Love in a Time of Homeschooling

by Laura Brodie

  And after those three weeks, what other trips might our family plan? What cities and countries might we show our children? What mountains and lakes and rivers? What planetariums and Broadway shows and art museums could we visit? What conversations could we have at the kitchen table, about news and politics and books and the subjects our girls were studying at school?

  So long as children lived under our roof, ours would be a homeschooling family, turning off the TV to spend more time talking and reading and going for walks. That June afternoon, as I watched my girls scoop sprinkles and hot fudge and cherries from the tops of their sundaes, I promised myself that at least until my daughters were teenagers, I could be the guiding force in their education.

  Julia smiled at me from behind her Oreo moustache, and I smiled back. This is not the end, I thought. This is one more beginning, among all the new beginnings to come.

  Epilogue: Back to School

  I will remember the coffee shop, and the trip to Jamestown…. And if I ever have kids, maybe I’ll homeschool them for a while.

  JULIA

  WHEN I LOOK BACK AT OUR YEAR OF HOMESCHOOLING, one memory stands out.

  Julia is riding a bicycle on our country road. The bike is typical Wal-Mart fare: purple and pink with bright white tires and silvery ribbons that stream from the handlebars. It’s too small for Julia, whose knees rise at right angles as she pedals very slowly, not fast enough for the wind to lift her hair.

  “Pedal faster, Julia.”

  I am jogging at her side in blue jeans and sandals, sweating through a Mr. Whippy T-shirt as I hold on to the right handlebar.

  “You’ve got your balance now. I’m going to let go for three seconds.”

  “Don’t let go, Mom!”

  “Just for three seconds.”

  I let go and count three milliseconds aloud, grabbing the handlebar before Julia topples to the left. A pickup truck approaches behind us, and we steer her bike over to the tall grass mingled with Queen Anne’s Lace at the side of the road. The stranger in the truck waves as he passes, and I wave back.

  Then Julia is in the middle of the road again, and I am running beside her, letting go for three seconds, four seconds, and five. Now she’s pedaling faster, and I’m huffing and puffing, saying, “That’s it! You’ve got it! Keep going.”

  I let go, and Julia speeds ahead, down the straightaway beside our neighbor’s sloping meadow, where the cows have paused to lift their heads and watch me as I cheer.

  That was one of our PE classes in September, scheduled as conscientiously as kickball or crab soccer would have been scheduled at Waddell Elementary. It might seem strange: you’d think that a ten-year-old would know how to ride a bike already. Most children master the feat somewhere between ages four and eight. But traffic on our road comes too fast to make the street a child’s playground, and our neighborhood has no cohort of bike riding kids to inspire my girls. Our house is situated too far from town for a child to ride a bike to school or the library, and most of our family excursions take place on mountain trails, not roads suitable for bikes. As a result, none of my girls had learned how to ride a bike, an omission that nagged at my conscience.

  On that September morning, when I saw Julia turn at the end of the street and pedal back toward me, I told myself: Even if we accomplish nothing else over the next few months, our homeschooling will have been a success. Homeschooling had given us the time and motivation to achieve something important, to master a skill that was long overdue and that might have been neglected for years to come, with all the busy-ness of school and homework, dance class and music lessons.

  Three years have passed since that September morning, and now I can tally a host of small achievements that homeschooling made possible. Our year of learning prompted us to step inside buildings I had always walked past, such as the U.S. Supreme Court, the National Archives, and the Governor’s Palace at Williamsburg. It inspired us to purchase a wealth of educational materials—card games for math and art and history, puzzles for geography and anatomy, and CDs of French songs. None of these purchases was essential; homeschooling can be accomplished on a shoestring budget, using materials available in nature and at the public library. Nevertheless, all these new items, combined with the inspiration of Julia’s example, have left a lasting impression on our family. These days, Kathryn knits, rides a bike, and plays the violin, while Rachel lies beside me in bed with Julia’s French book in her lap, saying “Dors bien, Maman.” “Toi aussi, Rachel. Dors bien.”

