by Laura Brodie
One woman in the room couldn’t be missed with her lovely copper-colored hair: Mary, mother to ten children ages three to eighteen. When I heard Mary mention “the Lord,” I assumed she must have come to homeschooling (and all those children) through some religious compulsion. “Oh no,” she said, laughing. Christianity was a recent development in her life. “I was a liberal feminist when I began homeschooling,” she explained. Her oldest children had started out in the public schools, where she had worked as an occasional substitute teacher. But Mary hadn’t liked what she saw. “I hated the Ritalin march,” she explained, “all the children lined up at lunchtime to take their medication. I thought there couldn’t be that many ADHD kids.”
Ritalin was not a school mandate; it was the choice of parents and doctors. But in Mary’s eyes, the urge to succeed in the public schools’ controlled environment had contributed to a medicated generation. Mary loathed the schools’ emphasis on behavior modification, every classroom with its chart on the wall, listing children’s names on paper tennis shoes or race cars or baseball bats, each name falling down the chart from green to yellow to red, depending on a child’s behavior. Nor did Mary like the incentives for good behavior—“If you stayed green all week you could visit the treasure box!” For her, traditional schools were too managerial, preparing children for the corporate world or factory life. A stubborn iconoclast with an MFA in poetry, she valued creativity and freedom above all: “Kids need time to be creative as children. In the adult world they’ll have plenty of time to meet other people’s expectations.”
In addition to being a poet and screenwriter in the scattered moments not devoted to her kids, Mary had a special flair for science. That fall she was planning a three-day fossil study, and she invited Julia and me to come along.
A few weeks later we joined Mary and a handful of other homeschoolers in the basement of a church, where an amateur paleontologist had spread part of his fossil collection across a table. He spent an hour explaining about the digs he had been on, and how fossil lovers could buy and sell specimens on the Internet. Every time he mentioned dinosaurs, Julia waved her hand and talked with such eager abandon that my pride in her knowledge was balanced by my sensitivity to the group. I kept putting my hand on her knee and murmuring, “Let the other kids speak, Julia.”
A week later we gathered in that same basement to hear Mary expound on trilobites—when they lived, where they lived, the details of their primitive anatomy displayed on handouts. Finally, in the third week, five moms and nine children crowded into Mary’s fifteen-seat van and she piloted us an hour south, through the rolling pasture between the Blue Ridge and Alleghenies, with one little carsick boy threatening to vomit half the way.
That drive gave me a chance to ask a few other moms why they had opted for lifelong homeschooling. The most succinct reply came from a woman with striking curly black hair and dark eyes, whose daughter looked like a beautiful Greek princess. “Why are you homeschooling?” I asked, and she looked me right in the eye: “Have you heard what sort of language the children use in the public schools?”
I knew what she meant. There were a lot of sassy kids at Waddell Elementary, steeped in the language of Happy Bunny—imagine the Easter bunny with an attitude: “I’m happy, don’t wreck it by talking.” Rachel, our verbally precocious middle daughter, had an ear especially attuned to edgy vocabulary. In the second grade she had tried a bout of experimentation with profanity that had left her babysitter puzzled: “Where did Rachel get the potty mouth?”
I had responded with feigned innocence: “Oh, you know how it is. Once they go off to school, they hear everything.” In fact, Rachel had heard plenty of bad words at our house. Between John’s military mouth and my occasionally roiling temper, our eight-year-old was starting to sound like Richard Nixon.
As I looked out the window of Mary’s van, watching the Blue Ridge Mountains parallel the highway, I knew that I was one of the parents whose slack habits had contributed to the schools’ verbal cesspool. Fortunately, after a few conversations on the difference between good words and bad, Rachel had cleaned up her act, but I discovered over time that I didn’t mind the occasional shit, damn, or crap so much as the shallow drivel that many elementary-age children were absorbing from American pop culture: daily discussions of who was and was not cool, whose clothes were pathetic, what boy was hot. Compared to all the gossip about social winners and losers, Rachel’s second-grade profanity sounded downright eloquent.
Now Mary had pulled off the highway, and after a few miles of winding country lanes, she had reached the site of our excavation: an unprepossessing dirt hill right beside the road—no marker, no parking area, just Mary’s childhood recollection that this was a good place to dig. With one mother standing in the road to slow passing cars, we sat on that incline of clay and shale and attacked the dirt with small picks and hand shovels.
Within fifteen minutes everyone had found a fossil except me and Julia. I was starting to think that short-term homeschoolers were deficient in the art of digging, when Julia hit a trilobite vein. The effect was like a miner’s first discovery of gold. Julia was thrilled, doubling her pace. For half an hour she carved out pieces of shale, peeling layers apart gently, uncovering trilobite fossils the size of my thumbnail. The earth was full of buried treasure more precious to Julia than any pirate’s hoard.
“It’s cool that you can find fossils right beside the road,” she said. “I mean, you usually think of fossils being out in the desert. But here they are, right in the dirt. And these are older than the dinosaurs.”
