Love in a Time of Homeschooling

by Laura Brodie

  Watching her fiddle away, I doubted my decision to stop her violin lessons. She was the most advanced little string player in the room, and now all of her progress would slow to a snail’s pace. But I feared that if we continued her lessons, hatred of practicing would turn into hatred of me. We had to choose between progress on the violin and peace in our household, which is why, after the recital, Julia packed her violin away in its case and stuffed it underneath her bed, where it would accumulate dust in the coming months.

  Now that we had reached the countdown until the end of the school year, I suffered a major attack of last-minute anxiety. Had Julia learned enough? Would she be prepared for the sixth grade?

  I’ve since learned that end-of-the-year panic is very common among short-term homeschoolers. One acquaintance in Northern Virginia told me that she and her middle-schooler, who had stayed home for a year, spent all of June cramming math, because she feared she had neglected it throughout the spring. In my case, math wasn’t the problem. For the past month Julia had been taking Saxon math tests at the rate of three per week, reviewing all of her knowledge, practicing test-taking skills, and reassuring me that no concept had been left behind. As far as I could tell, her math skills were fine; my anxiety came from an unexpected corner.

  In early May, Julia and I had visited our local independent bookstore, a comfortable, cat-inhabited space with a big children’s section, where we often lingered, reading silently in the cozy chairs. Usually the bookstore offered a calming experience. On that May afternoon, however, I made the mistake of glancing at the children’s education shelf, and there was E. D. Hirsch, perched atop his hill of cultural literacy, espousing What Your Fifth-Grader Needs to Know. I picked up the book, flipped through a few pages, and soon found my mind filled with dread. Julia knew nothing of feudal Japan or early Russian civilization. She had never been introduced to scientists such as Elijah McCoy or Ada Lovelace. Even some of Hirsch’s third-grade essentials, on Constantine and the Byzantine empire, would have left her dumbfounded. Oh God, I shuddered. Should Julia try to cram in some of these facts before the end of the year?

  Hirsch’s curriculum is a noble vision, especially in the area of history. While Virginia hammers home American history and government in elementary-, middle-, and high-school classes, giving far less attention to the larger world, Hirsch focuses on international history and geography—a much more colorful approach, suited to our increasingly global lives.

  But despite its strengths, for the average parent whose children have never followed Hirsch’s sequential plan, his books are an exercise in paranoia. Even with my Ph.D., I didn’t know all this stuff, and that recognition alone should have given me a clue. I should have rested assured that it was possible for a person to lead a thoughtful existence, get into a good college, and pursue an intellectual life without having her brain crammed with a specific list of cultural facts. Julia might not know about the dynasties of China, but I bet Hirsch’s disciples couldn’t tell the difference between a Parasaurolophus and a Pachycephalosaurus. The important thing was to nurture a child’s desire to learn, to encourage her intrinsic curiosity about the world, and to show her how to find the answers to cultural questions as they arose. I set Hirsch aside with only a mild sense of guilt.

  The next shelf of titles, however, was harder to dismiss. Here stood the Summer Bridge Activity Books, full of worksheets designed to keep a child academically hopping during the summer months. I had bought one of these books years ago, when Julia was approaching the third grade, but I had quickly put it away. Inside lay the same joy-sapping grammar and math worksheets that kids confront daily in the public schools. I’m all for summer learning when it takes the form of reading and writing, art and music, athletics and outdoor play, but true-false science quizzes make me cringe. The last thing a child needs during the summer is more multiple choice and matching.

  Nevertheless, on that May morning as Julia migrated toward the bookstore’s toy section, I opened the fifth-grade book. Julia would be far ahead of this game, I assured myself; these paperbacks followed the lowest common denominator in the public school curriculum. Thumbing through the pages, I found that Julia was well advanced when it came to math and grammar. So far, so good. Unfortunately, the book contained subjects I had never considered. One page featured the bones in the human skeleton—apparently standard knowledge for ten-year-olds. Another included hundreds of spelling words that children were supposed to know before entering the sixth grade.

