by Laura Brodie
She shrugged.
“What can you use to find out whether you’ve spelled a word correctly?”
“A computer?”
“Yes, but what if there’s no computer around?”
“A dictionary?”
“Right. Of course your spelling has to be close enough so that you can find what you’re looking for. If you’re trying to spell knight—the kind with a sword and horse—you’ll never find it if you’re looking in the n’s. But most of the time a dictionary can help.”
We pulled our big Merriam-Webster down from the shelf.
“Have you used dictionaries at your school?”
“Once or twice,” Julia replied.
It occurred to me that most children don’t know how to read a dictionary entry. What do n., adv., and adj. stand for? What about s. and pl.? What are all these quotes, and this foreign derivation?
Here, I thought, is another small benefit of homeschooling. I could acquaint my child with a dictionary. To my surprise, I found that Julia had a lot of trouble searching for a word alphabetically. When looking up guitar, she opened the dictionary to H, then moved forward through the pages.
“Say the alphabet in your head,” I suggested. “Where does the letter g come, compared to the page you’re on now?” After thinking for a moment, Julia started to flip backward through the pages, heading in the right direction. Eventually she located the correct entry and squinted at its small print, clearly intimidated by this heavy, boring book, with its small text and minimal pictures. Never before had I thought to buy a children’s dictionary, but now it seemed like common sense.
And so our morning continued, with me learning more than Julia. After lunch she played her violin for forty-five minutes, the only stressful time of our day, since an out-of-tune violin scrapes like sandpaper across my brain. “Look at the key signature,” I said to Julia. “It’s Bach, not Bartók.”
“Bar talk?” Julia shrugged, and continued to scrape away.
Then on to the blessed silence of geography, with Julia spreading a jigsaw puzzle of the world across the glass table on our screened porch. While she pieced together the countries of Africa, a squirrel cackled in a maple tree, berating our cat, who watched it from the grass. Down at the creek, a pair of bathing mallards dipped and bobbed, shivering their feathers dry. A breeze lifted and lowered Julia’s hair, and I thought: this has been a good day.
A half hour later, when we retrieved Julia’s sisters from school, Kathryn beamed.
“How was your first day?” I asked.
“Great!” she said, smiling.
“What did you do?”
“We colored, and we sat in a circle while the teacher read to us.”
How nice, to have a kindergartner who wasn’t weeping after the first day, who seemed perfectly content to attend school with everyone else. Rachel was also comfortable with her school routine, although, for her, the social life was the chief draw; the work was way too easy.
“What did you do on your first day, Rachel?”
“Not much. We went over the classroom rules and labeled all of our notebooks. And we did a few worksheets.”
“Did you write anything?”
“Not yet.” Her first writing assignment would not come for another week.
Back at home, I reminded Julia that she must write one page in her journal, so she took out her misty blue five-by-seven notebook, with its Thomas Kinkade cover—snapdragons and wild roses and wisps of smoke rising from a stone cottage. Opening to the first page, she wrote in enormous letters and double-spaced lines, filling the space with as few sentences as possible:
August 24, 2005
Dear Diary,
Today we started school. I have begun homeschooling while Rachel and Kathryn have begun regular school. I’m realy happy about every thing exept for music. I just can’t get violin to work so that it sonds good. But mom can make anything sound good. Well. Today is Wensday and next person I’m seeing is my friend Matt.
Sincerely,
Julia
When Julia showed me her entry I thanked her, while inwardly sighing: “Wensday.” Always “Wensday.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Autumn Field Trips
The best thing about homeschooling is the freedom—freedom from homework, freedom from the sameness of school, and the freedom to take field trips. That was my favorite.
JULIA
I WISH I COULD SAY THAT OUR HOMESCHOOLING HONEYMOON lasted for several months—that Julia and I spent the entire fall basking, trouble-free, in our intellectual liberty. In truth, the first conflict occurred on day two.
