by Laura Brodie
If Julia had been entirely unschooled for the year, she might have focused on science experiments for four or five days straight, followed by three weeks of short-story writing and a two-month immersion in Greek mythology. In the end, an unschooled approach might have been closer to the “real world,” where a carpenter can work on one house for months, or a painter struggle with one canvas for weeks. The division of children’s attention into arbitrary time slots is an artifice established for the convenience of schools, and is not designed to match the development of the human brain.
One thing is certain: if Julia and I had been unschoolers, our house would have been cleaner. Most unschooling websites stress the importance of children learning while doing chores; “household responsibilities” are a regular mantra. The idea falls somewhere between pioneer-style homesteading and Emersonian philosophy, promoting the notion that humans learn best by doing, not by sitting in a classroom. By contrast, today’s public school parents often complain that their kids have little time to help around the house. Children are so burdened with homework and afterschool activities, staying up late to finish assignments, that parents hate to ask much more of them. I’ve often watched my house devolve into a grubby mess while I remained reluctant to enlist my girls’ aid—their noses were too deeply buried in their schoolbooks. The appeal of unschooling grows in proportion to the grime in my kitchen.
During those mornings when Julia was busy writing, she and I led a charmed existence. Gone was the anger, the conflict, the profanity. Gone was my need to oversee, harangue, and correct. I didn’t have to ask Julia twice and thrice to settle down and get to work. While she wrote, I made great headway on grading and reading and laundry, and during her ten-minute breaks, she helped to empty the dishwasher and fold sheets. In those hours I began to lighten up about her education; I tried to enter the Zen of homeschooling, and let her learning emerge more “organically,” a favorite unschooling term. Those placid mornings went a long way toward healing the wounds of our stormy winter.
And yet, despite all of its appeal, Julia and I barely dipped our toes into the unschooling pond. With reentry into the public schools looming, I was willing to loosen the reins for only a few hours each day. At other times, I insisted that we maintain a traditional approach to French and music and, above all, math.
Math is the unschoolers’ Achilles’ heel. The website Un schooling.com claims that “Geometry can be found in quilt making, algebra in painting a room,” but I can imagine middle-school algebra teachers rolling their eyes. Yes, math is present everywhere in the world around us, and hands-on application is key to all education, but house painting is no substitute for daily practice with equations. Every day throughout the spring I still required Julia to practice math and spelling and violin exercises. Unsurprisingly, during those hours, she continued to fall into long periods of whining and foot-dragging that left me praying for the patience of Job.
Hanging over my head was my promise to cancel school for the day if I raised my voice. Given my track record, one might assume that Julia enjoyed plenty of abruptly truncated school days throughout the rest of the year. In fact, only once in the coming months did we have to drop everything and read for a day—which doesn’t mean that I got grouchy on only one occasion. Far from it. But Julia’s calm hours of creative writing helped to lower my stress level, and when trouble inevitably emerged, I found that if I couldn’t always control my temper, I could at least control my volume, which I reduced to a hissing simmer.
“I always know when you’re angry,” Rachel said to me one morning in March. “Because you get all stiff and shivery.”
That might sound unhealthy. Better to let one’s feelings out, some moms might say. Better to erupt in minor spurts than to compress all of one’s frustrations deep inside the heart’s core, where they’ll ultimately explode with Vesuvian force. In my experience, however, it’s often preferable for a mother to stiffen and twitch, apoplectic with annoyance, than to speak angry words. “Behold how much wood is kindled by how small a fire, and the tongue is a fire.” That’s how one of the characters in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead puts it.
My verbal pyrotechnics didn’t always require an audience. When possible, I tried to utter my angriest thoughts alone, outside, to the nonjudgmental trees. I felt like Midas’s wife, whispering her secrets to the river reeds. Usually my self-control was rewarded, because children morph from devil to angel hour by hour, transforming a mother’s thoughts from bile to honey. If I could weather my tempests, Julia would inevitably stop complaining and produce some wonderful piece of art or writing that ushered out all of my internal sunshine.
