Love in a Time of Homeschooling

by Laura Brodie

  In the coming weeks I found that The Well-Trained Mind’s dismissive tone toward the public schools was mild compared to other homeschooling books, where attitudes toward government-sponsored education could get openly nasty. Take Homeschooling for Excellence, by David and Micki Colfax. I sought that book out next because I was curious to read a homeschooling manifesto penned by the parents of a college acquaintance. Homeschooling for Excellence was blessedly short: an easy 150 pages, a home educator’s beach read. Stretched in our backyard hammock with book in hand, I found myself very impressed with the Colfaxes’ unique lifestyle. Their California homestead had no television and no close neighbors, and their sons’ daily physical labor was essential to maintaining the farm. Under those circumstances, reading was a delightful recreation for the children—a break from work, not work itself. The same was true for math equations; they were puzzles, not problems.

  With so much to admire in the Colfaxes’ book, I regretted every time the tone got highhanded. Take the book’s full title: Homeschooling for Excellence: How to Take Charge of Your Child’s Education and Why You Absolutely Must. Who are these presumptuous strangers, I wondered, to tell other parents what we must do? And as for their assessment of public education: “an abysmal performance by an institution rife with mediocrity, ineptitude, and political corruption.” Ouch.

  Over the coming weeks, as I surveyed more books, I often found battle lines drawn between home educators and the public schools. It seemed that in the year ahead I would have to tread carefully in the no-man’s-land between the two camps.

  The Colfaxes had some standing for criticizing public education, because Micki Colfax had been a public school teacher. So, too, for Jessie Wise, who had worked as a teacher and principal before turning to homeschooling. In fact, many Titans of today’s homeschooling movement, John Holt among them, started out as disaffected public school teachers. The most eloquent homeschooling book I encountered was written by one such veteran: David Guterson. These days Guterson is known for having written the highly acclaimed novel Snow Falling on Cedars, but before penning that story, he taught high school in Seattle, growing so disillusioned that when it came time for his eldest son to enter kindergarten, he and his wife walked their boy to the school bus stop, waited until the bus arrived and opened its door, then couldn’t bear to let him go. They turned back and began a new life as committed homeschoolers.

  Guterson wanted a community-based education for his sons; he wanted them to learn from real-life encounters. His book Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense offers lyrical descriptions of how he nurtured his sons’ curiosity about salmon: “Feeding the salmon fry, weekly, at a nearby holding pond, and measuring their growth and development, graphing changes in water temperature and flow, examining eggs, weighing out feed.” Not to mention the days they spent “visiting the Elwha River hatchery, the fish ladders at the Rocky Reach dam, the Science Center Display on the Nootka people.”

  Family Matters presents a gorgeous vision of education, made even more beautiful by its Pacific Northwest setting. Here are long, rapturous field trips and even longer, more rapturous conversations. Daily kitchen-table practice with math and grammar is followed by excursions to the Fish Market and Space Needle. Homeschooling Guterson-style sounds like paradise.

  Only one thing bothered me as I read that book, and it was a problem I also had with the others. None of these authors described the daily struggles of homeschooling. They mulled over curricula and philosophies and all the flaws of traditional schools, but they didn’t discuss the power struggles and irrational moments of fury that emerge in any family, however loving.

  Maybe they wanted to protect their children’s privacy. Maybe they didn’t want to reveal their families’ dark sides. Or perhaps their families don’t have dark sides. Perhaps they all enjoy perfect parent-child relationships, with minimal arguing, whining, and teeth-gnashing.

  Julia and I aren’t like that. Raising Julia has always been a struggle as well as a joy. She cried so much as a baby that John and I let her keep a pacifier until age four. Once the pacifier was removed, out of her mouth flowed a stream of objections: objections to shoes, hairbrushes, and toothpaste; objections to leaving the house, leaving the store, leaving the creek. I prefer an argumentative child to a sheepish one, but parenthood is especially challenging when every request becomes a battle. Getting Julia out of bed can be a Sisyphean task.

