Love in a Time of Homeschooling Read online

  Julia was not at the creek, nor was she walking the “shining path,” a trail that bisects our one unmown acre. Ten years ago John and I decided that two acres were the limit of our mowing. We let our third acre grow wild in an arboreal experiment, filled with blackberry bushes and sumac trees and sheltered forts of cedar, where deer sleep on winter nights. Julia can point out the traces of their curled bodies.

  On that April afternoon, she was not there. Back inside the house I telephoned our neighbors, a pair of elderly widows who live at the end of the shining path and who keep their door perpetually open to our girls. No, Julia had not stopped by for a visit. They would call if she appeared.

  Having done all that I could, and with no real reason to believe she was in danger, I resigned myself to the fact that a fourth-grader is old enough to wander alone outside for a little while, and I lay down in my bedroom and tried to concentrate on a paperback novel. I would give Julia another fifteen minutes before I started to panic.

  After ten I heard a small rustling in the closet. Probably a mouse, I thought. In the winter they occasionally scratch their noisy way through our walls and poke twitching heads from the heating vents. But the next sound was louder, heavy and shifting, too large to be a rodent. I opened the shuttered doors and found Julia hiding beneath the dresses and slacks.

  Now, I understand the appeal of closets, their liminal nature and womblike darkness, the primitive call of the animal den, full of smells and secrecy and the promise of dress-up clothes. My grandmother’s closets were otherworldly to my child-mind: large dark rooms lined in mahogany, with seersucker suits and lace dresses and light bulb cords too high to reach. Only the bravest hide-and-seek player would dare go inside and close the door.

  My own closet, however, is not so intriguing. It has no whiff of Narnia, no fur coats. It is not one of these enormous affairs mandated in today’s McMansions, carpeted havens with skylights and recessed bulbs, the size of a home office or a small bedroom, where a child could disappear for several placid hours, silent within a carousel of dresses.

  My closet is a disgrace. Two feet deep and five feet wide, with wooden shuttered doors and a hard pine floor piled with old sneakers and broken sandals and wrinkled pumps untouched for a decade. Beneath the sedimentary layers of dirty laundry, one can excavate lost library books, old greeting cards, crayons, earplugs, and scraps of paper that once seemed worth keeping. Above the racks of sloppily hangered blouses, the sweaters are not folded tight on their rows of shelves, but lie sprawled in loose piles, sleeves dangling.

  It is a closet fit for Sarah Sylvia Cynthia Stout. My yearly attempt to clean it feels like Hercules tackling the Augean stables, except that I never finish my task. Nevertheless, there, in that unsightly mess, Julia had chosen to sit for almost an hour, crouched silent on a pile of old shoeboxes.

  “Didn’t you hear me calling?” I asked.

  Yes, she nodded.

  “Why have you been hiding there?”

  “I heard you say that it was time for me to do my homework.”

  Ah, yes. I should have remembered. Just before her disappearance I had said that Julia must finish her homework before dinner, and rather than taking out pencil and paper, she had crawled into this dark space and closed the door. That, to me, was a sign.

  Every child has a misery quotient, the line at which mere whining turns into real unhappiness. Some children are born miserable, their glass always half empty; some are made miserable by the adult world. And there’s nothing like homework to squash a child’s joy. In Julia’s mind, homework was the shadow haunting every day, the shapeless dread that grew larger with each passing year.

  I don’t recall having so much homework when I was a fourth grader. Today’s public schools seem to have responded to the endless cry for “achievement!” by adding more worksheets to the homework pile. Math worksheets, grammar worksheets, bland spelling exercises. I wouldn’t mind the work if it seemed more interesting—if Julia were asked to try a fun science experiment, or to walk outside and compose a poem about the sounds in her yard. What rankles is the monotony of colorless paper, the columns of equations and fill-in-the-blank history.

