Love in a Time of Homeschooling

by Laura Brodie

  Mornings like that are reason enough for some families to homeschool. I know a local woman whose kids sleep until 9:30 while she enjoys her coffee and paper, a morning walk, and a leisurely shower. In her house, school begins at ten, and by two, the children have finished all of their lessons. I envision their home as an island of peace in the morning, while throughout their neighborhood, families scurry around grouchy and stressed. More arguments take place in our house between 7:30 and 8:00 a.m. than at any other time of day.

  Yes, one might say, but those late-sleeping children will never be prepared for the early morning grind of the working world! And maybe that’s true. But there are many working worlds in our country, with various working hours, and why must children be indoctrinated so early into the hassles of adult life?

  I pondered that question as I closed my door against the February chill. Walking into the kitchen, I sat down and warmed my hands on a mug of tea, blowing ripples across its surface. That day Julia could sleep late. Left undisturbed, she would doze until ten, which suited me fine. I needed time to think.

  Glancing at the counter to my left, I saw Julia’s journal, which beckoned with its oh-so-pretty Thomas Kinkade cover. I picked it up and examined that cover carefully for the first time: a painting of a stone cottage trimmed by multiple shades of blue. In the middle, an azure door was matched by azure shutters and eaves, topped with silvery blue shingles and a background of trees and sky that faded into a gray and pink twilit haze. In the foreground, a willow tree leaned over the cottage’s left corner, while dozens of plants bloomed simultaneously, perpetually. Snapdragons, red, pink, and purple, lined a hand-hewn wooden fence, and tall puffy shrubs buffered the entire scene, covered in miscellaneous blossoms that ranged from bluebonnets and scotch broom to daisies and lilac.

  This, I told myself, was the American idealized vision of home. Home was a place where every window glowed with orange and golden light, while tiny threads of smoke rose from the tops of brick chimneys. Home was a warm and sheltering nook, so inviting that even animals seemed drawn to it. Five blackbirds congregated on this painted roof, while a cat watched from a fencepost. To the left, free-range hens pecked in a pebbled walkway leading through a gate that remained always open.

  It struck me that Julia, for her daily journal, had chosen this paradisal image of home. Here, home was a haven of safety, beauty, and warmth, not a setting for anger and stress. Not a place where a frustrated mother called you a dumbass or popped you on the head for playing an F natural. What a betrayal of hopes my recent behavior had been. Obviously I was not living up to Thomas Kinkade’s vision of the world.

  I thought of the March family in Little Women. Even amid financial hardships and the troubles of war, their house was warmed by love, doled out under the guiding light of Marmee. And theirs, too, was a homeschooling house, where Jo was tasked with teaching little sister Amy, in protest against the tyranny of Amy’s knuckle-rapping schoolteacher. Of course, Jo deplored the idea of homeschooling her sister; she probably popped Amy on the head many a time. And Marmee, whose sticky-sweet name sounded too much like marmalade, confessed to having a fiery temper and a bitter tongue: “I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo.” Even in the most idyllic households, anger and frustration could simmer just beneath the surface.

  Still, I hated to compare myself to Marmee. I never did like Little Women, and in fact, neither did Louisa May Alcott, when she was first writing the book. She found the task dreary and dull and would have stuck to writing potboilers, if it weren’t for her somewhat despotic father, who pushed his daughter to complete the highly marketable project.

  The question for me, on that cold winter morning, was how hard a parent should push a child toward success. Should a parent “push” at all, or merely nudge and coax and pray? In the lives of many successful women there has lurked some form of parental despot, prodding, insisting, and sometimes punishing. I wondered: Was a touch of tyranny essential in parenting? So many parents of my generation seemed to allow their children to tyrannize them.

  I took another swallow of tea and opened Julia’s journal. Julia always let me read the pages with impunity, since she rarely used them for personal feelings. In fact, her first entries were little more than silly scribblings:

  A dragon is gold,

  A goblin is mold,

  And the fairies have to be sold.