We were studying Fahrenheit and Celsius—a Virginia SOL topic—but where the state presented it solely as a matter of measurement, I wanted to introduce a human, historical element. So after Julia checked our front porch thermometer and recorded the temperature on a coordinate line graph, I asked:
“Where did these words come from, Fahrenheit and Celsius?”
She shrugged. No clue.
“Why don’t we look them up on the Internet?” I suggested. There, Julia learned about Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit and Anders Celsius, a German and a Dutchman living in the early 1700s, who never met, but who shared an interest in meteorology, each developing his own method for measuring temperatures. These days, I explained to Julia, most countries prefer Celsius’s pragmatic scale, with the freezing point set at zero and boiling at one hundred. We stubborn Americans, however, have stuck with the old English model, which is why the word Fahrenheit now graces rock bands and movie titles and novel jackets, but few Americans know the temperature for boiling point (212°).
“This can be your first essay,” I told Julia. “You can write a paragraph about each scientist, and how his method of measurement works. Then include a paragraph on how to convert from Fahrenheit to Celsius, and vice versa.”
Poor child, what a boring topic. Homeschooling experts will shake their heads and say: “Shape the assignments around the child’s interests!” But I figured that life is full of work not tailor-made to suit us.
Julia dutifully printed a few pages from two Internet sites, quickly discovering that Fahrenheit and Celsius were passé. Today’s scientists prefer the more precise scales of Kelvin and Rankine, two guys I’d never heard of. Wonderful, I thought. This was precisely the benefit of homeschooling: the chance to discover and delve into unexpected knowledge.
I tried to show Julia how to highlight important facts with a yellow marker. She highlighted almost every sentence. While I hovered, saying things like “How do you spell tem-per-a-ture?” Julia wrote an introductory paragraph:
Temperatures measure how cold or hot it is. Without temperatures, people wouldn’t know what to wear. But who invented methods for measuring? What kinds of temperatures are there? And how low do they get?
“Great start,” I said. “Now keep on writing while I go upstairs and get dressed.” Standing in the shower, I congratulated myself on how well things were going. On day two, instead of still labeling notebooks and arranging pencils, Julia was already doing research and writing, expanding a topic beyond the bare minimum required by the state. This homeschooling stuff was a breeze.
Twenty minutes later I went downstairs to the living room, where I had left Julia writing on the couch.
Rubbing my wet hair in a towel, I said, “Show me what you’ve got.”
She handed me her sheet of paper. There, in a messy scrawl:
Well, the two most famos scientists in the field are Celsius and Fahrenheit. They were the two scientists who invented the mesurement of heat, Celsius and Fahrenheit.
“Two sentences?” I stared at Julia. “It took you twenty minutes to write two sentences?” And not very good ones.
Julia lowered her head in shame as my eyes turned to the television set.
“Have you been watching TV!”
“No!” she said.
“Are you sure?”
“I haven’t been watching TV, Mom.”
&n
bsp; “What have you been doing?”
Julia glanced toward the far end of the couch. Walking over, I lifted a pillow and found a paperback novel about—what else? Dragons. I felt a brief twinge of pride; left alone in a room, my daughter had chosen a book over television. But that pride was quickly squelched by frustration. There I stood, just like Julia’s other elementary school teachers, giving instructions while the child let her thoughts linger on her dragon book, ready to sneak-read at the first opportunity.
In that moment I foresaw the failure of our homeschooling. I saw how every time I left the room the curriculum would leave with me. Julia would enter middle school well versed in nothing but dragons, and the teachers would shake their heads at one more overzealous parent who thought that she could master their profession.
“You can’t do this!” I said. “This homeschooling isn’t going to work unless you do the assignments!”
Julia hung her head like a flinching Labrador.
I had been counting on the idea that she would be an independent learner—that after a brief daily math lesson she would concentrate on thirty minutes of practice problems while I graded my college students’ papers. Julia would draft book reports while I wrote my novel, and our house would be unusually clean because of my extra time at home folding laundry, scrubbing pots, and occasionally answering questions.
