Love in a Time of Homeschooling

by Laura Brodie

  Julia eyed the statue critically. “So now he’s going to be torn apart by wild women,” she said, imagining the maenads. “That sucks.”

  “Stinks, not sucks,” I murmured as I opened a filing cabinet full of CDs.

  On that first day of homeschooling, I had the noble idea that each week I would introduce Julia to a famous piece of classical music, teaching her about various composers and musical genres. She had already been exposed to more music than most children, but up to that point she had never studied it in any systematic way. She liked Disney’s Fantasia, versions one and two, but she couldn’t name more than one of the composers featured in those films. Homeschooling, so I hoped, might give Julia a chance to become acquainted with a small repertoire of famous pieces. We could play them in the car—there would be lots of driving in our daily routine: fifteen-minute trips to town for violin lessons, tennis lessons, library visits, and shopping errands. In my rookie enthusiasm, I intended to pack those minutes with Brahms and Beethoven; God forbid that there be any unproductive gaps in our school day. (It would take me a couple of months to realize that unproductive gaps can produce wonderful, spontaneous lessons.)

  In the mauve-walled Timmins Room, I flipped through the filing cabinets thinking, “Let us begin with something memorable for a child,” maybe something used in the old Bugs Bunny cartoons. One reason that Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes cartoons still outclass today’s Japanese imports—despite Julia’s love of anime—is because the creators had good taste in music. Peer Gynt accompanied each animated sunrise; Rossini’s William Tell Overture sped every foot race; Bugs Bunny donned bullfighting gear to strains of Carmen.

  I pulled out Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, a piece baby boomers know from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s a favorite musical selection for television advertisements and videotaped moon shots. The title, I explained to Julia, means “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” and it was taken from a book by a German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. The main character in Nietzsche’s book (are you listening, Julia?) was a deep-thinking, strong-willed man named after a prophet from Persia (now Iran) who lived thousands of years before the birth of Christ. The Persian Zarathustra was called Zoroaster, and he was one of the first men to preach a monotheistic religion, with a clear idea of heaven. (Pay attention, Julia, this is important.) Judaism and Christianity are thought to have taken many of their beliefs from Zoroastrianism. But Nietzsche didn’t believe in heaven. His Zarathustra hails the coming of a Superman, an Ubermensch who transcends traditional morality.

  By now Julia’s eyes were focused out the window, watching cars drive by. Children, like most adults, cannot absorb abstractions that have no connection to their daily lives.

  “You don’t need to remember any of that,” I said. “When you listen to the music, just try to imagine a solitary prophet walking through the Persian desert, and think about how his ideas inspired a German philosopher to write about a superman.”

  She nodded vaguely. Mom was still speaking in riddles.

  I knew I sounded like the Professor on Gilligan’s Island, but that was okay. I didn’t mind if Julia couldn’t grasp everything I was saying, because it was valuable for her just to hear an adult’s vocabulary. I’ve never felt that children need to fully comprehend all that they hear and see. Better to let them absorb a little more with each new conversation and each new book—to sense that the world is full of knowledge yet to be learned, and mysteries still to be fathomed.

  That afternoon I also pulled out Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Julia already knew the tunes from The Swan Princess movie, just as she knew the melodies from the Nutcracker Suite and the central theme in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. She didn’t know, however, that all of these pieces were taken from ballets written by the same Russian composer.

  We went downstairs and checked out the CDs at the circulation desk, then walked back to the car, where I put the key in the ignition and turned on Strauss.

  “Let’s listen to the opening before we drive home.”

  Outside our windows, cadets jogged by in narrow columns, singing their usual jodies: “I don’t know but I’ve been told / Army wings are made of gold. / I don’t know but it’s been said / Navy wings are made of lead.” Inside our car, the music started quietly. First the trumpets, playing three slow, ascending notes gradually getting louder, with the third note held to the limit of the trumpeter’s breath, until the whole orchestra entered with two descending tones, one short, one long, holding the long note with a steady crescendo, cut off with a ringing aftertone. Then came a seesaw pounding of tympani, slowing steadily until the trumpets began the pattern again.

  “Do you like it, Julia?” I asked at the end of the prelude.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “What does it make you think of?”

  She hesitated. “A bird, learning to fly. And it takes three tries.”

  We played the piece again, and Julia’s fingers fluttered across the dashboard, lifting and falling. “On the third try,” she said, as the music blossomed into major chords, “his wings open into beautiful colors and the bird flies up toward heaven.”

  We listened to the rest of the music as we drove out of town and into the countryside, the subdivisions giving way to fields peppered with cattle. We passed a friend’s pasture where a group of two dozen deer regularly graze. Julia counted seventeen that morning; brass chords floated out our window toward the does’ pricked ears, and I hoped that Julia would appreciate the beauty of it. In just looking out a car window, she might feel freed from the sadness of classrooms that had weighted her down over the past several years.

  “Windows are the only thing that rivet me to this world,” she once remarked. On that day, when I asked what she saw outside a window, she looked out from our living room at the trees and answered, “Everything that is really there that you can’t see. Camels and a guinea pig and a kangaroo head.”

