A typical homeschool lesson, with Bob Dylan

When I tell people that my children don't go to school, they often ask, 'so do you do lessons with them?' and I say something like, 'well, it doesn't exactly work like that...'

People sometimes ask them, 'What's your favourite subject?' and they just get confused, blank looks in return. We don't do subjects either.

Those people then go away, scratching their heads, thinking to themselves (or sometimes asking straight out) 'so how do your children learn anything?'

So, for those people who wonder what a typical homeschooling lesson is like, I'll give you an example from today. Let's call it 'English Literature' - that's a proper subject they teach in proper schools, isn't it...

We were driving down the road, on our way to the seaside, to watch the sunset. A tape was playing on the car stereo. I'm probably one of the only people who still uses casettes, since the cd player stopped working. On the plus side, it means that my children are probably among the few of their generation who know what a casette is and how it works. I taught them that in 'History' and also in 'Science'. On the minus side, I've only got about five tapes, which I recorded about thirty years ago. A couple of mix tapes, recorded off the radio, a Bob Dylan compilation and a couple of others. So we've been listening to the Bob Dylan tape mostly, for about the last year or two, while I keep a lookout for a tape recorder, so I can make some more tapes to listen to in the car.

There's this one song, 'Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts', which tells a complex story of love, loyalty, cunning, deception, greed and loss - against the backdrop of a illicit gambling den/cabaret saloon... It's a long song with a cast of several characters and a very elaborate plot. So elaborate in fact, that it took me about twenty years until I really understood exactly what's going on in the story.

My ten year old daughter is someone who listens to the words of songs. Not everyone does that, but she really does - and thinks about them too. So when this song came on, as it always does, I told her it's got such a complicated plot, it took me years to understand it. She asked me to tell her the story, so I did, as well as I could - in simplified form - describing the various characters, their relationship to each other, what they were doing there, what happened on various levels. She had a bit of a hard time working out if the Jack of Hearts himself is supposed to be good or bad, because really, he's both. There is also the hard to grasp idea that when Rosemary kills her husband, Big Jim, it's actually a selfless act of compassion. Like I say, it's a complicated story to fit into a song. Almost Shakespearean, I would say.

After we'd discussed the story a bit, I switched the tape back on and we listened to the song again. She seemed to understand it better now. After the song had finished, she didn't speak for a while, thinking about it and then asked 'why did she say about the coat of paint?'

There's these two lines in the song, where Lily says to Jack:
'Be careful not to touch the wall, there's a brand new coat of paint
It's good to see you're still alive, you're looking like a saint.'

Now, it's funny that she should ask that, because even after I'd worked out most of what's going on in the rest of the song, I could never understand those lines either. I just figured that Bob put it in because he was being random and wanted something to rhyme with saint. But then we got to thinking about it, looking at the lines in the context of the story and came to understand exactly why she said that to him. It made perfect sense.

It was a good lesson. We arrived at the seaside just before sunset, just in time for the swimming lesson. They're good swimmers, my kids. Nobody ever really taught them, but somehow they figured it out.

Click on the picture above to hear the song (acoustic out-take version)

Big Upvote for anyone who can say why Lily mentioned the paint on the wall!

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