  The wise one was told,

  Even though he was old,

  He still could not fold,

  The evil cold.

  In the first few weeks of homeschooling, Julia had viewed her journal as a boring chore. Compelled to write one page after school every Monday through Thursday, she had conformed to the letter, if not the spirit, of the assignment. She had filled her initial pages with short, terrible poems in large print, with double spacing between lines and quadruple spacing between stanzas. Her goal was haste, not quality; she sometimes completed her page in five minutes.

  I had been tempted, in our first month of schooling, to insist that she fill each page with thoughtful, single-spaced writing. This silly verse, I had wanted to say, was beneath her intelligence. Luckily, I never intervened. For once, I displayed amazing self-restraint, remaining patient even through the lowest forms of doggerel: “Twinkle twinkle little mutt, / Do not think I am a nut.”

  Now, as I flipped through the more recent pages of Julia’s writing, I was reminded that a mother’s silence is often more effective than her words. After weeks of jotting down hasty drivel, Julia had decided to put her journal to better use. She had begun to compile a dragon encyclopedia, filling her pages with descriptions of imaginary Fire Dragons, Cat Dragons, Were Dragons, and Water Wyverns. “Warrior Dragons,” she wrote, “are one of the most interesting dragons that have been”:

  They were the first dragons to paint their eggs. They also have a stinger on their tails that detaches at a speed of five milliseconds! Sometimes when detached it reaches over 1000 miles per hour. Warrior dragons’ wings have three sets of wing membranes [spelled “mendbrains”] so that if one part of the wing is damaged, the dragons can still fly. They breathe fire and have a way with their tails so that the stinger grows back in two seconds flat!

  At last, Julia was actually writing. These pages were not composed to silence an insistent mother; they were meant to satisfy a ten-year-old’s imaginative thirst. As a result, the sentences weren’t scribbled quickly, with oversize type. Here was single-spaced cursive, with subsequent entries that built upon earlier ideas:

  Dragon Eggs

  Warrior dragons paint their eggs with special symbols that give the baby dragons their small unique ability to run a bit faster or fly a bit better. But the reason why fairy dragons paint their eggs is for helping the eggs to not get eaten. So they usually paint a reptilian eye pupil on the egg…

  As I studied the progression in that little blue book, from hasty riffs on a single rhyme to intricate, creative sentences, I told myself that here, in my hands, lay tangible proof that something had been accomplished in our homeschooling. Julia had begun to write from her heart, and as a result, her ideas, her sentence structure, even her grammar, were improving.

  That brief moment at my kitchen table served as a minor revelation. How wrong I had been, for the past several weeks, to have fretted over all the things that were going badly in our schooling. What a fruitless waste of time, to have worried about incomplete tasks, abandoned goals, misspelled words, and miscalculated equations. Instead, why not celebrate everything that was going right?

  I should have known that the real test of our academic success would lie in Julia’s writing. After all, I am an English teacher—not a French linguist, not a scientist, certainly not a mathematician. For twelve years I had taught college students how to write papers and analyze literature, and my chief academic goal in homeschooling had been to encourage Julia to write across the curriculum, drafting essays on everything from fantasy novels to colonial life.

  Closing Julia’s journal, I wal
ked into our dining room, where our family computer stands in a corner cabinet. There, from the shelf above the monitor, I took out Julia’s portfolio, which held most of her formal writing from the year. Inside were pages and pages of essays, three times as much writing as her peers were doing—more writing, in fact, than Julia would ever complete in any of her middle-school years to come.

  Thumbing through the early pages, I stopped at Julia’s first book report, on a novel called Crispin, by the children’s author known as Avi.

  “What should you include in a book report?” I had asked Julia back in September.

  “The title of the book,” she answered.

  “That’s a good start.”

  “And the author?” she added.

  “That’s important, too. But what else?”

