Love in a Time of Homeschooling

by Laura Brodie

  Julia would admire Mrs. Larson for years to come, returning to her classroom to share birthday cupcakes. In fact, Julia was fond of most of her teachers, in and out of school. Once, in the middle of an afternoon “creative movement” class, when her dance teacher began gesticulating with lovely floating fingers, Julia walked over, took hold of one of the fluttering hands, and kissed it.

  “Thank you, Julia.” The teacher patted her hair, and then continued with her instructions for the group. I looked at my five-year-old daughter and saw that she was not listening to anything the teacher said. She was only watching those floating hands, only wanting to kiss them. Meanwhile, in kindergarten, Mrs. Larson began to have a problem that would often recur in the coming years. She began to lose Julia.

  “I lose her on the playground,” she sighed. “When it’s time to go inside and the children line up, Julia isn’t there.” Each time, an adult would be sent to perform a playground search. Was Julia sitting in the shaded nooks beneath the wooden walkways? Had she wandered to the trees at the farthest acre of the baseball field?

  Julia was not a “runner,” a term I learned from a college friend who had become a first-grade teacher. Runners, she explained, are children who exit the building and hit the road. They might walk home or wander the neighborhood, but either way, they are a teacher’s worst nightmare.

  Julia never ran away from elementary school; she just didn’t stick with the group. On the way to the cafeteria she would lag behind in the hallway, stopping to examine bulletin boards or wandering into the library to read a book, so that her class arrived at lunch with Julia nowhere in sight.

  “I was never hiding,” she would declare years later. “They might lose me, but I was never trying to lose them. On the playground I just liked to stand behind the trees near the garden and arrange stones and bark and twigs in the trunks’ nooks and crannies. But the other kids would take them, so then I crawled under the playscape, where there were pieces of broken asphalt that looked like moonstones—all white with gray and black. I liked to gather them up and bury them, so no one would find them.”

  Julia’s instinctive avoidance of the group created big problems on her first-grade field trip. Three classes were visiting the Natural Bridge, a vast stone arch 215 feet tall, carved by a meandering stream fifteen miles south of our town. The Bridge is hailed as one of Virginia’s natural wonders, surveyed by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and owned today by a corporation that sells expensive admission tickets in a massive gift shop.

  Earlier in the day, the first-graders had toured the nearby underground caverns, and after lunch they had visited the bridge. They were unpacking snacks at a cluster of outdoor tables when the teachers noticed that Julia was missing. Parent chaperones were dispersed to track her down, a worrisome prospect when surrounded by miles of woods traversed by a wide, deep stream. After twenty minutes of rising panic, Julia’s teacher decided to call the police. But first the adults walked all of the children back to the buses, and there, lo and behold, sat Julia, waiting patiently.

  “In all my years of teaching,” Julia’s teacher complained when she called me and John in for a mandatory conference, “I’ve never had this happen.” (This from a woman who had taught for more than three decades.) John and I were thoroughly apologetic. We would “have it out” with Julia.

  “What happened?” we asked her that evening.

  “I was staring into the stream,” she said. “There were fish swimming on the bottom, and I was watching them for a long time. And when I looked up, everyone was gone. So I went back to the bus to wait.”

  I had to admire my six-year-old’s calm logic. Although I lectured her on the need to stick with her class, in retrospect I would have placed more blame on the supervising adults. If a child could be left behind so easily, how simple would it be for a stranger to lead a first-grader away from the group?

  I looked down at Julia with my most serious expression: “Thank God this didn’t happen when you were in the caverns. Imagine how scary that would have been, to be alone in those miles of darkness.” My mind was filled with images of Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher lost in McDougal’s cave.

  The next year, John and I were informed that Julia could not attend the second-grade scavenger hunt (located in wooded hills surrounding a deep lake) unless a parent came along to watch her; John dutifully complied. Later, during the fourth-grade trip to Monticello, Julia’s teacher held her hand for the entire visit.

