Love in a Time of Homeschooling

by Laura Brodie

  But life rarely grants such idyllic moments. When Julia and I scheduled our Tuesday morning knitting lessons in September, we learned that if you didn’t come on Saturdays, your lessons weren’t with Sharon. Instead, we were taught by another local woman who was perfectly nice, but she didn’t teach children for free. And she didn’t teach in the yarn shop; she preferred the nearby office, with its comfortable couch and coffee table. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that we had come chiefly for the ambience of all that rainbow yarn.

  Julia, meanwhile, could manage only a fifteen-minute attention span when it came to knitting. Her impatient fingers battled the needles and yarn, producing stitches that were often bulky or twisted; the teacher was always unraveling and telling her to try again. Invariably I released Julia to go outside, where she stalked the peacocks and free-range hens, while I received the knitting instruction to pass along in the evenings.

  Although Julia didn’t take naturally to textiles, our mornings in that corner of the county were time well spent. The introduction of knitting supplies into our home meant that for years to come, all my girls would take turns picking up the needles and yarn, sporadically trying and failing and trying again. Moreover, next door to the Orchardside Farm (“next door” meaning two hundred yards away) stood an equally wonderful spot, the Buffalo Springs Herb Farm.

  Julia and I visited there after our first knitting lesson, parking beside a bank barn built in 1890, which was painted dark red with brown trim. Originally the bottom housed livestock and the top stored hay, but on that day the lower level held offices, and when Julia and I walked into the upper area, we were impressed by the cathedral-high roof that revealed open lofts where dozens of herbs and flowers in clustered bouquets had been hung upside down to dry. Around us, antique farm equipment lined the walls—a Christmas sleigh, a shaving horse (i.e., a wooden foot-operated vise). To our left stood a gift shop filled with woven baskets, potpourri, sachets, and soap (southernwood, pennyroyal, lavender, and peppermint) along with a wealth of spices (parsley, savory, and tarragon).

  Most of the spices and dried flowers had come from a garden outside, where Julia and I headed after buying a few items. The garden resembled an Appalachian answer to the grounds at Versailles—tiny, but landscaped with meticulous care. Heirloom vegetables remained locked away behind a picket fence, but the rest of the gardens were open for the public to wander free of charge, and were bordered by a trellised walkway on the east, a small hill on the west, and the gardener’s cabin at the southwest corner, with its log walls, stone floor, and two centuries of gardening tools on display.

  Julia was in Nirvana, smelling and touching very gently, never picking or trampling. She wandered through the fragrance garden, the Mediterranean garden, the paradise garden. A small incline lay covered in twenty-three varieties of thyme—I hadn’t known there was more than one—golden thyme, caraway thyme, longwood thyme, and all the varieties of creeping thyme (fairy and cosmosus, and orange spice). My favorite was “minus thyme,” as if thyme could be subtracted back into some herbal past.

  Julia lingered in the medieval garden, which was constructed like the ruins of a small stone chapel, with two-foot statues of saints tucked into stone nooks, a Celtic cross draped in vines, wind chimes dangling where the altar should have been, and small wooden benches that served as pews. When we sat down, Julia tilted her head: “Can you hear that?” Gregorian chants echoed so softly that a visitor would barely notice if she didn’t take the time to stop and sit quietly. On our way out, I saw that someone had dropped pennies in the holy water.

  Outside the gardens, across a broad green field, stood Wade’s Mill, its water wheel turning. Julia and I headed there next, both of us dashing through the lawn sprinklers (September in Virginia can reach the upper nineties), so we entered the stone-and-brick mill still dripping. Inside that tall structure, giant gears pulled a four-story oval belt that operated huge grinding machines, producing white flour, wheat flour, and cornmeal, mixed with other ingredients and sold in little rope-tied bags: pesto flour, polenta, buckwheat pancake mix. Julia ascended the mill level by level, until she reached the outdoor platform beside the top of the wheel, where a long trough filled with water led to a moss-covered chute. She dipped her palm into the water and stirred. “It’s cold and clear,” she said, smiling, and I smiled back.