  Among the millions of homeschoolers in America, there must be plenty who have stormy encounters with their children, and who sometimes doubt the efficacy of their teaching. Those people, however, don’t seem to write books. In the homeschooling volumes I encountered, expressions of serious frustration seemed taboo. One afternoon, when browsing through our library’s reference section, I picked up The Homeschooling Almanac, 2000–2001, and began scanning through the “Frequently Asked Questions.” Only one query approached my concerns:

  Q: “What if I can’t stand to be with my kids all day?”

  Admittedly, the question was ill-phrased. I might have put it this way: “What if my daughter and I are both strong-willed females who might drive each other crazy if we spend all day together?” Regardless of semantics, the authors’ reply left me dumbfounded:

  A: People don’t ask this question often, but when they do, we are always shocked and saddened. We believe parents who cannot stand to be with their children don’t really know them. And if they don’t like their children, they are probably seeing a child who isn’t “real” but is a creation of marketing, school peer pressure, fear, low self-esteem, and alienation.

  Oh pllllease, I thought. The question didn’t say, “What if I don’t like my children?” or “What if I can’t stand to be with my kids?” The questioner was expressing anxiety about being with one’s kids all day, which struck me as a reasonable concern. Moms need downtime; they need silence and solitude and some occasional peace. Most stay-at-home-moms can recall the blessed joy on the first day when their toddler was old enough to attend preschool for a few mornings each week. Oh, the pleasure of those hours—the napping, the reading, the shopping that gets done without a child in tow. “But a homeschooled child can help you with the shopping,” some authors might interject. Yes, but it’s not the same. There should be a special punishment (a day in the stocks?) for writers who call it “shocking” and “saddening” when a parent confesses that she might go nuts if she spent all day with her kids.

  Nevertheless, I kept reading homeschooling books, setting aside ones with chapter headings such as “Homeschooling God’s Way.” In the process, I discovered the queens of homeschooling how-to guides, Linda Dobson and Rebecca Rupp, and I made a mental note to return to them later.

  As I perused these books, one question kept coming up: Why should I focus exclusively on one child? If homeschooling had so many benefits, shouldn’t I teach all three of my daughters, and make it a family affair? That’s how most homeschoolers operate; the siblings form a social unit, and learn from one another as the years progress. One-on-one homeschooling seemed like a lonely proposition for Julia.

  And yet, when I looked at the largest homeschooling families in our town, with three or four children still under the parents’ wings, I wondered if a few of those kids might not thrive in a good public school classroom. Realistically, homeschooling could not work equally well for all members of a family.

  My daughters provided a clear example. It took me less than sixty seconds to decide that Rachel, my middle child, would hate homeschooling. For Rachel, maternal instruction equals maternal criticism. When it comes to most school projects, Rachel prefers to keep me at arm’s length, and I bless her for it. On those rare occasions when she solicits aid, the results can be volatile, because Rachel is a perfectionist with a fiery temper. As a preschooler, she used to spend fifteen minutes every morning putting on her socks, taking them off, and putting them on again, raging at the intransigence of cotton as she tried to get the line of stitching at the end of each sock to fal
l evenly, like a white rainbow, over the tips of her toes. While I fretted over Julia’s loner instincts and rocky start in the public schools, my mother in-law just shook her head.

  “Julia is not the one you need to worry about.” She nodded toward Rachel. “That’s the one to keep an eye on. She’s wound way too tightly around the axle.”

  I never did worry very much about Rachel, largely because of her intellectual gifts. At age three, she read comfortably; at age seven, voraciously. She hit the public schools running and delighted in making As on almost every assignment. Report cards cannot measure a child’s well-being, but Rachel also seemed to enjoy the social life of school. When I asked if she would want to be homeschooled, she didn’t hesitate: “I’d miss my friends too much.”

