Love in a Time of Homeschooling (17 page)

“It's cool that you can find fossils right beside the road,” she said. “I mean, you usually think of fossils being out in the desert.
But here they are, right in the dirt. And these are older than the dinosaurs.”

We went home with shale fragments wrapped in tissue paper and packed in individual jewelry boxes. To this day Julia has two pieces tucked away in her bedroom drawer—homeschooling relics, as tangible as the bones of saints.

 

One final trip capped our fall: a three-day mother-daughter excursion to Washington, D.C. Although I had worked in Washington for two years, and had visited annually for the past eighteen, I had never set foot in the National Archives, the Supreme Court, or the Library of Congress. Homeschooling offered the chance to fill the gaps in my own education, let alone Julia's. We packed our itinerary with sights new to both of us, along with our old favorites: the museums of Natural History and Air and Space.

What a glorious sense of escape, to leave town after a Thursday college class, with only one child in tow. John could manage Rachel and Kathryn for three days; he could make their lunches and drive them to school, chauffeur them to playdates and dance class and birthday parties, feed them, read with them, tell them to brush their teeth and take their baths and go to bed. I was free—free in a way I hadn't experienced in years.

On the drive, Julia and I listened to books on tape (after some obligatory math and history quizzing, which she lamented noisily), but when we crossed the Potomac, my job as tour guide began. “Look at the Kennedy Center,” I said. The Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument.

“What's that building on our left?” I asked.

“The White House,” Julia answered.

“What branch of government is run from the White House?”

“The executive.”

Inside the National Archives' Rotunda, we stood before the Constitution, preserved in helium under glass.

“Isn't it impressive?” I asked, but Julia shrugged.

She found the space dark and dull, the Declaration of Independence yellow and faded, a mere ghost of its former self. Julia was more interested in lunch than in the Bill of Rights. And yet, two years later, when I asked if she remembered the Archives, she said yes, it was “very cool” to see history preserved. That struck me as a statement about the nature of homeschooling; it was an experience liable to be valued mostly in retrospect, once memory had filtered out the discomfort of sore feet and the growling of a child's stomach.

Although it would take years for Julia to appreciate the Archives, she did seem to show an immediate interest in the Supreme Court interior. There, she sat quietly while a guide explained what we would be seeing if the Justices were in session. I was impressed with Julia's silent concentration; she seemed absorbed in the tour guide's words. But when we walked outside and I asked her to write a paragraph about the experience, I learned what had monopolized her attention:

The courtroom's human history and function held little interest for my daughter; her eyes were searching for any animal presence in the room. “I kept imagining the animals coming to life
and climbing off those golden bars,” she told me later. “Even the fish, swimming in the air…I never do that with humans. I never imagine statues getting up and walking around.”

There were plenty of animals to interest Julia inside the old Library of Congress, which we visited next. Zodiac symbols decorated the central hall's marble floor, and Julia stood on Capricorn's bronze goat while peering up at the names of Milton, Shakespeare, and Dante inscribed in a heaven of stars and angels. The Library had just reopened after years of renovation, and the colors were almost fluorescent, all peach and aqua and white. It looked like an elaborate Italian palace, full of intricate Corinthian columns, sculpted staircases, shimmery mosaics, and sparkling stained glass. The main reading room glowed with rose and tan marble arches leading up to the rotunda, where statues of Newton and Herodotus and Moses peered down from the ether.

“I think this is the most beautiful room in Washington,” I murmured to Julia.

She wasn't impressed. Sure, it was pretty, but as she noted on our way out, “What's the point of a library where you can't even check the books out?”

Julia chose instead to linger in the glassed-in botanical gardens beside the Capitol, where she could commune with orchids and bromeliads. She also felt at home inside the National Museum of the American Indian, donning buffalo skins and beating on drums. She loved the television screen that showed cartoon stories of Native Americans transformed into stars in the night sky. “I could have watched that all day long,” she mused.

