Love in a Time of Homeschooling

by Laura Brodie

  I usually required Julia to complete the tasks I had planned for the week, whether they appealed to her or not. Remember that boring essay on Fahrenheit and Celsius? I insisted that she write the whole thing, for the sake of having finished what we started. This meant that I had to squeeze the paragraphs out of her over the course of five days, which was kind of like running a soggy shirt through a dry wringer. She probably would have written a better essay on a more appealing subject, and in the coming months I tried to offer many choices: If you don’t like this math book, what book would you prefer? If the metric system is boring, what science topic do you want to write about? And yet, the wringer approach was sometimes necessary, because even when we chose topics that Julia enjoyed, she could still, like any ten-year-old, display an immense capacity for foot-dragging.

  Take, for instance, our fall-term focus on natural history. We had decided to study Peter Ackroyd’s The Beginning, a book that follows the evolution of life from the Big Bang through cavemen. The pictures were vivid, the text was well written, and the subject was right up Julia’s alley, with its angry T. rex on the cover. We planned to complement each chapter with art projects and videos and writing assignments, focused on different time periods: Precambrian, Paleolithic, multiple ice ages.

  In theory, it sounded great. In practice, the first time I asked Julia to read a chapter, she managed about three pages before closing the book. I soon discovered that this child, who could remain absorbed in fiction for hours at a time, had a very limited attention span when it came to nonfiction. Julia was happy to learn nonfiction from films and TV: the History and Discovery channels were fine with her, and Eyewitness videos, with their catchy opening music, white backdrops, and thirty-minute length, were ideal. But when it came to reading a single chapter from a children’s biography, she balked like a recalcitrant mule. Dinosaurs might hold her interest for half a dozen pages; she could rarely stomach human beings for more than a few paragraphs.

  This surprised me, because in the first through fourth grades, Julia had often checked out nonfiction books from the library, usually on nature and sometimes outer space. But now I realized that she had never read those books from cover to cover. She had sampled them, scanning the pictures and dipping into paragraphs here and there. And why not? She was a child, not a college student (something I, with my professorial habits, had to constantly remind myself). I tried to suggest novels for Julia with historical subjects, for the sake of sneaking a little nonfiction into her brain. Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Tree House series had been wonderful for Julia in the second grade, incorporating history and science into a magical adventure. But now, in the fifth grade, Julia had such a strong preference for fantasy that it was hard to interject versions of the real world into her reading. I supposed that I should be glad she was eager to read anything at all; perhaps an interest in nonfiction would emerge later in life.

  Nevertheless, since The Beginning was the centerpiece of our science and history, I wasn’t willing to give it up. Instead, we spent several mornings reading the book together. I would read a paragraph, then Julia would read one. Or sometimes I would read a chapter on my own, then deliver the information in the form of a mini-lecture, with questions and answers. Either way, the process was much more labor-intensive for me than I had anticipated, and we wound up skimming much of the text.

  When faced with Julia’s bored indifference, I would sometimes set aside a book, a film, or the entire plan for an afternoon. With no standardized tests looming, no required facts to memorize, we had the flexibility to stop, regroup, and adjust the plan. As I saw it, our curriculum was valuable as a starting point. We had a set of clear goals; how we achieved them could be a matter of trial and error.

  So as for that beautiful counting book? I put it away. And what else did we abandon over the course of the year? How many books and games and plans were relinquished as lost causes? I’ll mention just a few.

  There was, for instance, my plan to conduct verbal lessons with Julia while going on outdoor walks. I had imagined she and I might talk about history, poetry, and geography while getting some exercise and fresh air. (Elementary school teachers can chuckle at my idealistic expectations.) Although little John Stuart Mill was capable, by age five, of sustaining long talks while strolling with his father, my lovely child of nature displayed a two-minute tolerance for conversation before she would run ahead of me to pick Queen Anne’s Lace growing at the side of the road.