  I looked upon that field trip as a great success, even though it served no big educational agenda. There were no facts for Julia to memorize about mills or gardens or bank barns; no quiz the next day. The excursion’s purpose was largely aesthetic, allowing a child to absorb the beauty of the world and to admire what men and women could build when they set their minds to it. I sensed that Julia needed lessons in the marvels of human life as much as lessons in math and English. Much of the time she had spent in school seemed to have convinced her that human existence was a dreary affair filled with tests and worksheets and homework. And although hard work is an inescapable part of life, the world I wanted to show my daughter was also full of wonder—not only the wonders of wilderness (Julia was willing to acknowledge those), but of man working in harmony with nature.

  We would return to that corner of the county twice in the coming weeks, journeying an hour round trip to reach the knitting cottage—a significant chunk of time in an average school day. Add all the field trips I had planned to Washington and Williamsburg, combined with frequent jaunts to the library, grocery store, and coffee shop, and Julia and I were destined to spend a lot of time on the road. Time is especially precious when you have only one year, so I wondered—what was the best way to use the car as a classroom?

  Driving to the yarn shop, I sometimes turned on classical CDs and let Julia absorb Tchaikovsky while she stared out the window counting hawks that perched in trees alongside the highway. On longer trips, we brought along DVDs on history and modern art, followed by Julia’s choices: Dinotopia and Pokemon 2000. But for most of our shorter drives, I turned off the technology and insisted on quizzing her in math and history and French. What is eight times six? I asked as we maneuvered between tractor trailers. Eight times seven, eight times eight? What’s the difference between obtuse and acute angles? Take out a sheet of paper, I’d say, and draw a trapezoid. Indicate the length of its sides, then calculate the area.

  Julia was thoroughly, invariably disgusted.

  “We’re in the car, Mom. Can’t you give it a rest?”

  When traveling on public school trips, she explained, the kids were allowed to play with Game Boys and listen to iPods.

  “Public school field trips happen once every couple of months,” I replied. “We are in the car every other day.”

  I tried to compromise by quizzing her for only the first half of every car ride—the longest I could ever hold her attention anyway. But even that intrusion was met with resentment. At root, Julia was a child who wanted to be left alone with her thoughts, and I valued that impulse. In our world of cell phones, text messages, and endless screens, most people spend far too little time engaging with their minds. Deep contemplation is an endangered art.

  In Julia’s case, however, the pendulum had swung in the opposite direction. She seemed likely to overdose on introspection. I remembered the words of Mrs. Hennis, Julia’s first-grade teacher: “Julia is in her own world, and it’s a wonderful world…but she needs to spend more time in our world.” On car rides, I dragged her into my world by peppering her with questions. “Quel âge as-tu, Julia?” “What country first established colonies in New York?” “How do you find the circumference of a circle?”

  Perhaps we would have been happier if I had engaged her in thoughtful conversations about the uses of mathematics or the complexities of historical events. But Julia was willing to have those conversations after three o’clock each day. The hours between 8:30 and 3:00 were the only time when she would agree to “play school,” trying math computation, French conversation, or memorization of anything. I was determined to make the most of those hours.

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bsp; Thus we established the roles that would become entrenched over the coming months: I was the drill sergeant and Julia was the dreamer. I wanted measurable progress, achieved through self-discipline and effective time management. Julia wanted a free-flowing and organic approach to life, where reading and math and music were pursued only to satisfy impulses of curiosity and pleasure, not to make “progress” toward societal goals. She wanted to live like Walt Whitman in Song of Myself: “I loafe and invite my soul / I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.” Loafing was Julia’s joy.

  I had done my own share of dreaming and loafing as a child, and I valued those hours as critical for building an imagination and nurturing a happy spirit. Still, I worried that Julia didn’t show much motivation to succeed at her schoolwork, whether in our car or kitchen. When I told John, he just sighed and gave one of his “like father, like daughter” explanations: “When I was a kid I don’t think I had motivation to do anything except play floor hockey, watch cartoons, and hang out with my friends. I didn’t want to be anything or do anything until late in high school, when I first thought about going to college.”

