I have this constant dilema with myself and education.

I don’t like the education system – it doesn’t work for me. I can’t stand sitting around being expected to be engaged in stuff for such a long period of time. Over days. Weeks. Years.

What’s worked for me in the end is to find my own path. Learning as I go. Through the internet. Through the occasional course, meetup or conference. Through reading books.  And, perhaps most importantly, through trial and error.

And I’m getting there.  I’ve discovered things along the way that have deeply interested and inspired me.  And I’m doing things because I can and want to.  Not because I have qualifications of x, y and z.

To Homeschool, or not to Homeschool

I mulled for ages about homeschooling my boys. I never did.  Opted for choosing to send them to a small private ‘child led’ school.  Long story cut very short – I should have spent my money elsewhere.

When it came time for my boys to go to ‘normal’ school, I was nervous and full of fear, though remained positive for their sake. The funny thing is I’ve actually been somewhat surprised at how well they’ve done.  The past 1.5 years has done them wonders.  Their confidence has grown. Aaron’s cleverness shines. Within a couple of months he went from barely interested in reading to reading loads.  He’s now working his way through the Harry Potter books which is freaking him out a bit And his math skillz are awesome…a geek in the making perhaps.

Ben has gone from just being able to read and write his own name, suffering from huge amount of shyness and lack of confidence, to being proud, writing (messy, but at least writing!) and is now reading The Diary of The Wimpy Kid series.  He’s working himself up to the top half of the class, rather than being at the bottom where he was at the beginning.

I can’t help but think that if I were homeschooling them, that I couldn’t have gotten them to this stage myself.  Perhaps with a bit of support…who knows, perhaps I’m doing myself a disservice.

Questioning

Of course, I’m not really here to brag about their achievements. I’m questioning things.

For example, the really simple things at school appear to make such a difference.  Those different colour reading levels give them so much motivation. As do stickers. And being star of the week. And having those precious 15 minutes golden time at the end of the week.

It’s great that these techniques work, and perhaps this is the best way to get kids to learn and do stuff in a school environment, but is it the best way for the child to learn in the long run?  Maybe, maybe not.

I think back to what puts me off the school system, which is the inflexibility, standardization and tests.  My boys haven’t reached the tests stage yet.  I am not really sure when they do and am trying not to think about it – it appears these things change constantly that I can no longer be bothered to keep up.

Will things change then? The idea of them studying hard with the focus being on passing a test, it just feels wrong.

Will the fact that my son would love to play more football make me rethink all of this over again? What’s better for a child – spending that extra time learning more about something they appear to love, or focusing on passing that test.

I really struggle with this.

What’s in my heart?

And of course, it doesn’t help me when deep in my heart I just don’t value degrees (in general) as an entry to a better job.  And in 10 years time when my eldest will be 18 and perhaps considering going to university, the job market will probably be even tougher.

My heart tells me to educate these kids myself.

Seeing how Penelope Trunk runs her startup life and homeschools her kids makes me believe it is achievable too.  For example, she brings her son on business/conference trips. He is learning business skills. They learn through her. They put some stuff into action, she encourages it.

My boys would love that, they love my STC monsters are curious about what I do and often help me stuff envelopes and stamp our brand on it.  They are always trying to come up with business ideas (often ones similar to mine!), to make that bit of money to buy toys or a house with a big garden and swimming pool and a horse and a dog and a cat and a Camaro…

Schools don’t teach…

Schools can never teach these kind of things.  The kind of things that I want them to be teaching will probably never happen, like…

• When it comes to technology – I want my kids to build stuff. Invent. Code. Design.
• I want them to learn about business. About making a life for themselves and not relying on having a proper job.
• I want them to do creative stuff every day.
• I’m really not fussed about fancy math or reading skills.  If they can read and write and practice regularly, this feels good enough for me.  I didn’t read much until my early twenties.  There wasn’t anything that made me want to read, but that changed once I started to develop interests.  I now can’t get enough books or time to read or learn.
• More sports please – twice a week is not enough
• Cooking! Food! This is so crucial for everyone.  I really wish I knew the basics of cooking when I left home.

The Sherry School

So I struggle. They like school and seem to be happy right now. This makes it more of a dilema.

But I also bet they would be happy creating their own school agenda full of sports, cooking, business, making stuff, reading, etc… and given the choice, I think they would opt for The Sherry School.

And god, where would I find the time to do it? Hah!

And my husband probably disagrees, purely to keep him from going insane

It’s Sunday night (or Monday very early, jetlag!) and I’ve been back from my Workliday a couple of days now.

How did it go?