  Hanging out with her sister would provide no substitute for Rachel’s friends. Far from it. Only eighteen months apart in age, Julia and Rachel mix like baking soda and vinegar. Every day I play referee in their verbal, and sometimes physical, battles, sending them to their separate corners of the house. If Julia, Rachel, and I were to stay home for a year, the results would be worse than a three ring circus—more like the Bermuda triangle.

  And what about Kathryn, my youngest daughter? Kathryn could be very happy as a homeschooler, or very happy in the public schools, because Kathryn is naturally cheerful. Perhaps the public schools would thwart that happiness; perhaps the test-prep culture would sap her joy. I couldn’t say, because she had yet to enter kindergarten. In the fall, Kathryn was scheduled to try her first taste of public education. Most of her preschool friends would be attending Waddell, and I wanted to let her take the plunge at their side. If the experience turned out badly, maybe Kathryn could try some homeschooling in the future. For now, she needed time away from Mom, since she tended to be overly, sometimes ferociously, attached to me.

  Waddell seemed sufficient for Rachel and Kathryn; only Julia needed a break from school. The coming year would be a special one-on-one experience with my eldest daughter—an educational odyssey scripted to meet her unique needs.

  “You’re really going through with this homeschooling idea?” John asked one night as we sat up reading in bed.

  “Sure looks like it,” I answered, holding up my latest homeschooling volume.

  “I know that the one-on-one tutoring would be great for Julia,” John said, his position apparently softening. “But what about her socialization?”

  I sighed. “She’s not really connected to the social world at school. Most of her social life takes place afterward. And besides, this is just for one year. She’s going to have twelve years of public education.” I didn’t add that the “socialization” offered at most public and private schools contains an equal proportion of benefits and dangers, and that social skills can be learned in many places, far from classrooms and cafeterias and gymnasiums.

  “I guess you’ve got a point,” John said, “if it’s just for one year.”

  Feeling totally committed (crazy or not), I found my questions coming in an avalanche. Was I legally allowed to homeschool Julia? Would she still be required to take Virginia’s fifth-grade Standards of Learning tests? Could she be forced to repeat the fifth grade if I did a lousy job?

  “Questions? Call Claire!” said the homeschool bulletin board at our public library, and as fate would have it, I already knew Claire. She was another ex-schoolteacher who hadn’t wanted to entrust her two sons to the public system. Too many aspects of the schools conflicted with her Christian background and her pedagogical ideals. “It’s sad,” she said, “to get all that training and then have your hands tied.” With her own boys, she wanted to be free of state mandates and employ her teaching degree in the manner she saw fit.

  When I asked about legal requirements, she directed me to the website for the Home School Legal Defense Association. HSLDA offers advice and legal services for homeschoolers facing problems from local or state officials, and when I opened their website and typed in “legal requirements,” I encountered a map of America, with states colored green, yellow, orange, and red. In the green states, homeschoolers enjoy a complete green light; they don’t even have to notify the local schools of their intent to abstain. Ten states fall under this category, and I wasn’t surprised to see Texas among them. But New Jersey and Connecticut? There, too, parents could do anything with their kids’ education, no questions asked.

  Virginia appeared bright orange, having what the HSLDA considers to be “moderate regulation.” I would substitute the word minimal for moderate. It seemed that, in Virginia, you needed a high school diploma in order to homeschool, or else you had to hire a tutor for your kids. Virginians also needed to inform the local school superintendent of their intention to homeschool, and had to describe their curricular plans. “Curricular plans,” however, could be as concise as one sentence: “I plan to use the Calvert Curriculum,” or “I plan to follow Virginia’s SOLs.”

  At the end of the year, most homeschooled children in Virginia must take some sort of standardized test, the only requirement that made me a little queasy. But Claire explained that if I sent twenty-five dollars to an Internet company, they would mail the fifth-grade California Achievement Tests to my home. I could administer the exams myself, then send Julia’s answer sheet back to the company’s PO Box. In a couple of weeks I would receive a copy of the results, to be forwarded to our school superintendent. So long as Julia scored above the lowest twenty-fifth percentile, she could advance to the next grade.