  “Hey, Julia,” I called into the adjoining room, where she was busily arranging a landscape of African safari animals. “How do you spell exception?”

  “E-x-e-p-t-i-o-n,” she said.

  “How about descent?”

  “D-e-s-e-n-t?”

  My heart sank, so I tried one more word. “Julia, how do you spell Wednesday?”

  “W-e-d-n-e-s-d-a-y.”

  Okay, so my spelling-journal approach had at least cemented a few pragmatic words into the phonetic bog within Julia’s brain. But now I was stricken with petty fears—exactly the reaction these books try to elicit, since parents’ anxieties and competitive impulses are a powerful trigger for consumer spending. Worried that Julia wouldn’t be prepared for the sixth grade, I paid the fourteen dollars, and for three weeks in May I required my daughter to cram spelling words and memorize bones.

  The human skeleton was easy enough to master, with the help of our tangible bodies and a four-foot floor puzzle. Julia and I sang in the car: “The humerus is connected to the…femur.” The spelling of abstract words, however, was a hopeless chore. In those last frantic weeks of our homeschooling, Julia memorized dozens of words for one test, then forgot them by the next week. By May 20 I’d given up, chiding myself for having ended the year with this desperate spelling marathon. It had been ridiculous to add last-minute goals to our curriculum—the paranoid mistake of a novice teacher. Homeschooling requires an enormous amount of faith in oneself and one’s child. I needed to trust that Julia had absorbed plenty of knowledge throughout our year, and that she would keep learning day by day as her life continued. Chagrined by my frivolous purchase, I dropped the Summer Bridge book into our recycling bin.

  With May now drawing to a close, only one task remained for our school year. Julia needed to take some form of standardized test and mail the results to our local school superintendent. So long as she scored above the lowest twenty-fifth percentile, she could advance to the sixth grade.

  The mere mention of standardized testing conjures anxious memories from my childhood—the misery of three-hour exams that grew harder every year, prompting repeated nightmares of arriving at a test unprepared. After my last comprehensive graduate school exam, I remember thinking: “I will never again take a serious test. Never, never, never.”

  But when it came to Julia’s testing, there was no reason to worry. Following the advice of several homeschooling friends, I bought the fifth-grade California Achievement Test from an online service, and when the test arrived in the mail, I was surprised at what an innocuous little exercise it was. The test was comprised entirely of English and math—no science or social studies units that Julia might not have covered. In addition, the test was administered completely on the honor system, with no proctor required to monitor the process. In other words, this was a cheater’s paradise. Any parent, sibling, or stranger could have filled in the answers, and although the test gave clear instructions on how much time to allot for each section, I knew homeschooling families who allowed their children unlimited time. Those parents objected, philosophically, to putting time constraints on children, and justified their practice by pointing to Virginia’s SOL tests, where students are granted plenty of extra time.

  Julia had the freedom to take the five-part test at her leisure—scattered across one week, or crammed into one afternoon. She chose to tackle one section each day of the week, faithfully sticking to the prescribed time limits. That faithfulness was sorely tried on her first math test; when I looked
over her shoulder after the first ten minutes, I saw that she had completed only five problems.

  “Why are you going so slowly?” I interrupted.

  “You told me to check my answers,” she replied. “So I’m doing each problem twice.”

  “No,” I smiled. “Complete the entire test first, then go back and check your answers in whatever time you have left.”

  Julia barely finished that exam on time, but the other tests posed no problem. In fact, many of the questions were shockingly simple.

  “Which of these numbers is even?” one test asked. “39, 81, 42, or 73?”

  “I think this question is testing your English, not your math,” I explained to Julia afterward. “Some children might not know what even means when it’s applied to numbers.” I could imagine no other reason for asking fifth-graders to distinguish between odd and even numbers.