Mostly good as I didn’t do too much work at all.

Was travelling with the (3) kids exhausting?

Yes. I’m now trying to figure out how to get that relaxing holiday that my husband and I need!  The hardest part was my youngest, 11 months, who was and seems to have grown even more attached to me.  It felt like he was constantly glued to me, probably because he was!

Was I in a different mind set?

Yes. I didn’t think too much about the day to day stuff that needed doing.  I was managing a couple of small testing projects. Ensuring new subscriptions of The Testing Planet were going smoothly. And attending to some @testingclub marketing type activities that we do.  It was all mostly managed via email which was handy and we had constant access via my iPad, so that worked out ok.  The positive thing for me was the ability to think about things a bit more deeply.  It’s a bit of a time of reflection as it is just a short time after our first training event and conference/TestBash via Ministry of Testing.  It’s important to reflect on these things, take a step back and see where we can go next.

I didn’t really have much time to read.  But I did do some writing.  A few blog posts here and some more personal/internal stuff.  Good stuff.

The holiday itself was great, mostly about catching up and meeting family members – it’s all too easy to let the years roll by without seeing important family members.

Did I only work when nothing else was planned?

95% of the time.  There were a couple of occassions where I was responding to important emails whilst I was out and about on excursions, but mostly it was all done in the evenings, spending around 30 minutes catching up on emails or whilst my husband was driving

It was definitely more of a holiday than a work time.  We travelled over 4,500 miles just within the US in a period of just under 4 weeks.  It was a pretty busy time, always something to do or be attending to.  It’s really nice to be back, it still feels a bit weird, but I love being back ‘at work’.  The work I do for @testingclub really motivates me and lifts me up.  Looking after kids full time has always been a challenge for me…I’m constantly trying to find the right balance between work and family life.

Inbox Chaos

One thing became more obvious, my email inbox gets a load of cr*p.  Not checking emails as frequently and being in a different timezone made this even more apparent.  I really need to filter, sort and unsubscribe to lots of stuff!

It’s something I would like to do more of and should get easier as my youngest one grows up a bit!

My work and home life very much overlaps. I do what I need to do to get things done.

Sometimes this means working late. Sometimes it means having a lie in. Sometimes stress is included too – “like argghh, I’m supposed to be looking after the kids, but all this stuff is happening around me!”

When my kids are on school holidays I usually take time off with them, but I usually end up working part of it, mostly the evenings.  So in some sense I’ve been doing worklidays for quite a while.

But now is my first chance at a proper workliday in America, a holiday mixed with a bit of work.  Some make thing I’m crazy to do this, but there are advantages.

• Travelling with kids is exhausting – we’ve opted to take a longer holiday to get over the long travel hours.  This is particularly tiring with Codie, long flights or car rides are hardest on him.  Lots to accomodate.
• We feel we can stay away that bit longer – instead of going for a couple of weeks, we’ll be away for a month.  Most people can’t afford to do that.
• I’m in a different mindset – I’ll be aiming to do more writing over these weeks, rather than day to day tasks that often consume me entirely.
• It’s empowering – I love the fact that I can work from anywhere.  I hope this will continue.
• I will only work when nothing else is planned, when there is downtime and I am not sure what to do with myself! Like right now. My boys are out exploring in the woods.  They just found a small snake, have caught it and are now trying to find food for it.  And unfortunately Codie has been unwell and my husband has taken him to get checked over, just to be on the safe side of things.  All seems ok.

And me? I’m catching up on a few emails. Writing this blog post. And feeling very happy about how our TestBash went on Friday.  More on that soon!

This whole topic of juggling babies with modern day life has resurfaced itself for me.  Obviously it is not a coincidence, it’s all to do with Sherry #3.

And with a new baby I think again about how I can get out and involved with events.  It’s always a tricky one, that is never straightforward and often stressful, at least for the mother involved

With my two previous boys I was never really in the position or mindframe to take them to events with me.  At that stage I wasn’t really participating in events and didn’t have the confidence to take them out with me, but that was 6/7 years ago now.  Things have changed since then where I have been much more active in organising and attending web and software testing related events for the past 5 years or so.

Now that I am juggling young baby-ness again, it has made me think about all the challenges that are involved. And also how much more willing and confident I am to just ask and/or bring a baby or kid along to an event.  This is not something I would have done in the past and probably not something most mothers would do.

I think, as a community, we should be encouraging women/families more.  Of course, this includes men wanting to bring kids along too, women is just a generalisation.  It by no way means that events would get overtaken by children, I think most parents wouldn’t let this happen

The reality is often that event organisers don’t actually mind having kids/babies around, as long as they don’t ruin the event for others, but this is rarely communicated.