  Above all, homeschooling enabled Julia and me to understand one another more deeply—to witness each other’s flaws and strengths and practice the art of patience. I wish I could claim that my angry outbursts have disappeared, and that I am now a model of meditative calm. But who would believe it, especially in a house with four opinionated females? Truth is, the emotional weather in our family alternates between sunshine and storm, with the occasional hurricane looming (never more than a category two). Homeschooling taught Julia and me to comprehend each other’s tempests, and to appreciate all chances to bask in warm, cloudless love.

  And yet, for all the successes I could recount, my memories remain tinged with the sadness of lost opportunities. What would I do differently, if I had the year to do again? How could I have made Julia’s education a little more joyful?

  Looking back, I fear that with my professorial habits and constant admiration for John Stuart Mill, I tended to treat my ten-year-old like a miniature college student. Accustomed to teaching young people twice her age, I approached my little pupil as a short, scruffy-haired adult—my coffee shop companion and knitting buddy, not my little girl. Plenty of children yearn to be treated as adults, but Julia’s instincts have always pulled in the opposite direction. For her, the grownup world holds no allure, other than the freedom to abandon school. Throughout our year, Julia would probably have liked more chances just to be a kid, running free and clowning around.

  Recently I discovered a wonderful book called Educating Esme, the diary of a young woman’s first year of teaching in Chicago’s public schools. Esme Codell taught the fifth grade, and in reading about the quirks, fears, and dreams of her students, I can see how young ten-year-olds really are, and how desperately they want to play. Grandparents are probably able to look at children with such eyes, to appreciate their incredibly fragile youth, and know the value of skipping and shouting and eating candy while you can.

  Esme Codell knew how to have fun with kids. In her first year, she planned a Fairy Tale Festival that included a fashion show: “Is fur still ‘in’ for the Three Bears? What is Cinderella wearing to the ball this season?” She also built a time machine for her class—a huge cardboard box covered in aluminum foil, with a flashing red ambulance-style light on top. The side of the box included dials to imaginatively set the century and place where a child wanted to travel. Inside were beautiful books, and a cozy space for reading alone with a flashlight. No child ever complained that the time machine was a fraud; they emerged from the box with stories of extravagant worlds they had visited.

  “Wow,” I thought as I envisioned that silver box with its flashing light, “I wish I had read this book before teaching Julia.”

  Here was a wealth of creative ideas for sparking a child’s imagination. Of course, Ms. Esme’s pupils were inner-city kids who did not arrive at the fifth grade with Julia’s academic skills. They had to be inspired and entertained just to be coaxed into reading, whereas Julia took to books like a bird in flight. Perhaps reading outside on a hammock was just as fun for a child as reading inside a decorated box? I doubt it. A hammock is not a time machine, not a gateway into a spaceship, a safari, or a haunted house. In our average homeschooling day, Julia had many opportunities to absorb the beauties of nature, but not many chances for wild, imaginative adventure.

  To Julia’s ten-year-old mind, my idea of “fun” was probably as dull as my definition of “cool.” I remember a math game we sometimes played in the name of “fun.” Julia and I
shuffled a deck of cards with all the jacks, kings, and queens removed, then dealt five cards each. Using addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, we had to separately contemplate the numbers before us, and produce an equation that equaled 1, then 2, then 3. For instance, if Julia’s cards read 5, 10, 3, 8, and 4, she might write “((5 x 3) – 8) + 4 – 10 = 1.” Then she would deal five new cards and construct an equation that equaled two. Then three, four, and so on, with new cards dealt for each step on the ladder. Together she and I advanced until one of us was stumped. The highest number Julia reached, one wintry day, was twenty-three.

  Card games struck me as a creative approach to math, but Julia found them only mildly entertaining. One morning, she peered at me over the cards and said:

  “Why don’t we ever do holiday worksheets?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “At school we do decoding worksheets, like at Halloween, where the answers have ghosts and vampires in them.”

