Love in a Time of Homeschooling Page 6

  When parents become teachers in response to short-term crises, Home Education Magazine calls it “emergency homeschooling.” For Julia and me, however, there was no emergency. Julia’s stint in the closet was a wake-up call, not a crisis. It was the proverbial straw that broke my back, providing just enough of a jolt to force me into action.

  A few weeks after the incident, I presented Julia with the words that had been running through my mind.

  “Would you like to try a year of homeschooling?”

  She looked up from her copy of Dragons of Deltora. “What does that mean?”

  “It means you wouldn’t go to Waddell for the fifth grade. I’d be your teacher.” Julia crinkled her nose. Apparently the vision of Mom as her teacher was not a strong selling point. “You’d get to study things that interest you,” I added, “not just the usual school stuff. And we could plan lots of field trips, to Washington and Williamsburg, and all around town.”

  “I dunno.” Julia shrugged and returned to her book.

  I stood there mutely embarrassed, amazed at her lack of enthusiasm. I had thought she would jump at the chance, embracing me as the best mom ever. In my eyes, Julia was a caged bird, and I was opening the door, offering her the sky, the clouds, the freedom to let her mind soar. But like so many imprisoned creatures, when the cage door opened, Julia remained perched in the back, wary and bored.

  “Don’t you think homeschooling might be fun?” I prodded.

  She sighed. “How is it any better than what I’ve got right now?”

  “You wouldn’t have the usual homework. The only homework I’d require is that you read for an hour every day and write one page in a journal.”

  “Write about what?” I had caught my daughter’s attention, and I could sense her inching toward the door of her cage.

  “Whatever you want.”

  Those were the magic words. “I like that.” Julia smiled. “That sounds good.”

  “Think about it for a while,” I said. “It’s a serious decision. Think about what you’d miss at school, and what you’d gain at home. We don’t have to make any commitment yet.” Nevertheless, it was clear from that point forward that Julia and I were harboring a special secret. We were contemplating playing hooky for a year.

  A few days later, standing at the edge of the Waddell playground, watching children slide and climb and swing in the last few minutes before the final bell, I approached my friend Ruth. Ruth is a woman of sturdy good sense, with children roughly the same age as mine.

  When she asked, “What’s up with you?” I replied, “I’m thinking about homeschooling Julia for the fifth grade.”

  She didn’t express surprise or ask a single question. Instead, she looked me straight in the eye and said, “You’re crazy.”

  Ruth is famous for being blunt, but “crazy” seemed harsh. While I spluttered some self-defensive nonsense, she shrugged in a “choose your own poison” gesture. “No way I’d ever do that.”

  No way Ruth ever could, since she works as a full-time lawyer. But she wasn’t talking about her job; she was referring to her temperament. Ruth is a high-energy, career-oriented, contemporary woman. Staying home with a child day after day, reviewing multiplication tables and rules of grammar, would be her idea of hell. Or at least Purgatory. Obviously, she was not the best audience for trying out my fledgling idea.

  Smoothing my slightly ruffled feathers, I collected my girls and drove home, hoping for a better response from John. His cooperation would be crucial in the coming year, not only for moral support, but because I wanted him to teach Julia flute lessons and French on the two afternoons each week when I would be busy at Washington and Lee.

  That evening I waited until he was relaxed and well fed, lounging at the computer, before I mentioned the idea casually from my armchair across the room.

  “I think I’d like to homeschool Julia next year.”

  John was barely listening, his mouse moving in crooked circles. “What was that?”

  “About Julia,” I said. “I’d like to take her out of school next year and try some homeschooling.”

  The mouse came to a halt and John turned to face me. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Why not?”

  “You two fight all the time.”

  “We fight over her homework,” I replied. “We fight because I have to force her to do schoolwork she hates. If she were homeschooled she would only have to read and write after three o’clock. She wouldn’t mind that.”

  “You fight over her violin,” he pointed out, and he was right. Julia had been taking violin lessons for three years and showed real talent, but getting her to practice was an ugly ordeal.

  “If she were homeschooled, her violin practice could be part of the school day,” I replied. “She wouldn’t object so much if it took place before three o’clock. She just resents spending seven hours at school, then coming home and having more lessons.”

  “You also argue about the mess she makes.”

  There again, John was right. (I was beginning to sense he had a list.) Julia tends to leave her clothes and toys scattered throughout the house in serpentine trails, as if she were Gretel dropping crumbs to find her way home. In response I gradually progress from patient tolerance (“Pick up your toys please, Julia”) to teeth-gritting tolerance (“Please pick up your toys now, Julia”) to raging frustration (“What the &*%^$ are all these toys still doing in the hall!”). The length of my fuse depends on the stress of my day and the sharpness of the object I’ve just stepped on.

  John could see from my tightened jaw that this homeschooling idea wasn’t merely a casual impulse. He sighed. “Why do you even ask me when you’ve already made up your mind?”

  “I wasn’t asking. I was telling.”

