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Break

I must have walked past this tree at least a 1000 times and yet today was the first time that I truly noticed it…..

So it’s 8 exams down another 12 to go. So much for Hawklad to learn and revise over the next three weeks. Currently he is ‘enjoying’ a week long revision school holiday before the exams come flying back at him. Poor Hawklad is mentally shattered, these exams are taking so much out of him, he is drained. Trying to cram in almost 3 years work into just a few weeks, across a number of subjects. Trying to do this while trying to cope with the stress which the revision and exams are placing on his hard earned reading skills. Trying at the same time trying to learn to type exam answers up without any speech or grammar assistance.

It’s unbelievable to think that just under three years ago school had decided that he would never be able to read. The fact he is doing these exams unaided is already the biggest of big WINS for him.

But he is drained. Really drained.

So we through out the revision playbook. He needed a break. So he is having a couple of days off before he dives back into the work again. Two days off will hit the revision but it was the right decision. We all need to recharge sometimes.

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Ok that wasn’t part of the plan

Routine and familiarity is so important to Hawklad. Change is best approached with planning and preparation. Especially when he is under so much additional exam stress. As a result we have been trying to map out a course that has been as smooth as possible but sometimes all we can do is whisper “REALLY…..”

Been so many instances just over these first few exam days that have put obstacles in the smooth path.

After the first exam, Hawklad getting stuck in the classroom for an hour due to a faulty printer and national rules. Then having his invigilators changed at the last minute. Then being given teacher tips on banker questions that always come up and then they don’t this year. Or finding the day before the exam that he hadn’t been given part of the course. Or the cat and dog having a fight for the first time ever, a proper full on fight, just before another exam. Or other things…..

And then we got those extra days. A day mapped out to just focus on revising for his weakest subject for the upcoming exam. Minutes into starting work and this happens to the conservatory where he was sat.

Yes a shimmering sheet of supported roof glass shattered in seconds. I think that’s a bit of ‘s’ alliteration – I’m clearly learning as well. The end result….

Randomly one inner roof glass sheets turned into a glass rain.

I have never seen so much glass pieces. On the floor, on furniture, in revision papers, in Lego sets, in clothing. Everywhere. Thankfully the safety glass did its job and no injuries, well apart from my hands trying to sort out the mess. Spooked Hawklad, Spooked Muppet Dad, Spooked Pets. We could have REALLY done without that. So his favourite revision spot is not so favourite now.

Don’t you just love exam time….

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One week

The daily dog walk is getting very yellow…

More farmers opting for this round here.

It’s less than a week before Hawklad’s first exam starts. It’s starting to feel very real now. Very rushed. Very unnerving. Not feeling planned, feeling very out of control. Not controlling direction, much more being bounced and pushed around.

No exam revision breakthrough yet but he is trying. The problem is that this statutory process suits the system, certainly not Hawklad. He works best when he can focus on one topic and then go deep on that. Switching between topics disrupts his thinking, his learning, unsettles him. So randomly sitting 20 exams, across 6 subjects, over just a few weeks is so counterproductive to him. To him it feels like any progress made is then largely lost as he switches to a completely different topic.

The last few weeks he has also been trying to build rapport with a Teaching Assistant he has worked well with previously at school. If he needed to use a scribe in the exam then this seemed like a good option. The Student and Scribe need to develop that understanding and confidence for the best chance of success. With Asperger’s this is even more important. But now the Exam Board has ruled out using this Teaching Assistant in his exams. New regulations prevent scribes having a direct teaching link with the student. The Teaching Assistant has been providing some one to one English help as part of the weekly school sessions. Back to square one on this, any scribe would now be a stranger to Hawklad, he won’t have time to build up a rapport with a new potential person. A scribe is now not an option. So he is committed to reading and typing up his exams without help. With the grammar and spelling assistants turned off – he losses marks for using these.

A week to revise.

A week to try to learn to type much faster.

A week isn’t long enough.

Less than a week to go.

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1000

The garden is still largely bereft of colour. Thankfully a couple of colourful characters are trying to buck the trend.

