Love in a Time of Homeschooling (2 page)

My closet is a disgrace. Two feet deep and five feet wide, with wooden shuttered doors and a hard pine floor piled with old sneakers and broken sandals and wrinkled pumps untouched for a decade. Beneath the sedimentary layers of dirty laundry, one can excavate lost library books, old greeting cards, crayons, earplugs, and scraps of paper that once seemed worth keeping. Above the racks of sloppily hangered blouses, the sweaters are not folded tight on their rows of shelves, but lie sprawled in loose piles, sleeves dangling.

It is a closet fit for Sarah Sylvia Cynthia Stout. My yearly attempt to clean it feels like Hercules tackling the Augean stables, except that I never finish my task. Nevertheless, there, in that unsightly mess, Julia had chosen to sit for almost an hour, crouched silent on a pile of old shoeboxes.

“Didn't you hear me calling?” I asked.

Yes, she nodded.

“Why have you been hiding there?”

“I heard you say that it was time for me to do my homework.”

Ah, yes. I should have remembered. Just before her disappearance I had said that Julia must finish her homework before dinner, and rather than taking out pencil and paper, she had crawled into this dark space and closed the door. That, to me, was a sign.

Every child has a misery quotient, the line at which mere whining turns into real unhappiness. Some children are born miserable, their glass always half empty; some are made miserable by the adult world. And there's nothing like homework to squash a child's joy. In Julia's mind, homework was the shadow haunting every day, the shapeless dread that grew larger with each passing year.

I don't recall having so much homework when I was a fourth grader. Today's public schools seem to have responded to the endless cry for “
achievement
!” by adding more worksheets to the homework pile. Math worksheets, grammar worksheets, bland spelling exercises. I wouldn't mind the work if it seemed more interesting—if Julia were asked to try a fun science experiment, or to walk outside and compose a poem about the sounds in her yard. What rankles is the monotony of colorless paper, the columns of equations and fill-in-the-blank history.

For Julia, homework had always been a monumental burden. Sometimes I could persuade her to complete the work by reiterating our house rules: she could not have her daily hour of screen time (TV, DVD, or computer) until her homework was finished and she had practiced her violin. But often I had to resort to cajoling and threats, nagging the poor creature all the way to the kitchen table, and hovering for the duration, saying, “That's good. Keep going.” Without constant prodding Julia's mind tended to wander out the window, into the meadow, “away down the valley, a hundred miles or more.” A twenty-minute math assignment could take two hours, with Julia staring into the boundless space between each fraction.

On that April afternoon Julia's homework was surprisingly minimal. Rather than her usual hour of assignments, which might have dragged on for twice that long, the day's task barely filled ten minutes. She had spent an hour of hiding to avoid ten minutes of schoolwork, and the thought of that warped equation broke my heart.

Many parents know the ache of raising a child who doesn't fit smoothly into a traditional school routine; all children learn in different ways, and for some, the rituals of education are a daily struggle. Although Julia's younger sisters could navigate social and academic waters with relative ease, for Julia, there were in
dications even from her toddler years that she would not conform easily to a highly structured environment. At every stage of development she had chafed, not only against her homework, but also against the world of classrooms and desks so alien to her nature. In retrospect, I see these moments of discomfort as signposts on a road to homeschooling, a road traveled by many families who have children with special needs, special gifts, special personalities—families who look at the mismatch between school and child and ask themselves year after year: Can't we do better than this?

There are countless reasons why parents homeschool—stories of unhappy children or ambitious parents, bad schools or persistent bullies, religious fundamentalists or nerdy academics—and these narratives, with their varied characters, are as compelling as the homeschooling itself. They reveal the vast complexities of education in today's America. On that April day, however, I wasn't thinking about all of that. I didn't assume that I was headed toward homeschooling. I only knew that something about my daughter's education was going wrong, and I must try to fix it. My once-joyful child now felt so oppressed by her schoolwork that she wanted to retreat into dark spaces. This couldn't continue.

Over the next few days I pondered Julia's education up until that moment. Awake at night, staring into my bedroom's shadows, I recalled scenes from preschool, kindergarten, and third grade. Some of the scenes were happy, but others were tinged with conflict and stress. These memories struck me as symptoms that might yield a diagnosis. I told myself that if I could sift through these glimpses from the past, I might be able to choose the right direction for the future.