Washington is a homeschooler's paradise, not only because of the museums and monuments at every corner, but because so much of it is free. At 6:00 p.m. we attended the daily complimentary concert at the Kennedy Center's Millennium Stage. An Irish harpist performed with a percussionist and a tap dancer, and
when she told the crowd that we were welcome to dance, Julia stood and waltzed in the aisles.

Our chief expense came from restaurants, but even those were educational for a ten-year-old. Lexington has no Thai café, no Indian or African food. In Washington we could enjoy them all, especially my favorite: Ethiopian. Julia, child of my heart, was happy to eat with her fingers, tearing bits of spongy injera bread to pick up minced lamb, shredded cabbage, and pureed lentils.

As for our lodging, we stayed with the college friends whose children had faithfully learned their state capitals in the D.C. public schools. Their mother was a Justice Department attorney who, years earlier, had argued and won a case before the Supreme Court. Spotting the opportunity for one final lesson, I prodded Julia: “Remember what you heard at the Supreme Court today? How each lawyer has thirty minutes to present a case to the Justices? And how the Justices grill the lawyers with questions? Wendy is one of those lawyers—she stood in that courtroom and answered the questions, and she won her case. Do you want to ask her anything?”

Yes, at the end of the day my fifth-grader had a pressing question for the accomplished attorney. The most important question of all.

“So, where are your toys?”

I
F HOMESCHOOLING HAD BEEN AN ENDLESS STRING OF FIELD
trips, wandering through museums and parks and concert halls, Julia and I would have been happy all year. Away from home, reveling in freedom and space, we enjoyed the pleasures of hands-on learning. But field trips are the exception, not the rule. In between our sporadic travels, the kitchen table waited with its hours of math and grammar and science—and as most parents can attest, extended spells of homebound mother-daughter contact are a recipe for trouble.

Most homeschooling books don't mention these troubles; they don't dwell on shouting matches and slammed doors. Perhaps other homeschooling households are more placid than mine, or perhaps the first foray into homeschooling is always rocky, and years of practice are required to smooth the path. But I suspect that even the best homeschooling families have their ugly moments, from minor annoyances to major fights, and at the risk of inviting the social worker to my door, I will tell you about ours. Here, in order of increasing aggravation, are all the things that
began to go wrong for me and Julia, as the hopefulness of fall gave way to the gloom of winter.

To begin with—something small.

Before launching into the regular fifth-grade math curriculum, I had thought to give Julia some sense of where numbers come from, and why they are necessary. Our public library has an excellent children's book called
The History of Counting
, written by an archaeologist named Denise Schmandt-Besserat. The book begins with the numberless systems of simple societies, and with a mixture of brightly illustrated pages and clearly written text, it demonstrates how the rise of cities in ancient cultures made precise methods of counting necessary.

“Look at this page,” I said to Julia one morning in early September. “Did you know that there are people living in the world today who don't use numbers at all?”

Julia settled beside me on the living room couch while I read aloud:

Here was a drawing of a handsome brown-skinned man with a bone through his nose, his torso facing the reader with arms
down, palms forward, head turned to his right, naked except for a skirt of long white feathery fronds. Numbers outlined his upper body, extending from the tips of his fingers, up his arms, around his head, and down to his opposite hand.

“How would you say nineteen in the Paielas' language?” I asked Julia.

“Right shoulder.”

“What about five?”

“Left thumb.”

We turned the pages and saw cultures that counted with pebbles, and the ancient Egyptians using oval stone markers to represent each sheep.

“Isn't this interesting?” I said.

Julia turned away, staring out the window toward the mountains.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

“C'mon, Mom,” she sighed. “It's
boring
.”

Boring? People in the twenty-first century who survive without numbers beyond twenty-eight was boring? I looked at my beautiful daughter leaning away from me on a pillow, strands of dark brown hair falling in swirls beside her cheeks, and I immediately recalled T. S. Eliot's
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
:

There I was, armed with my pile of books and games and puzzles and field trip itineraries, trying to reveal the wonders of the world to this yawning creature. And there she was, running the tip of her finger across the pattern in the upholstery, intimating that I had no comprehension whatsoever of her mind: “That is not what I meant at all. / That is not it, at all.”

