01 Jun 2008, 1:12 am
After holding off for as long as possible to see what the correspondence school director had to say about his board of inspectors/ministry contact's activities on our behalf, but who when the papa phoned him had forgotten that he was supposed to have some indication by friday, and had nothing to add, I phoned the Education Advisor.
I confirmed for the afternoon of the 10 June, but requested that it start half an hour later because unless get up at 7 am to get the morning bus, can not be there before 14.00. Also warned him that we will have to leave at 16.30 at the latest, to be sure of getting the last but one bus back to our village. I do not intend to rely on the last one.
He accepted this, saying that he would just have to make do with the time this would leave us. He had told the papa that the tests would be for 3-4 hours. It's funny that ludicrously minimal public transport has come to our aid in reducing this time to 2 and a half hours!
He said the tests were usually "child on their own with the inspector" I declared this out of the question. After initially only allowing that I could of course stay in the building while my son did them, he apparently accepted this too. ( if he tries to send me out of the room he will have to throw me out bodily). He would not back down about the tests, though he began calling them "a few questions"! 
I suggested bringing along a book in english for him to test my son on english reading, but he wasn't interested, despite the fact that, since 2006 apparently, bilingualism has been legally taken into account, ( which is the result of the german mother's struggle to overturn the judgement which put her in prison) as acceptable reason for delay in french language acquisition. So I'm going to take a book along anyway.
If we hear nothing useful from the corr school director before the visit I will not hesitate to use the idea given me by a homeschooling mother last week, which is to explain that actually the course only represents a small part of our son's instruction, the french "backbone" which his father, being on the road so much, could not provide, and the rest is in english, which it is really, reading, internet games, talking about all kinds of subjects with me, etc.
Thus will no longer have to lie about how much time we spend on the course, which is supposed to be at least 5 hours a day, whereas we only spend a little over an hour. Not having to lie will be good. And also represents the first step to liberating ourselves from dependence on the correspondence course in the future. As the school have been no help to us at all so far in proving to the inspection that their course provides a full schooling I see no reason to protect their reputation for it, when in fact it is clear that it doesn't count.
So... just 10 days to go!
The advisor said that he will not have time to correct/mark/"score" the tests while we are there, so will not know how my son has done for a few days after that.