  “It’s lucky she’s such a delightful child to have at your side,” the teacher said.

  “Do you still lose her in the school building?” I asked her.

  “Oh yes,” she said, nodding.

  Apart from physically losing Julia, the teachers also lost her attention. Back in the first grade, the teacher who had lamented Julia’s disappearance at the Natural Bridge also worried about our daughter’s lack of focus in the classroom. Julia seemed to be tuning out the class for hours at a time.

  “She’s in her own world,” explained Mrs. Hennis, “and it’s a wonderful world. But she needs to spend more time in our world.”

  John and I knew all about that. At dinner, I would sometimes nudge John and say, “Look at Julia.” And there she would be sitting, frozen in mid-chew, her fork at her mouth and her mind miles away. Her behavior reminded me of the words of the English poet William Wordsworth, in his “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.” Wordsworth suggests that humans enjoy a state of consciousness before birth, a connection to the spiritual world that lingers in the minds of young children until their earthly experiences fully sever the connection. As Wordsworth puts it, “Trailing clouds of glory do we come from God.”

  Julia seemed to be tuned to a different frequency, a reality preferable to our own, and I would have liked for her to enjoy her alternate world for as long as possible. But success in the public schools demanded that she march in step, and especially with our firstborns, we parents crave success.

  Back at our parent-teacher conference, Mrs. Hennis compared Julia to her own son, a unique and creative boy who had struggled through elementary and middle school. Fortunately, by high school this young man had found his niche, and had succeeded, academically and socially, from that point forward. Nevertheless, when Mrs. Hennis considered her son and our daughter, she shook her head and uttered one prophetic statement: “The public schools aren’t for everyone.”

  Those are mighty depressing words to hear at a first-grade parent-teacher conference when eleven years of public education loom in the future. In our small town, there are few alternatives to the public system. The only private school in Lexington, Virginia, is a tiny Christian academy; all other options require hours of driving up and down the local interstate—a truck-ridden hazard. For most families in our area, “private” education means homeschooling, something I was not yet ready to consider. But in the coming years, whenever Julia struggled with her classroom routine, I would recall Mrs. Hennis’s words: “The public schools aren’t for everyone.”

  Meanwhile, we tried to carve out strategies to help Julia function in a traditional classroom. Mrs. Hennis taped an index card to Julia’s desk, reminding her of tasks that were automatic for other children. Hang up your coat and backpack. Put your lunch away. Write your name on all work. Listen to the teacher. I posted a similar checklist at home. Have you finished your homework? Is it packed in your backpack? Do you know where your shoes are?

  I also decided to have Julia’s hearing checked, since children with poor hearing often tune out the group and withdraw into themselves. I visited our small-town doctor’s office, which boasted the only physician within a thirty-mile radius with a background in pediatrics, and I spoke privately with this man before bringing Julia in to see him.

  “She seems to inhabit her own world,” I explained to the doctor. “She’s wonderfully creative and artistic, and has a special love of visual patterns. She’s always arranging objects into symmetrical designs. She’s also got an almost obsessive power o
f concentration on subjects that interest her, but she tunes out her first-grade classroom for hours at a time and shows little interest in other children.”

  The doctor spoke the words that I had been avoiding for months. “Do you think she might be autistic?”

  Yes, the idea had crossed my mind. Not autistic in a disabling sense, but in its mildest variety. On an autism spectrum of one to ten, Julia might fall somewhere around two.

  The doctor called her into the room and tested her hearing, which seemed normal. Then he gave her a brief checkup and spoke to her for several minutes about her interests, her artwork, and her ideas.

  When she left, the doctor turned to me and smiled. “She’s not autistic. She’s just doing her own thing.”

