Love in a Time of Homeschooling Read online

  To me, multiple choice is the greatest sign of the failure of American education—a form of testing developed for the convenience of grading machines, that has little to do with real learning. Genuine education involves writing, making connections, and drawing conclusions, but at Julia’s school, as at many schools nationwide, writing played second fiddle to “fill in the bubble.”

  Waddell was such a promising place, it was sad to see the teachers dragging around their state-mandated ball and chain. But our little school was a good foot soldier in Virginia’s SOL crusade, which meant that Julia and I, along with all the other families and teachers, kept marching in step.

  That march became especially dreary at the end of the third grade, as Julia prepared for her first standardized test in social studies. School districts throughout Virginia were issuing flash cards from a private company that gave its package the silly title “Race for the Governor’s Mansion.” Trying to be a dutiful parent, I quizzed Julia on the cards and was dismayed by their poor quality.

  Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are ________ that all Americans enjoy, one flash card read. “Inalienable rights,” Julia responded, repeating Jefferson’s words from the Declaration of Independence. I flipped the card over. Privileges, it read. How ridiculous, I thought, to have the children memorize an arbitrary word pulled out of a hat.

  In fact, the flash cards would get worse in upcoming years, containing numerous errors. “What ancient cities farmed on hillsides?” Greece and Rome. “What country was home to several great empires?” Africa.

  Julia didn’t mind all the flash cards and multiple choice as much as her homework assignments. By the fourth grade, she had become so bored that homework was a daily struggle. Every day, I tried to allow her time to play outside for a few hours after school, but by five thirty I was usually telling her to start her homework. I offered a little television or computer time as an incentive, but often these weren’t enough inspiration. By seven, I’d be unpacking her books myself, insisting that she sit down at the table and concentrate. By eight, when she had finished only a fraction of her work and was complaining about how her sisters were watching SpongeBob without her, I could feel my jaw tighten. At nine, when Rachel and Kathryn were in bed and Julia wasn’t finished with her math, I usually launched into some lecture about time management and the need to concentrate. By ten o’clock, when my fourth-grader finally went to bed, she and I were both angry and exhausted. I began to dread every single afternoon.

  Had I known then what I know now: that in the elementary grades, studies show that the link between homework and academic achievement is minimal at best—its impact grows in middle and high school—I might have staged my own little homework rebellion. I could have written a letter to Julia’s teacher explaining that homework had become counterproductive for my daughter; the tension it produced negated any potential benefits. For the rest of the fourth grade, I would see that Julia devoted forty minutes each school day to homework—the old ten-minutes-per-grade rule. Beyond that, she had my permission to skip the rest.

  Julia’s teacher, a thoughtful and intelligent woman, would probably have worked with us had she known that Julia’s homework was taking so much time, dragging down our family routine. She might have given Julia shorter assignments—ten math problems instead of twenty. And if this woman had not been willing to compromise—so what? So, Julia would get a minus on the “completes homework” line on her report card. What did it matter?

  Homework has not always been accepted as a valuable part of education. These days there are plenty of books that argue against America’s homework overload: The Homework Myth, The Case Against Homework, The End of Homework. Most of the authors stress that our country’s attitude toward homework has fluctuated over time, according to political and social trends. The 1930s and 1940s witnessed a growing movement for the abolition of homework, as doctors and educators emphasized the need for healthy, joyful children who spent plenty of time playing outside. This move for health and happiness mirrored labor advocates’ calls for more recreation and no unpaid overtime. But the anti-homework trend ended in 1957, with the Soviet launch of Sputnik. In recent years, the desire to produce citizens who can compete in the global economy has produced a spike in homework for American children.

  I didn’t know any of this back in 2005. Still suffering the residual intimidation from my own public school days, I assumed that Julia should complete all of the teacher’s assignments, even if it meant that I must push and prod. Waddell seemed to assume that parents would do some prodding. Every week we were asked to administer practice vocabulary tests, time math quizzes, call out flashcards, and sign forms verifying that our child had completed her reading, her spelling, her arithmetic.