I don't know what I expected from my ten-year-old. Boundless joy at a book about numbers? Mesmerized interest in the tribes of New Guinea? Naturally a little girl wouldn't share all of her mother's interests, but I did assume, in those early days, that Julia would meet me halfway. I thought that once we embarked on homeschooling, she would stop equating teacher with torturer, and muster enough enthusiasm, enough sense of intellectual adventure, to give each new subject, and each new book, a cheerful try. Julia, however, could be remarkably dismissive of topics that didn't immediately spark her interest.

“Shall we watch this award-winning film on George Washington?” I would ask, and Julia would merely sigh. Dullsville.

A concert featuring the Cleveland String Quartet? Ho hum.

A speech at W&L by Jimmy Carter? “Oh, Mom, do we
have
to go?”

Yes, often we
had
to go. Much as I understand the need to follow a child's interests, how does a ten-year-old know where her passions lie unless she is first introduced to the myriad possibilities in the world? A child might skip one concert, but should she skip math because she dislikes it? Or science? Or history? Some unschoolers would say, “Yes, she'll come back to math in her own time.” But short-term homeschooling doesn't allow time for the child's interests to catch up with the curriculum, and I
believe in the daily discipline of math and writing and music for any school-age child.

I usually required Julia to complete the tasks I had planned for the week, whether they appealed to her or not. Remember that boring essay on Fahrenheit and Celsius? I insisted that she write the whole thing, for the sake of having finished what we started. This meant that I had to squeeze the paragraphs out of her over the course of five days, which was kind of like running a soggy shirt through a dry wringer. She probably would have written a better essay on a more appealing subject, and in the coming months I tried to offer many choices: If you don't like this math book, what book would you prefer? If the metric system is boring, what science topic do you want to write about? And yet, the wringer approach was sometimes necessary, because even when we chose topics that Julia enjoyed, she could still, like any ten-year-old, display an immense capacity for foot-dragging.

Take, for instance, our fall-term focus on natural history. We had decided to study Peter Ackroyd's
The Beginning
, a book that follows the evolution of life from the Big Bang through cavemen. The pictures were vivid, the text was well written, and the subject was right up Julia's alley, with its angry T. rex on the cover. We planned to complement each chapter with art projects and videos and writing assignments, focused on different time periods: Precambrian, Paleolithic, multiple ice ages.

In theory, it sounded great. In practice, the first time I asked Julia to read a chapter, she managed about three pages before closing the book. I soon discovered that this child, who could remain absorbed in fiction for hours at a time, had a very limited attention span when it came to nonfiction. Julia was happy to learn nonfiction from films and TV: the History and Discovery channels were fine with her, and Eyewitness videos, with their catchy opening music, white backdrops, and thirty-minute length, were
ideal. But when it came to reading a single chapter from a children's biography, she balked like a recalcitrant mule. Dinosaurs might hold her interest for half a dozen pages; she could rarely stomach human beings for more than a few paragraphs.

This surprised me, because in the first through fourth grades, Julia had often checked out nonfiction books from the library, usually on nature and sometimes outer space. But now I realized that she had never read those books from cover to cover. She had sampled them, scanning the pictures and dipping into paragraphs here and there. And why not? She was a child, not a college student (something I, with my professorial habits, had to constantly remind myself). I tried to suggest novels for Julia with historical subjects, for the sake of sneaking a little nonfiction into her brain. Mary Pope Osborne's
Magic Tree House
series had been wonderful for Julia in the second grade, incorporating history and science into a magical adventure. But now, in the fifth grade, Julia had such a strong preference for fantasy that it was hard to interject versions of the real world into her reading. I supposed that I should be glad she was eager to read anything at all; perhaps an interest in nonfiction would emerge later in life.