  “Thank you,” I would say when she handed me a bouquet. “And what do you think brought about the end of Mayan civilization?”

  “Oh no!” she would respond. “A dead rabbit!” And off she’d go to stare at whatever mangled corpse graced our path that day. (On our road, the daily fare can range from possum to ground hog to skunk. I soon got tired of making lessons out of squished squirrels.)

  Surrounded by the glories and horrors of nature, Julia had no interest in abstractions; world history or American government couldn’t compare with a scuttling chipmunk. On most walks, she bounded like an unleashed golden retriever, chasing after cardinals or blue jays, returning to my side only briefly before running again. Given space, Julia always preferred running over walking, darting down sidewalks and grocery store aisles, rarely attentive to teachers and parents saying, “Slow down Julia! No running in the halls!”

  The few occasions when we managed to blend outdoor walks with a clear academic agenda came when Julia maintained a leaf journal. With a field guide in hand she was content to slow her pace, walking from tree to tree on Washington and Lee’s campus, taking photographs, doing leaf rubbings, distinguishing the eastern white pine from the short-needled loblolly. She recorded ash, elm, and oak according to their kingdoms and phyla, and wrote a descriptive paragraph on each one.

  “Remember those times when we took pictures of trees and wrote about them?” she said to me a year later. “I liked that. Let’s do that again.”

  And yet, once the gold and crimson and saffron shades had vanished from our landscape, much of the initial luster of homeschooling vanished as well. When the air grew cold and the trees fell bare and we retreated more and more indoors, Julia and I started to seriously grate on each other’s nerves.

  In a large classroom, or a larger homeschooling family, there would have been other children to dilute our one-on-one contact. My attention would have been diverted, and Julia would have had time to daydream, and to chart her own imaginative course over the hills and valleys of learning. It was hard for her to have my maternal eye focused so frequently upon her—imagine Sauron’s eye in The Lord of the Rings—and any mother who observes one child intently is bound for unpleasant discoveries.

  I soon found that my eldest daughter had an enormous flair for whining, a veritable gift for discontent. Her repertoire of grievances spanned all the injustices of a child’s world, from teeth brushing to room cleaning to the daily grind of math and grammar. “I hate fractions…I don’t want to proofread…Why do I have to practice my violin?” Homeschooling can be especially exhausting when every bout of productive work is preceded by ten minutes of lamentation, and I found myself repeating the classic parental refrain: “You could have finished the job by now, in the time you’ve spent complaining about it.”

  How foolish I had been, to have believed that Julia’s complaints over the past two years had been caused by her distaste for the public schools. I had assumed that all her griping stemmed from an institutional cause; surely she would be a cheerful learner once I granted her this break from the old routine.

  If only it had been that simple. My daughter, I soon realized, protested about all structured schoolwork, whether it took place in a classroom or a kitchen. She might have been pleased with pure unschooling if freed to choose her daily direction, but that, from my perspective, was not an option. Math and spelling and science all had to be studied, regardless of a ten-year-old’s habitual petulance.

  “Glass half full,” I kept saying to Julia. “Glass half full.”<
br />
  “Halfway isn’t good enough,” she replied.

  I began to wonder if my child had a genetic predisposition toward grumbling. This must be a matter of nature, not nurture, I told myself, because Rachel and Kathryn, born into the same household, the same model of parenting, and attending the same schools, did not share Julia’s propensity to balk noisily at all schoolwork. In fact, my chief concern about Rachel was the excessive time she devoted to her homework. Far from complaining about it, she threw herself into her assignments with such high standards that in future years my efforts would be torn between trying to get her to lighten up and encouraging Julia to work harder. As for Kathryn, encountering the rituals of public school for the first time, including weekly homework, she didn’t blink. When I mentioned that I never had homework in kindergarten, she found my comment a curiosity, but not a rallying cry. Only Julia, keenly attuned to social injustice, saw the adult world as infringing way too much upon her childhood. Whether in the form of homeschooling or a traditional classroom, education and lamentation went hand in hand.