  To John, this level of parent involvement was perplexing. His mom and dad had never paid attention to his homework: “I was the fourth of six kids, so their attitude was, ‘Hey, you’re on your own.’ Their only job was to go to the teachers at the end of each year and say, ‘Pleeease let John go on to the next grade.’”

  Given John’s laissez-faire attitude, I wondered if I was too wrapped up in Julia’s homework. Maybe the problem was me, not my daughter. Maybe I was joining the ranks of helicopter parents—overly ambitious and intrusive.

  In her book Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, Judith Warner describes how today’s mothers have become a generation of control freaks, frantically prepping children to get their piece of a shrinking American pie, rather than taking political action to ensure that there is enough pie for everyone. The result is stressed-out women and kids, all suffering from an existential crisis that Warner calls “the mess.”

  Although Lexington’s small-town culture is shielded from the worst extremes of “the mess” (there are no private schools that families compete to enter, no exclusive afterschool lessons, no excess of choices), around me I saw plenty of moms heavily invested in their children’s schoolwork and extracurriculars: monitoring homework, helping with projects, driving to dance and lacrosse and Girl Scouts, volunteering in the classroom, and sometimes arguing with teachers. Most of this involvement seemed appropriate and loving, but some of it was over the top, and I wondered what category I fell under: helpful, concerned parent or stressed-out Uber-Mom?

  “Should we let Julia fail?” I sometimes asked John. Should we let her skip her homework and school projects until she had the maturity and desire to complete them without my prodding? At this, John shrugged and offered another confession: “You know, I never did any of my homework until about the fifth grade. That’s one of the reasons I was failing.”

  I wondered if Julia would benefit from seeing the consequences of failure; maybe a bad report card would ruffle her complacency. And yet, whenever I did step back from the process and allowed my daughter to miss project deadlines or receive zeros on homework, or sometimes go for days without brushing her hair, it never bothered Julia as much as it bothered me. She displayed little interest in whether her papers were marked with As or Fs, and on one level, her utter lack of concern seemed healthy. When I was a child, I had been too intent on pleasing other people—making my teachers and parents happy, wanting to fit in at school. That mind-set can produce good grades, but it can also have dangerous consequences for young girls: trying to please peers who are passing out drugs, wanting to please boys who try to go too far.

  Julia’s independence would serve her well on future occasions, but for now I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of a smart child doing poorly in school, and neither could Julia’s teachers. Whenever I mentioned the thought of stepping back and letting Julia’s school fortunes rise or fall as they might, her teachers objected strongly. They cared about Julia’s success, and I’m sure they also cared about their school’s accreditation. In the era of No Child Left Behind, Waddell needed bright kids like Julia to “perform,” and they encouraged me to serve as her homework coach. Some children needed a helper, they explained—someone who could sit at the k
itchen table and keep the child focused.

  But serving as a homework coach is an exhausting job, and Julia and I butted heads every time she dragged her feet. I didn’t enjoy ushering the clouds into so many of her afternoons, bringing out the books and pencils and calling her in from the creek. I feared that her hatred of homework would soon morph into a hatred of me. And then came the closet incident, which threw me into days of worried reflection. We had reached the breaking point, and something had to change.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Making a Plan

  School is all about copying the teacher. I mean, I’ve been saying the pledge of allegiance for six years, and I only learned what “pledge” meant one year ago.

  JULIA

  THAT’S WHEN THE HOMESCHOOLING BUG FIRST FLARED within me. After puzzling over the trajectory of my daughter’s education, I knew we had to try something different.

