by Laura Brodie
Compared with Carnage, Julia’s new school seemed childishly innocent. At Lylburn Downing Middle School there were no buses, and no apparent problems with alcohol, drugs, or tobacco. No girls were visibly pregnant, and in his seven years on the job, the principal had broken up only one fight. “The school is so small,” he explained, “I can stand at the door in the morning and look into every kid’s face, and know who might be headed for a bad day.”
The sixth-grade class that Julia was scheduled to join contained about sixty children—mostly the same kids she had known at Waddell. Her English class would be limited to fifteen, a wonderful student-teacher ratio for any public school, and the teachers seemed smart, friendly, and funny.
As for the building, it was an old 1940s and ’50s one-story brick affair, with a tiny library, a primitive cafeteria, and no real auditorium, just a gym with a leaky roof and a small curtained stage. The facilities were so limited that whenever the band teacher wanted a child to practice alone or be videotaped for a solo quiz, she had to set the young musician up in the only space available—a tiny handicapped bathroom. There, children took turns sitting on the toilet, the bell of a French horn pressed into the sink, the slide of a trombone hitting the door.
Nevertheless, LDMS seemed like a good place for Julia.
“I think you’ll like it,” I said when I dropped her off on the first day. Watching her pale, fragile figure in denim shorts and flip-flops disappear behind the school’s heavy doors, I felt the same anxiety as on her first morning of kindergarten—that almost desperate longing for a child to be happy.
Julia entered those doors with a small modicum of confidence. Over the summer, she had asserted that one year of homeschooling was enough. It was time to rejoin the other kids.
What little enthusiasm she mustered, however, was short-lived. At the end of her first day, Julia collapsed into the backseat of our car and moaned: “There was no recess.” For seven hours she had remained confined indoors, spending most of her time slumped in a plastic chair, filling out pieces of paper and signing her name in thick, heavy textbooks. In other words, she hated it as much as she had initially hated kindergarten.
“Can you eat lunch outside?” I asked. The school had a small interior courtyard with a few picnic tables.
“Nobody did.”
“Didn’t you go outside for PE?” Her sixth-grade schedule included PE twice each week.
“We played kickball inside the gym, but we might go outside next week.”
For the vast majority of the next nine months, Julia would get no fresh air between 8:15 and 3:00. Although a public park extended to the left of the school, with trees and grass and a covered pavilion perfect for hosting a class of twenty, the teachers rarely used it.
All of this indoor work might have been less irksome if Julia could have spent plenty of time playing outdoors after school. Unfortunately, on the second day she brought home assignments in five subjects, which took all afternoon to complete. In less than forty-eight hours, she had descended back into homework hell.
I suspected that Julia’s wandering mind might be dragging out the homework, causing her to spend way too much time, but after polling several parents, I learned that my daughter was not alone. Although some children were breezing through their assignments in ninety minutes, many others shared Julia’s plight and were slogging away for twice that long. “Shockwaves of home-work,” Julia would describe it in later years, when she and Rachel were both struggling with hours of afterschool assignments.
Julia had increased her burden by signing up for Latin, a strong class taught by a quirky veteran teacher who made the students sing their declensions. (Imagine a child warbling “A…A-E…A-E…A-M” to the tune of “Tea for Two.”) Mrs. Riley’s Latin instruction was far superior to anything I could have mustered—one example of the benefits that this school could offer. But Latin involved homework on every school day, weekend, and holiday.
“I have to build a model of the Roman Coliseum,” Julia remarked one Friday afternoon in October.
“When it is due?” I asked.
“Monday morning.”
My heart sank. Another ruined weekend. One by one our free hours filled with school projects, while family excursions dropped to a minimum.
As for the standard sixth-grade curriculum, it wasn’t very hard. Much of it came from old texts that the children followed chapter by chapter, covering Virginia’s SOL guidelines. Despite the clear intelligence of Julia’s teachers, who engaged their classes in lively conversation, multiple choice still reigned as the most prevalent measure of knowledge, and Julia quickly mastered strategies that had little to do with learning.
“What major strike in 1894 challenged the concept of welfare capitalism?” I asked her one afternoon, reading from one of her quizzes in preparation for a big test.
“It’s the answer with a p in it,” she replied.
“What does the p stand for?”
She shrugged.
“The Pullman strike?” I suggested.
“Yeah, that’s it.” She nodded.
“But what was the Pullman strike about?” I asked. “And what is welfare capitalism?”
“Oh Mom,” Julia rolled her eyes. “All I need to know is which word to circle.”
All of my gripes from Julia’s elementary school days returned with added vigor in middle school: too much multiple choice, too much homework, too much time prepping for standardized tests, and not enough time writing and thinking. Although the English teachers emphasized writing skills, Lylburn Downing as a whole offered minimal writing across the curriculum, and even when papers were assigned, they often were graded but not critiqued. The total quantity of writing instruction was not nearly enough to hone the children’s skills.