  She shrugged. “Stuff that happened in the story?”

  “Yes, that’s called the plot. But what other information should you include?”

  Julia was stumped, because what else did a book contain besides the stuff that happened?

  “How about your own analysis of the book?” I suggested.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, did you like Crispin?”

  “Yeah,” she nodded.

  “Why?”

  “Because it was good.”

  “What made it good?”

  “The writing.”

  “What made the writing good?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Every good book is successful for different reasons,” I explained. “Some books are funny, some have beautiful descriptions, some have exciting adventures, some have great characters. If you know what makes a particular book good, then you’ll know what makes each author unique. Is Avi talented at writing action scenes, or dialogue, or describing a place?”

  Julia wound up writing two brief paragraphs:

  Crispin Critique

  Crispin is good because of all the different settings and adventure. I like the settings a lot because they are so different but also so alike. I liked the adventure because it’s so exiting [i.e. exciting] yet so dramatic.

  But I don’t like how his on-the-run life stopped so quickly. Because as soon as he saw Bear his on-the-run life stopped short, and a minute later, was gone for good.

  It was rough, but it was a start. My college students still write about how things are “so different but also so alike.” That, I explained to Julia, doesn’t say much.

  My students also suffer from repetitive vocabulary. “See how you’ve used like in three sentences in a row?” I said to Julia. “How can you change that? What’s one synonym for different? And how else can you say ‘on-the-run life’?” That day marked Julia’s first acquaintance with a thesaurus.

  We also talked about larger questions of content. What made the story exciting and dramatic? Could she describe some of the settings? Why was Crispin’s life “on the run,” and who was Bear? These sorts of questions occupied every week of our autumn homeschooling, and now when I turned to Julia’s most recent book report, the benefits were clear:

  Martin the Warrior

  In a mysterious place called Redwall, there is a stoat called Badrang who has a fort next to the sea. He has long dreamt of a fort to call his own, and now he has one using the slaves he has captured in fighting. One of those slaves is a young mouse named Martin.

  Martin has a warrior’s spirit and a hate for the stoat. When he stands up to one of the captains, Badrang ties him to a log post and leaves him there until morning, but during the stormy night he meets a mouse named Rose who is on the outside of the fort looking for her brother Brome. Martin agrees to help her if she keeps the deadly seagulls off of him in the morning…

  When compared with Julia’s Crispin sentences, these paragraphs were a model of eloquence. They contained more color and detail than her previous work, with none of the awkward stiffness. Here, after briefly getting mired in the word call, she had experimented with her verbs, and had used more dependent clauses to make the sentences flow. Admittedly, the content was mere plot summary; analysis would have to follow. But Julia’s writing had made a clear step forward.

  Flipping through more pages, I saw that her research had also improved. Over the past few months I had required Julia to complete several author studies, just as her fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Gonzalez, had recommended. As a book lover, Julia had welcomed the reading. In the fall she had devoured all six volumes of The Chronicles of Narnia, in anticipation of Disney’s November release of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Together we had watched the movie Shadowlands, starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger, to learn about C. S. Lewis’s life. Julia found that film tedious, but she did enjoy reading Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising trilogy, as well as two books by Natalie Babbitt, three by Avi, several Redwall installments, and Christopher Paolini’s five-hundred-page sequel to Eragon, titled Eldest. With Lewis, Cooper, Avi, and Paolini, Julia had researched each author on the Internet (“Find three sources,” I said, “and don’t just rely on Wikipedia!”), and she had composed essays on each writer, with a biographical paragraph or two, a few sentences on each book she read, and occasional attempts at introductory and concluding paragraphs, which sometimes amounted to introductory and concluding sentences.

  When it came to doing research, her early efforts were shaky. With Lewis, she had displayed a child’s fixation on death:

  I think that C. S. Lewis was a very experienced writer, and had great trageties in his life. His mother died when he was a kid, and his wife died of cancer. But he did get three wonderful years with her when her cancer subsided, only to return again! C. S. Lewis died on the same day President Kennedy was assassinated. But his books live on today.