  Since then, I’ve often wondered if that answer was too simple. Years later, when reading Songs of the Gorilla Nation, by Dawn Prince-Hughes, I marveled at the small similarities between Julia and this author who struggled with Asperger’s syndrome. It was as if Prince-Hughes was a distant cousin, twice removed. Julia has never demonstrated the more debilitating symptoms of Asperger’s: exaggerated tactile sensitivity, avoidance of eye contact, responding to stress by locking her muscles into repeated gestures. But Julia did share Prince-Hughes’s obsessive love of symmetry, the tendency to connect with animals more readily than humans, a constant disregard for hair brushing and table manners, and an odd verbal habit of occasionally repeating one syllable of a word several times, as if she had her own built-in echo. Above all, Prince-Hughes’s hatred of change sounded like an intense version of Julia’s feelings:

  I would feel like I was dying—my heart would pound, my ears would ring, and my whole consciousness would go hollow—if something changed. I remember instances of buildings being torn down, trees being cut, new roads going in, and two building fires happening along my routes. It took weeks for me to recover from these things. I would cry and yell and announce my convictions regarding the basic evil of mankind. I hated the changers and the changed. To me, change was nothing less than murder.

  “I think Julia might have a touch of Asperger’s syndrome,” I told a cousin who works as an English professor at an ultra-liberal college.

  He shrugged. “I think half of my colleagues have Asperger’s. If you want to talk about highly intelligent and creative people who are socially inept, that covers most of our faculty.”

  I also wondered if Julia’s behavior might be categorized as attention deficit disorder. I never took her to be diagnosed, because her problems weren’t severe, but recent studies have shown that in girls, ADD often manifests itself in “space cadet” behavior, characterized by a wandering mind and lack of organizational skills. That seemed to describe Julia, and it matched John’s childhood memories. “I never could pay attention in school,” he explained. “I sat at my desk with a toy hidden in my lap, and my mind constantly wandered.”

  His mother gave me the full story one afternoon, when I spoke to her about my concerns for Julia. “When John was little, I had a regular weekly conference with the nuns. Every Friday, I was required to go in and hear them complain about how immature John was, and how badly he was doing. Each year they wanted to hold him back…. But look how well he turned out!”

  Somehow these revelations weren’t reassuring. On the one hand, it was good to know that despite his inauspicious start, my husband had gone on to earn a Ph.D. in music education. John had great talents in music and art, aptitudes that Julia shared, along with his blue eyes, dark hair, and fair skin. But at the same time, John’s repeated insistence on what a “moron” he used to be, and how he made Ds and Fs throughout his early school years, sometimes made me doubt the wisdom of having had three children with this man. There’s nothing like parenthood to bring out all the skeletons in one’s childhood closet, and in the coming years John took pleasure in regaling me with a host of colorful confessions, joking that I would have to help Julia overcome her Brodie genes. Of course I had my own share of childhood vices, but none were academic, and I sometimes found it hard to grasp what could be so difficult about elementary school.

  Julia’s teachers explained that although she was obviously very bright, her work didn’t always show it. Her spelling was poor, her handwriting resembled a caveman’s scrawl, and she could get the right answers in math only if given lots of extra time. I was almost resigned to the idea that Julia’s intellect would never shine in a regular classroom when, at the end of the second grade, I received a letter stating that the school was considering her for its gifted program. Apparently she had scored in the ninety-ninth percentile on something called the Naglieri test.

  “What is this?” I asked Mrs. Patrick, the school’s coordinator of the gifted program.

  “It’s a nonverbal test,” Mrs. Patrick explained. “The children are shown black-and-white images, and they have to recognize patterns or differences, or guess what comes next.”

  That made sense; Julia’s brain had a knack for processing visual information. Once, at the end of a little boy’s birthday party, the hostess remarked that Julia had won their party game. Apparently this mom had stood before the children with a cookie sheet full of small objects—toys and kitchen gadgets and knickknacks—and she’d given the kids a brief moment to survey it all. Then she had put the cookie sheet away and asked the children to write down every object they could remember. (A pretty boring game for a bunch of eight-year-olds, if you ask me.) Anyway, Julia won hands down. After a short glance, she could recall almost every object on the sheet.