We went home with shale fragments wrapped in tissue paper and packed in individual jewelry boxes. To this day Julia has two pieces tucked away in her bedroom drawer—homeschooling relics, as tangible as the bones of saints.
One final trip capped our fall: a three-day mother-daughter excursion to Washington, D.C. Although I had worked in Washington for two years, and had visited annually for the past eighteen, I had never set foot in the National Archives, the Supreme Court, or the Library of Congress. Homeschooling offered the chance to fill the gaps in my own education, let alone Julia’s. We packed our itinerary with sights new to both of us, along with our old favorites: the museums of Natural History and Air and Space.
What a glorious sense of escape, to leave town after a Thursday college class, with only one child in tow. John could manage Rachel and Kathryn for three days; he could make their lunches and drive them to school, chauffeur them to playdates and dance class and birthday parties, feed them, read with them, tell them to brush their teeth and take their baths and go to bed. I was free—free in a way I hadn’t experienced in years.
On the drive, Julia and I listened to books on tape (after some obligatory math and history quizzing, which she lamented noisily), but when we crossed the Potomac, my job as tour guide began. “Look at the Kennedy Center,” I said. The Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument.
“What’s that building on our left?” I asked.
“The White House,” Julia answered.
“What branch of government is run from the White House?”
“The executive.”
Inside the National Archives’ Rotunda, we stood before the Constitution, preserved in helium under glass.
“Isn’t it impressive?” I asked, but Julia shrugged.
She found the space dark and dull, the Declaration of Independence yellow and faded, a mere ghost of its former self. Julia was more interested in lunch than in the Bill of Rights. And yet, two years later, when I asked if she remembered the Archives, she said yes, it was “very cool” to see history preserved. That struck me as a statement about the nature of homeschooling; it was an experience liable to be valued mostly in retrospect, once memory had filtered out the discomfort of sore feet and the growling of a child’s stomach.
Although it would take years for Julia to appreciate the Archives, she did seem to show an immediate interest in the Supreme Court interior. There, she sat quietly while a gui
de explained what we would be seeing if the Justices were in session. I was impressed with Julia’s silent concentration; she seemed absorbed in the tour guide’s words. But when we walked outside and I asked her to write a paragraph about the experience, I learned what had monopolized her attention:
Hi, I’m Julia and I just went to the Supreme Court. Inside I saw the Supreme Court’s courtroom. It had one eagle on each flagpole. We saw that golden animals were carved into gates that rimmed the right and left hand sides. If you go one floor up there is a basketball court called the highest court in the land.
The courtroom’s human history and function held little interest for my daughter; her eyes were searching for any animal presence in the room. “I kept imagining the animals coming to life and climbing off those golden bars,” she told me later. “Even the fish, swimming in the air…I never do that with humans. I never imagine statues getting up and walking around.”
There were plenty of animals to interest Julia inside the old Library of Congress, which we visited next. Zodiac symbols decorated the central hall’s marble floor, and Julia stood on Capricorn’s bronze goat while peering up at the names of Milton, Shakespeare, and Dante inscribed in a heaven of stars and angels. The Library had just reopened after years of renovation, and the colors were almost fluorescent, all peach and aqua and white. It looked like an elaborate Italian palace, full of intricate Corinthian columns, sculpted staircases, shimmery mosaics, and sparkling stained glass. The main reading room glowed with rose and tan marble arches leading up to the rotunda, where statues of Newton and Herodotus and Moses peered down from the ether.
“I think this is the most beautiful room in Washington,” I murmured to Julia.
She wasn’t impressed. Sure, it was pretty, but as she noted on our way out, “What’s the point of a library where you can’t even check the books out?”
Julia chose instead to linger in the glassed-in botanical gardens beside the Capitol, where she could commune with orchids and bromeliads. She also felt at home inside the National Museum of the American Indian, donning buffalo skins and beating on drums. She loved the television screen that showed cartoon stories of Native Americans transformed into stars in the night sky. “I could have watched that all day long,” she mused.
Washington is a homeschooler’s paradise, not only because of the museums and monuments at every corner, but because so much of it is free. At 6:00 p.m. we attended the daily complimentary concert at the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage. An Irish harpist performed with a percussionist and a tap dancer, and when she told the crowd that we were welcome to dance, Julia stood and waltzed in the aisles.
Our chief expense came from restaurants, but even those were educational for a ten-year-old. Lexington has no Thai café, no Indian or African food. In Washington we could enjoy them all, especially my favorite: Ethiopian. Julia, child of my heart, was happy to eat with her fingers, tearing bits of spongy injera bread to pick up minced lamb, shredded cabbage, and pureed lentils.
As for our lodging, we stayed with the college friends whose children had faithfully learned their state capitals in the D.C. public schools. Their mother was a Justice Department attorney who, years earlier, had argued and won a case before the Supreme Court. Spotting the opportunity for one final lesson, I prodded Julia: “Remember what you heard at the Supreme Court today? How each lawyer has thirty minutes to present a case to the Justices? And how the Justices grill the lawyers with questions? Wendy is one of those lawyers—she stood in that courtroom and answered the questions, and she won her case. Do you want to ask her anything?”
