ARTICLE
Wormed out
by Karen Luckhurst
Daily Telegraph, 4th February 2006, Page 12
Knowledge is power to home educator Karen Luckhurst.
Previous: What if the inspector calls? Next: Sink or swim
The door crashes back on its hinges. Sam, my four-year-old son, enters, very pleased with himself. He is holding a worm, which at first glance appears to be two feet long. I resist the urge to scream. One of the most difficult things about having small children, I find, is not showing fear about the things that would normally make you bolt. If you do so, you hand them power.
We return the worm to the garden and inspect it through a magnifying glass. I try to find something meaningful to say. I think they have something called a saddle but I'm not sure what relevance this has, or whether it exists.
"Let's find some other insects to look at," says my husband, who seems to be under the impression that anything neither feather nor fur constitutes an insect. I feel the urge to score a point. "I think you'll find," I sneer, "that worms are not insects."
"What are they then?" he says sweetly. I hadn't thought this far ahead. I rack my brain for a distant memory of a biology class dissection. Suddenly it comes: "They're invertebrates," I shout triumphantly.
"And they are?"
"Things with no skeletons."
"So what's an insect then?" Now he's being facetious, but Sam and two-year-old Zena are hooked on every word. Even the baby has ceased banging his saucepan lid. "Something with six legs."
"Spiders don't have six legs," he says.
"That's because spiders are not insects."
"What are..."
But I am already heading indoors for the encyclopedia. This is the problem with home education - it exposes pitiful gaps in what should surely be fundamental knowledge. I have discovered I have few answers to the why-is-the-sea-salty questions children ask. When I was a child, the stock adult answer was: "Because that's the way it is." This is a very tempting fall-back option but, since taking up home education, I feel duty bound to come up with something constructive to say. Half an hour later I return.
"An insect has three body sections, an exoskeleton, jointed legs and compound eyes," I intone. "Whereas spiders have two body segments and eight legs, and may share a distant ancestry with crabs and scorpions."
I can sense I have lost my audience, but struggle on: "There are 2,200 species of earthworm, ranging from an inch to 10ft long. One Philippine species is vivid blue," I add, brightly.
But husband and children have moved on to a noisy game of football - today's science and nature window having apparently disappeared. I go for base instincts: "And they eat the soil and poo it out making it lovely and soft for mummy's plants," I yell, to the astonishment of the neighbours.
Not to waste my new-found knowledge, I turn to address the baby, just in time to see the tail end of a worm disappearing into his mouth. The urge to scream comes over me again. This time I go with it.