“Look at this,” she would say, and show me a pencil drawing of a phoenix rising from its ashes, thirty-two feathers drawn with individual attention. At ten, Julia’s drawing skills vastly exceeded my own.
“It’s beautiful,” I smiled. “C’est magnifique.”
Meanwhile, as spring advanced, the weather provided the external warmth that had been absent from our lives over the past few months. Purple crocuses dotted the lawn, followed by jonquils and daffodils, growing in clusters in the woods beside our creek, and with each burst of color, Julia and I shed our chilly moods. She brought me daffodil bouquets, their yellow heads drooping, and I cut sprigs of forsythia that shot like fireworks from the vase on our hall table. These were our peace offerings, symbols that familial love can be renewed along with flowers and trees and grass.
Despite all my previous tantrums, Julia never seemed to hold a grudge. Perhaps it was the gaps in her memory; my outbursts slipped from her mind as quickly as the state capitals. Or perhaps she never took me as seriously as I took myself. Even in the midst of my bleakest winter fits, she often maintained a sense of humorous patience: “Breathe deeply,” she told me as I gritted my teeth. “Count to ten.”
“You know that I love you, even when I’m angry,” I said to her on those occasions.
“Yeah,” she replied, sidling up to me on the couch. “I know.”
By April we were celebrating the return of regular field trips, including our most memorable history lesson: three days in Virginia’s “historic triangle” of Jamestown, Williamsburg, and Yorktown. Jamestown, site of the first permanent English settlement in America, was planning to celebrate its four hundredth anniversary the following year, and in preparation, the state of Virginia had joined with private donors to build a huge living history complex, called Jamestown Settlement, next to the original historic site.
“I’ve been wanting to visit this place,” I said to Julia one afternoon, pointing to the settlement’s website on my computer screen. “I’ve never been to Jamestown, and we can spend a day in Williamsburg, too.”
“Can we visit Busch Gardens?” Julia piped up.
“No,” I shook my head.
“Can we go to Water Country USA?” she asked.
“That’s not even open for the season…But we can stay at a hotel, and eat at restaurants,” I said, trying to coax her.
She was unimpressed.
“And you won’t have to play the violin,” I added. “Or do any math.”
“Not even in the car?” she asked.
“Okay,” I bargained. “We’ll listen to books on tape instead.”
We had a deal.
Driving though the Virginia Piedmont on an early April morning, past the scrubby pines and into the marshy Tidewater region, I explained to Julia why our state wanted to shine a spotlight on Jamestown. Virginia hoped to remind the rest of the country about the Old Dominion’s important role in early American history. This was, in part, another North-South thing. Virginia had long been annoyed that the Massachusetts pilgrims often got top billing for founding America. Schoolhouse Rock features cartoon Puritans crashing into Plymouth Rock, but it doesn’t ever mention John Smith and the Jamestown crew.
When we reached historic Jamestown’s national park and began to walk around, Julia and I overheard a park ranger jokingly curse the “damn Yankees” for
stealing Virginia’s thunder in the colonization race. The ranger went on to inform his tour group that pilgrims searching for religious freedom made a better founding legend for our country than the truth behind Jamestown: rich members of a joint stock company scouring the New World for profit.
Historic Jamestown featured a small museum and archeological excavations, a church and a statue of Pocahontas, and best of all, a working glass house, where Julia stared for twenty minutes at artisans crafting vases and pitchers from balls of molten sand. The glass house stood beside a small beach, where wavelets from the James River broke onto the white shore. Julia threw bits of pine bark into the water and watched a small ferry crossing the half-mile stretch, where the James widens as it approaches the Chesapeake Bay.
“Who would have thought that there would be beaches at Jamestown?” she said.
“What were you expecting?” I asked.
“A port,” she explained. “A small city with more boats.”