  Actually, I didn’t say those words aloud, but that’s pretty much what ran through my head. In our household, most child-rearing decisions fall under my authority; with three daughters, so many questions relate to ballet and Barbies and training bras that John gratefully allows me free rein. This decision, however, involved an important, gender-neutral subject, and he wasn’t going to acquiesce with his usual “Yes, dear. Just tell me what to do.”

  “Look,” he began, “you’ve got to remember that I started out as a public school teacher, and the first time I heard about homeschooling, about twenty years ago, my instant reaction was ‘Oh hell no!’ That’s like a slap in the face, to say that a parent with no training can do my job. I know homeschooling has come a long way since then, but I think it’s going to be a lot harder than you imagine.”

  “I know it will be hard,” I said, “but I think Julia needs it.”

  “You’re thinking about what’s good for Julia,” he replied, “but I’m worried about what’s good for you. Teaching kids is exhausting. A few months at home with Julia and you’re going to be miserable.”

  I sighed. “Her school situation already makes me miserable. She hates the routine; I hate the boring SOLs. We can’t do any worse.”

  At which point he turned back to the computer. “You’re the one with the Harvard degree.”

  John only mentions Harvard when he thinks I’m doing something stupid. Whenever I let the oil in my car run dangerously low, or when I’m careless with the laundry and all our underwear turns pink, John’s response remains the same: “What school did you go to?”

  But after nineteen years of marriage, he knew it was useless to argue. Of late he had embraced the motto “Happy wife, happy life.”

  “By the way,” I said as he clicked through some YouTube clips. “I’ll need your help with Julia two afternoons each week, when I’m teaching.”

  He didn’t even reply.

  Wow, I thought as I lay in bed that night. This was not going well. I had expected to encounter some skepticism, some questions and curiosity, but not the direct, in-your-face, “you’re a naïve idiot” variety. I decided to lie low for a while and shield my fragile vision from any other potential naysayers.

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p; Julia, however, had no inhibitions. She raised the subject at our local dance studio while her fellow modern dancers were donning leotards and kneepads.

  “Mom’s going to homeschool me,” she announced to her instructor, Ms. Sellers, who turned to me with eyebrows raised.

  “Only for a year,” I added, feeling defensive and apologetic.

  Ms. Sellers’s face broke into a broad smile. “That’s fabulous. Julia is the perfect child for homeschooling.”

  God bless Nina Sellers, our town’s creative diva. She’s a fiery woman with red hair halfway down her back, who stood last August at our community festival under the shade of a Japanese parasol (“A prop from our last recital,” she said, laughing) wearing a batik skirt rustling above Greek sandals, trailed by an entourage of adoring children and equally adoring fiftysomething bachelors.

  Now, as the modern dancers began to congregate in her studio, she smiled at me. “You know, I homeschooled my two daughters.”

  “Really?”

  She nodded. “I took them out halfway through middle school, and let them study on their own until college.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  She frowned and issued a guttural noise of disgust: “I can’t stand our country’s industrialized form of education; these assembly-line schools that just ruin childhood.” Then she laughed, as if the cloud of public education had lifted from her thoughts. “I’m not the best model for homeschooling. With my oldest daughter, I just left her alone to read anything she wanted. And she read everything. Novels, history, biographies, newspapers. When she got to the verbal part of her SATs, she scored off the charts, almost one hundred percent. But I never made her study math, so her math scores were pretty low.”

  I couldn’t imagine Nina teaching algebra. She’s an artsy spirit, the sort who often lets modern dance students choreograph their own recital numbers, sometimes to the parents’ chagrin. Whenever John sees Julia rolling across the floor at an end-of-the-year performance, he turns to me and whispers, “How much did we pay for this?”

  Reassured to find a hidden homeschooler among my acquaintance, I resolved to mention my plans to other homeschooling moms, beginning with Julia’s violin teacher, Esther Vine. Esther is a Mormon homeschooler with seven children—facts that, in my mind, would normally conjure an image of a repressed housewife and religious extremist. In fact, Esther is one very cool Latter Day Saint. In addition to raising her large family, she performs in orchestras and chamber groups and teaches college students and children. She serves as the perfect poster woman for her faith.

  Esther is a very calm home educator. Just that fall, when her seventh child asked to attend fourth grade at the county school, she packed his lunch and sent him off on the bus, no problem. But by January, when he’d had enough, she confessed to being relieved. “He had so much homework every day,” she told me, “it really cut into our family time. I don’t know how all the other families can stand it.”

  When I told Esther that I might try a year of homeschooling, her eyes lit up. “Wait a moment. I’ve got something for you.” She left the room and came back a few minutes later with a fat, glossy hardcover book: The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home.

  “This is what I use,” she said, smiling. “Or try to use. It’s a lot more than I could ever manage, but if you’re thinking about homeschooling, there’s no better place to start.”

  That evening, after settling in bed, I lifted the heavy book and plopped it onto my covers. Turning first to the final chapter, I glanced at the last page number—810, Lord help us. More of a reference book than a bedtime story. Next, I contemplated the jacket photos of the smiling authors, a mother-daughter team, Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer. Their names immediately appealed. After my fortunate experience with Montessori’s Molly Wise, I had an instinctive respect for Wise women.

