Love in a Time of Homeschooling (23 page)

“Well, with science, you can keep doing experiments.” (We had fiddled haphazardly with balloons and dirt and potatoes and magnets and electrical circuits.) “But you won't have to write about what you learn. And from here on out you can choose whatever science subjects you want to study for the rest of the year. What interests you?”

Julia paused for a moment. “Birds,” she said, “and flight.”

“Okay, so we'll go to the library and check out books on that.”

“And what about social studies?” she asked.

I sighed. Our adventures in social studies had been a curious, and somewhat depressing, odyssey. History, I had discovered, is a tricky subject to teach when your pupil has an intrinsic bias against human beings.

When reading
The Beginning
, Julia had been happy to learn about the evolution of animal life. Walking fish and giant sloths and saber-toothed tigers all sounded great. But when
Homo sapiens
entered the picture, she had tuned out completely. Mankind was utterly unappealing, especially drawings of hairy Neanderthal men. Perhaps she would have preferred pictures of smooth-skinned Adam and Eve.

I doubt it. At heart, Julia seemed to nurture a slightly misanthropic streak. She was comfortable with human beings when they appeared in ones or twos, but when people congregated, they produced war, urban blight, bigotry, and the destruction of the rain forests.

Julia's art testified to her preference for animals. She frequently drew elaborate pictures of creatures, both mythical and real, devoting hours to the scales on a single snake. As for human beings, she sketched them quickly, thoughtlessly, with a first-grader's techniques—circular heads, rectangular legs, ears like a heart divided in half. It seemed as if she did not want to observe human beings in detail; stick figures sufficed for the planet's most destructive occupants.

For such a creature-centered child, social studies presented a unique challenge. There were few human civilizations that Julia admired. The Incas gained her respect, with their mysterious ability to move five-ton rocks across rivers, valleys, and mountains to build Machu Picchu. “The state made them drink beer,” Julia wrote, “so that even when they were exhausted they would be relaxed.” She composed a seven-paragraph essay on
these ancient Peruvians, but three of the seven paragraphs described bloodshed and havoc: the Incan civil war, the slaughter and destruction wreaked by Pizarro (whom Julia always called Bizarro), the pillaging of Machu Picchu by thieves. As for the Spanish invaders:

When it came to human history, everybody was guilty.

After the Maya, Aztecs, and Incas, Julia had transitioned into Native American cultures, where she felt an instinctive sympathy for the Sioux. (I can imagine Julia as a Sioux child in a previous life, a girl with a name like Running Wolf—riding horses, honoring nature, keeping her hair in braids that wouldn't get tangled.) But the history of the Sioux is a tragic tale. “This is a true story,” Julia wrote at the end of another depressing essay:

And she didn't even mention Wounded Knee.

Julia's perspective got even darker when we moved on to Caucasians; after studying the Sioux, the lives of the early Pilgrims seemed pretty drab. I suggested that she write an essay on a strong woman in early America, hoping that a woman's life might provide a counterbalance to all the killing Julia seemed to find in the lives of men. Settling on a female role model, however, was easier said than done. Whom should she choose? Betsy Ross? No way. What 1950s version of gender roles promoted the sewing of a flag as the female contribution to the American Revolution? Pocahontas and Sacagawea seemed a little more exciting, but Julia recognized that their chief role in history was to serve as helpers of men, and they were ultimately co-opted into white expansionist ambitions.

Abigail Adams and Dolley Madison possessed admirable qualities, but I feared that Julia was unlikely to appreciate the subtleties of these women's epistolary skills, nor was a ten-year-old liable to grasp how a wife's sharp intellect could advance the career of a more blunt-witted husband. One book on Molly Pitcher briefly held Julia's attention; Molly seemed like a model of rough-edged girl power, once she set aside her job as the guys' water girl. Her glory at the cannons, however, was a momentary flash in the pan.

I wanted Julia to study a strong woman who consistently challenged the status quo, so I suggested Anne Hutchinson, that famous thorn in the side of the clerical leaders of early Massachusetts. Hutchinson, I explained to Julia, was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony after holding discussions in her home where she questioned the teachings of the male clergy. She and her family were forced south in the footsteps of Roger Williams, the nonconformist minister who founded Providence Plantation. Not far from Providence, Hutchinson and a small band of followers formed a tiny community called Rhode Island.