Some boats were waiting at the national park’s fancy new neighbor, Jamestown Settlement. That’s where most of the cars had been headed when Julia and I turned off to see the original Jamestown. Many of those tourists would never visit the authentic site, now that a living history complex had been built next door.
“We’re the real McCoy,” one miffed ranger complained. “Jamestown Settlement is just a replica.” Julia and I nodded in sympathy before skulking over to contribute our dollars to the newcomer.
When we pulled into the Jamestown Settlement parking lot, we faced a brick building so large it looked more like a hospital than a museum/café/educational center. Inside, the structure boasted not one but three gift shops among acres of museum displays. Julia and I walked straight through the building and outside, to the living history sites. There, on the banks of the muddy James, floated replicas of the three ships that had brought the early colonists: the Godspeed, the Discovery, and the Susan Constant.
These were Virginia’s answer to the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. Julia and I strolled aboard the surprisingly small decks, then climbed below to see the cannons and supply barrels, and tiny officers’ beds built into the wooden hull. The beds were so small that even Julia, who promptly climbed into one, could not stretch out her four-foot-ten-inch frame. She and I sat down on a rough-hewn bench and played crazy eights with a hand-drawn deck of parchment cards.
“It’s nice,” Julia said as we exited the Susan Constant, “but it’s too pretty.” The ship’s hull was painted yellow, blue, and brown, with decorative flowers and stripes. “It doesn’t look hundreds of years old,” she explained.
“It’s supposed to look like it would have in 1607,” I replied, “when the colonists first arrived.”
Julia eyed the ship critically. “After four months at sea, do you think it would look like that?”
She had a point. In fact, the entire settlement had a slightly Disneyfied appearance, with colorful ships neatly docked and a well-maintained wooden fort containing structures built of clay and wood: small storehouses hung with dried tobacco and smoked ham, an armory, a blacksmith’s shop, a church. Julia ran from building to building like Goldilocks, trying out all of the straw mattresses and preferring the four-poster bed in the governor’s two-room cottage.
Living history was much more fun than social studies on a printed page. Julia loved posing in a soldier’s metal helmet and breastplate, and carrying empty water buckets on a wooden beam across her shoulders. While my own inclination was to walk quietly from place to place, Julia had no qualms about noisily questioning the blacksmith and tobacco farmer. “What’s this called?” “What does that do?” Could she touch it, throw it, shoot it?
She liked it all, even though she realized that the “settlement” didn’t capture the ambience of the real colony. Back in the early 1600s, Jamestown was a desperate, marshy place where the vast majority of colonists died of malaria and starvation. These well-fed reenactors, neatly shaven and freshly bathed, wearing straw hats and knee breeches and drawstring cotton shirts, couldn’t re-create the anguish of their antecedents, some of whom had dug up dead bodies in order to eat them.
The written materials throughout the settlement acknowledged the grim truth: starvation and slavery and the gradual destruction of the Powhatan culture. Julia was too busy touching tobacco leaves and flintlocks to read the printed placards, but I found them enlightening—another lesson in all that a parent can learn while homeschooling. My childhood memories of Jamestown were limited to visions of Pocahontas saving John Smith’s life, but nowhere, in film or painting or book, did the settlement teach that old story; too much doubt had been heaped upon John Smith’s journals. I made a mental note to stop repeating the old legend to Rachel and Kathryn.
“Did you know that Pocahontas’s real name was Matoaka?” I asked Julia. “Pocahontas was her nickname.” I didn’t add that Pocahontas meant “little wanton”—a nickname some historians define as “frolicsome,” while others view it as an insulting term for a girl who liked to play games with strange boys from foreign lands.
“It says here that during her teenage years Pocahontas was taken captive by the English and held hostage.” I pointed at a placard. “They wanted to trade her for English prisoners and weapons and tools.”
“I can’t believe you read all the little tablets,” Julia replied. “I just walk around and scan everything, but you stop to read the signs.”
