Helena is determined to go to high school and to be able to do this we are practicing- this was her idea. I looked up a local school’s bell times and an approximate kind of subject list. The bell times were nothing like what I remembered from all those eons ago when I was at high school.

• 8:45 first period – I chose English
• 9:50 art
• 10:50 what in the 80s we called form class…
• 11:10 playtime
• 11:35 maths
• 12:35 computer time
• 1:35 lunch
• 2:15 what I called science/social history…
• 3:15 home

I chose the subjects based on my laziness! The prep took very little time, or was it that they were the things I’d been thinking about without thinking I was. I’ve always hated the idea of detailed planning.

We are doing a novel study about Lord of the flies. I love this book. I know people have problems about the idea of that is how the kids would behave and how some boys who actually got stranded on an island didn’t behave as they did in Lord of the flies so I started with context. When the book was written and what schools were like, the class system in the UK and what William Golding was like. I found someone’s high school unit and stole some of the questions. Fun.

I used someone else’s lesson plan for art. We had been to the Hundertwasser gallery in Whangarei- so so awesome, and I knew she’d like the idea of a choose your path adventure idea and having some, but not all control. It went well. Neither of us got stressed!!

Maths was even good!. My Dad started doing some algebra with her but aimed a little high. I gave her some definitions then found some algebra she thought was easy, she got the kind of confused that you get when you think you can’t have the answer because it was too easy.

Then I showed her how to file things on a computer- she likes a good bit of order…. and followed it up by typing, which she agrees is a necessary skill.

The weirdest winging it lesson was because our local museum is having an exhibition about learning from nature, aka dead things. We talked about that was how early naturalists studied the world, Darwin for instance. Then did a De Bono 6 hats analysis and discussion, a useful thinking tool and some thing other kids have probably come across.

I felt that everything went so well, it wasn’t hard, it was interesting and H was cooperative… Even having my winging it style planning and only having one student we still didn’t finish anything. The bells were both too soon and a relief. What Helena said was that she liked not having to choose, to just be told what to think about. I get that. We are both keen to try again.