  I had always thought of homeschooling as a drastic measure. Homeschooling was for Mormons, for Bible-thumping Baptists, for children with disabilities, mental or physical, and for families who live off the grid, with solar heat and composting toilets. Homeschooling was a little bit weird. But in the chameleonic world of modern parenthood, we mothers must constantly change colors to meet our children’s needs. We become accomplished fund-raisers when our preschools need a fruit sale chair; we take up the violin when the Suzuki method calls for parent-child lessons. And when my daughter decided that she would rather hide in a closet than complete her homework, I knew that it was time for me to become a schoolteacher, if only for a little while.

  On one level, my motives were entirely selfish. Sure, I wanted to help my child, but I also wanted to save myself from the tortures of our evening homework routine. After dinner, whenever I longed to relax and read or watch a movie, I was stuck at the kitchen table encouraging Julia to make a map of Virginia out of lentils and pinto beans. Homeschooling looked heavenly by comparison. If Julia were homeschooled, I could be off duty by three o’clock.

  There was also the matter of my intellectual standards. If I was going to be spending a couple of hours each day on my daughter’s schoolwork—supervising, cheering, and prodding—at least let it be on assignments I valued. Not this spelling busywork, this fill-in-the-blank history. Not this state-mandated world of multiple choice. If Julia were homeschooled, she could be writing essays, gathering evidence, forming conclusions, and reading constantly.

  As I sat there at our dining room table night after night watching my daughter slog through another column of multiplication, I recalled the first time I had ever heard of homeschooling. It was way back in August of 1983, when I was up late watching The Tonight Show, with Johnny Carson. Johnny had a special guest from California, a young man who was going off to Harvard in the fall without ever having completed a year of school. His story caught my attention because I was a Harvard student as well, preparing for my sophomore year.

  The incoming freshman was named Grant Colfax, and he had grown up on a remote forty-acre homestead in Northern California. Much of his education had been hands-on, helping his parents to clear land and build a farm. He had learned biology while raising animals, geometry while constructing a house, and his discovery of Indian ruins on the family property had inspired him to study North American archaeology.

  Years later, Grant Colfax’s name would become legendary in the homeschooling world when his parents, David and Micki, wrote a book called Homeschooling for Excellence. By the time of the book’s publication, the Colfaxes had three sons at Harvard, and their brief manifesto provided inspiration to tens of thousands of Americans who believed that if they, too, took their children’s educations in hand, their kids might end up in the Ivy League.

  Back in 1983, the first thing that struck me about the televised Grant Colfax was his handsome face. (I was nineteen, after all.) My second impression was that he seemed so normal—articulate and easy-going. Grant and I would eventually wind up living in the same house at Harvard—“house” meaning a cluster of brick buildings that housed and fed more than four hundred students. We never had a conversation; I would pass him on the Radcliffe Quad, nod hello, and think to myself, “There’s that guy who never went to school.” Each time, I felt the same emotion that I had experienced watching him on The Tonight Show: a mixture of curiosity and envy.

  College had opened my eyes to enormous vistas of learning, and I was appalled at how much time had been wasted in my public school years doodling in the margins of dull workbooks. Grant Colfax, I told myself, didn’t spend a semester in Consumer Education, learning to balance a checkbook. He didn’t suffer through Sex Education and Drug Education and the moronic swamp of multiple choice.

  In truth, I knew nothing, then or now, of the real Grant Colfax, but I liked to imagine his education as an Emersonian experiment: immersed by day in the “discipline of nature” and surrounded at night by a pile of books. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his 1837 Phi Beta Kappa address, The American Scholar, said that the ideal student should concentrate on three things: nature, to learn of God’s present creation; books, to understand the past and human history; and activity, the sort that the Colfax boys enjoyed on a daily basis (building sheds, tending sheep, fixing plumbing and electrical wiring).

  Twenty-two years later, as I called Julia away from her pleasure reading to do yet another science worksheet, I thought of Grant Colfax and how he never had homework. Instead, he had a life in which he learned by doing. I also thought of my childhood and how the most important part of my education had not come from the public schools. It had come from my mother, an educator in the finest sense.