I was musing over a concert next year which happens to be nearby. Three old Rock Bands from my youth. Judas Priest, Saxon and Uriah Heep. One I managed to see a few decades back, the other two, it would be my first time. Maybe this time.

Following much friendly winding up from Hawklad, I worked out that the current combined age of those 3 bands was in excess of a 1000 years. Following on from his maths revision, Hawklad estimated that adding me into the mix takes the number closer to 2000 years. 2000 years ago the Romans hadn’t even got round to invading England yet. There’s a thought…

Another thought is that the first exam is less than 2 weeks away. Less than 2 weeks and some of the subjects are still teaching, still trying to get through the set curriculum. Hawklad ain’t getting through everything as it is, never mind adding to it. As Hawklad put it

Next week would be bad enough just trying to learn 25 love poems for English Literature which might as well haven been written in Vulcan, but I’m also supposed to revise six other subjects and all this new stuff. Actually I could do with being a Vulcan like Spock.

Deep sigh.

Is it time to go to my prehistoric heavy metal concert yet…..

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Farmer

The Farmer has been busy. The Farmer in a seriously thick jumper. The Farmer who was complaining to me about it being so cold for Spring. The village has an annual walk to the Bluebell Wood usually this last weekend in April. This year it is currently on hold as even the bluebells have decided it’s TOO COLD to make an appearance.

Don’t blame them….

The Farmer reckons the plants are at least a month behind where they should be. Hawklad with just a tad of irony, said that he’d would happily settle for just being a month behind schedule. I know what he means.

Hawklad is ploughing on with his exam revision, mostly sat by the fire. So much to do and not enough time. Probably only in one subject, History, will he fully complete the course before the exams. The other subjects he will be playing catch up right until the exams. But he’s still giving it a go, he is trying. So proud of him.

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Butty

Do you think I would get away with this in my garden as a bit of a water feature. You don’t think that it might be a tad pretentious. My current water feature is me walking about with a watering can….. Imagine the fun Captain Chaos would have with this.

We were in the garden (without a water feature) playing table tennis and trying to lift Hawklad’s spirits after a demoralising couple of hours revising. He was frustrated and dispirited because we had picked up that he had been using the wrong method to calculate something in mathematics. He’d apparently been doing it the wrong way for a couple of years but as the teacher hasn’t been looking at his submitted maths work, it wasn’t picked up until we spotted it.

He had an Easter Egg, I had a coffee with a BUTTY.

I came from a family that survived on Butties… Dad would always say only POSH people called them sandwiches. Most items could be placed between two slabs of bread for a tasty meal. Family favourites included

Fish Finger butties

Chip butties (My favourite)

Crisp butties (Mum’s favourite)

Baked Beans butties (don’t wear a white shirt eating this one)

Sausage butties

Yorkshire Pudding and Gravy butties (a particularly messy one)

Mushy Peas and Vinegar butties

Fried Egg and Tomato Ketchup butties

Last nights Pizza butties

Pork Pie butties (Dad’s favourite)

At one stage I even started having Pot Noddle butties

All things butties. I even once remember a debate about whether a slice of bread sandwiched between two other slices of bread counted as a Bread Butty or just three Slices of Bread. Whatever the answer to this philosophical point, we had so many butties as a family for one good reason. Bread was cheap, it was a cheap way of padding out our meals.

Now a thought has crossed my mind. Sitting in our garden, it’s summer, after the exams, next to that giant water feature, having a butty. That works…

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Time

The Poor Daffs are taking a right weather pounding and yet they are still going strong. Definitely hardy souls. A varied learning/revision day for Hawklad.

Vectors,

UK River Landscapes,

Romeo and Juliet,

Cell Specialisation,

The 1846 Mormon Migration (Revision)

All in just over TWO HOURS…. If you read the blurb that school sends out, Hawklad should be doing a minimum 4 hours revision on every school day and a minimum 7 hours on a non school day.

****some parents might disagree with the next bit****

Learning and revision surely needs to be tailored around the individual needs and characteristics of the pupil. Some might suit the 7 hours of academia each day, others not so. The homeschooling of Hawklad over the last few years has revealed many things, one of which is…

Hawklad has a sweet spot for learning of up to 3 hours a day. Up to 3 hours and things go in, but quickly after that and his learning potential drops off a cliff. He gets rapidly tired and frustrated. His anxiety levels begin to spike. Connections aren’t made, facts don’t go in and they certainly don’t stay in. He even starts to struggle and get confused with the information he had earlier learnt so well.

