In almost 18 years of home educating, I've had a lot of moderators.
When we lived in Scotland, and we home educated for a few months, we were planning to leave, so we didn't bother with any of their system. We started 2006 home educating Willow in class 1 in a Steiner method with a curriculum from a Queensland Steiner school, with the idea that this would be helpful for returning to Australian schooling by 2007. April 2006 we made our way to London, and from there we headed to Paris where we spent two months life learning and using our Steiner curriculum, until we returned to Adelaide mid 2006. The remainder of 2006 saw us home educating and looking at schools for Willow.
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| Willow working on a drawing in Musee d'Orsay |
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Gabriel working on a drawing too |
Our first moderator was called Sally, and she ran the home education department in Adelaide, and she was lovely. She was an ex-homeschooler and she made it quite clear that the department was not on my side and was not there to support me. She did supply a few ideas for contacts, but again it was made clear that this was not her primary role. Her role was to assess my ability to provide an education.
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| Vaccswim in Glenelg |
For our approximately five years home educating in Adelaide, I became accustomed to writing up my notes on our experiences, and reviewing our year, and reading the learning outcomes and connecting our curriculum to the learning outcomes. I grew to find the experience quite useful and it helped me a lot to understand the progress my children were making over the year.
Every year in Adelaide, we had a different moderator who was generally an ex-principal with no interest in home education, who the department was "retiring". For six months they would cause havoc in the community and then they would work out how home education worked. Generally we were lucky to have our review in the second half of the year. Plus Damien and I had the advantage of knowing how to work the system. By our final year in Adelaide, after a few dramas, including discussing the dramas the Department of education were creating with the education minister, we were assigned a moderator who was to be our new permanent moderator. By then, after five different moderators, we were off to Perth.
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| Arden working on geometry. |
In Perth, in total, over approximately 12 years we've had three different moderators. Our first was very supportive and indicated that that was part of her role, which was quite a foreign idea to me. The longer we got to know her, the more we enjoyed her visits, and the better she understood our family's learning style and goals. During our time with her as moderator we shifted from having learning outcomes to report on, to having the WA national curriculum to report on. (I was less than impressed with this, when we lived in the UK the media was constantly reporting on how the national curriculum was failing our children, and it was one of the main reasons we decided to send Willow to the Glasgow Steiner school.)
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| Willow busking with Irving hanging out on his balance bike. |
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| At an exhibition of historic pianos |
Our next moderator, was a mixed bag, sometimes he would be ok, and other times he was trying to catch me out, which made the experience somewhat unpleasant. It was like I was misbehaving in school and he knew it!, and if he just saw me it the right moment or time he could reprimand me. After two years of having him as our moderator, I sent him our notes, a week in advance, and this did help quite a lot. Sadly I never really found a rapport like our first moderator here.
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| Arden working on some art. |
Our current moderator came with a reputation for being difficult, so I made a few amendments to how I wrote up my report. Instead of hand writing I typed it, and for each learning area bar english and maths, I added either a photo or screen shot as evidence of progress. This seemed to make all the difference, and our first meeting with her was a pleasure, and a huge improvement on our last moderator!