I had hoped that the life of a strong woman might inspire Julia. Instead, she found the reading boring and the writing tortuous. Our library had no children's book on Hutchinson, although they had ten on Betsy Ross. (They've since acquired two Hutchinson books, at my suggestion.) Julia's research was limited to a few Internet sources and one page in a history text devoted to dozens of Puritan men. Although she had produced eight paragraphs on the Sioux with little coaxing, when it came to Hutchinson, she managed only three, and that trio came as easily as blood from a stone. Even to most adults, the nuances of Puritan religious doctrine are about as comprehensible as Mandarin. I didn't expect a fifth-grader to grasp the subtleties of Hutchinson's trial, but I hoped she might be impressed with this woman's tough-mindedness. Instead, Julia absorbed another lesson in the evils of mankind:

For Julia, history always morphed into antisocial studies.

She wasn't alone in her skepticism. Today, plenty of children express doubts about the inherent greatness of America and the supremacy of mankind above all other creatures. Some parents blame the public schools' emphasis on “political correctness” for producing a cynical generation, and wonder how our children will ever learn to be patriots if we dwell on the horrors of slavery, the slaughter of Native Americans, and the centuries of discrimination against women. Better to emphasize classic tales of blue-eyed heroism.

But what some folks call “political correctness,” I call honesty. Julia, I had determined from the start of our homeschooling, would be educated with forthright discussions about racism, sexism, and all the other nasty “isms” of human existence. If that made her less than idealistic about the world around her, so be it. Love of country, I once told Julia, should be open-eyed, just like love of family. You should see all the flaws and yet still know that you are a part of the group and should struggle to preserve it.

So—should Julia keep writing about social studies?

“No,” I told her. “But you do have to keep reading American history, since by the end of the fifth grade you're supposed to be familiar with all the highlights, up through the Civil War.” Midway through the year I had purchased the Smithsonian's
Children's Encyclopedia of American History
, which offered three hundred glossy pages of colored photos and drawings, documents and timelines, mixed with lively text. That snazzy book summed up the major events in every era; if Julia carefully reviewed the first 110 pages, she'd have a good survey of all the American history a fifth-grader needed to know.

“Reading? That's all I have to do?” Julia asked.

“Reading and conversing and thinking,” I responded. “Can you handle that?”

Julia stood, walked to my side of the table, and gave me a big hug. “Thanks, Mom.”

T
HUS BEGAN A NEW CHAPTER IN OUR HOMESCHOOLING
. With history and science relegated to afternoon reading and conversation, Julia embarked upon seven weeks of creative writing, devoting all of her computer time to short stories, poems, and scraps of soon-to-be-abandoned novels. She wrote twenty-five typed pages of fiction, and as always, her mind dwelled upon a fantasy world in which creatures were the heroes, oppressed by human villains.

“Once there was a beautiful palace in the sky where unicorns grazed on clouds,” her longest story began,

Watching Julia absorbed in her stories for hours, I understood the impetus behind unschooling. John Holt, who spurred the unschooling movement in the 1970s with his revolutionary book
Teach Your Own
, believed that children were natural learners who would absorb the most knowledge and skills if freed to pursue their individual interests, and if encouraged to gain insight from the daily activities of life. It's a pedagogical approach too loose and liberal for most parents, but in Julia's case, there was clear value in letting her throw herself into her passions, without a parent or teacher forever interrupting, dividing the day into fifty-minute segments and saying, “Stop what you're doing…Change gears…Time for math…. Time for social studies.”

If Julia had been entirely unschooled for the year, she might have focused on science experiments for four or five days straight, followed by three weeks of short-story writing and a two-month immersion in Greek mythology. In the end, an unschooled approach might have been closer to the “real world,” where a carpenter can work on one house for months, or a painter struggle with one canvas for weeks. The division of children's attention into arbitrary time slots is an artifice established for the convenience of schools, and is not designed to match the development of the human brain.

One thing is certain: if Julia and I had been unschoolers, our house would have been cleaner. Most unschooling websites stress the importance of children learning while doing chores; “household responsibilities” are a regular mantra. The idea falls somewhere between pioneer-style homesteading and Emerso
nian philosophy, promoting the notion that humans learn best by doing, not by sitting in a classroom. By contrast, today's public school parents often complain that their kids have little time to help around the house. Children are so burdened with homework and afterschool activities, staying up late to finish assignments, that parents hate to ask much more of them. I've often watched my house devolve into a grubby mess while I remained reluctant to enlist my girls' aid—their noses were too deeply buried in their schoolbooks. The appeal of unschooling grows in proportion to the grime in my kitchen.