  Three months later, when she researched Christopher Paolini, Julia was handling an author who was eighteen and brilliantly alive, so she found more to say:

  Christopher Paolini is the author of Eragon and Eldest. He was born on November 7, 1983 in Southern California, and lived for some years in Anchorage, Alaska before moving to Montana. He was homeschooled all his life and was surrounded by the Bear Tooth Mountains. Christopher Paolini has a sister named Angelina, which is where he got the herbalist’s name in Eragon and Eldest. He also got some of the scenery from home, like the mountains in the Spine, and the valley which holds Carvahall…

  The fact that Paolini was homeschooled seemed to inspire Julia. She marveled that a home-educated sixteen-year-old could make a million dollars writing about dragons. Paolini was leading her dream life, and Julia set about writing in her journal with added vigor.

  Reading Julia’s portfolio was like perusing the before and after shots that fill so many women’s magazines and television shows. Look at the amazing transformation! Before and after a trendy diet, before and after a professional makeover, before and after a stint on What Not to Wear. Julia’s writing was now sleeker, more stylish, more beautiful. Admittedly, one reason for the improvement was purely cosmetic; her later essays were typed, while the earlier work was handwritten. Our computer was now checking her spelling and grammar, and computer screens tend to inspire more verbosity than mere pencil and paper. Still, the bare fact that Julia had learned to type represented yet another significant achievement.

  The previous year, Waddell’s gifted program coordinator had recommended typing for Julia’s homeschooling curriculum. Typing, she explained, was a valuable talent in middle school. These days many ten-year-olds have already honed their typing skills through years of computer access, but I had steered Julia away from keyboards for much of elementary school, believing that children should be immersed in books before they are immersed in technology. At the start of our homeschooling year, Julia was still pecking at the keys with one finger.

  Now, as I thought back over the weeks in which Julia learned to type, the process seemed analogous to our entire experience of homeschooling. It had been a matter of me planning and insisting, Julia complaining and resisting, all leading up to the crucial question: W
hen was it time to quit?

  Back in August, I had tried to buy a fun typing game for Julia, not realizing that plenty of free games are available on the Internet. The Webkinz site—sacred oracle to so many grade-school girls, including my Kathryn—includes a typing game. But as a novice homeschooler, I didn’t know about these options, so I thought to purchase something online. A basketball game—where children could shoot virtual hoops while positioning their fingers at ASDF JKL;—had garnered the most enthusiastic reviews. Alas, my primitive PC didn’t have the Windows operating system necessary to run that program. Instead, I settled for SpongeBob SquarePants, with his Bikini Bottom typing tournament, filled with maritime games. (Imagine a motorboat accelerating down an underwater raceway, speeded by a child’s typing, with slops of seaweed splattered on the windshield at every error.)

  Julia hated it. After a few tries in early September she grew weary of SpongeBob’s high-pitched nasal words of encouragement: “One key at a time, baby, one key at a time…. Don’t get sand in your britches!…Just think how hard this would be if you were a clam!” The only game she appreciated was Do Ray Mi, where the computer played one musical note for each typed letter, plunking through some sailorish tune, à la “The Irish Washerwoman’s Song.” Anyone who has heard “The Irish Washerwoman’s Song” knows that there is only one rule for performance: the faster the better. Julia had a musical incentive to increase her typing tempo.

  Nevertheless, she complained. “Do I have to use this stupid program?”

  “You have to learn how to type,” I replied, “and this program is all we’ve got.”

  Over the next few weeks, Julia’s lamentations combined with SpongeBob’s nasal cheerleading to produce an intolerable duet.

  “Okay,” I relented. “You don’t have to practice typing as part of your regular curriculum, but each time you misspell one of the words in your spelling journal, you’ll owe me five minutes of SpongeBob.”