Not that Julia cared. She was happy to have a break from all the writing I had required in the fifth grade. Multiple-choice quizzes and tests were fine with her, and most of the time she had little problem mastering basic materials. In terms of grades, her chief stumbling block came on her first math test.
“D?” I gawked when she mentioned the results. “Why did you get a D?”
She shrugged, utterly unconcerned. “I got stuck on a problem halfway through the test, so I stopped to think about it, and before I knew it, the class was over.”
I could envision Julia at her desk, getting lost in the world of a word problem, unmindful of the clock and her classmates carrying their tests up to the teacher. The previous spring we had reviewed test-taking skills, devoting extra attention to time management. Now I repeated the same advice, and over the next few weeks Julia grew accustomed to the norms of middle-school work and began to make excellent grades. Still, she displayed no pride in the accomplishment, no particular concern about whether her quarterly report card contained As or Cs. Good grades were her concession to me and my academic mind-set; they were signposts from an adult’s world of paperwork that she abhorred.
“Would you study for this test if I didn’t require you to do it?” I asked her on one occasion.
She shrugged. “Probably not.”
“Would you write the papers for your English class?”
“Maybe,” she said. “It depends on whether I liked the topic.”
I might have called her lazy, except for the pages of unfinished short stories that lay around her bedroom, and for the hours she spent reading and composing tunes on the piano. Julia was not averse to intellectual activity; she was just allergic to school.
Take her out! I can hear the homeschoolers cry. Why subject a child to a traditional school if its academic deficiencies are apparent, and the child is not thriving? Many times I felt the urge to yank Julia out of Lylburn Downing, but I was well aware of the failures in my own teaching, and Julia needed daily exposure to social situations even more than she needed practice writing paragraphs.
Unfortunately, middle school is a miserable place to learn social skills. Especially for girls, early adolescence is at best a difficult journe
y, at worst, a painful crucible.
“These girls are scary,” one mom of an eleven-year-old boy remarked to me after his second day in the sixth grade. “Have you seen what they are wearing?”
Yes, I had noticed. While some of Julia’s peers still preferred their elementary fashions—loose blue jeans and T-shirts and dirty-white sneakers—others seemed to have leaped from fifth grade straight to high school, donning tight high-cut shorts and tighter low-cut shirts. Here were cosmetics in endless variety: lipstick and gloss, eye shadow and liner, rouged cheeks and pedicured toes, all accompanied by high-priced accessories, seventy-dollar flip-flops, designer purses, and manicured nails thumbing text messages into cell phones.
Julia stood staunchly in the anti-fashion camp. On the days when she chose to exert some effort…behold, the duckling was a swan! But most mornings, when I looked at her wrinkled shirts, unbrushed hair, and dirty fingernails, I felt that I was raising a young Janis Joplin.
For many of Julia’s peers, decisions about hair care and clothing seemed calculated to catch the eyes of boys. During the first week of middle school, Julia walked into the bathroom and encountered a couple of girls chatting about which boys were cute, which boys they liked, and, more important, which boys might like them.
“Who do you like, Julia?” they asked.
My eleven-year-old replied with absolute honesty, “I’m too young for that.”
“Good for you,” I said when she described the incident later that night, but I dreaded the social minefield that lay ahead. It startled me, in the coming weeks, to overhear sixth-grade girls flirting diligently with boys and dreaming aloud about Saturday night dates.
“How prevalent is dating in the sixth grade?” I asked one of Julia’s peers.
“Oh, everyone dates,” she asserted, although I had my doubts. From what I could tell, a “date” usually meant a group gathering at the movies. Still, many of the middle-school girls seemed obsessed with the idea that if they weren’t dating, they should be, and Lylburn Downing contributed to the carnival of prepubescent hormones by holding monthly dances.
“A dance every month?” I gasped when a friend first told me about the middle-school social calendar. I couldn’t recall my junior high ever holding a dance, and my high school managed it only three times each year, thank God.
“Isn’t that a lot of social pressure for the kids?”
“Oh, the dances are tame,” this mom assured me. “The kids enjoy them.”
She was right that the dances offered nothing fancy—just social gatherings in the gymnasium, sponsored by athletic teams and afterschool clubs that reaped the two-dollar admission charge and profits from snack sales and raffles. Mostly the kids stood clustered in circles talking, watched by handfuls of parent chaperones and one burly policeman, who stood with arms crossed at the front stage, eyeing groups of boys gathered at the bleachers.
When the time came for a group dance, a large crowd of girls gathered on the floor and shuffled around in rows, with a few brave boys joining in. But the excitement of each evening centered on the slow dances, when the girls watched eagerly to see which couples would assemble with bodies pressed together. The principal occasionally walked over to separate male and female flesh, trying to establish a three-inch rule, but the teenagers merged together again as soon as he walked away.
It’s clear why some conservative Christian homeschoolers have fled the public schools, with sex education introduced by age nine and slow-dancing by age eleven. Whenever I pondered Lylburn Downing’s world of dancing and dating, I was reminded of the Beardsley School for Girls in Nabokov’s Lolita. There the curriculum focused on “Dramatics, Dance, Debating, and Dating,” much to the consternation of Humbert Humbert. As head-mistress Pratt explained, “Dr. Hummer, do you realize that for the modern pre-adolescent child, medieval dates are of less vital value than weekend ones [twinkle]?”