  For Julia, homework had always been a monumental burden. Sometimes I could persuade her to complete the work by reiterating our house rules: she could not have her daily hour of screen time (TV, DVD, or computer) until her homework was finished and she had practiced her violin. But often I had to resort to cajoling and threats, nagging the poor creature all the way to the kitchen table, and hovering for the duration, saying, “That’s good. Keep going.” Without constant prodding Julia’s mind tended to wander out the window, into the meadow, “away down the valley, a hundred miles or more.” A twenty-minute math assignment could take two hours, with Julia staring into the boundless space between each fraction.

  On that April afternoon Julia’s homework was surprisingly minimal. Rather than her usual hour of assignments, which might have dragged on for twice that long, the day’s task barely filled ten minutes. She had spent an hour of hiding to avoid ten minutes of schoolwork, and the thought of that warped equation broke my heart.

  Many parents know the ache of raising a child who doesn’t fit smoothly into a traditional school routine; all children learn in different ways, and for some, the rituals of education are a daily struggle. Although Julia’s younger sisters could navigate social and academic waters with relative ease, for Julia, there were indications even from her toddler years that she would not conform easily to a highly structured environment. At every stage of development she had chafed, not only against her homework, but also against the world of classrooms and desks so alien to her nature. In retrospect, I see these moments of discomfort as signposts on a road to homeschooling, a road traveled by many families who have children with special needs, special gifts, special personalities—families who look at the mismatch between school and child and ask themselves year after year: Can’t we do better than this?

  There are countless reasons why parents homeschool—stories of unhappy children or ambitious parents, bad schools or persistent bullies, religious fundamentalists or nerdy academics—and these narratives, with their varied characters, are as compelling as the homeschooling itself. They reveal the vast complexities of education in today’s America. On that April day, however, I wasn’t thinking about all of that. I didn’t assume that I was headed toward homeschooling. I only knew that something about my daughter’s education was going wrong, and I must try to fix it. My once-joyful child now felt so oppressed by her schoolwork that she wanted to retreat into dark spaces. This couldn’t continue.

  Over the next few days I pondered Julia’s education up until that moment. Awake at night, staring into my bedroom’s shadows, I recalled scenes from preschool, kindergarten, and third grade. Some of the scenes were happy, but others were tinged with conflict and stress. These memories struck me as symptoms that might yield a diagnosis. I told myself that if I could sift through these glimpses from the past, I might be able to choose the right direction for the future.

  And so, in the days to come, I pieced together the narrative of Julia’s education, beginning at a little Montessori school beside a rippling creek.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Julia and the Schools

  It’s hard to focus when you look outside and see that the branches of trees are forming eyelids.

  JULIA

  JULIA WAS TWO YEARS OLD WHEN SHE ENTERED WOODS Creek Montessori—a sweet, small place situated in an old brick house on a half-acre of land surrounded by a buffer of trees. In front of the school ran a wide stream and jogging trail, where the children took regular nature walks. A stroll to the left led through a tunnel above shaded pools that housed one large snapping turtle and several eight-inch fish. Beyond that, the trail opened onto a wooded enclave behind student apartments, and there, for two years, an anonymous undergraduate maintained a small fairy house. A three-inch-high, round wooden door was attached with hinges to the hollowed-out base o
f a tree, and when the children kneeled to open it, they found a little statue inside, sometimes a fairy, once a gnome, most often a red, round-bellied Buddha. The children scribbled notes for the fairy/Buddha, and left gifts of flowers, drawings, beads, and tiny plastic furniture. The anonymous student responded with messages of gratitude and friendship, until, one morning, the children found the door ripped from its hinges and the occupant gone. A note explained that some vicious human troll had taken everything, and the fairy had gone into hiding.

  Fortunately another good spirit came to watch over the children, a reddish brown screech owl perched in a squirrel’s nook, high in a tree that stood in the middle of the school’s small parking lot. For over a year that sleepy bird faced the Montessori entrance, mostly drowsing, sometimes opening one eyelid at a time. The school’s largely Quaker staff dubbed him “Friend Owl.”