  Overall, Virginia’s homeschooling regulations struck me as very lax. There were no attendance or recordkeeping requirements, no specific subjects that I needed to teach. In fact, parents in Virginia can ignore all of the regulations if they file for a religious exemption.

  I had assumed that most states would require homeschooling parents to have a college degree, but as I clicked on all the states that had earned HSLDA’s red light, North Dakota was the only one that asked for a BA. Even there, parents who had never finished college could still homeschool, as long as they passed the state teacher’s examination.

  I respected stodgy old North Dakota, with its mild attempt at holding homeschoolers accountable. The thought that in forty-nine states any parent who’d scraped through high school with a D average could then teach high school to their own children struck me as setting the bar very low. In my case, however, the lack of regulation was highly convenient. To homeschool Julia, I needed only to produce a curriculum, and although HSLDA advises against telling local school districts much of anything about one’s plans—the less you reveal, the less they can challenge—I felt compelled to justify my decision to homeschool by assembling an impressive program.

  I began by examining Virginia’s fifth-grade Standards of Learning, available on the Internet, to see what Julia’s peers would be taught. The English requirements were basic—all the grammar and spelling and reading comprehension that most kids can absorb through constant reading and writing—but they did inspire me to add one line to my to-do list: “Buy the Schoolhouse Rock DVD.” After thirty years, “Conjunction Junction” still has no rival.

  Next came math, the nemesis of my own school days. Virginia’s fifth-grade requirements include decimals and fractions, geometry and probability, measurement and a tiny smattering of statistics. I supposed I was going to need a refresher course in dividing with decimals. Otherwise, the nice thing about homeschooling in the elementary grades is that the math still falls within most parents’ comfort zones. By high school, many homeschoolers hire private tutors, or enroll their kids in college classes, but the early years are a different story. Even when it came to math, I felt that I was as smart as a fifth-grader.

  One notable absence from Virginia’s fifth-grade requirements was Roman numerals. In our school district, Roman numerals had become the exclusive knowledge of Latin students, but I still had a fondness for all those capital letters—those Vs and Xs and Ls that almost made numbers into words.

  “Hey, Julia,” I asked, “did yo
u ever talk about Roman numerals at school?”

  “I don’t think so,” she responded.

  “Would you like to learn them?”

  “Sure,” she said, shrugging, and I added them to our list.

  I was also surprised that Julia couldn’t guess where Arabic numerals came from. “Arab-ic,” I said to her. “ARAB-ic?” She had no clue. (Actually, they originated in India, but the Arabs brought them to Europe’s attention.) Neither did Julia (nor I) know much about the history of zero. Why didn’t the Romans use it? Before embarking on Virginia’s math essentials, I thought we should back up and learn about the history of mathematics: where numbers came from and why.

  Math was the sole subject where I planned to buy a textbook; generally I avoid them. There’s nothing like a heavy, dull text to drain the pleasure from literature or history. Most of my homeschooling friends recommended the Saxon math method, and the Saxon 65 book seemed well organized and clear. In one area, however, the book couldn’t help me.

  Julia had not been learning her multiplication tables in the same manner I remembered as a child. I had learned my twos and threes and fours sequentially, in times tables, but Julia’s instruction had hopped around, starting with easy numbers, such as two, five, and ten. This approach didn’t seem to have worked for her, because her retention was entirely piecemeal. She needed to back up and relearn her math facts one number at a time: first two, then three, then four. I thought that we might spend a month (or less, as needed) on the number three—multiplying and dividing by 33.33, computing the area and perimeter of rectangles three inches long, cutting pies into thirds, then ninths, then twelfths. Whatever the mathematical concept at hand, we could practice it while saturated in our number of the week. This meant that I would have to write out a lot of math worksheets separate from the Saxon supply—but so be it. A weekly schedule for math was taking shape in my head.