  At the end of the week we mailed Julia’s testing booklet and answer sheets off to the designated P.O. box. A few weeks would pass before we received the paperwork showing Julia’s scores, which alternated between the ninety-seventh and ninety-ninth percentile on all tests. In the meantime, a standardized exam seemed like a pretty dull way to end a child’s school year. The test was a requirement, not an accomplishment; Julia felt no sense of pride. What should we do, I wondered, to acknowledge the successful completion of a year of homeschooling?

  At Waddell Elementary, the fifth-graders were preparing for a graduation ceremony, where every student would walk the stage and receive certificates of achievement in reading and math and music. A few top students would get special prizes, and I wondered if Julia should be given some sort of award: A framed diploma? A blue ribbon? In the past, she had never cared about certificates; they disappeared among all the other miscellaneous school papers. But she did like ribbons, especially big blue ones with frills. However, I couldn’t imagine assigning a first, second, and third place to homeschooling; this wasn’t an art contest or a horse show.

  Instead, I arranged for Julia to bask in the glow of some warm, human praise. The previous year, her fourth-grade teacher had offered to read Julia’s writing at the end of the year. It was important, she had explained, for children to share their work and receive recognition for a job well done. And so, at the beginning of June, I scheduled an afterschool meeting with Mrs. Gonzalez.

  “Oh, how lovely.” The veteran teacher smiled when Julia placed her portfolio on a table in front of Mrs. G. Julia had decorated the cover with green and red and blue mountains; inside, a dragon sketch was tucked into the jacket pocket. The portfolio writings were divided into author studies, creative writing, science and social studies essays, and miscellaneous work.

  “You wrote about Susan Cooper!” Mrs. Gonzalez beamed. “I love Cooper. And you studied the ice age, and the Aztecs and Incas!”

  While Mrs. Gonzalez read a few of the essays, Julia strolled around her old classroom, touching books and bulletin boards and lifting a piece of chalk to sketch a dragon’s head on the blackboard.

  “Do you know what I like best?” Mrs. Gonzalez called out, and Julia came to her side to look down at the pages.

  Mrs. G. pointed to a poem called “Old Barns”: “In a cow pasture / Stands our neighbors’ barn / Here a hundred years / Housing cows and larks…” “Your writing is wonderful,” Mrs. Gonzalez said, smiling, and she gave Julia a big hug. That small act of commendation was exactly the prize that I had been seeking. A hug from a favorite teacher beat any certificate or ribbon. It was a loving, physical stamp of approval—recognition beyond the usual praise from Mom or Dad. The fact that the approval came from a public school teacher seemed to represent a human bridge between the worlds of government education and homeschooling.

  All that remained now was for me and Julia to clean our house. Homeschooling is a messy affair, with posters and puzzles and glue sticks scattered on mantels and tables and counters. Over the next two days, while her sisters packed up their school supplies, Julia would recycle piles of math sheets and store away half-used spiral notebooks. I began to reclaim our dining room, which had served as a cross between a science laboratory and an art studio. Finally, after searching under beds and couches and coffee tables, I carried two stacks of books to the public library, checkbook in hand to pay the overdue fines.

  “You’re done?” A homeschooling acquaintance seemed surprised when I ran into her at the circulation desk.

  “Sure,” I replied, somewhat taken aback. “Tomorrow is the last day of school.”

  The woman smiled. “Our family keeps going straight through July, then we usually take a break in August.”

  “Wow,” I murmured. “Good for you.”

  Once again, my rookie status as a homeschooler was on display. It had never occurred to me that Julia and I might continue with math and grammar and spelling through June and July, but of course there was no reason for homeschoolers to follow the public schedule. A three-month summer break makes little sense outside agricultural communities, and plenty of today’s teachers deplore the long summer vacation, because of all the catching-up that has to be done in September.

  Julia, however, would not have tolerated a single hour of schoolwork beyond the public limit. She was accustomed to the idea of a finish line, a June date toward which she could sprint like a marathon runner in her final Olympic lap. With two sisters in the public system anticipating the joy of their last day, it would have been cruel to ask anything more of Julia, or of myself. I, too, was steeped in an academic worldview that craves June as a light at the end of a long, dark tunnel.