“When I was a kid I didn’t read them, either,” I explained. “But when you get older you slow down and get curious about the history. Besides,” I added, “these cards show me how much I don’t know.”
I had embarked upon nine months of homeschooling with the innocent assumption that Julia and I would be reviewing a lot of the same history and science that I had encountered as a fifth-grader. That assumption was particularly naïve when it came to science. Our knowledge of the universe changes on a daily basis, and much of what Julia had learned in the fall about natural history—the Big Bang, tectonic plates, feathered dinosaurs—was undiscovered country when I was a child. Now, at Jamestown Settlement, I was reminded that history, too, constantly evolves. Narratives are transformed according to each teller’s perspective, and are influenced by the ongoing discovery of new records and artifacts.
I realized on that day that if I were to homeschool beyond the elementary grades, I would feel enormous responsibility to learn more than I already know about science and history. At the fifth-grade level I already felt inadequate as a science teacher, knowing so little about chemistry and physics and the scientific method. At Jamestown, I saw that if I were to teach history to a middle-schooler, I would want a few weeks of advance reading on every subject we studied—just to uncover the latest facts, to find the best books to share, and to communicate the importance of historians’ methods, from proper documentation to the value of primary sources. One of the joys of homeschooling comes from how much parents and children discover together, but I can understand why some homeschoolers rely on the Calvert curriculum or the Charlotte Mason method, or any of several models available on the Internet that guide a parent year by year through all the ins and outs of math and history and science. For one year, Julia and I could wander free from prescriptive models, but as a long-term homeschooler, I would probably seek more guidance, just to avoid the worry that my knowledge was out-of-date.
Someday Julia might be similarly humbled by the obsolescence of her knowledge. On that April afternoon, she was concerned only with scraping out charred bits of a tree trunk that a Powhatan reenactor was carefully burning and carving into a canoe.
“Do you like this place?” I asked Julia as we prepared to leave.
“I like dressing up,” she replied, “and I like scraping deer hide with an oyster shell.”
As for me, I liked letting my child learn from other people who knew much more than me.
The next day Julia and I drove twenty miles to Colonial Williamsburg. Our family had visited the site twice in the past, w
alking the gravel lanes and watching horse-drawn carriages led by coachmen in knee breeches and triangular hats. On previous visits, however, we had always been the unticketed second-class citizens, barred from almost every interior, grasping at scraps of history as we glanced into the windows of the millinery and cobbler’s shop. Now, in the name of homeschooling, I swallowed hard and paid sixty dollars for two tickets, which granted access to the entire town.
We began our day with a visit inside the Governor’s Palace, where the tour guide earned her money by parrying Julia’s constant questions. As usual, I resorted to whispering in my daughter’s ear, “Let the other people speak. Be patient. Don’t wave your hand so furiously.” Fortunately the tour guide was a matronly good sport who quickly took the situation in hand. She dubbed Julia her junior tour guide, which meant that the ten-year-old “guide” must wait for all the “guests” to ask their questions before she peppered her older “colleague” with inquiries. The tour guide kept Julia at her side, where she could prevent my curious child from touching the swords and armor on the walls. Steel blades seemed to have a magnetic attraction for Julia’s fingertips.
At the end of the tour one woman approached me and said, smiling, “Don’t worry about your daughter asking too many questions. I’m a schoolteacher, and it’s wonderful to see a child who is interested enough to ask any questions at all.”
Of course she was right. My own tendency to be quiet and unobtrusive when clustered in a group of strangers didn’t need to be imposed on Julia. Still, that teacher could not see the worrisome trend that my maternal eyes spotted in my child. During that tour, I once again noticed how Julia did not acknowledge herself as one among many. When the group moved from room to room, she initially tried to jostle her way to the front, as if this were a race she must win. She had no instinct for letting others go first, and no inclination to listen to strangers’ questions. Call it childish self-absorption or something more clinical, Julia might as well have been enjoying her own private tour, she was so oblivious to the crowd.
