Love in a Time of Homeschooling (12 page)

This is homeschooling at its best—a constant segue from music history, to literature, to geography, to contemporary politics. It can take place anywhere, at almost any time, even with a carload of children driving home from their regular school. The key, when it comes to all music, is to choose pieces that tell a story. It doesn't matter whether the music is classical, jazz, salsa,
or Broadway. The style is less important than the quality, and the ability of a piece to spark a child's imagination. In our case, I wanted to emphasize classical music, so in the upcoming year I thought that Julia and I might listen to Gustav Holst's
The Planets
when we studied the solar system. Aaron Copland's music could provide a good accompaniment for American history—
Billy the Kid
and “Hoedown” when studying the Old West; “Fanfare for the Common Man” for lessons on democracy. Johann Strauss's “Blue Danube Waltz” and Smetana's
Die Moldau
might inspire some interest in European geography.

“If I were a principal,” I said to Julia on our first day, as we reached the last half-mile of our journey home, “I would pipe soothing classical music into the hallways, something for the children to contemplate when standing in line or visiting their lockers. Or maybe a little quiet Mozart in the cafeteria?”

By now we'd reached our house, and after a short break I asked Julia to take out paper and pencil. Writing was our top priority, so we might as well get down to it.

Many students arrive at today's universities with their AP ducks all in a row, but unable to write a thoughtful paragraph. Writing is the act of contemplation borne to life on a page, and too many high school students have minimal practice with quiet contemplation; they struggle to form their own ideas and support them with a coherent sequence of evidence.

“Write a page,” I said to Julia, “about what we did this morning.”

This was something new for her. At Waddell, writing assignments tend to be highly formulaic exercises. Bulletin boards in the second-grade hallway display dozens of student paragraphs, all beginning with the same sentence, followed by information that varies only minimally in content. “My favorite color is ________. It smells like_______. It looks like________. It
tastes like _____. This color makes me feel ______.” Fill-in-the blank is one way to get children started as early writers, and Waddell's older children are encouraged to vary their sentence patterns, but even in the highest grades, their writing assignments usually dictate the content of every paragraph.

To be given a broad topic, without specific instructions for each stage, was a new challenge for Julia. After twenty minutes she handed me her sheet of paper.

I read Julia's meager sentences with mixed emotions. On one hand, they were endearing; I was now “Mrs. Brodie” instead of Mom. But they were also somewhat pitiful. I knew that Julia's spelling and grammar were rough, but even for a ten-year-old, this writing struck me as primitive. Her teachers had often claimed that Julia was ahead of her peers when it came to writing skills, a possibility that now made me cringe. Staring at those words, I wondered: Where to begin?

The best teachers always begin with praise—that's one of the tenets of Shinichi Suzuki, the famous violin teacher. A friend of mine once saw Suzuki in practice, leading a master class where a little girl gave an incredibly bad performance. Her music was out of tune; the rhythm, imprecise; her bow grip, hand position, and stance, all wrong. What could the master possibly praise?

“Well,” Suzuki said, smiling into the child's mournful face as she lowered her instrument. “You finished that whole piece!”

And so I smiled at Julia: “I'm impressed you noticed that only one of the bluegrass musicians was female. I hadn't paid attention to that. Why do you think there were so few women?”

She shrugged. “The women are all out working.”

“You mean the men have time to fool around with music while the women are busy doing the work?”

Julia nodded.

“What kind of work are the women doing?” I expected her to say that the women were home taking care of children.

“They're teaching at the colleges,” she stated matter-of-factly.

“Fair enough.” I laughed. “Okay, let's work on your spelling.”

Spelling, I'm convinced, is a genetic trait, in no way indicative of intelligence. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who penned
The Great Gatsby
, was a narrative genius but a spelling moron. He was humiliated on the one occasion when an editor published a piece of his writing without correcting all of the spelling and grammatical errors. Similarly, Zachary Taylor, America's twelfth president, was known (according to Julia's cartoon guide to U.S. government) for being a “turrible speller.”

So, too, for my husband. It took the first three years of our marriage for me to convince John that
congratulations
was not spelled with a
d
. Julia, very much a daddy's girl, inherited her father's spelling genes along with his bright eyes. After learning basic phonics in kindergarten, she clung to them tenaciously
throughout grade school, constantly frustrated by the inconsistencies of the English language: “
I
before
e
except after
c
, and except when the verb sounds like long
a
(
weight, neigh, sleigh
), and don't forget about
seize,
and
sleight
,” et cetera et cetera.

I often tell my students that the only way to master spelling is to read, read, read, and pray that your brain absorbs the spelling of words seen again and again. Today, most students rely desperately on computer spell-check programs, which continually fail them. I once had an undergraduate explain that he didn't need to master spelling or grammar—his secretary would correct that for him. When I mentioned this to John over dinner, his response was blunt: “Tell the kid he's not going to have a secretary when he's working at Jiffy Lube.”

Julia has never expected someone else to correct her spelling, but neither does she have much luck fixing it herself. From kindergarten through fourth grade most of her spelling instruction didn't sink in. She could memorize words for a weekly test (on those days when she bothered to study), but she rarely applied the test-drilled spelling to her sentences. She would ace a test one morning, then misspell the same words that afternoon.