Now I glimpsed the truth—if I was not nearby to constantly prod, push, and cheer, Julia would get nothing done. My annoyance grew as my visions of freedom ebbed away.
“I’m glad that you’re a reader,” I began, my voice crescendoing slightly, “but you also need to write, and do math problems, and science, whether or not I’m in the room. If you don’t do the work, this year will be a disaster, and you won’t be prepared for middle school. And you can’t get by in middle school just reading dragon books; your teachers will fail you. Do you want to fail?”
Which was, admittedly, a stupid and mean thing to say. I think I was worried more about my failure than hers. One of the problems with short-term homeschooling is that you never escape the shadow of traditional schools, and remain perpetually concerned with whether your child is keeping up. I should have realized from day one that I was responsible only to Julia, not to any teachers she might encounter in the future, but in homeschooling it is hard to escape the sense of communal responsibility, and communal judgment.
Parenthood always involves an awareness of judgment; when children misbehave or don’t do their schoolwork, all eyes fall upon the parents, especially the mother. And if that mother is a homeschooler, she is doubly accountable for her children’s success or failure. As John would jokingly say in the coming months, “If Julia grows up to be a serial killer, you’ll only have yourself to blame, because you took her out for the fifth grade.” (Thanks, dear.)
In those early days, I was determined to negate the serial-killer possibility. I felt a strong obligation to meet some vague societal measure of success, if only to legitimate my decision to homeschool. Petty as that might sound, I think other homeschoolers sometimes feel the same way—so many authors trumpet their children’s high SAT scores, spelling bee trophies, or admission to elite colleges, as if they want to show the world that homeschooling isn’t crazy.
All of these concerns about the world’s judgmental eyes might be small-minded, but they are also inescapably human. To deny that I felt them would be dishonest. So there I was on day two, already laying my ridiculous fears squarely on Julia’s birdlike shoulders, positing middle-school report cards as a guillotine poised to fall upon her should she blow off her fifth-grade schoolwork.
She shook her head as she stared into her hands. “This is terrible for my self-esteem.”
I almost laughed, because on many levels Julia was wiser than me. It was stupid to lose my cool so early in the process; a good teacher should encourage, not harangue. But I am not a believer in empty self-esteem. Our culture seems to have developed the habit of offering major tributes for our children’s most minor accomplishments; fifth-grade graduations now have the pomp and circumstance once reserved for high school. Self-esteem, I should have told Julia, does not come from vacuous praise; self-esteem comes from a job well done. Neither Julia nor I was doing her job well that morning.
The rest of the day progressed through math and music and history with little tension, but also little joy.
“How did it go today?” John asked when he came home for dinner at six.
“Less than an hour into it, I was already yelling at Julia.”
He nodded. “So it begins.”
Nevertheless, each morning offered the hope of a new start, and our next day was better, as were many of the days to come, largely because the weather was beautiful and I was determined that we would get out of the house as much as possible.
There’s good reason why children often compare school to prison, spending so much time confined to a building, a room, and a desk, with lunchtime and recess limited to less than thirty minutes. For a child like Julia, who didn’t always finish her classwork, recess could be even shorter. Some of her elementary school teachers denied children chunks of outdoor time if they failed to complete assignments.
For Julia’s year of homeschooling, I planned to use the outdoor world as a pedagogical tool, something to be incorporated into daily assignments. During English, she could write about sights in our yard. For science, she could keep a leaf journal, wandering through college campuses with a field guide to trees, writing paragraphs, taking photographs, and doing leaf rubbings. Many history lessons could be conducted on long walks; Julia and I might get some exercise while discussing books that she had read about the Maya and the Aztecs, just as John Stuart Mill’s education had unfolded on walks with his father. I envisioned Socrates strolling through the Greek Acropolis while questioning his disciples.