Middle-school rites of passage are an education unto themselves, and for Julia, there has been value in muddling through the rituals of the preadolescent world. But now, as I write these pages, she is finishing the eighth grade, preparing for high school in the fall, and whenever I ask her to look back and ponder the pros and cons of homeschooling versus traditional schools, her response is emphatic:
“Homeschooling is better, because you get to feel that you are remotely in control of your own education. And the scenery changes: in school, I’m stuck in the same building for seven hours every day.
“The only problem with homeschooling,” she adds, “is the socialization, because let’s face it, Mom, you and I mostly hung out with a lot of old people.”
At Lylburn Downing, Julia could hang out on the girls’ tennis team. She could play in a band filled with kids her own age, and work on group projects with very bright classmates who wrote mini-plays and stories and shared her love of drawing. But all the social interaction didn’t compensate for the hours of mind-numbing boredom.
“Being in school,” Julia remarked, “feels like sitting in a chair and having someone with a power tool drill holes into your head.” Her only escape, she explained, was to get lost in her thoughts, just as she had done in elementary school. “There is a space between being consciously present and being asleep, and in most classes I try to get my mind into that halfway zone. It helps to make the time go by faster, and that’s key, because school is a lot like sitting in an airport. The one thing I’ve learned is how to pass the time.”
Those might sound like the words of a child aching for another homeschooling sabbatical, but they are also the sentiments of a thirteen-year-old, and teenage girls don’t want more time at home with Mom. In the past year, when faced with my daughter’s dreary assessment of school, the one alternative I’ve been tempted to try is an odd variation on the usual home-ed model: part-time homeschooling.
Two years ago one of my friends thought to remove her rising eighth-grade son from Lylburn Downing, citing concerns that ranged from bullying to a desire to enjoy more time with her child. Her boy still wanted to play with the school’s jazz band, but when she asked the principal if that was okay, he said that the student could continue with the band only if he took at least two other classes—the minimum required for the school to receive state funding for a child. The principal’s suggestion turned out well for the boy; he took algebra, band, and geography at middle school, and stayed home for English, science, and foreign languages, taught primarily by private tutors. It was a well-timed break for the kid, who entered high school on a full-time basis the following year.
That mixture of public schooling and home education strikes me as an intriguing compromise. I would be happy to have someone else teach my daughters algebra, Latin, and science, and Julia would cheerfully stick with her school’s tennis team and art classes. But when it comes to English and all forms of history, ideally my girls would follow a curriculum freed from state mandates and multiple choice, and filled with constant writing.
I once asked the principal if any parent could remove a child for a third, or even half, of each school day, to pursue their own homeschooling. “Yes, that’s possible,” he said, nodding. “In our system, parents can pretty much do whatever they want. I’d discourage it if a family were just trying to avoid a certain teacher, but if they had a special opportunity planned for a child, that would be okay.”
One afternoon I asked Julia what she would think of leaving school after two thirds of each day, to audit my freshman literature and composition class at Washington and Lee. She would read the same texts as the college students, ranging from Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Tale” to short stories by Alice Walker and Flannery O’Connor, and between listening to the undergraduates’ discussion and writing papers that I would critique, she could get a sense of what a college English class involved. But Julia didn’t jump at the chance. She balked at the idea of sitting in a room with eighteen-year-olds; the world of young adults was too intimidating.
And now that high school is approaching, the chanc
es of more homeschooling for Julia are fast slipping away. Home education at the senior-high level has never appealed to me, because the stakes are so much greater than in elementary school, with college admission on the line. I couldn’t teach most high-school subjects, and I’ve never been tempted to juggle tutors and community college classes—the usual plan for my homeschooling friends with high-school-age children. For now, it seems that Julia’s homeschooling will occur in orchestra rehearsals and trips abroad, in dinner table conversations and in books and films that our family shares. Freed from all assignments and pressures, I hope that she and I will indulge together in the pleasures of learning for years to come.
As for her sisters, I sometimes wonder if Rachel would enjoy a semester of part-time homeschooling. This child who has already begun to read the classics, and whose memory is keen as a sharpened blade, would benefit from greater challenges and fewer hours of homework. But Rachel remains fascinated with the ins and outs of social behavior, enjoying her friends at school and attending every dance. For both Rachel and Julia, “homeschooling” is likely to mean “afterschooling”: reading together, sharing concerts, and planting a garden.
Finally, there’s Kathryn, currently in the third grade, advancing through Waddell with social and academic ease, but with limited interest in reading and writing. There, perhaps, lies an opportunity—a child happy to spend time with Mom who could benefit from a year of individually tailored learning.
Perhaps I could design a special fifth-grade experience for her, something that would spark a lasting passion for words. Perhaps I could learn from the mistakes and triumphs of my year with Julia, beginning from day one with more patience, more humor, and more openness to outrageous fun.