  Clearly, Julia had a unique intelligence churning inside her head, and so Waddell tried her out in its third-grade gifted program. The experience didn’t amount to much: twice a week Julia spent a little time outside the regular classroom, doing special activities in math and English. She didn’t last long in the advanced math group, but the Junior Great Books Club seemed right up her alley. There, the children discussed and wrote about stories they read together. “I love having Julia in the group,” Mrs. Patrick said, beaming. “She’s so creative. She always has something unusual to say.”

  Unusual was the operative word, a word that sometimes made me sigh. How many mothers of unusual children have occasionally prayed for a little normalcy—just enough to ease their child’s passage through the world of averages that constitutes America’s public schools? Nevertheless, I was pleased that Julia had been recognized as a bright kid. This gifted program might give her a boost, especially since the regular curriculum was getting very dull.

  In Virginia, third grade marks the onset of annual standardized tests, something all states employ, but some are more zealous than others when it comes to dictating the schools’ test-driven curriculum. In the 1990s, Virginia instituted a new curriculum called the Standards of Learning, or SOLs—an appropriate acronym, since most parents and teachers I’ve met seem to feel that when it comes to the SOLs, we are all “shit out of luck.” As one high-school teacher put it, “The SOLs are the monster that is devouring our schools.”

  If Julia’s wandering mind had been our only challenge—if her school curriculum had been full of exciting materials, taught with creative approaches—I never would have opted for homeschooling. But Virginia’s ardent embrace of our nationwide test-prep culture pushed me over the edge. I kept looking at the bland content in Julia’s worksheets and tests, and thinking, “Oh, c’mon. I could do much better than this.”

  Most of Julia’s teachers felt the same way. During her early years at Waddell, they consistently lamented the effect of the SOL tests on their program. “We always had standards,” one veteran teacher sighed, but now the standards were being dictated by strangers in Richmond, and there was little time left in the day for teachers to use their own imaginations. “More than eighty percent of our curriculum is mandated by the state,” another teacher explained. “And don’t let anyone tell you that we don’t teach to the test. We absolutely teach to the test.”

  To make time for extra test preparation, Waddell had abandoned many of th
e teachers’ favorite units. “We used to do a first-grade unit on dinosaurs,” one teacher recalled. “The children loved it.” But since dinosaurs weren’t part of the first-grade standards, they had become extinct in the classroom. “I used to do more creative writing,” a fourth-grade teacher noted. “But now with all the testing, we don’t have time for it.” The Roots and Shoots Garden was another SOL casualty, incorporated less and less into the children’s schedule. By Rachel’s fifth-grade year, she would complain that they never visited the garden at all.

  John, who had started his career as a K–12 music teacher, felt a personal loathing for the tests. “When I taught in the public schools we didn’t have these strict standards. If a teacher had a passion for chemistry or politics, he could share that. Teachers could play to their strengths.” John acknowledged that some teachers and schools were weak, and needed state standards to hold them accountable. But for most conscientious educators, the testing requirements had gone way too far: “Now you don’t have the time to elaborate on the finer or more interesting points of a subject. All you want the kids to do is spit out that the symbol for salt is NaCL.”

  “In the end,” one local principal explained, “the SOLs make great teachers good and good teachers bad.”

  None of Julia’s teachers seemed to mind Virginia’s math and English requirements. Math and English were the bread and butter of elementary school; it was fine for the state to insist that grade-school teachers hammer home the basics of arithmetic and reading comprehension. The problems stemmed from the state’s increasingly specific mandates in science and social studies, which covered everything from elementary economics to Virginia state history. When I told a friend about Virginia’s fourth-grade test on state history, this veteran public school principal threw back her head and laughed. “My teachers would revolt if we instituted a standardized test on Pennsylvania history. The whole concept behind standards is to cover basic knowledge that is essential for everyone—not to memorize facts that are specific to one region.” Unfortunately, with each successive year, Julia seemed to spend more and more time on rote memorization for multiple-choice exams, preparing for what one teacher called “these horrible trivia tests.”