And so, in the days to come, I pieced together the narrative of Julia's education, beginning at a little Montessori school beside a rippling creek.

J
ULIA WAS TWO YEARS OLD WHEN SHE ENTERED
W
OODS
Creek Montessori—a sweet, small place situated in an old brick house on a half-acre of land surrounded by a buffer of trees. In front of the school ran a wide stream and jogging trail, where the children took regular nature walks. A stroll to the left led through a tunnel above shaded pools that housed one large snapping turtle and several eight-inch fish. Beyond that, the trail opened onto a wooded enclave behind student apartments, and there, for two years, an anonymous undergraduate maintained a small fairy house. A three-inch-high, round wooden door was attached with hinges to the hollowed-out base of a tree, and when the children kneeled to open it, they found a little statue inside, sometimes a fairy, once a gnome, most often a red, round-bellied Buddha. The children scribbled notes for the fairy/Buddha, and left gifts of flowers, drawings, beads, and tiny plastic furniture. The anonymous student responded with messages of gratitude and friendship, until, one morning, the children found the door ripped from its hinges and the occupant gone. A note explained
that some vicious human troll had taken everything, and the fairy had gone into hiding.

Fortunately another good spirit came to watch over the children, a reddish brown screech owl perched in a squirrel's nook, high in a tree that stood in the middle of the school's small parking lot. For over a year that sleepy bird faced the Montessori entrance, mostly drowsing, sometimes opening one eyelid at a time. The school's largely Quaker staff dubbed him “Friend Owl.”

I never felt guilty about sending my firstborn away to that preschool. Some people imagine homeschooling moms as ultra-clingy zealots who refuse to relinquish control of their children, but that's not me. By the time Julia was two, I was eager to set her loose for a few hours each day. I had another baby to tend, six-month-old Rachel, and I did not plan to become a full-time stay-at-home mom. I was busy toting Rachel around the campus of the Virginia Military Institute, where John taught band, and where I was contracted to write a book about the college's transition to coeducation. Every day, I carried Rachel to meetings with generals, colonels, and captains, placing her on the floor in her car seat, which I rocked with the ball of my foot while I took notes at the table. I figured that if these military men were serious about making their culture female-friendly, they might as well get used to having a baby in the boardroom.

Meanwhile, Julia was in good hands at the Montessori school, because she had a brilliant teacher, aptly named Molly Wise. Molly was a dark-haired, tanned, Southern woman in her early fifties, an exuberant cross between an aging cowgirl and a priestess of Mother Earth. I once attended a ceremony over which she presided, with candles and flowers and eggs, to welcome the coming spring. A small group of friends formed a circle, cross-legged, on the floor of a carpeted living room, and Molly told us to envision an enclosure at our backs. If anyone needed to at
tend to children in the next room, we should cut a window into this imaginary barrier. That sounded kind of strange, and it got weird when I tried it. Julia cried out so often, I was constantly slicing a rectangle into the air, lifting my legs, and dipping my head to step through the fictive opening. With all my ducking and climbing I'm afraid I ruined the ritual's mystic ambience, transforming it into a third-rate mime act.

Some adults might sniff at the hint of Wicca, but the Montessori preschoolers adored Molly's earth-centered style. They loved her animal books and games, her songs about the sun and moon, and the New Age music full of waterfalls and ocean breezes that murmured in her classroom's background, alternating with Mozart or a little bluegrass. The effect was never flighty; Molly projected a wholly grounded strength, communicated in part by the width of her biceps. As John put it: “I would always do whatever Molly says. Otherwise she might kick my ass.”

I was glad that John liked Molly, because he was a little skeptical about the whole Montessori concept. “We're going to spend four thousand dollars a year,” he groaned, “so that our kid can learn how to share and hang up her coat?” Having been raised in conservative Catholic schools, John found the Montessori teachers a little too hippie, and he jokingly called their enclave “People's Republic School Number Three.” Nevertheless, he soon became a fan of Molly's style.