I was also inspired by Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods. According to Dr. Louv, today’s children are suffering from “nature-deficit disorder,” spending more time indoors than any previous generation. He suggests that the rise of ADHD diagnoses might be tied to American children’s lack of interaction with nature. Nature has been proven to have a calming effect, so Louv argues; not to mention the healthy benefits of outdoor exercise. When Louv was a child, he and his friends devoted hours to roaming cornfields and woods, free to play outside until suppertime. Now many of those cornfields and woods have been replaced with strip malls and subdivisions. At the same time, more children face tightly scheduled afterschool activities, more homework, and more fearful parents. Louv claims that it’s not television and video games that are keeping children away from nature—it’s parents’ fear of stranger danger. Today’s moms and dads don’t want their children playing outside, unsupervised, for hours.
America’s schools have exacerbated the problem by drastically reducing or eliminating PE and recess, and by holding class outside only on rare occasions. The outside world, some teachers explain, is too distracting to be a setting for math or English. In our small town, when the new high school was built, some folks suggested that the classrooms have no windows. It was easier to manage the air circulation without them, so the argument went, and all that sunshine and greenery distracted from the serious work of learning. There was enough outcry from appalled parents that the window-snatchers were denied the fullest extent of their Orwellian vision. Now our high school has a mixture of windowless classrooms and rooms where the windows are so high and narrow that when the teachers and children sit at their desks, their view consists mostly of cinderblocks.
“Go outside,” I told Julia on our third morning of homeschooling, “and take your notebook with you. Choose an object anywhere in the yard and write a page about it in as much detail as possible, without ever stating what the object is or exactly where it’s located. Then bring the page to me, and I’ll have to walk around our property and find whatever you were looking at, based on your description.”
As I expected, she returned in fifteen minutes wit
h half a page of sentences too broad to be of use. She had found something in the creek that was covered in moss and grass, but more than seventy yards of creek meander through our property, full of little islands that met her description.
“How can you be more precise?” I asked.
The best writers, I explained, have an eye for the telling detail. She must go back and determine what made her object unique. After ten more minutes Julia returned with much better sentences: “The object is two feet long and one foot wide, and ten inches tall above the water. The object is next to a moss-covered flat waterfall. It has a few dead weeds on it that have turned white. There is an arched rock near it.”
With those directions I found the precise rock that she had in mind, and we sat together on the creek bank while I gave her a brief lesson in how to avoid using it and is so many times in her sentences.
By 12:30 that day, after indoor lessons in math and music, we prepared to go outside for an even longer spell. We had scheduled our first field trip for that afternoon. The coffee shop didn’t count, nor did any trip within our town limits. The grocery store, the colleges, the local library—all constituted a daily part of community-based schooling. A “field trip” meant traveling at least twenty minutes out of town, something we would do on a regular basis over the coming months.
In many public schools, field trips are the latest victim headed for the chopping block, and not only because of budget concerns, which would be a lamentable but understandable excuse. Instead, the anti–field trip folk often cite the need for more test-prep time, while also questioning whether field trips hold much educational value.
This last complaint is the most mind-boggling. In my experience, one well-executed field trip can offer more intellectual content than an entire week of classroom exercises. I once took Kathryn out of school for a day to visit my sister, who works as a neonatologist at the University of Virginia’s medical center. For half an hour Aunt Karen gave us a tour of the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit), where dozens of premature babies wrapped in blankets lay in thick plastic bassinets with tubes attached to their noses, their chests, and their feet. Kathryn stared at the computer monitors above each bassinet, watching heart and respiratory rates produce jagged lines that looked like the results of a lie-detector test, revealing the faulty lung, the inconsistent heart. Alarms beeped as oxygen rates exceeded or dipped below healthy limits. “The baby is rolling over,” Karen explained, unruffled. “The baby is crying.” Occasionally she turned a knob one notch forward or back.