  I never felt guilty about sending my firstborn away to that preschool. Some people imagine homeschooling moms as ultra-clingy zealots who refuse to relinquish control of their children, but that’s not me. By the time Julia was two, I was eager to set her loose for a few hours each day. I had another baby to tend, six-month-old Rachel, and I did not plan to become a full-time stay-at-home mom. I was busy toting Rachel around the campus of the Virginia Military Institute, where John taught band, and where I was contracted to write a book about the college’s transition to coeducation. Every day, I carried Rachel to meetings with generals, colonels, and captains, placing her on the floor in her car seat, which I rocked with the ball of my foot while I took notes at the table. I figured that if these military men were serious about making their culture female-friendly, they might as well get used to having a baby in the boardroom.

  Meanwhile, Julia was in good hands at the Montessori school, because she had a brilliant teacher, aptly named Molly Wise. Molly was a dark-haired, tanned, Southern woman in her early fifties, an exuberant cross between an aging cowgirl and a priestess of Mother Earth. I once attended a ceremony over which she presided, with candles and flowers and eggs, to welcome the coming spring. A small group of friends formed a circle, cross-legged, on the floor of a carpeted living room, and Molly told us to envision an enclosure at our backs. If anyone needed to attend to children in the next room, we should cut a window into this imaginary barrier. That sounded kind of strange, and it got weird when I tried it. Julia cried out so often, I was constantly slicing a rectangle into the air, lifting my legs, and dipping my head to step through the fictive opening. With all my ducking and climbing I’m afraid I ruined the ritual’s mystic ambience, transforming it into a third-rate mime act.

  Some adults might sniff at the hint of Wicca, but the Montessori preschoolers adored Molly’s earth-centered style. They loved her animal books and games, her songs about the sun and moon, and the New Age music full of waterfalls and ocean breezes that murmured in her classroom’s background, alternating with Mozart or a little bluegrass. The effect was never flighty; Molly projected a wholly grounded strength, communicated in part by the width of her biceps. As John put it: “I would always do whatever Molly says. Otherwise she might kick my ass.”

  I was glad that John liked Molly, because he was a little skeptical about the whole Montessori concept. “We’re going to spend four thousand dollars a year,” he groaned, “so that our kid can learn how to share and hang up her coat?” Having been raised in conservative Catholic schools, John found the Montessori teachers a little too hippie, and he jokingly called their enclave “People’s Republic School Number Three.” Nevertheless, he soon became a fan of Molly’s style.

  In keeping with Montessori principles, Molly viewed herself more as a guide than a teacher, responsible for maintaining a clean, inviting space with beautiful materials, designed primarily by Montessori experts. She and her assistant, Dierdre, steered their eleven toddlers toward the pouring work, the beadwork, the sand work. No Disney toys, no Barbies, no TV or videos. No teacher-led arts and crafts—group work was a rarity. They adhered to the Montessori belief in two-hour sessions of undisturbed individual work—work was not yet an onerous word for the children—followed by gather time, when the toddlers sat in a circle and sang songs, shared life events, then traipsed off on a nature walk.

  “I liked everything about that place,” Julia would recall, years later. “The creek, the walks, the nice teachers, the sandbox where I first learned to make stories about the plastic animals that I buried and dug up.” The flexibility in the Montessori method matched Julia’s temperament. “But the best thing,” she added, “was the lack of judgment. In regular school, everybody is judged all the time. You take tests constantly to see who’s smart and who’s not. Socially you get labeled as a nerd or a class clown. We didn’t have that at Montessori, but maybe that’s just preschool.”

  The only form of evaluation in the Woods Creek program came from each teacher’s watchful gaze. Molly often stated that her ideal morning was one in which the class ran itself, when she could sit back and watch each child choose his or her work, carry it on its plastic tray to a table, then manipulate the materials for as long as desired, before returning it neatly to its place. I valued this minimization of adult intervention, although it sometimes mystified John: “When I was a kid, students were never treated as individuals. Nobody ever asked, ‘How would you think to play with these blocks?’ You were just expected to walk the line.” But he and I wanted something better for Julia, and Molly fit the bill. Her hours of observation gave Molly a thorough understanding of each child, so that parent-teacher conferences were scenes of revelation. For those of us baffled by the tyranny of our firstborns, Molly served as a guiding light.