  She meant the kind of puzzle where every correct equation yields a letter to be inserted into a blank space at the bottom of the page. The spaces provide the punch line to some tepid joke: What happened to the guy who didn’t pay his exorcist? He was repossessed.

  “You like those worksheets?” I asked, somewhat amazed.

  “Everybody likes those.” Julia sighed, exasperated with my blunt, middle-age brain.

  I had always dismissed those exercises as more useless pulp in the weekly stacks of paper that Julia brought home. It had never occurred to me that she enjoyed these activities, and wanted me to copy them. Julia wanted Thanksgiving hangman games with words like cornucopia. She wanted Christmas word search puzzles and connect-the-dot drawings that yielded shamrocks for St. Patrick’s Day. Sometimes I complied. I found holiday puzzles and jokes on homeschooling websites, or made them up on my own. But those were rare occasions. More often, I tried to wean my daughter from her childish tastes. I offered her chess when she wanted tic-tac-toe. I gave her acrylics and watercolors and kits of Chinese calligraphy when all she really desired was a new pack of crayons.

  If I had the year to do again, I would try to let my ten-year-old act her age.

  I would also try to craft assignments better tuned to the habits of Julia’s visually oriented brain. Just last month, when I complimented her on how well she knew the stages of osmosis, she shrugged and replied: “Our teacher made us draw it. When I draw things, I learn them.”

  At that, a tiny light bulb flickered in my dimly lit mind. I always knew that Julia liked to draw, but I never understood how much she learned from drawing. My own language-oriented brain easily absorbs information from a printed page, and from listening to speakers. Julia, however, has a hard time concentrating on other people’s nonfiction words, whether printed or spoken. When a teacher begins to lecture, Julia’s mind begins to roam.

  Drawing helps to keep her thoughts focused. Somehow the transfer of information from her brain into her fingers and down to her pencil manages to inscribe data within Julia’s memory. Had I fathomed that concept earlier, I would have doubled the amount of drawing that she did during our year.

  “Draw Africa,” I would have said, “and indicate all the major lakes and rivers and national borders…. Draw the solar system; draw the human skeleton; draw timelines with small pictures for the major events in the development of the Mayan, Aztec, and Incan civilizations.”

  Homeschooling could have been Julia’s chance to try a year of sketchbook learning.

  Ah well—regret is a mother’s perennial fate. There is always something that we should have done better, sooner, more lovingly. Especially when it comes to homeschooling, the learning curve is slow and endless. It takes a year of practice, most experts will explain, to understand how to teach one’s children. The trouble with short-term efforts is that you quit just when you are starting to get the hang of things.

  Professors often feel the same way about sabbaticals. One year barely suffices to get a research project under way, let alone complete it. They return to the classroom temporarily rejuvenated, but with thoughts of everything that waits to be done. And yet, what a wonderful gift sabbaticals are. Adults and children alike need respites from their institutionalized routines, chances to learn and think and grow in new ways, in new settings, with new teachers. Despite its ups and downs, short-term homeschooling strikes me as a wonderful opportunity for any family that has the desire, the academic impulse, and the financial resources to take time off from work to concentrate on their children. It offers a rare chance for parents and kids to gain control of their educations, in a manner that might inspire them to read and write and learn together for years to come. For some families, once they have stepped away from traditional schools, they will never go back.

  Julia went back. That had always been a nonnegotiable part of our deal. But what was it like for her to return to a public classroom? Was the transition hard, and would she have preferred to stay at home? My friends often asked those questions throughout Julia’s sixth-grade year, and the answers were never quick and easy.