Nevertheless, since
The Beginning
was the centerpiece of our science and history, I wasn't willing to give it up. Instead, we spent several mornings reading the book together. I would read a paragraph, then Julia would read one. Or sometimes I would read a chapter on my own, then deliver the information in the form of a mini-lecture, with questions and answers. Either way, the process was much more labor-intensive for me than I had anticipated, and we wound up skimming much of the text.

When faced with Julia's bored indifference, I would sometimes set aside a book, a film, or the entire plan for an afternoon. With no standardized tests looming, no required facts to memorize, we had the flexibility to stop, regroup, and adjust the plan.
As I saw it, our curriculum was valuable as a starting point. We had a set of clear goals; how we achieved them could be a matter of trial and error.

So as for that beautiful counting book? I put it away. And what else did we abandon over the course of the year? How many books and games and plans were relinquished as lost causes? I'll mention just a few.

There was, for instance, my plan to conduct verbal lessons with Julia while going on outdoor walks. I had imagined she and I might talk about history, poetry, and geography while getting some exercise and fresh air. (Elementary school teachers can chuckle at my idealistic expectations.) Although little John Stuart Mill was capable, by age five, of sustaining long talks while strolling with his father, my lovely child of nature displayed a two-minute tolerance for conversation before she would run ahead of me to pick Queen Anne's Lace growing at the side of the road.

“Thank you,” I would say when she handed me a bouquet. “And what do you think brought about the end of Mayan civilization?”

“Oh no!” she would respond. “A dead rabbit!” And off she'd go to stare at whatever mangled corpse graced our path that day. (On our road, the daily fare can range from possum to ground hog to skunk. I soon got tired of making lessons out of squished squirrels.)

Surrounded by the glories and horrors of nature, Julia had no interest in abstractions; world history or American government couldn't compare with a scuttling chipmunk. On most walks, she bounded like an unleashed golden retriever, chasing after cardinals or blue jays, returning to my side only briefly before running again. Given space, Julia always preferred running over walking, darting down sidewalks and grocery store aisles, rarely
attentive to teachers and parents saying, “Slow down Julia! No running in the halls!”

The few occasions when we managed to blend outdoor walks with a clear academic agenda came when Julia maintained a leaf journal. With a field guide in hand she was content to slow her pace, walking from tree to tree on Washington and Lee's campus, taking photographs, doing leaf rubbings, distinguishing the eastern white pine from the short-needled loblolly. She recorded ash, elm, and oak according to their kingdoms and phyla, and wrote a descriptive paragraph on each one.

“Remember those times when we took pictures of trees and wrote about them?” she said to me a year later. “I liked that. Let's do that again.”

And yet, once the gold and crimson and saffron shades had vanished from our landscape, much of the initial luster of homeschooling vanished as well. When the air grew cold and the trees fell bare and we retreated more and more indoors, Julia and I started to seriously grate on each other's nerves.

In a large classroom, or a larger homeschooling family, there would have been other children to dilute our one-on-one contact. My attention would have been diverted, and Julia would have had time to daydream, and to chart her own imaginative course over the hills and valleys of learning. It was hard for her to have my maternal eye focused so frequently upon her—imagine Sauron's eye in
The Lord of the Rings
—and any mother who observes one child intently is bound for unpleasant discoveries.

I soon found that my eldest daughter had an enormous flair for whining, a veritable gift for discontent. Her repertoire of grievances spanned all the injustices of a child's world, from teeth brushing to room cleaning to the daily grind of math and grammar. “I
hate
fractions…I don't
want
to proofread…Why do I
have
to practice my violin?” Homeschooling can be especially
exhausting when every bout of productive work is preceded by ten minutes of lamentation, and I found myself repeating the classic parental refrain: “You could have finished the job by now, in the time you've spent complaining about it.”

How foolish I had been, to have believed that Julia's complaints over the past two years had been caused by her distaste for the public schools. I had assumed that all her griping stemmed from an institutional cause; surely she would be a cheerful learner once I granted her this break from the old routine.