  When we picked up Rachel and Kathryn on the last day of school, Julia gave her annual cheer of delight from the backseat of the car. Usually that howl of pleasure makes me smile, but that year I felt a little sorry to see my daughter so gleeful. Despite all the freedoms of our homeschooling year, all my efforts to make it stimulating and fun, Julia still experienced the last moments with a sense of visceral release. In the end, our version of homeschooling had not escaped the worst aspects of school: the pressures of daily work, the crush of high expectations.

  That’s the problem with short-term homeschooling, some long-termers might say. Real home education doesn’t involve a mere break from traditional schools; it requires a whole new approach to life and learning. Parents and children must be willing to opt out of the competitive, overscheduled culture that currently dominates American education, if they really want to get the benefits of homeschooling. And it takes more than one year to accomplish that.

  Nine months was not enough time for me and Julia to break our institutionalized habits and decide for ourselves what we truly valued in education. I almost wished that she and I had another year to try again, without the steep learning curve that we had climbed so painfully throughout the winter. But if Julia and I had taken more time to fully master homeschooling—if we had tried one more time to craft a year of glorious, conflict-free success—how could Julia ever return to the public system? Many families who try short-term homeschooling never go back to traditional schools; they are so pleased with their new-found freedom. For us, however, continued homeschooling wasn’t an option. Julia needed more time away from Mom, in a place where she could observe hundreds of other human beings, and learn what behaviors she admired and deplored. As for me, I wanted more time alone. The writer’s life is a solitary venture, and in the hours before noon, when I am most productive, I yearned for the silence of an empty house to allow characters and worlds to take shape in my mind. One year of homeschooling had provided a wonderful break from my usual routine, but I needed an end date, too.

  Nevertheless, as I drove my girls to our local ice-cream shop for celebratory sundaes, it occurred to me that this really wasn’t the last day of school. If I had thought of it at the library, I would have told my homeschooling acquaintance that, yes, Julia and I would be continuing straight through July as well. Not only because every well-planned family outing can constitute a day of homeschooling, but because one big educatio
nal adventure remained ahead, an event that I viewed as the culmination of Julia’s entire experience.

  For years John and I had been hoping to fly out west for a three-week vacation, to show our children canyons and mountains and desert landscapes far different from anything they had seen in the eastern United States. This summer seemed like the ideal occasion, because now the trip could provide the perfect capstone for Julia’s year. Over the past few months, while Julia had been busy crafting stories and taking math tests, I had scoured the Internet, booking campsites and hotel rooms and searching for cheap airfares. In the process, I had mapped out an itinerary that resembled a fireworks finale, with multiple bursts of natural beauty coming in quick succession. From late June through mid-July we would be camping in the Rockies, strolling through Yellow-stone’s geothermic wonders, motorboating on Signal Lake at the foot of the Grand Tetons, mule riding through hoodoos in Bryce Canyon, walking along the Virgin River at Zion, lodging among Luxor’s faux-Egyptian splendor in Las Vegas, admiring the Bellagio fountains by day and Cirque du Soleil by night, hiking into the southern rim of the Grand Canyon, driving through Monument Valley after a visit to the Navajo National Monument, and marveling at ruins in Mesa Verde National Park.

  I didn’t call this “homeschooling” because I didn’t want to taint our plans with that dirty word school, but I viewed these weeks as the ultimate field trip, designed to reinforce much of Julia’s curriculum. What better way to appreciate the shifting of tectonic plates than to stand among the Rockies’ Aspen range? How better to witness the power of supervolcanoes than to watch Old Faithful erupt? Julia’s study of dinosaurs would culminate among the fossils at Dinosaur National Monument, in Utah, and her unit on Native Americans would include dancing in a powwow in Cody, Wyoming, and touring the Anasazi’s Cliff Palace, in Arizona. Since half of our evenings would be spent pitching a tent and cooking over an open fire, that, too, would be educational, and I planned to ask all three of my girls to keep a daily journal.