  Although children who enter the public system after many years at home can find the transition a shock to the system, for Julia, public school was the norm, and homeschooling the anomaly. We took for granted that middle school waited at the end of our road, and my biggest surprise, as we prepared for the new school year, was to learn that not all short-termers expect their child to advance to the next grade. In August, when Julia was busy buying notebooks and pencils and felt-tipped markers, one homeschooling mom explained to me that although her daughter was eligible to enter middle school with Julia, that child was going back to repeat the fifth grade.

  “But why?” I asked, taken aback. “Won’t she be bored and miss her friends?”

  No, this girl had friends in both the fifth and sixth grades; socially, she would be comfortable in either class. She and her mom liked the concept of completing the elementary school experience, and getting more practice in basic skills before reaching middle school. For them, the decision made sense.

  For Julia, it would have been torture. Our year had been designed to accomplish more, academically, than could be achieved in a normal classroom. Julia was well prepared for sixth-grade schoolwork. Still, the idea of hanging back was an interesting prospect. Had we embarked on homeschooling with the expectation that Julia would repeat the fifth grade, there might have been advantages.

  Above all, our year would have been a lot more relaxed. Removing the assumption that a child will progress to the next grade takes the pressure out of short-term homeschooling. The experience becomes a luxury, an educational bonus with no academic schedule to uphold and no essential skills that must be mastered.

  A few days after my conversation with that homeschooling mom, another friend explained that she had long contemplated just such a “bonus year.” She dreamed of giving her son nine months of what she called “enrichment,” to focus on English, art, and foreign travel. This woman had no interest in keeping up with the usual school curriculum, and if she carried out her scheme, she expected her boy to repeat the grade. That’s where her plan hit a brick wall. The child absolutely loathed the stigma of being held back. As John remembered from his own close calls in elementary school, “Being held back is one step above wearing a helmet.”

  “So long as you keep up with math,” I assured that boy’s mother, “you could carry out your plan and still move him on to the next grade. All the other subjects get repeated year after year.”

  The woman smiled and sighed. To her, math was anathema. Homeschooling appealed only if she could avoid all equations. Eventually, she compromised by taking her son abroad for six weeks during the school year, and came back shaking her head.

  “I don’t know how you did it,” she said when we met again in the library. “It was exhausting, trying to require him to read or write, or just settle down. I could never homeschool for a whole year.”

  “Julia and I sometimes drove each other crazy,” I
confessed. “It really helped to know that we had a deadline in mind.”

  Although that deadline had first arrived back in June, with the official start of summer break, I felt it even more tangibly in August, as Julia prepared to enter middle school. A big part of her education was moving out of my hands, and the prospect made me nervous.

  My first year of middle school had been rough. I had attended Raleigh’s Carnage Junior High, named after Fred J. Carnage, a lawyer who, in 1949, was the first African American appointed to the local school board. The irony of the name was lost on 90 percent of Carnage’s students, whose vocabularies were too limited to appreciate the humor.

  Carnage enjoyed a decent academic reputation; the problem was getting there. Each morning and afternoon involved a seventy-minute bus ride, which constituted the adolescent equivalent of Lucifer’s descent into hell. In the height of some budget-strapped lunacy, Raleigh’s school administrators had decided to let high-school students drive the buses, with predictable results. Our sixteen-year-old driver, armed with her newly laminated license, was an avid smoker who bummed cigarettes from the “cool kids” and allowed the bus to become a foggy den of iniquity. On cold winter days, drivers in adjacent lanes were surprised to see billows of smoke plume from our windows whenever we opened them. Meanwhile, the backseat devolved into a notorious brothel, where girls remained perpetually horizontal.

  One morning, in her eagerness to please the oldest ninth-grade boys, our driver stopped at a dilapidated corner grocery two blocks from Carnage and let the boys run in and buy several six-packs. (Those were the days before serious ID checks.) The bus roamed the neighborhood for ten extra minutes while the boys held a chugging contest. Every day at Carnage, first period was disrupted by intercom announcements of all the buses arriving fifteen or twenty minutes late, and I often wondered how many of those children had gone on an early morning beer run.