Basket cases

Round, with integral handles

This was the fulfilment of a long-held dream: in order to enable my daughter to learn to make baskets from willow wands, I had to join in too.

She has always been attracted to weaving and basketry and taken every opportunity a child could take to learn.  But I had to wait for her to grow taller than me before enrolling her on an adult course: this week-end, at a month shy of 14, she joined me, a friend and three other adults on a course at Woodchurch, Kent, with basketmaker Alan Sage.

So even I, who am no good at all at crafts, made a basket.  After starting us off, the ever-patient and generous Alan guided us through the stages of making the simplest shape of basket, round, which nevertheless seemed to offer an endless combination of possibilities.  I chose a large onion shape with integral handles while others made straight ones with bow handles.  My daughter embarked on a large, straight-sided handle-less version to act as her new waste-paper bin.

The task was not without its challenges.  Even once the basics were explained and demonstrated, the possibilities for error seemed multitudinous.  I only had to start chatting to someone for a weave to go wrong, and an agonised call would go up for help from Alan.  I don’t think I was alone but I may have been the one who needed the most support.  My onion shape needed to lean outwards before tilting in again, and at one stage my early effort leaned out so much I thought it had lost the plot entirely.  Alan guided the shape back in, I wove furiously and the result is surprisingly attractive.  In two days we’ve learned a lot and taken home two baskets to boot.

The challenge now is to remember how we did it and try again, with willow from our own woodland.  I will buy some books and rely on my daughter’s excellent memory to get going  as soon as possible.  With its combination of pure logic and three-D visuals, basketmaking is curiously addictive.

Drawing arm gets Christmas boost

Look, no rubber:  the world’s most incompetent artist has drawn a bird.

The inspiration – and the skill – for this feat came straight out of a book called Draw 50 Animals by Lee J. Ames.  I have purchased this book for countless children this Christmas and, having successfully used it to produce a tortoise, decided we needed one for the family.  Now my daughter has drawn a horse, my son a wolf and I this creature resembling a bluetit.  It feels like a small seasonal miracle.

I have always mourned my total inability to draw.  As a child, how many pages did I fill with rubbish while others created perfect, life-like pictures, until I finally got the message?  I have zilch artistic flair and just have to accept it.  And while it’s tempting to dismiss such skill as being of no value in later life, the truth is that many jobs depend on the possession of a good eye, floristry and hairdressing to name but two.

My daughter discovered this young when her dissatisfaction with the way I arranged her hair led her to take over this responsibility from her earliest school days.  I have barely been allowed near her locks since she was five.

True, I have always been able to “draw pictures” with words and express my feelings for landscape in poetry.  But his cuts little ice with a child who wants her mother to draw her a duck, as I was once – only once – requested to do.  The duck, or let’s call it a head with a wing and a couple of legs, went the way of the hair and said child took over the task herself, far better ducks emerging repeatedly from her more inspired hand.

Now Lee J. Ames has breathed new life into the old drawing arm.  As I understand this, you start with a circle here and an oval there and build up with extra lines, and assuming the original shapes were placed correctly, there on the page is a recognisable bird.  So stand by National Gallery, here I come.  Or maybe I’ll just start saving credit-crunch money and cut hair.

Education of extremes

Get this term: “multiple exceptionalities”.  Try  to remember it long enough to research it on the internet, and you will find it refers to people who are gifted and disabled at the same time.  In the context of underachieving children, the expression describes intellectual gifts that are masked by specific disabilities, or difficulties which a child uses his or her extra abilities to overcome.

Either way, neither the disability nor the gift is correctly targeted by the school.  This mean that a bright child, assessed as average or below average, can become extremely frustrated.

Perhaps I should count myself lucky that in our case this frustration has spilled over into challenging behaviour, so that we have all been forced to ask ourselves why an obviously clever child is consistently underperforming.  Hard as they have been to live with, the moodiness, lack of co-operation and propensity to needle others might be interpreted as a healthy cry for help.

Papers on the subject of multiple (or dual) exceptionalities describe cases where a physical disability, like poor sight or hearing, is masked by a child’s superior ability to cope.  They also say the situation can be far more subtle than that: high ability coupled with behavioural problems, or with poor motor skills that make it hard to write.  Children displaying these often get no help because even when they are spotted, they are impossible to pigeonhole.  In today’s UK educational parlance, they belong to the “gifted and talented” and to the “special needs”.

Look more closely at the exceptionalities literature and you might even find yourself described somewhere.  People may argue that the term applies to “too small a population to merit concern”.  But the more I read, the more I think it describes vast numbers of us who experienced problems at school.

Our compulsory western school system, of which we should be so proud, has failed us by becoming a universal machine that cannot accomodate the extremes.  In its on-size-fits-all environment, the task of addressing some children’s problems while encouraging their extra skills can be lost in the scramble for league-table ratings.  Officially sanctioned efforts to remedy this, in the form of specialist help, have to be fought for instead of being available as of right.

But children just do not come neatly trussed and packaged, waiting only for a school to anoint them with the balm of standard education in order to grow and flourish.  They develop in fits and starts and even those with no serious problems at home may display extremes of ability and behaviour.  There is no better argument than this for treating them as what they are: individuals.