7 hours of revision slog would just be counterproductive for him.

So we made a decision, Hawklad works for 3 hours max each day. Yes it limits what we can cover but surely quality is so much more important than quantity. Surely his well-being has to be paramount. Exams cannot be everything.

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Exams

A few minutes later we got seriously wet….

Hawklad’s final school exams are fast approaching, they start in a months time. School are now providing a weekly one hour teaching assistant session to help with English. Another subject teacher is providing revision instructions which help. The rest is down to us now. The REST means revision and subject learning.

It’s a real mixed bag across the subjects. In History (his best subject) we have just about completed the course and can start to revise. This is the subject which has consistently provided teaching materials for Hawklad to work with and marked his submitted work. But in the other subjects we are still scrambling around trying to cover all the topics. It’s clear now that he has missed out significantly being at home. The school and the national education system isn’t setup for pupils who miss significant portions of classroom teaching on health grounds. On top of that teachers are having to cope with class sizes of up to 30 with increasing pressure from Government to stick to prescribed teaching methods. They just don’t have the time to teach outside the box now.

The end result is that Hawklad is having to learn new material when he is supposed to be revising old material. The dilemma now is do we try to cover all the missing topics which would effectively rule out any real revision in most of the subjects OR do we take a punt on just covering some topics and revising these. Cover everything thinly or cover some of it a little more in depth….

In Geography and Sciences we are going to try to cover the entire subject and see if we can squeeze in some crash revision over the last few days. In these subjects we are dumping all the school material as it is so incomplete. We have bought into an online science teaching site that was recommended by a fellow blogger ❤️. For Geography we are finding teaching videos on YouTube.

We have also largely dumped the school maths materials and I’m reteaching the entire subject. Again we hopefully will get a couple of days to crash revise at the end.

With English and Literature we will cover some of the course using the teaching assistant weekly sessions and by watching teaching videos we find on YouTube. Here we just can’t realistically cover all the required reading content in the time left, so we intend to cover and revise just part of the course (and hope we get reasonably lucky in the exam).

The other factor is the actual exams. School haven’t been able to organise a mock exam for Hawklad, so he won’t have sat any practice exams at all before these main ones. In addition, with the time constraints it’s unlikely we will be able to spend too much time practicing exam questions at home. That is just so not ideal. The knock on effect of no exam practice is that we haven’t been able to test whether Hawklad will be able to write his own answers, or whether he needs to type them or if he needs a scribe. All we can do is have a stab at guessing which way will suit him best and then see who it goes in the first exam. If it doesn’t work out then we will have to switch approach for the second exam.

As Hawklad says ….. what could possibly go wrong ……

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San Siro

I guess the rainbow season has started.

“Ok Dad, if I somehow manage to pass every exam then I think that probably means we should do something special to mark that.”

Absolutely and actually why should it be just dependent on the outcome of some random exams whose outcomes can be far reaching. Exams that are such a poor reflections of real person, their effort, the struggles they overcome, their character, just how amazing they are and just how much they have to offer.

So my mind wandered to what that prize could be.

And once again I was so far away from the answer.

“If I do that then can you look into getting me to Milan. Going to see Inter play at the San Siro. I don’t know how you would get me there, maybe we could try to get there using Switzerland as the base.”

Time to get the thinking hat on but I do know that our old Swiss base has direct trains to Milan each day. How cool would that be for Hawklad.

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20

Sometimes you need to get out to breathe, take stock, maybe even forget a few things for a while.

In less than 2 months Hawklad’s final school exams begin. I kinda gave one of those Paddington Bear penetrating LOOKS to someone from his school when they referred to Hawklad having an easier exam ride than many other pupils.

Some won’t see a problem with what comes next and what do I know anyway.…

When the exams start, Hawklad will have 20 exams and one video assessment to complete in just under 4 weeks.

TWENTY……

And that’s an EASIER ride. Doesn’t seem very easy to Hawklad.