  Apparently Jessie had taught Susan and her brother back in the 1970s, when homeschooling was a new and somewhat bizarre phenomenon. Susan had become a professor of literature and writing at the College of William and Mary, but as I flipped through the book, I was surprised that they didn’t mention the brother much. I wondered what he thought of his homeschooling years.

  Within these 810 pages, mother and daughter advocated a classical education in which global history served as the guiding principle, with literary masterpieces and scientific discoveries taught in a historical chronology. The first through twelfth grades were divided into three repetitions of a four-year pattern: the ancients (5000 BC–AD 400), medieval through early Renaissance (400–1600), late Renaissance through early modern times (1600–1850), and modern times (1850–present). Grade-school children were supposed to study each time period at a simple level; fifth-through eighth-graders delved into the same subjects with increasing complexity, and by high school, students should be reading original sources in translation.

  It was all very impressive, and reminded me of another illuminating book that provided a backdrop for my homeschooling. Many secular homeschoolers point to John Holt’s Teach Your Own as their inspiration, but my own thoughts hearken back to John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography. Mill was one of the greatest intellectuals of the nineteenth century, and it all began with his extraordinary home education. Starting at age three, his father gave him lessons in Greek and arithmetic, the latter being “a most disagreeable process.” In his autobiography, Mill doesn’t mention any lessons in reading English—a feat he probably mastered in utero. At an age when most American children would be first encountering phonics, Mill was lisping Greek vocables. Meanwhile, his father took long walks every morning before breakfast, and from ages four through eight, little John Stuart accompanied him, giving his dad daily accounts of all he had read the day before, assisted by notes that he wrote on slips of paper.

  No Cat in the Hat for this four-year-old; in his kindergarten years, Mill read the great histories of the world: Hume, Gibbon, Herodotus, Plutarch. This little boy absorbed the lessons of Rome and Greece, England and Napoleonic France, the Netherlands fighting Spain, the knights of Malta fighting the Turks. At age seven he “felt a lively interest in Frederic of Prussia,” and when it came to “the American War,” he supported what he called in retrospect “the wrong side” (i.e., the English). Because Mill’s father was a historian, the family possessed a huge historical library. Fiction, however, received short shrift, although Mill did read The Arabian Nights and Don Quixote before age eight. At that point he commenced Latin lessons, which he was required to repeat to his younger sister, and from there, Mill began to teach all of his little siblings, which compelled him to learn his subjects more thoroughly than ever.

  In other words, by age fourteen John Stuart Mill had read and taught more than most Harvard professors. Mill is to classical education what Mozart is to music.

  Unfortunately his education strengthened his mind more than his soul. In his early twenties, Mill suffered a mental breakdown, falling into a deep depression that lasted a few years. Some readers point to this crisis in Mill’s life with almost ghoulish glee, as if the genius’s breakdown provides license for the rest of us to wallow in mediocrity. But I remain fascinated with Mill’s education. Although I never wanted to inflict Greek on my toddlers, his experience offers a reminder of how much potential resides in children’s minds.

  The Well-Trained Mind seemed to outline a modest version of Mill’s superhuman education. Here was the classical trivium presented for the intellectual mortals among us. These authors allowed eighteen years instead of eight for a child to learn the classics (and in translation, moreover). Nevertheless, their ambitious agenda left me daunted. Fingering through that book, I fell asleep each night thinking how, in our imperfect worlds, we mothers constantly fall short. In my brief homeschooling experiment, the best I could hope for Julia was that, by year’s end, she would have read some children’s versions of the Iliad and Odyssey.

  Jessie Wise and her daughter did write something that gave me hope; they explained that fifth g
rade is an ideal year to homeschool. In the earlier years, children are busy learning the nuts and bolts of reading and math, memorizing facts in science and history without gathering them into a coherent picture. By fifth grade, most kids are eager to discuss the world. They are curious and inquisitive, ready to exercise all the skills accumulated in previous years, and they are primed to benefit from one-on-one tutoring. It seemed that Julia and I would be stepping into homeschooling at the perfect moment, and I felt grateful to the public school teachers who had laid the foundation before me.

  One other thing struck me about The Well-Trained Mind, an issue destined to come up frequently as I surveyed homeschooling books. In this case it emerged in the opening sentences:

  If you’re fortunate, you live near an elementary school filled with excellent teachers who are dedicated to developing your child’s skills in reading, writing, arithmetic, history, and science. These teachers have small classes—no more than ten students—and can give each student plenty of attention.

  Whoa. I sat up in bed. No more than ten students? That pie-in-the-sky number appeared like an arrogant wave of a queen’s hand, abruptly dismissing all the lowly public schools in America, and most private ones as well. Admittedly, the overcrowding in America’s public schools is unconscionable. Elementary classes with thirty or more children are a national disgrace, and any administrators or statisticians who claim that class size doesn’t substantially affect performance have obviously had their brains addled by test-score fever. Sure, one hundred children can recite in unison that Columbus sailed the ocean blue in fourteen hundred ninety-two. But small class size is crucial for the one-on-one attention needed to teach writing, which is why many American schools fail miserably in that area. I thought our local elementary school was doing an admirable job holding classroom maximums at around seventeen.