  Molly was the first teacher to recognize that Julia was “different.” At our initial parent-teacher conference, seated at a child’s table in knee-high chairs, Molly explained to John and me that Julia had her own way of doing everything.

  “Let me show you.”

  From a shelf at her right, Molly lifted a plastic tray and placed it on our table. It contained two white porcelain bowls, one with half a dozen large marbles the size of peach pits, in cloudy pastels. Beside the bowls lay a small pair of silver tongs.

  “Here is the basic lesson I give on this work.” Molly pinched the tongs, transferring each marble from one bowl to the other.

  “It’s a simple exercise, designed to help develop fine motor skills.” Apparently tongs are a challenge for toddler fingers.

  “But here,” Molly went on, “is what Julia does.”

  She turned the second bowl upside down, revealing its flat bottom. With her fingers, she arranged a few marbles on the upturned bowl, put the tongs on top, and then smiled at us. “It’s wonderful.”

  Most new parents grasp at straws of genius in their toddlers, but I looked upon that pile of marbles with deep skepticism. It was nice; it was original, but far from brilliant.

  Nevertheless, Molly remained a fan. She welcomed “creative variations” on the classroom materials; so long as each child had mastered the concept behind each activity, she could experiment to her heart’s delight. And several children did; Julia had no monopoly on creativity. What struck Molly was that Julia’s variations were unusual; she maneuvered objects in unexpected ways.

  I had noticed some of this “unexpected” behavior at home. Upon opening Julia’s bedroom door one winter afternoon, I found the floor tiled in hardcover picture books, pieced together like a puzzle, spine to spine. It was beautiful and original, and a librarian’s nightmare—a preschooler arranging books into a flooring to be trod upon.

  “It’s very pretty,” I said to Julia. “But it’s time for the books to go back on the shelf.”

  Two weeks later I stepped into my bathroom and was met by a sudden onset of cobwebs. They hung from cabinet knob to knob, draped across the sink, stretching from the linen closet to the tub faucets. It took a few seconds for me to realize that this was not a spider’s silk. My toddler had been spinning webs of minty dental floss, transforming the room into her priv
ate Halloween. It was strange and beautiful—a preschool version of installation art. I let the webs remain for twenty-four hours before taking them down. Dental floss, I showed Julia, is for your teeth.

  Julia showed little interest in the proper use of household objects. Once, on a rainy afternoon, I tried to demonstrate the marvels of a plastic egg-slicer. See how the top lifts like the cover of a book? See, inside, this oval cradle, divided into eleven thin white strips? You place the peeled egg into the cradle, gently, very gently, and then pull down the top. Look! The metal wires cut the egg into eleven slices, and each slice has a yellow center! Would you like to eat one? Would you like some salt for that?

  I gave Julia the slicer. Would you like to put an egg inside and cut it up? She took the white apparatus into her two-year-old fingers, opened its cover, and inspected the metal wires with their tiny shreds of egg still clinging. Then she reached forward and plucked the wires, emitting a twangy music with an Asian ring. The loose wires in the middle produced an indistinct, low thrumming pitch, but the tighter metal at the edges offered clear, high notes. She plucked a tune for a minute or two, then put the slicer down and walked away.

  Imagine us a year later, alone on the carpeted floor of a friend’s family room, surrounded by a city of blocks, the last remnants of a group playdate. The other children’s impulses were clearly vertical: apartment buildings and skyscrapers, steeples and tall arches. I, too, was enamored with height, stacking one cube on to another until they fell in a heap. Meanwhile, Julia sat twelve feet away, at the opposite end of the room, with a set of colored blocks, spreading them flat on the floor, apparently incapable of building a tower.