creaked. In one hand I had a jerry-rigged net, the handle bodged together from two pieces of wood to make it longer.
A hummingbird had flown in and was trapped under the skylight. The real trick is apparently to quite literally take your life in your hands and climb right to the top of the ladder and then with almost nothing to grasp, to try and catch the bird in your cupped hands because the net may damage the bird.
Well, sure, but I'm just thinking, three gram bird or me? I won. Hummingbird eventually got her long, pointy beak stuck in my net and I pulled her down. We both lived to tell the tale.

And when I put it like that, stuck up a ladder talking to a hummingbird, I wonder if I come across as any less strange than one of those home schoolers.