I now ask the organisers of events if it is ok to come along with my baby.  No one has said no to me yet, but should I have to ask?

So, I thought why not have a sign showing an event is ‘kid friendly’?  Much like the Disabled sign we are all so familiar with. Or like a more recent ‘Breastfeeding Friendly’ sign that many public locations are promoting?

Would this encourage more women to come along to events?

This has wound me up for a while.

P&G’s campaign this year state that they are the proud sponsors of mums.

Eh, hem. Excuse me. You don’t sponsor me.

And am sure you don’t sponsor millions of other mums, surely you need our permission?  What are you giving them if you are? The privilege to buy your products? So why claim that you do?  What makes you think you can speak for me and all the other mums?

I wouldn’t dare speak for all the mums in the world/UK., like P&G does, but I feel offended and please leave me alone.

There’s no shortage of times where I wished I had more tangible memories from the past.  I barely have any photos of me or my family growing up. Videos are non-existent.  On the very rare occasion I come across an old photo, though now this is more likely to happen when someone tags me on Facebook rather than discovering a hidden stash of photos in one of my family’s houses scattered across the globe.

I grew up living in several different countries. My dad was Irish. My mum is Colombian.  In a non internet age this basically meant along the way our tangible memories were lost.  This makes me sad, especially as I get older it gets more apparent how easy it is to forget.  And of course when people leave us unexpectedly we yearn more for proof of those memories.

The physical objects are so important. Written words. Documents. Photos. Videos… Yet in present day it is easy to dismiss them as irrelevant. Life is too busy to capture, log and organise the now.

5 weeks ago I gave birth to my 3rd son.  It has sent me into a renewed motivation to capture those young family years.  I got quite emotional looking back at the family photo albums I have created online – smiling at the memories I had so easily forgotten about.  Life got in the way of me consistently updating these photos in the past year or so.  I now have regrets about it.  I wish I had done more.

And now that I dwell upon it. I wish I had done more than take photos. Not for my sake, but more for something to leave behind to the kids.

For me, Flickr has been great.  I’ve used it mostly for photos.  I have now started using their video functionality.  My next thing is to write more – this could also be easily incorporated into Flickr.

Flickr is embedded into my lifestyle, a habit that is already there.  It doesn’t feel like work maintaining it (whereas a blog does all too often feel like a chore).  

However, I do often wonder what would be the best thing for my family in the future.  I currently have all content open.  Will my boys hate me for it in the future? Will they *force* me to remove or make it private? Will Flickr even be here in 10, 20, 30 years time?

All important things to think about.

Google play on this topic in their recent TV ad.

We’re going on a long holiday soon.  Not quite sure how long it will last at this stage…however it does mean that we are ‘unschooling‘ our two wonderful boys – currently aged 5 & 6.

Aaron (our 6 year old) is starting to read and write.  Ben still has a way to go, he can write his own name on his own and is happy to write other words with help.

We were really keen to log our experiences of our travel and are very conscious that it is a family experience, so it only makes sense that everyone participates!  Of course, with kids we have to think about their capabilities.

Our Jolly Wicked website is named after a term our boys used to describe things as very cool.  We think our trip will be jolly wicked too.  And all the more wicked with our boys logging their view of the world.

We opted to use Tumblr because it is very user friendly and astonishingly easy for the kids to post content through an iPhone, this is because:

• there is a Tumblr iPhone app
• the iPhone takes pictures and videos
• the Tumblr iPhone app can easily use pictures and videos for sources of content
• nice graphics make it easy for the kids to understand what they are doing
• we have chosen a very visual template to encourage the use of photos and videos (at least initially) for the boys
• our kids say some nice and funny things sometimes, so Tumblr’s quote feature comes in handy and gives our boys the option to write something short

It is experimental.  It is educational.  And in years to come it will be a great resource to look back on.  We’ve all had a go at posting something and it has been successful so far.

In the future, when my boys turn 18, they can tell their future employer/university/clients that they have been blogging for 12/13 years

I’ve long had frustration with how our capitalist system works.  Especially since having kids.  Things get damn expensive.

This post kind of focuses of the children/family angle, but will hopefully show how our society is driven to spend and we increasingly feel tied down because of what we feel we need to commit to.

Perhaps turn away from the following figures if you plan to have kids and want to maintain both parents working.

So if the ‘mother’ plans to go back to work full time then kids have to have full time care.  In the UK families are not as close to each other as other countries, so there is a natural reliance  on child care.  This usually comes in the form of a nursery or childminder.