In keeping with Montessori principles, Molly viewed herself more as a guide than a teacher, responsible for maintaining a clean, inviting space with beautiful materials, designed primarily by Montessori experts. She and her assistant, Dierdre, steered their eleven toddlers toward the pouring work, the beadwork, the sand work. No Disney toys, no Barbies, no TV or videos. No teacher-led arts and crafts—group work was a rarity. They adhered to the Montessori belief in two-hour sessions of undis
turbed individual work—
work
was not yet an onerous word for the children—followed by
gather time
, when the toddlers sat in a circle and sang songs, shared life events, then traipsed off on a nature walk.

“I liked everything about that place,” Julia would recall, years later. “The creek, the walks, the nice teachers, the sandbox where I first learned to make stories about the plastic animals that I buried and dug up.” The flexibility in the Montessori method matched Julia's temperament. “But the best thing,” she added, “was the lack of judgment. In regular school, everybody is judged all the time. You take tests constantly to see who's smart and who's not. Socially you get labeled as a nerd or a class clown. We didn't have that at Montessori, but maybe that's just preschool.”

The only form of evaluation in the Woods Creek program came from each teacher's watchful gaze. Molly often stated that her ideal morning was one in which the class ran itself, when she could sit back and watch each child choose his or her work, carry it on its plastic tray to a table, then manipulate the materials for as long as desired, before returning it neatly to its place. I valued this minimization of adult intervention, although it sometimes mystified John: “When I was a kid, students were never treated as individuals. Nobody ever asked, ‘How would you think to play with these blocks?' You were just expected to walk the line.” But he and I wanted something better for Julia, and Molly fit the bill. Her hours of observation gave Molly a thorough understanding of each child, so that parent-teacher conferences were scenes of revelation. For those of us baffled by the tyranny of our firstborns, Molly served as a guiding light.

Molly was the first teacher to recognize that Julia was “different.” At our initial parent-teacher conference, seated at a child's table in knee-high chairs, Molly explained to John and me that Julia had her own way of doing
everything
.

“Let me show you.”

From a shelf at her right, Molly lifted a plastic tray and placed it on our table. It contained two white porcelain bowls, one with half a dozen large marbles the size of peach pits, in cloudy pastels. Beside the bowls lay a small pair of silver tongs.

“Here is the basic lesson I give on this work.” Molly pinched the tongs, transferring each marble from one bowl to the other.

“It's a simple exercise, designed to help develop fine motor skills.” Apparently tongs are a challenge for toddler fingers.

“But here,” Molly went on, “is what Julia does.”

She turned the second bowl upside down, revealing its flat bottom. With her fingers, she arranged a few marbles on the upturned bowl, put the tongs on top, and then smiled at us. “It's
wonderful
.”

Most new parents grasp at straws of genius in their toddlers, but I looked upon that pile of marbles with deep skepticism. It was nice; it was original, but far from brilliant.

Nevertheless, Molly remained a fan. She welcomed “creative variations” on the classroom materials; so long as each child had mastered the concept behind each activity, she could experiment to her heart's delight. And several children did; Julia had no monopoly on creativity. What struck Molly was that Julia's variations were unusual; she maneuvered objects in unexpected ways.

I had noticed some of this “unexpected” behavior at home. Upon opening Julia's bedroom door one winter afternoon, I found the floor tiled in hardcover picture books, pieced together like a puzzle, spine to spine. It was beautiful and original, and a librarian's nightmare—a preschooler arranging books into a flooring to be trod upon.

“It's very pretty,” I said to Julia. “But it's time for the books to go back on the shelf.”

Two weeks later I stepped into my bathroom and was met by a
sudden onset of cobwebs. They hung from cabinet knob to knob, draped across the sink, stretching from the linen closet to the tub faucets. It took a few seconds for me to realize that this was not a spider's silk. My toddler had been spinning webs of minty dental floss, transforming the room into her private Halloween. It was strange and beautiful—a preschool version of installation art. I let the webs remain for twenty-four hours before taking them down. Dental floss, I showed Julia, is for your teeth.

