Tag: homeschool

Self-Schooling…

Ok, since we’ve come back from our trip to the UK, about 3 weeks ago, it’s been chill out time!

Just before we left for the UK the kids wrapped up their exams. For Maryam, in particular, it was tough. She has worked about 8 hours a day, 7 days a week for about 3 months. She didn’t meet many friends during that exam-intense period – and so she wasn’t the happiest girl in the world.

But all bad things come to an end (I just made that up). Now there are no exams for almost a year! Things feel really relaxed, they’re meeting friends regularly, watching plenty of films, the kids are enjoying it.

The kids know what they need to do now, and getting on with their stuff.

What is amazing is that Isabelle and myself are essentially out of the picture. It’s no longer homeschool – it is self-school. Our kids are educating themselves.

Hey, what?! Yes, they’re educating themselves, and here’s how:

  • The kids are working together, teaching themselves Maths A-level, with two other kids that have joined in. I set the past papers, they do it. When they get stuck they ask each other, Google it, or if that fails, they ask me via WhatsApp group we’ve set up.
  • They’re teaching themselves coding, to build their game app. Plenty of resources online. I asked a coder who used to build games to give them some guidance over WhatsApp. Any questions, they can ask him.
  • Maryam is trying to start her business – but she needs so to figure it all out herself (it’s an online business). She asks me things once in a while.
  • The language-learning is now pretty much all online, and they have their schedule to stick to.

So Isabelle has taken a full-time remote job as CFO of LaunchPad, my tech venture builder, and all she does homeschool-wise is take the kids to their various group activities – football, art, study groups, and visit her friends that have kids of a similar age to ours.

And I play squash with the kids every morning. That is it!

If you can teach your kids to teach themselves, but it has taken us almost 4 years to get here, it all becomes VERY easy. We’re now doing next to nothing.

And everyone still tells us we’re such dedicated and committed parents that have made huge sacrifices for our kids!

A-Levels

We’ve decided to press ahead with Maryam and Danyal’s A-levels despite Danyal having only done 3 iGCSE’s – he’ll probably do two more this coming November and January.

Maryam has been working on her A-level Biology with Isabelle for a few months. I’ve decided to keep the momentum (ha ha!) with their Physics iGCSE and go for the Physics A-level rather than a Maths A-level, which we’ll do later. Also, given I have a degree in physics, I feel a little nostalgic about it all, so physics it is.

We have 4 months until their Physics A-level exams – it was either that or drag it on for an extra year. 4 seems like a good a challenge.

A lot of people ask me why the urgency? My response is why the complacency? We’re not doing 12 hour days – we’re doing a total of 5 or 6 hours of study during each weekday, no homework – and there is tons of time for sport, reading, meeting friends and pissing about.

I told them on the day they started studying for their Physics A-level that the spoon feeding needs to stop – they can grab me if they don’t understand things, they have the text book, they have Google, they have each other. They work when they want, if they want. It’s their lives and it’s up to them, not me, to get the A* so not have to go through the pain of a resit.

The pep talk has worked. The physics text book is 166 pages, and four days into it they have gone through 65 pages – so that’s 40% of the syllabus (hello?) – but bear in mind it’s the first 40 pages so it’s mostly covering iGCSE stuff they’ve already done – and at this stage there would be some gaps in their understanding of the material they’ve covered. Hopefully they’ll be done with the text book in another 2 weeks and then it’s just past papers, which will fill any gaps, until they do their exams.

How can my kids even have a chance of doing an A-level in 4 months? Trust me, they’re not geniuses – it’s just that they are leveraging off the power of intensity.

I’ll keep you posted on progress…

Someone has already asked me how the kids will do the practical exam. I’ve found out that although the board, Edexcel, says it’s ‘compulsory’, it is really optional – it doesn’t affect the grade, and if one does the practical they just get an extra 1 or 2 next to their grade, which no-one cares about. Do I care that the kids will not learn how to do physics practicals? No.

iGCSE results!

So Maryam, 11, got A*s in Maths, Biology and French, and Danyal, 9 got an A* in Maths.

We’re obviously really pleased!

We don’t know the grade boundaries but going on the average of past papers, all 4 A*s were comfortable – around 7-10% above the minimum required.

It’s interesting that most UK school children will study biology for around 9 years (in the early years as part of science) before they take a Biology GCSE – and Maryam took 1/6 of that. In my estimation around 30% of kids doing what we’re doing could too, with another 50% taking less than 30 months to get an A*. The remainder 20% probably wouldn’t be bright enough to get an A*, but I think most of them would end up getting A’s. Just my guess – I don’t have any stats to prove it.

Anyway, glad to get this hurdle out of the way…