Yes, at the end of the day my fifth-grader had a pressing question for the accomplished attorney. The most important question of all.
“So, where are your toys?”
CHAPTER SIX
The Winter of Our Discontent
All’s fair in school and war.
JULIA
IF HOMESCHOOLING HAD BEEN AN ENDLESS STRING OF FIELD trips, wandering through museums and parks and concert halls, Julia and I would have been happy all year. Away from home, reveling in freedom and space, we enjoyed the pleasures of hands-on learning. But field trips are the exception, not the rule. In between our sporadic travels, the kitchen table waited with its hours of math and grammar and science—and as most parents can attest, extended spells of homebound mother-daughter contact are a recipe for trouble.
Most homeschooling books don’t mention these troubles; they don’t dwell on shouting matches and slammed doors. Perhaps other homeschooling households are more placid than mine, or perhaps the first foray into homeschooling is always rocky, and years of practice are required to smooth the path. But I suspect that even the best homeschooling families have their ugly moments, from minor annoyances to major fights, and at the risk of inviting the social worker to my door, I will tell you about ours. Here, in order of increasing aggravation, are all the things that began to go wrong for me and Julia, as the hopefulness of fall gave way to the gloom of winter.
To begin with—something small.
Before launching into the regular fifth-grade math curriculum, I had thought to give Julia some sense of where numbers come from, and why they are necessary. Our public library has an excellent children’s book called The History of Counting, written by an archaeologist named Denise Schmandt-Besserat. The book begins with the numberless systems of simple societies, and with a mixture of brightly illustrated pages and clearly written text, it demonstrates how the rise of cities in ancient cultures made precise methods of counting necessary.
“Look at this page,” I said to Julia one morning in early September. “Did you know that there are people living in the world today who don’t use numbers at all?”
Julia settled beside me on the living room couch while I read aloud:
For example, the Paiela, who cultivate orchards in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, count by pointing to parts of their body. The number 1 is called “little left finger,” 11 is “left neck,” 16 is “right ear,” etc. This way of counting is called body counting. When the Paiela go to the marketplace, they trade and bargain by pointing to their fingers, wrists, elbows, shoulders, neck and nose. This way of counting is sufficient in communities that have no use for large numbers, because the people themselves produce most of the food and things they need. (The largest number of the Paiela is 28, shown by the two hands clenched together.)
Here was a drawing of a handsome brown-skinned man with a bone through his nose, his torso facing the reader with arms down, palms forward, head turned to his right, naked except for a skirt of long white feathery fronds. Numbers outlined his upper body, extending from the tips of his fingers, up his arms, around his head, and down to his opposite hand.
“How would you say nineteen in the Paielas’ language?” I asked Julia.
“Right shoulder.”
“What about five?”
“Left thumb.”
We turned the pages and saw cultures that counted with pebbles, and the ancient Egyptians using oval stone markers to represent each sheep.
“Isn’t this interesting?” I said.
Julia turned away, staring out the window toward the mountains.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“C’mon, Mom,” she sighed. “It’s boring.”
Boring? People in the twenty-first century who survive without numbers beyond twenty-eight was boring? I looked at my beautiful daughter leaning away from me on a pillow, strands of dark brown hair falling in swirls beside her cheeks, and I immediately recalled T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:
And would it have been worth it, after all
…
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all�
�—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”
There I was, armed with my pile of books and games and puzzles and field trip itineraries, trying to reveal the wonders of the world to this yawning creature. And there she was, running the tip of her finger across the pattern in the upholstery, intimating that I had no comprehension whatsoever of her mind: “That is not what I meant at all. / That is not it, at all.”
I don’t know what I expected from my ten-year-old. Boundless joy at a book about numbers? Mesmerized interest in the tribes of New Guinea? Naturally a little girl wouldn’t share all of her mother’s interests, but I did assume, in those early days, that Julia would meet me halfway. I thought that once we embarked on homeschooling, she would stop equating teacher with torturer, and muster enough enthusiasm, enough sense of intellectual adventure, to give each new subject, and each new book, a cheerful try. Julia, however, could be remarkably dismissive of topics that didn’t immediately spark her interest.
“Shall we watch this award-winning film on George Washington?” I would ask, and Julia would merely sigh. Dullsville.
A concert featuring the Cleveland String Quartet? Ho hum.
A speech at W&L by Jimmy Carter? “Oh, Mom, do we have to go?”
Yes, often we had to go. Much as I understand the need to follow a child’s interests, how does a ten-year-old know where her passions lie unless she is first introduced to the myriad possibilities in the world? A child might skip one concert, but should she skip math because she dislikes it? Or science? Or history? Some unschoolers would say, “Yes, she’ll come back to math in her own time.” But short-term homeschooling doesn’t allow time for the child’s interests to catch up with the curriculum, and I believe in the daily discipline of math and writing and music for any school-age child.