  Her complaints reminded me of Julia’s toddler years, when my pockets were full of pacifiers to soothe her screaming outrage. Now I was offering games and puzzles and outdoor science experiments as intellectual pacifiers with only moderate success, and on her most petulant days I could feel myself getting resentful.

  Instead of protests, I think I would have liked a small measure of gratitude. That might sound selfish, but it would have been nice to have a teacher appreciation week in homeschooling—some recognition from Julia that Mom was spending a lot of time trying to make her education livelier and more fun, so maybe she should give the complaints a rest.

  My only consolation came from other frazzled moms, similarly exasperated with their querulous children. “It’s terrible,” one British mother explained, describing her son’s behavior with a term that I liked: whinging. “I asked him just yesterday, when did you become such an incredible whinger?”

  Fifth grade, a few mothers explained, was an especially trying time for girls—the beginning of their transition from childhood to adolescence. A few of Julia’s classmates had started their periods; some looked like fourteen-year-olds, their bodies had developed so fully, so suddenly. Along with this physical development came a host of emotional struggles: eating disorders, debilitating self-criticism, obsession with popularity and fashion and dating. Sadly, the behaviors once associated with girls’ teenage years now seem to be ensconced by the end of elementary school.

  Julia displayed none of this preteen angst; she couldn’t care less about clothes or boys or social ladders. I told myself that her loathing for structured schoolwork was mild compared with the self-loathing that some of her peers were expressing. Still, that didn’t take the edge out of her complaints, or mine.

  Faced with growing frustrations, my first response was predictable—I got mad at my husband. This homeschooling, I told myself, might be less exhausting if John was more supportive.

  John had been skeptical about the whole homeschooling concept, predicting that I was going to drive myself crazy. And rather than admit he might have been right (too much to ask of any wife), I started to focus on all the subtle ways he was contributing to my insanity.

  At the beginning of the year he had willingly jumped aboard our homeschooling train once it started to leave the station. On Tuesdays and Thursdays from noon until three, John was ready to welcome Julia at his VMI office, for lunch and lessons in the flute and conversational French. In preparation, Julia and I had visited the French teacher at our local middle school and had purchased the same textbook she was using, noting how far the first-year French class usually advanced. We didn’t expect Julia to maintain a middle-school pace; our town’s sixth-graders study their language five days a week. But we hoped that John’s fluency (from years of study and travel in France) would give Julia a solid start.

  I was especially adamant about leaving Julia in her father’s care, not only for the sake of my mental health, but also to thwart the idea that homeschooling is the sole territory of stay-at-home moms. Homeschooling is sometimes labeled as antifeminist—an enterprise that keeps women occupied at home, focused on their children and incapable of pursuing a career. This label has always bothered me, first, because homeschoolers are a diverse bunch of women and men, and second, because, in my mind, “feminism” is defined not by the voltage of one’s career, but by the ability to make choices—to choose to be a full-time doctor or a full-time mom, or something in between. In my case, I wanted to combine homeschooling with a part-time job, something plenty of homeschoolers, female and male, manage across our country. But flexible options are possible only when homeschooling moms and dads receive support from spouses and partners, grandparents and friends. If I wanted to blend homeschooling with professional work, that meant getting help from John.

  He seemed willing enough when September rolled around. “Today was great!” Julia wrote in her journal after her first day with Dad. “I went to the library, and I even had Dad start to tutor me in French and flute. Which is great because I don’t get to see him that often anymore.” John’s typical schedule involved evening rehearsals three days a week, football or basketball games on weekends, and out-of-town trips every month. A three-hour block of time with her father was a special treat.