Julia showed little interest in the proper use of household objects. Once, on a rainy afternoon, I tried to demonstrate the marvels of a plastic egg-slicer. See how the top lifts like the cover of a book? See, inside, this oval cradle, divided into eleven thin white strips? You place the peeled egg into the cradle, gently, very gently, and then pull down the top. Look! The metal wires cut the egg into eleven slices, and each slice has a yellow center! Would you like to eat one? Would you like some salt for that?

I gave Julia the slicer. Would you like to put an egg inside and cut it up? She took the white apparatus into her two-year-old fingers, opened its cover, and inspected the metal wires with their tiny shreds of egg still clinging. Then she reached forward and plucked the wires, emitting a twangy music with an Asian ring. The loose wires in the middle produced an indistinct, low thrumming pitch, but the tighter metal at the edges offered clear, high notes. She plucked a tune for a minute or two, then put the slicer down and walked away.

Imagine us a year later, alone on the carpeted floor of a friend's family room, surrounded by a city of blocks, the last remnants of a group playdate. The other children's impulses were clearly vertical: apartment buildings and skyscrapers, steeples and tall arches. I, too, was enamored with height, stacking one cube on to another until they fell in a heap. Meanwhile, Julia sat twelve
feet away, at the opposite end of the room, with a set of colored blocks, spreading them flat on the floor, apparently incapable of building a tower.

“Look at this, Julia.” I pointed to my narrow structure, twenty-one stories, teetering, collapsing. “Wouldn't you like to build a tower?”

She glanced at my pile of rubble and shook her head. Sighing, I stood up and walked across the room, determined to teach my daughter, now three years old, the art of balancing one block upon another. But when I reached her corner and looked at the floor, there before her knees lay a wooden dragon with a long red-and-green tail and triangular spikes arranged across its back, its feet, and its huge snout—the first of many dragons to come.

“Julia,” I murmured, “I love it.”

 

“If I had a grant,” Molly once stated, “I would spend a year observing Julia. She seems to learn in ways that I've never seen before.”

But Julia's time with Molly was all too short. The next year, Julia moved upstairs to join the “big kids,” ages three through six, in a space three times as large, with twenty-eight children, two teachers, and one assistant. The transition, to put it mildly, was not a success. Most children flew from Molly's nest with pride in their mature status, excited by the many shelves of materials in their new classroom and delighted by the expansive size of the upper playground. Julia, however, refused to take flight. She took one look at the upper classroom, with its crowd and noise and constant motion, and she balked. She wanted to go back downstairs and stay with the little ones.

“It's not a problem,” Molly assured us. “Many children like to
make a gradual transition. After a while she'll get tired of this, and the upstairs class will seem more appealing. In the meantime, she can come down here as much as she likes.”

For two months Julia spent half the day, every day, in the toddler classroom, showing no signs of letting go. She didn't mind that the newcomers were half her age and still in diapers. She barely noticed them. She remained absorbed in her own work, her own marbles and tongs. Eventually the upstairs teachers became exasperated. With my guilty acquiescence, Julia was exiled from the toddler space—the first in the string of losses that we adults know as life.

This was my initial encounter with my daughter's aversion to change: the tears, the howling fury, the desire to go back, back, back. In coming years, the trait would appear over and over—most notably in dismay at home improvements. A simple change—a scratched brick fireplace newly covered with ceramic tile—would cause Julia to weep for twenty minutes. Once, when I hired a contractor to demolish our thin, crooked front porch and build a wider screened space, Julia complained for months. She mourned the holly bush that was cut down in the process, and the original porch columns, which were octagonal cement lampposts.

Many human beings, young and old, deplore change. What seemed unusual in a child less than ten years old was Julia's capacity for profound nostalgia. From her preschool years forward, she vocalized the belief that all human life, and her life in particular, was better in the past. Her yearnings for her toddler classroom were mirrored at age five, when she entered a public kindergarten, full of lamentations for her lost Montessori world. From first grade forward, she longed to return to kindergarten, with its blocks and Legos and dolls. At every stage, she became more convinced that life got harder—not more interesting—as
she aged. Each new year brought new responsibilities, added homework, and the incremental loss of basic comforts. Soon, in her average school day, the toys would be gone, the carpet gone, the background music gone. By middle school, recess would be gone.