  “So you find trees to be just as evocative as clouds?”

  “Oh, clouds,” she said dismissively. “Clouds are so obvious.”

  The best homeschooling lesson I ever taught would come a few months later, on that stretch of road where Julia counted the seventeen deer. All three of my girls were in the backseat that day, bickering, poking, whining—their habitual state—when I turned on Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade.

  “Have you ever heard of Scheherazade?” I asked over their noise, and they quieted enough to mutter a negative.

  “There was once a sultan of Arabia,” I began, “with a beautiful wife whom he loved very much, but she betrayed him.”

  “You mean she had s-e-x with another man?” Nine-year-old Rachel had an unlimited, disgusted fascination with s-e-x.

  “Yes,” I said, “she had s-e-x with several other men. As a result, the sultan was convinced that all women were unfaithful and should be killed. So each night he married another young woman, and every morning he ordered her to be strangled, until all his people were terrorized, fearing for their daughters’ lives.”

  By now my girls were silent. Any story that contains both murder and sex can hold their attention. I told them the whole gist of the Arabian Nights, and how Disney got the ideas for Sinbad and Aladdin from Scheherazade. Then I turned on Rimsky-Korsakov, and the music began with loud brasses playing a few forceful notes.

  “That sounds like the angry sultan,” I suggested.

  Next came the solo violin, sweetly melodic, with a harp in the background, playing a winding, twisting tune—the voice of Scheherazade weaving her stories. Rimsky-Korsakov titled his first number “The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship,” and when the full orchestra launched into its rhythm of rolling waves, Julia nodded: “It sounds like the ocean.” And so it continued, with Sinbad’s ship cresting wave after wave after wave. (Rimsky-Korsakov can be maddeningly repetitive.) Every so often the orchestra stepped back and the solo violin intervened with its lovely song, reminding us that Scheherazade was still there, narrating this sea story.

  My girls were
hooked. They asked to hear Scheherazade every day for two weeks, before school, after school, driving to errands. I checked out an illustrated version of the Arabian Nights from our local library, and we read some of the stories at bedtime. Once we took out the globe and located Saudi Arabia. And where is Iraq, they asked, home to the Thief of Baghdad? And why are our soldiers in Baghdad now?

  This is homeschooling at its best—a constant segue from music history, to literature, to geography, to contemporary politics. It can take place anywhere, at almost any time, even with a carload of children driving home from their regular school. The key, when it comes to all music, is to choose pieces that tell a story. It doesn’t matter whether the music is classical, jazz, salsa, or Broadway. The style is less important than the quality, and the ability of a piece to spark a child’s imagination. In our case, I wanted to emphasize classical music, so in the upcoming year I thought that Julia and I might listen to Gustav Holst’s The Planets when we studied the solar system. Aaron Copland’s music could provide a good accompaniment for American history—Billy the Kid and “Hoedown” when studying the Old West; “Fanfare for the Common Man” for lessons on democracy. Johann Strauss’s “Blue Danube Waltz” and Smetana’s Die Moldau might inspire some interest in European geography.

  “If I were a principal,” I said to Julia on our first day, as we reached the last half-mile of our journey home, “I would pipe soothing classical music into the hallways, something for the children to contemplate when standing in line or visiting their lockers. Or maybe a little quiet Mozart in the cafeteria?”

  By now we’d reached our house, and after a short break I asked Julia to take out paper and pencil. Writing was our top priority, so we might as well get down to it.

  Many students arrive at today’s universities with their AP ducks all in a row, but unable to write a thoughtful paragraph. Writing is the act of contemplation borne to life on a page, and too many high school students have minimal practice with quiet contemplation; they struggle to form their own ideas and support them with a coherent sequence of evidence.

  “Write a page,” I said to Julia, “about what we did this morning.”

  This was something new for her. At Waddell, writing assignments tend to be highly formulaic exercises. Bulletin boards in the second-grade hallway display dozens of student paragraphs, all beginning with the same sentence, followed by information that varies only minimally in content. “My favorite color is ________. It smells like_______. It looks like________. It tastes like _____. This color makes me feel ______.” Fill-in-the blank is one way to get children started as early writers, and Waddell’s older children are encouraged to vary their sentence patterns, but even in the highest grades, their writing assignments usually dictate the content of every paragraph.

  To be given a broad topic, without specific instructions for each stage, was a new challenge for Julia. After twenty minutes she handed me her sheet of paper.

  Wensday

  Today I went to the cofee shop. That day there was a blue grass band playing. The blue grass band played some songs with there insturments.

  The musician’s insturments were the banjos, mandalins, gitars and a bass.

  There was only one girl who was playing a banjo.

  We listened to the music and played two games of gin-rummy. I won both the games (but when we played war I lost.) We also had drinks. Mrs. Brodie had juice and I had hot chocolate.

  After that we drove to the VMI libary and walked to the Timmins room. We got a C.D. by Richard Strauss it was called Also Sprach Zarathustra.