  Unfortunately, after the first week, those three-hour blocks quickly dissolved into fifteen-minute chunks. It seemed that John’s office was a bad setting for homeschooling (no surprise there, many working parents will affirm). With 150 band students, John often had cadets streaming in and out of the room. A thirty-minute flute lesson might suffer two or three interruptions, and with his telephone and computer beckoning, John spent as much time on email as on Julia’s French.

  Meanwhile, once the novelty wore off, Julia began to lose interest.

  “When we started,” John explained, “it was all new and interesting, so she paid attention to me. In the first two weeks we’d spend an hour on French and an hour on the flute each day, and everything went well. But after that, she figured out that she could just blow me off.”

  Like me, John assumed that if he got Julia started on an assignment, she should be able to work independently for half an hour. Occasionally that worked; more often, when I came to pick her up at three o’clock, John would be off at a meeting while she was absorbed in computer games.

  “What did you do with your dad today?” I’d ask.

  “A little bit of French,” she’d reply, not looking up from the screen. “A little bit of music. Mostly we hung out at the weight room.”

  The VMI weight room. Imagine a vast monument to sweaty testosterone, full of football players and warriors-in-training, working their abs and biceps and pecs while blasting songs from The Killers and Drowning Pool. That family-friendly space was destined to become Julia’s alternate classroom, as John’s need for daily exercise competed with her need for academic instruction. While Dad tried to break his latest bench press record, Julia went next door to the cardio room, full of treadmills and stationary bicycles and, most important, a TV hanging down from the ceiling. Julia had no qualms about monopolizing the remote control; John was often amused to walk in and find a room full of macho cadets watching the Powerpuff Girls—Bubbles, Blossom, and Buttercup—saving the world with their tiny, muscle-free physiques.

  As the weeks passed and the weight room prevailed, I thought, “Okay. No problem.” Since John thrived on daily exercise, he could be Julia’s PE teacher. In the coming months, they ran the steps at VMI’s football stadium, jogged around the parade ground, and practiced sit-ups and push-ups. They tried a little racquetball, and John timed Julia running around the outdoor track. When it came to physical education, he had one clear objective: “All I have to do is get Julia sweating.”

  This all sounded great to me, so long as John and Julia kept up with their other subjects. Sadly, that didn’t happen.

  One evening in October, John came home from a lat
e jazz band rehearsal, dropped his keys and trumpet case on the hall table, and collapsed on the couch.

  “Julia’s stopping flute,” he announced.

  “But you’ve only tried it for one month,” I protested.

  “She isn’t making progress.”

  Julia, he explained, had learned the first few notes with ease, but when it came to “going over the break” (when all the lifted fingers must be placed back on the air holes at once, while pressing down an octave key), she’d hit a brick wall. It was hard. She got frustrated. She fell into tearful tantrums, which provoked dry-eyed tantrums from John. The two of them spent as much time arguing as playing.

  “Anyway, she’s not practicing,” he said.

  “You’ve never practiced with her at home,” I responded.

  “She should practice on her own.”

  By then I was gritting my teeth, a habit I had developed after the birth of my children. My maternal frustrations are recorded on the whittled-down edge of my left incisor. “I’ve spent four days a week for the past four years,” I said, “getting Julia to practice her violin. You could spend one night a week working on the flute with her.”

  John shook his head. “That’s your thing, not mine.”

  There we were, caught in an old family argument—the same argument that echoes in households across America, wherever parents debate whether a child should be required to practice a musical instrument.

  John and I have very different perspectives on the matter. I come from a family where, at age seven, every child was signed up for one year of piano lessons, followed by several years of any instrument the child preferred. My mother viewed music as an essential part of a child’s education, as relevant as science, history, or math. Although my brother gave up his French horn after a few years, my sister is now an excellent cellist as well as a doctor. As for me, I earned money with my violin all through high school, playing at weddings and parties and pops concerts, and working as a strolling, gypsy-clad violinist in an Italian restaurant that my mother described as “whorehouse red.” These days I still perform with a small local symphony—the legacy of a mother who sat her children down and required them to practice.