A quick search on Brighton Nurseries will show a common price of £40 per day per child at a nursery.  Some are a bit less, others easily go up to £50 per day.

So if you have one child and work full time then that’s 5 days per week for 52 weeks per year.  Yes there will be holidays in between, but to keep your childs place often you are pressurised into paying for their attendance even if they are not there.  For calculation purposes and to show I am not trying to be excessive we could calculate this to be based on 48 weeks per year.

So, £200 per week (£40 per day) x 48 weeks = £9600.

£9600 is after tax.  So ‘the mother’ would have to earn around £12,000 per year before they can start paying themselves.

Of course it’s worse if you have two children under the age of 5.  It could be double that figure (£24,000).  Our government does support working families financially with child care, but this is only when the child turns 3 – not quite quick enough – (especially when they encourage mothers to get back to work within a year).

So if you did have 2 kids (like I do) £24,000 is a lot of money to find every year – just to cover the costs of childcare.  Even if it was a few thousand less, it’s still a lot of money!  Many parents obviously opt out, or choose to work part time.  Putting their career on hold and then feeling like they can’t (or don’t want to) get back on the ladder once their kids start school full time.

It’s also very stressful. Getting kids ready early in the morning. Picking them up when they are tired.  The sadness of not spending as much time as you would like with them…it just doesn’t feel right, not to me anyways.

The bigger point is that whilst this example is very much a reflection of my experience and situation – the pressure to keep working and make money is huge.

• If you commute a fair chunk of your wages will go on travel.
• If you don’t commute you probably get paid less or you can achieve the same salary by living in a prime area (and therefore probably having a bigger mortgage to pay).
• If you work you probably spend a lot more on eating out at lunch time (unless you are very organised!)
• If you work full time and have a family you probably don’t spend nearly as much quality time with them as you would like. And many have the need for a second family car. And of course child care costs!
• etc, etc, etc

I could go on, but the point is that it is very expensive to be a ‘full time worker’.

If you didn’t have to work ‘as much’ many of the costs could be significantly reduced. It’s easy to save a bit of money here and there.  The extra time could be used to do those things that you really want to or should do. I’d be very surprised if people’s lives overall would not improve.

There is a report recommending a 21 hour working week by the New Economic Foundation.

I know that I’m not the only one who feels our modern, western, capitalist society needs to change to be more human, social and community focused.

I was chatting to a mum today about life as working mother.  What she use to do, what she’d like to do. What I do, which took a wee while to explain

She described what I do as similar to the child led education approach that our boys experience at Lewes New School.  Which is so true.

I follow my interests. Do projects according to my interests. Have the opportunity to decide how to do it. Educate myself as I go along.

What I’m doing now is completely different to what I was doing 10, 5, 3, 2 and 1 year ago.  But I am where I am because of my experience and desire to learn at every point.  But perhaps more importantly, the past 7 years or so I have been in control of what I want to learn and do. (ie. I don’t have a boss!)

It’s not all a success.  Some things work out better than others.  But the reason I believe I am loving what I am doing is because I get to choose what I want to do.  Once I’m bored I move on or change my approach.

People are no where nearly as effective  or inspiring when they are bored.  Boredom is a form of torture that no one should have to go through.

Of course, not everyone is the same as me.  But modern life appears to pin you down to your past. Getting a new career or changing industry is so difficult.  At every step of the way there are people questioning you and your ability – not trying to be helpful or encouraging change.

Lets see what I will be doing in a couple years time.

Next week my boys start a new year at Lewes New School.

I’m excited because it marks a big change for moi.

My eldest is soon to be a whooping 6 years old.  That means it has been around 6.5 years since I felt the loving yet physically difficult pregnancy that really changes everything.

It’s also been 6.5 years of chaos and child juggling, shedding out way too much money on child care and working too late to only regret it in the morning when it’s just not possible to have a lie in.

The cost of being a parent!

More importantly it has been 6.5 years of figuring out who I am and what I want to do.  I feel I am getting there now, despite the difficulty that family life often brings with trying to balance a business.

However, it all changes next week.  Both my boys will be in full time school.  It leaves me with lots (more)  time to focus on more business-y stuff without feeling guilty.  That extra time is not yet a full working day as most people know it.  It is still just school hours.  But that makes me happy and that’s what I want.

What am I going to do with all the extra time?  Party anyone?

So expect more from Schux. Flash Mob Testing. Software Testing Club. Lewes Werks. (Revamp and re-focus of) Project Brighton. And more…!

(I don’t make it easy for myself, do I?)