“Okay, let's start a spelling journal,” I said. “We'll keep a list of the words you misspell in your writing, and those will be the words you need to learn each week.”

Julia took out a black marble notebook and wrote
Spelling J
at the top.

“How do you spell
journal
?” she asked.

“J-o-u-r-n-a-l.”

Our first job, I explained, was to determine if she couldn't spell a word or if she was just being careless.

“How do you spell
library
?” I pronounced the
r
with deliberate emphasis, and she spelled the word correctly. “What about
instrument
?” Again I emphasized the
r
, and Julia fixed her spelling.

“What about ‘guitar'?” Julia never guessed at the silent
u
, so we put that word at the top of her slate. “And how do you spell
coffee
? One
f
or two?” She couldn't say, so the word went on the agenda. Five minutes more and we had her first spelling list:
Wednesday
,
guitar
,
coffee
,
mandolin
, and the difference between
there
,
their
, and
they're
.

The fact that my ten-year-old could not spell
Wednesday
bothered me. It's a difficult word, full of silent letters, but it seemed a commentary on the spelling instruction at her school, where emphasis is placed on learning patterns—prefixes and suffixes,
mega-
and -
tion
—rather than learning practical, common nouns. As a result, Julia could spell
macroeconomics
, but she had never encountered
Wednesday
on an elementary school spelling test.

“How do you spell
February
?” I asked. As I suspected, she missed the
r
.

I sometimes recommend spelling journals for my college students. Personalized lists are useful because everyone makes different mistakes, and each person's vocabulary is unique. Carpenters, plumbers, and mathematicians all deal in different words. A ballet instructor should learn how to spell
plié
; a house painter should know
soffit
. Ten-year-old Julia needed to learn
Wednesday
and
February
. If, by Friday, she had mastered those two words, I would consider the week a success.

“It's okay to be a rotten speller,” I told Julia, “so long as you are a very good proofreader. Whenever you write something, you need to get into the habit of checking all words that don't look right.”

In upcoming weeks, whenever Julia finished a piece of writing, I would ask her to underline every word where she wasn't confident about the spelling. Unfortunately, she tended to underline half of her words, leaving me to ask, “Do you really think you've misspelled
they
?” Once she had shortened her list, she had to look the words up.

“What should you do,” I asked her on our first morning, “if you've written something but you're not sure about your spelling?”

She shrugged.

“What can you use to find out whether you've spelled a word correctly?”

“A computer?”

“Yes, but what if there's no computer around?”

“A dictionary?”

“Right. Of course your spelling has to be close enough so that you can find what you're looking for. If you're trying to spell
knight
—the kind with a sword and horse—you'll never find it if you're looking in the
n
's. But most of the time a dictionary can help.”

We pulled our big
Merriam-Webster
down from the shelf.

“Have you used dictionaries at your school?”

“Once or twice,” Julia replied.

It occurred to me that most children don't know how to read a dictionary entry. What do
n.
,
adv
., and
adj
. stand for? What about
s.
and
pl.
? What are all these quotes, and this foreign derivation?

Here, I thought, is another small benefit of homeschooling. I could acquaint my child with a dictionary. To my surprise, I found that Julia had a lot of trouble searching for a word alphabetically. When looking up
guitar
, she opened the dictionary to
H
, then moved forward through the pages.

“Say the alphabet in your head,” I suggested. “Where does the letter
g
come, compared to the page you're on now?” After thinking for a moment, Julia started to flip backward through the pages, heading in the right direction. Eventually she located the correct entry and squinted at its small print, clearly intimidated by this heavy, boring book, with its small text and minimal pictures. Never before had I thought to buy a children's dictionary, but now it seemed like common sense.

And so our morning continued, with me learning more than Julia. After lunch she played her violin for forty-five minutes, the only stressful time of our day, since an out-of-tune violin scrapes like sandpaper across my brain. “Look at the key signature,” I said to Julia. “It's Bach, not Bartók.”

“Bar talk?” Julia shrugged, and continued to scrape away.

Then on to the blessed silence of geography, with Julia spreading a jigsaw puzzle of the world across the glass table on our screened porch. While she pieced together the countries of Africa, a squirrel cackled in a maple tree, berating our cat, who watched it from the grass. Down at the creek, a pair of bathing mallards dipped and bobbed, shivering their feathers dry. A breeze lifted and lowered Julia's hair, and I thought: this has been a good day.

A half hour later, when we retrieved Julia's sisters from school, Kathryn beamed.

“How was your first day?” I asked.

“Great!” she said, smiling.

“What did you do?”

“We colored, and we sat in a circle while the teacher read to us.”

How nice, to have a kindergartner who wasn't weeping after the first day, who seemed perfectly content to attend school with everyone else. Rachel was also comfortable with her school routine, although, for her, the social life was the chief draw; the work was way too easy.

“What did you do on your first day, Rachel?”

“Not much. We went over the classroom rules and labeled all of our notebooks. And we did a few worksheets.”

“Did you write anything?”

“Not yet.” Her first writing assignment would not come for another week.

Back at home, I reminded Julia that she must write one page in her journal, so she took out her misty blue five-by-seven notebook, with its Thomas Kinkade cover—snapdragons and wild roses and wisps of smoke rising from a stone cottage. Opening to the first page, she wrote in enormous letters and double-spaced lines, filling the space with as few sentences as possible: