Love in a Time of Homeschooling (16 page)

“You don't learn state capitals?” I asked a fifth-grade teacher.

“No,” she explained. “And we don't require the children to spell the states' names correctly. We only want them to locate the states on a map, and learn their postal abbreviations.”

Postal abbreviations? As in AK, AL, AR? That struck me as incredibly slack, another example of how the schools had lowered their standards to allow more time for test preparation.

The teacher saw no problem. “I don't think anyone learns state capitals anymore,” she explained.

The next day I polled my freshman composition students at Washington and Lee: “How many of you learned the state capitals when you were in elementary school?” Of eighteen students from across the nation, fifteen raised their hands.

Still curious, I raised the subject with a couple of college friends whose daughter had just completed fifth grade in the Washington, D.C., public schools.

“Did Kerry learn state capitals?”

Yes, and their son would be learning them the following year.

“The kids in our district only have to learn the state postal abbreviations,” I lamented, expecting these parents to commiserate.

The father merely shrugged. “Those can be useful.” He was an economics professor at Georgetown, and he explained how a very smart colleague at another institution had been gathering oil statistics on Alaska, and was surprised that the numbers contradicted all of his expectations, until he realized that for months he'd been collecting data for the state abbreviated AL: Alabama.

Despite one professor's costly mistake, my daughter would learn her state capitals, thank you very much, at the rate of two or three per day, reviewing them each week on our trips to the yarn shop, coffee shop, and library.

Julia didn't seem to mind. She displayed a surprising talent for visualizing the U.S. map and naming all the states in geographical order. Beginning with Maine, she would run down the Atlantic coast, reciting each state and its capital sequentially, all the way to Florida. Then she'd move west: Montgomery, Alabama; Jackson, Mississippi; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; until she hit California, then north to Washington, and east across the Canadian border all the way back to Maine. The middle states were more of a jumble in her mind, but she learned their capitals dutifully, aided by a game that was our best homeschooling purchase, The Scrambled States of America.

I had bought several games during our summer homeschooling shopping spree: art games, science games, a Quantum Pad Smart Guide to the Fifth Grade. Some purchases turned out to be a dull waste of cash, but Scrambled States was so entertaining that Rachel and Kathryn frequently asked to play.

The game is a kind of slapjack, comprised of fifty cards that feature cartoon drawings of each state, along with its capital and nickname. Players arrange five cards face up, one of which should be slapped and tucked away into a victory pile in response to a prompt card. When the prompt read, “State capital has a person's name in it,” Julia slapped Hawaii, because of the Lulu in its capital. I slapped Montana (remember Helena?). Sometimes the prompts were geographic: “Does the state border at least six other states?” Other times they were silly: “Is the state showing teeth?” All of the states had little smiling faces.

Between that game and our car-time practice, Julia learned her capitals in a few weeks, and I was once again congratulating
myself on a job well done when a brief conversation burst my pedagogical bubble.

Our family was planning a trip to Chicago in the coming months, so I asked Julia, “What state is Chicago in?”

She shrugged. “Ida know.”

“We've been there twice before,” I reminded her.

Still no clue.

A dim realization swept over me. “Do you know what state Seattle is in?”

She cringed and muttered, “Oregon?”

“How about St. Louis?”

She cringed further. “Kansas?”

My heart sank. Here I thought that I was holding Julia to a higher standard by having her memorize state capitals, but in the end I was just being miserably traditional. She would have been much better served if I had asked her to learn the most important city in each state. After all, which city is more central to the history and economy of Illinois: Springfield or Chicago? What city should a child be able to identify in Washington: Olympia or Seattle? Most Americans know that St. Louis is located in Missouri, but few can remember that state's capital, Jefferson City. And why should they? (Sorry, Jefferson City folk.) In a big state like California, Julia might be wise to learn a few cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, and maybe San Diego. Sacramento would not make the top of my list.

In the end, I had committed the same folly that so many teachers and parents deplore: requiring an elementary-grade child to spend a significant amount of time memorizing facts that she would not use on a regular basis, and would therefore forget within a matter of months. So be it, I consoled myself. Live and learn.

 

In addition to our visits to the knitting cottage, Julia and I also tried field trips with other homeschooling families. Here was our opportunity for “socialization,” that word so dear to critics of homeschooling. Here, too, was a chance to learn why other parents had chosen to bushwhack their own trails through the educational wilderness.

First came a trip to the Frontier Culture Museum—acres of reproductions of seventeenth-century farms—Irish, German, English, and American—located in a town forty minutes north. We drove there with Melanie and her daughter, Sara, whom we had met when their house was featured on an “alternative homes” tour. Each spring Lexington's Garden Club holds a “traditional” house tour, allowing folks to ogle some of the town's fanciest interiors. But that year Lexington's Healthy Foods Co-op arranged an alternative, which included a yurt and several solar homes with composting toilets. Sara and Melanie's remote rural house featured prominently on the tour, and was dubbed by my daughters as the “house of straw,” because the walls were insulated with bales of carefully dried straw. A large tree stripped of leaves and twigs and polished smooth as marble rose through the interior of the house, so that Sara could sit in its branches inside her room. Outside, gnomish faces were carved into the plaster walls. The entire effect was luxuriously hippy, with large southern-facing windows that made the house passive solar, overlooking a manmade pond and a hundred or so acres.

While admiring her house, I learned that Melanie was an intermittent homeschooler. She had guided her older two sons through their elementary years before entrusting them to the local middle and high schools. Sara, her youngest child, had received one year of homebound kindergarten, before spending four years at our county's tiniest rural school—twenty-five children per grade. Melanie hadn't planned to homeschool again, but
at the end of the fourth grade, Sara had begun to lobby hard. She was one of several children I would meet in the coming year who specifically asked to be homeschooled, wanting to spend more time learning at home with Mom. In the end, Melanie had given in, explaining, “You know, they grow up so fast.”

So there we were on a September morning, two homeschooling moms, me a part-time professor and Melanie a part-time veterinarian, strolling with our fifth-grade daughters through replicas of seventeenth-century farms, complete with crops and barns and a smattering of livestock. On the German farm, Sara showed Julia how to pick up the chickens carefully and pet them like kittens. Luckily there were no ill-tempered fowl with sharp beaks.

By the end of the afternoon, Julia had learned much about the history of agriculture, from Colonial times to Sara's contemporary experiences. She had been able to touch and see and sometimes taste the differences in farmhouse life among various European countries, all the while getting fresh air, exercising her legs, and socializing with another child. The event met all of my requirements for a good field trip.

I followed this up by planning excursions with hardcore, long-term homeschoolers, families Julia and I had met at a fall pot-luck hosted by Claire, the mom who had been so helpful with all of my planning for the year. The mothers at her event (no dads in sight) ranged from devout Christians to confirmed atheists, and their kids ran the gamut from well-groomed preschoolers to well-pierced teens. Claire explained that each of these families homeschooled in their own, separate way, but they liked to gather for occasional group activities: theater productions and art workshops and communal algebra lessons.

One woman in the room couldn't be missed with her lovely copper-colored hair: Mary, mother to ten children ages three to
eighteen. When I heard Mary mention “the Lord,” I assumed she must have come to homeschooling (and all those children) through some religious compulsion. “Oh no,” she said, laughing. Christianity was a recent development in her life. “I was a liberal feminist when I began homeschooling,” she explained. Her oldest children had started out in the public schools, where she had worked as an occasional substitute teacher. But Mary hadn't liked what she saw. “I hated the Ritalin march,” she explained, “all the children lined up at lunchtime to take their medication. I thought there couldn't be that many ADHD kids.”

Ritalin was not a school mandate; it was the choice of parents and doctors. But in Mary's eyes, the urge to succeed in the public schools' controlled environment had contributed to a medicated generation. Mary loathed the schools' emphasis on behavior modification, every classroom with its chart on the wall, listing children's names on paper tennis shoes or race cars or baseball bats, each name falling down the chart from green to yellow to red, depending on a child's behavior. Nor did Mary like the incentives for good behavior—“If you stayed green all week you could visit the treasure box!” For her, traditional schools were too managerial, preparing children for the corporate world or factory life. A stubborn iconoclast with an MFA in poetry, she valued creativity and freedom above all: “Kids need time to be creative as children. In the adult world they'll have plenty of time to meet other people's expectations.”

In addition to being a poet and screenwriter in the scattered moments not devoted to her kids, Mary had a special flair for science. That fall she was planning a three-day fossil study, and she invited Julia and me to come along.

A few weeks later we joined Mary and a handful of other homeschoolers in the basement of a church, where an amateur paleontologist had spread part of his fossil collection across a
table. He spent an hour explaining about the digs he had been on, and how fossil lovers could buy and sell specimens on the Internet. Every time he mentioned dinosaurs, Julia waved her hand and talked with such eager abandon that my pride in her knowledge was balanced by my sensitivity to the group. I kept putting my hand on her knee and murmuring, “Let the other kids speak, Julia.”

A week later we gathered in that same basement to hear Mary expound on trilobites—when they lived, where they lived, the details of their primitive anatomy displayed on handouts. Finally, in the third week, five moms and nine children crowded into Mary's fifteen-seat van and she piloted us an hour south, through the rolling pasture between the Blue Ridge and Alleghenies, with one little carsick boy threatening to vomit half the way.

That drive gave me a chance to ask a few other moms why they had opted for lifelong homeschooling. The most succinct reply came from a woman with striking curly black hair and dark eyes, whose daughter looked like a beautiful Greek princess. “Why are you homeschooling?” I asked, and she looked me right in the eye: “Have you heard what sort of language the children use in the public schools?”

I knew what she meant. There were a lot of sassy kids at Waddell Elementary, steeped in the language of Happy Bunny—imagine the Easter bunny with an attitude: “I'm happy, don't wreck it by talking.” Rachel, our verbally precocious middle daughter, had an ear especially attuned to edgy vocabulary. In the second grade she had tried a bout of experimentation with profanity that had left her babysitter puzzled: “Where did Rachel get the potty mouth?”

I had responded with feigned innocence: “Oh, you know how it is. Once they go off to school, they hear everything.” In fact, Rachel had heard plenty of bad words at our house. Between
John's military mouth and my occasionally roiling temper, our eight-year-old was starting to sound like Richard Nixon.

As I looked out the window of Mary's van, watching the Blue Ridge Mountains parallel the highway, I knew that I was one of the parents whose slack habits had contributed to the schools' verbal cesspool. Fortunately, after a few conversations on the difference between good words and bad, Rachel had cleaned up her act, but I discovered over time that I didn't mind the occasional
shit
,
damn
, or
crap
so much as the shallow drivel that many elementary-age children were absorbing from American pop culture: daily discussions of who was and was not cool, whose clothes were pathetic, what boy was
hot
. Compared to all the gossip about social winners and losers, Rachel's second-grade profanity sounded downright eloquent.

Now Mary had pulled off the highway, and after a few miles of winding country lanes, she had reached the site of our excavation: an unprepossessing dirt hill right beside the road—no marker, no parking area, just Mary's childhood recollection that this was a good place to dig. With one mother standing in the road to slow passing cars, we sat on that incline of clay and shale and attacked the dirt with small picks and hand shovels.

Within fifteen minutes everyone had found a fossil except me and Julia. I was starting to think that short-term homeschoolers were deficient in the art of digging, when Julia hit a trilobite vein. The effect was like a miner's first discovery of gold. Julia was thrilled, doubling her pace. For half an hour she carved out pieces of shale, peeling layers apart gently, uncovering trilobite fossils the size of my thumbnail. The earth was full of buried treasure more precious to Julia than any pirate's hoard.