  I read Julia’s meager sentences with mixed emotions. On one hand, they were endearing; I was now “Mrs. Brodie” instead of Mom. But they were also somewhat pitiful. I knew that Julia’s spelling and grammar were rough, but even for a ten-year-old, this writing struck me as primitive. Her teachers had often claimed that Julia was ahead of her peers when it came to writing skills, a possibility that now made me cringe. Staring at those words, I wondered: Where to begin?

  The best teachers always begin with praise—that’s one of the tenets of Shinichi Suzuki, the famous violin teacher. A friend of mine once saw Suzuki in practice, leading a master class where a little girl gave an incredibly bad performance. Her music was out of tune; the rhythm, imprecise; her bow grip, hand position, and stance, all wrong. What could the master possibly praise?

  “Well,” Suzuki said, smiling into the child’s mournful face as she lowered her instrument. “You finished that whole piece!”

  And so I smiled at Julia: “I’m impressed you noticed that only one of the bluegrass musicians was female. I hadn’t paid attention to that. Why do you think there were so few women?”

  She shrugged. “The women are all out working.”

  “You mean the men have time to fool around with music while the women are busy doing the work?”

  Julia nodded.

  “What kind of work are the women doing?” I expected her to say that the women were home taking care of children.

  “They’re teaching at the colleges,” she stated matter-of-factly.

  “Fair enough.” I laughed. “Okay, let’s work on your spelling.”

  Spelling, I’m convinced, is a genetic trait, in no way indicative of intelligence. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who penned The Great Gatsby, was a narrative genius but a spelling moron. He was humiliated on the one occasion when an editor published a piece of his writing without correcting all of the spelling and grammatical errors. Similarly, Zachary Taylor, America’s twelfth president, was known (according to Julia’s cartoon guide to U.S. government) for being a “turrible speller.”

  So, too, for my husband. It took the first three years of our marriage for me to convince John that congratulations was not spelled with a d. Julia, very much a daddy’s girl, inherited her father’s spelling genes along with his bright eyes. After learning basic phonics in kindergarten, she clung to them tenaciously throughout grade school, constantly frustrated by the inconsistencies of the English language: “I before e except after c, and except when the verb sounds like long a (weight, neigh, sleigh), and don’t forget about seize, and sleight,” et cetera et cetera.

  I often tell my students that the only way to master spelling is to read, read, read, and pray that your brain absorbs the spelling of words seen again and again. Today, most students rely desperately on computer spell-check programs, which continually fail them. I once had an undergraduate explain that he didn’t need to master spelling or grammar—his secretary would correct that for him. When I mentioned this to John over dinner, his response was blunt: “Tell the kid he’s not going to have a secretary when he’s working at Jiffy Lube.”

  Julia has never expected someone else to correct her spelling, but neither does she have much luck fixing it herself. From kindergarten through fourth grade most of her spelling instruction didn’t sink in. She could memorize words for a weekly test (on those days when she bothered to study), but she rarely applied the test-drilled spelling to her sentences. She would ace a test one morning, then misspell the same words that afternoon.

  “Okay, let’s start a spelling journal,” I said. “We’ll keep a list of the words you misspell in your writing, and those will be the words you need to learn each week.”

  Julia took out a black marble notebook and wrote Spelling J at the top.

  “How do you spell journal?” she asked.

  “J-o-u-r-n-a-l.”

  Our first job, I explained, was to determine if she couldn’t spell a word or if she was just being careless.

  “How do you spell library?” I pronounced the r with deliberate emphasis, and she spelled the word correctly. “What about instrument?” Again I emphasized the r, and Julia fixed her spelling.

  “What about ‘guitar’?” Julia never guessed at the silent u, so we put that word at the top of her slate. “And how do you spell coffee? One f or two?” She couldn’t say, so the word went on the agenda. Five minutes more and we had her first spelling list: Wednesday
, guitar, coffee, mandolin, and the difference between there, their, and they’re.

  The fact that my ten-year-old could not spell Wednesday bothered me. It’s a difficult word, full of silent letters, but it seemed a commentary on the spelling instruction at her school, where emphasis is placed on learning patterns—prefixes and suffixes, mega- and -tion—rather than learning practical, common nouns. As a result, Julia could spell macroeconomics, but she had never encountered Wednesday on an elementary school spelling test.

  “How do you spell February?” I asked. As I suspected, she missed the r.

  I sometimes recommend spelling journals for my college students. Personalized lists are useful because everyone makes different mistakes, and each person’s vocabulary is unique. Carpenters, plumbers, and mathematicians all deal in different words. A ballet instructor should learn how to spell plié; a house painter should know soffit. Ten-year-old Julia needed to learn Wednesday and February. If, by Friday, she had mastered those two words, I would consider the week a success.

  “It’s okay to be a rotten speller,” I told Julia, “so long as you are a very good proofreader. Whenever you write something, you need to get into the habit of checking all words that don’t look right.”

  In upcoming weeks, whenever Julia finished a piece of writing, I would ask her to underline every word where she wasn’t confident about the spelling. Unfortunately, she tended to underline half of her words, leaving me to ask, “Do you really think you’ve misspelled they?” Once she had shortened her list, she had to look the words up.

  “What should you do,” I asked her on our first morning, “if you’ve written something but you’re not sure about your spelling?”