  Born in New York City in the 1930s, my mom was a child of German immigrants too poor to treat their children to much more than books from the public library and free opera performances in Central Park. Four years at Manhattan’s Hunter High had led her to Hunter College and advanced degrees from Yale and the University of Washington. Married at age thirty, she had three children in four years, and raised us while working on her Ph.D. When her study group met in our dining room, we children sat under the table maneuvering our toys around the graduate students’ feet.

  My mother filled our house with classical music, and insisted that all her children play instruments. Because she and my father loved the outdoors, we spent more family vacations in tents than hotels. When my father died at forty-two, my mom (by then a full-time political science professor) continued our education on weekends, taking us to museums, parks, and tennis lessons. She included us on trips to Europe with groups of college students, and when I showed an interest in creative writing, she introduced me to poetry readings: Gwendolyn Brooks and Czeslaw Milosz.

  As I thought back on my mom, it occurred to me that all good parents are homeschoolers. Homeschooling is what happens when families turn off their TVs, cell phones, and iPods. It occurs in long, thoughtful conversations at the dinner table, as well as at baseball games and ballet recitals, and in the planting of a vegetable garden. Parents who enrich their children’s lives with art and sports and multiple trips to the library provide the backbone of American education. Unfortunately, in our busy lives, parents and children have less and less time for hours of thoughtful interaction, which is one reason why homeschooling has been on the rise. Homeschooling provides families with the quality time that used to occur after school.

  Now I began to look at the homeschooling moms around me with a new respect. Maybe they weren’t so strange after all. Maybe they weren’t overly religious, overly liberal, or overly mothering. Maybe they knew something that I didn’t know.

  My work as a part-time English professor at Washington and Lee had always left me free to accept or decline courses in any given semester, so I started to consider how I might fit some homeschooling into my schedule. For one year, I told myself, I could teach a minimal load. For one year I could concentrate on fifth-grade mathematics instead of Jane Austen. I could give Julia a break from her homework burnout; a year of intensive writing and one-on-one math tu
torials might provide her with a leg up before the sixth grade. Our local middle school was supposed to be very good, and the change in scenery and schedule would hopefully motivate Julia once she reached that school. But for the fifth grade, she might enjoy something totally different.

  The idea of taking a one-year hiatus appealed to my academic mind, steeped as I was in the culture of sabbaticals. Julia was approaching her sixth year at Waddell—the sabbatical year at most colleges. Why shouldn’t she take time off to try her own line of study? Why shouldn’t kids have sabbaticals, too?

  Many committed homeschoolers will cringe at the idea of a one-year experiment. Studies show that the academic benefits of homeschooling (higher test scores and college admission rates) emerge only after several years of work. And the emotional benefits that many homeschoolers cite—enthusiasm for lifetime learning, strengthened family ties—develop slowly over many years.

  Still, long-term homeschooling held no allure for me. I wanted plenty of time for my own teaching and writing and solitude. One year was the limit of my excitement.

  At the time, a year of homeschooling seemed like an original, even radical idea. How many mothers took their children out of school for one grade to give them an individually tailored education?

  As it turns out, plenty. The more I looked into it, the more I discovered that short-term homeschooling is a growing trend in America, for a vast array of reasons. Some parents have academic motives: they want to expose their kids to ideas and experiences beyond the usual curriculum, but they don’t have the time or desire to pull their children from traditional schools permanently. Other families fall into temporary homeschooling unexpectedly, as the result of sudden crises; Hurricane Katrina made homeschoolers out of many reluctant moms and dads. Severe bullying can also drive parents to homeschool for the short term. In our town, I met one mother who withdrew her daughter midyear from the seventh grade when the preteen nastiness of the middle-school girls became too painful. “She was up at midnight crying,” the woman explained. One semester sufficed to steer that child past the social tempest, and she was a happy eighth-grader the following year. Another mom explained that she removed her daughter from middle school in South Carolina when the girl came home with choking marks on her neck. That child was scheduled to return to the public system once ninth grade began, with hopes that her high school would be better policed.