  I told Julia that she needed to find a balance between dreamy reflection and structured tasks. Youth offered that rare opportunity when a girl could grow to become an accomplished athlete, a rock musician, a Rhodes scholar, or whatever she set her heart upon, if she could combine self-discipline with her imaginative visions. And so I gripped the steering wheel and pushed my reluctant child forward with her schoolwork.

  One of my initial goals, as the cows and sheep and cornfields passed beside us, was to ensure that Julia learned her state capitals. I had been surprised, the previous summer, to hear that her fifth-grade peers would not be memorizing Bismarck, North Dakota, and Boise, Idaho. I viewed that task as an elementary rite of passage, and so had Julia’s school, until a few years earlier, when they’d decided to drop it.

  “You don’t learn state capitals?” I asked a fifth-grade teacher.

  “No,” she explained. “And we don’t require the children to spell the states’ names correctly. We only want them to locate the states on a map, and learn their postal abbreviations.”

  Postal abbreviations? As in AK, AL, AR? That struck me as incredibly slack, another example of how the schools had lowered their standards to allow more time for test preparation.

  The teacher saw no problem. “I don’t think anyone learns state capitals anymore,” she explained.

  The next day I polled my freshman composition students at Washington and Lee: “How many of you learned the state capitals when you were in elementary school?” Of eighteen students from across the nation, fifteen raised their hands.

  Still curious, I raised the subject with a couple of college friends whose daughter had just completed fifth grade in the Washington, D.C., public schools.

  “Did Kerry learn state capitals?”

  Yes, and their son would be learning them the following year.

  “The kids in our district only have to learn the state postal abbreviations,” I lamented, expecting these parents to commiserate.

  The father merely shrugged. “Those can be useful.” He was an economics professor at Georgetown, and he explained how a very smart colleague at another institution had been gathering oil statistics on Alaska, and was surprised that the numbers contradicted all of his expectations, until he realized that for months he’d been collecting data for the state abbreviated AL: Alabama.

  Despite one professor’s costly mistake, my daughter would learn her state capitals, thank you very much, at the rate of two or three per day, reviewing them each week on our trips to the yarn shop, coffee shop, and library.

  Julia didn’t seem to mind. She displayed a surprising talent for visualizing the U.S. map and naming all the states in geographical order. Beginning with Maine, she would run down the Atlantic coast, reciting each state and its capital sequentially, all the way to Florida. Then she’d move west: Montgomery, Alabama; Jackson, Mississippi; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; until she hit California, then north to Washington, and east across the Canadian border all the way back to Maine. The middle states were more of a jumble in her mind, but she learned their capitals dutifully, aided by a game that was our best homeschooling purchase, The Scrambled States of America.

  I had bought several games during our summer homeschooling shopping spree: art games, science games, a Quantum Pad Smart Guide to the Fifth Grade. Some purchases turned out to be a dull waste of cash, but Scrambled States was so entertaining that Rachel and Kathryn frequently asked to play.

  The game is a kind of slapjack, comprised of fifty cards that feature cartoon drawings of each state, along with its capital and nickname. Players arrange five cards face up, one of which should be slapped and tucked away into a victory pile in response to a prompt card. When the prompt read, “State capital has a person’s name in it,” Julia slapped Hawaii, because of the Lulu in its capital. I slapped Montana (remember Helena?). Sometimes the prompts were geographic: “Does the state border at least six other states?” Other times they were silly: “Is the state showing teeth?” All of the states had little smiling faces.

  Between that game and our car-time practice, Julia learned her capitals in a few weeks, and I was once again congratulating myself on a job well done when a brief conversation burst my pedagogical bubble.

  Our family was planning a trip to Chicago in the coming months, so I asked Julia, “What state is Chicago in?”

  She shrugged. “Ida know.”

  “We’ve been there twice before,” I reminded her.

  Still no clue.

  A dim realization swept over me. “Do you know what state Seattle is in?”

  She cringed and muttered, “Oregon?”

  “How about St. Louis?”

  She cringed further. “Kansas?”

  My heart sank. Here I thought that I was holding Julia to a higher standard by having her memorize state capitals, but in the end I was just being miserably traditional. She would have been much better served if I had asked her to learn the most important city in each state. After all, which city is more central to the history and economy of Illinois: Springfield or Chicago? What city should a child be able to identify in Washington: Olympia or Seattle? Most Americans know that St. Louis is located in Missouri, but few can remember that state’s capital, Jefferson City. And why should they? (Sorry, Jefferson City folk.) In a big state like California, Julia might be wise to learn a few cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, and maybe San Diego. Sacramento would not make the top of my list.

  In the end, I had committed the same folly that so many teachers and parents deplore: requiring an elementary-grade child to spend a significant amount of time memorizing facts that she would not use on a regular basis, and would therefore forget within a matter of months. So be it, I consoled myself. Live and learn.

  In addition to our visits to the knitting cottage, Julia and I also tried field trips with other homeschooling families. Here was our opportunity for “socialization,” that word so dear to critics of homeschooling. Here, too, was a chance to learn why other parents had chosen to bushwhack their own trails through the educational wilderness.

  First came a trip to the Frontier Culture Museum—acres of reproductions of seventeenth-century farms—Irish, German, English, and American—located in a town forty minutes north. We drove there with Melanie and her daughter, Sara, whom we had met when their house was featured on an “alternative homes” tour. Each spring Lexington’s Garden Club holds a “traditional” house tour, allowing folks to ogle some of the town’s fanciest interiors. But that year Lexington’s Healthy Foods Co-op arranged an alternative, which included a yurt and several solar homes with composting toilets. Sara and Melanie’s remote rural house featured prominently on the tour, and was dubbed by my daughters as the “house of straw,” because the walls were insulated with bales of carefully dried straw. A large tree stripped of leaves and twigs and polished smooth as marble rose th
rough the interior of the house, so that Sara could sit in its branches inside her room. Outside, gnomish faces were carved into the plaster walls. The entire effect was luxuriously hippy, with large southern-facing windows that made the house passive solar, overlooking a manmade pond and a hundred or so acres.

  While admiring her house, I learned that Melanie was an intermittent homeschooler. She had guided her older two sons through their elementary years before entrusting them to the local middle and high schools. Sara, her youngest child, had received one year of homebound kindergarten, before spending four years at our county’s tiniest rural school—twenty-five children per grade. Melanie hadn’t planned to homeschool again, but at the end of the fourth grade, Sara had begun to lobby hard. She was one of several children I would meet in the coming year who specifically asked to be homeschooled, wanting to spend more time learning at home with Mom. In the end, Melanie had given in, explaining, “You know, they grow up so fast.”

  So there we were on a September morning, two homeschooling moms, me a part-time professor and Melanie a part-time veterinarian, strolling with our fifth-grade daughters through replicas of seventeenth-century farms, complete with crops and barns and a smattering of livestock. On the German farm, Sara showed Julia how to pick up the chickens carefully and pet them like kittens. Luckily there were no ill-tempered fowl with sharp beaks.

  By the end of the afternoon, Julia had learned much about the history of agriculture, from Colonial times to Sara’s contemporary experiences. She had been able to touch and see and sometimes taste the differences in farmhouse life among various European countries, all the while getting fresh air, exercising her legs, and socializing with another child. The event met all of my requirements for a good field trip.

  I followed this up by planning excursions with hardcore, long-term homeschoolers, families Julia and I had met at a fall pot-luck hosted by Claire, the mom who had been so helpful with all of my planning for the year. The mothers at her event (no dads in sight) ranged from devout Christians to confirmed atheists, and their kids ran the gamut from well-groomed preschoolers to well-pierced teens. Claire explained that each of these families homeschooled in their own, separate way, but they liked to gather for occasional group activities: theater productions and art workshops and communal algebra lessons.