During those mornings when Julia was busy writing, she and I led a charmed existence. Gone was the anger, the conflict, the profanity. Gone was my need to oversee, harangue, and correct. I didn't have to ask Julia twice and thrice to settle down and get to work. While she wrote, I made great headway on grading and reading and laundry, and during her ten-minute breaks, she helped to empty the dishwasher and fold sheets. In those hours I began to lighten up about her education; I tried to enter the Zen of homeschooling, and let her learning emerge more “organically,” a favorite unschooling term. Those placid mornings went a long way toward healing the wounds of our stormy winter.

And yet, despite all of its appeal, Julia and I barely dipped our toes into the unschooling pond. With reentry into the public schools looming, I was willing to loosen the reins for only a few hours each day. At other times, I insisted that we maintain a traditional approach to French and music and, above all, math.

Math is the unschoolers' Achilles' heel. The website Un schooling.com claims that “Geometry can be found in quilt making, algebra in painting a room,” but I can imagine middle-school algebra teachers rolling their eyes. Yes, math is present everywhere in the world around us, and hands-on application is key to all education, but house painting is no substitute for daily
practice with equations. Every day throughout the spring I still required Julia to practice math and spelling and violin exercises. Unsurprisingly, during those hours, she continued to fall into long periods of whining and foot-dragging that left me praying for the patience of Job.

Hanging over my head was my promise to cancel school for the day if I raised my voice. Given my track record, one might assume that Julia enjoyed plenty of abruptly truncated school days throughout the rest of the year. In fact, only once in the coming months did we have to drop everything and read for a day—which doesn't mean that I got grouchy on only one occasion. Far from it. But Julia's calm hours of creative writing helped to lower my stress level, and when trouble inevitably emerged, I found that if I couldn't always control my temper, I could at least control my volume, which I reduced to a hissing simmer.

“I always know when you're angry,” Rachel said to me one morning in March. “Because you get all stiff and shivery.”

That might sound unhealthy. Better to let one's feelings out, some moms might say. Better to erupt in minor spurts than to compress all of one's frustrations deep inside the heart's core, where they'll ultimately explode with Vesuvian force. In my experience, however, it's often preferable for a mother to stiffen and twitch, apoplectic with annoyance, than to speak angry words. “Behold how much wood is kindled by how small a fire, and the tongue is a fire.” That's how one of the characters in Marilynne Robinson's
Gilead
puts it.

My verbal pyrotechnics didn't always require an audience. When possible, I tried to utter my angriest thoughts alone, outside, to the nonjudgmental trees. I felt like Midas's wife, whispering her secrets to the river reeds. Usually my self-control was rewarded, because children morph from devil to angel hour by hour, transforming a mother's thoughts from bile to honey. If
I could weather my tempests, Julia would inevitably stop complaining and produce some wonderful piece of art or writing that ushered out all of my internal sunshine.

“Look at this,” she would say, and show me a pencil drawing of a phoenix rising from its ashes, thirty-two feathers drawn with individual attention. At ten, Julia's drawing skills vastly exceeded my own.

“It's beautiful,” I smiled. “
C'est magnifique
.”

Meanwhile, as spring advanced, the weather provided the external warmth that had been absent from our lives over the past few months. Purple crocuses dotted the lawn, followed by jonquils and daffodils, growing in clusters in the woods beside our creek, and with each burst of color, Julia and I shed our chilly moods. She brought me daffodil bouquets, their yellow heads drooping, and I cut sprigs of forsythia that shot like fireworks from the vase on our hall table. These were our peace offerings, symbols that familial love can be renewed along with flowers and trees and grass.

Despite all my previous tantrums, Julia never seemed to hold a grudge. Perhaps it was the gaps in her memory; my outbursts slipped from her mind as quickly as the state capitals. Or perhaps she never took me as seriously as I took myself. Even in the midst of my bleakest winter fits, she often maintained a sense of humorous patience: “Breathe deeply,” she told me as I gritted my teeth. “Count to ten.”

“You know that I love you, even when I'm angry,” I said to her on those occasions.

“Yeah,” she replied, sidling up to me on the couch. “I know.”

 

By April we were celebrating the return of regular field trips, including our most memorable history lesson: three days in
Virginia's “historic triangle” of Jamestown, Williamsburg, and Yorktown. Jamestown, site of the first permanent English settlement in America, was planning to celebrate its four hundredth anniversary the following year, and in preparation, the state of Virginia had joined with private donors to build a huge living history complex, called Jamestown Settlement, next to the original historic site.

“I've been wanting to visit this place,” I said to Julia one afternoon, pointing to the settlement's website on my computer screen. “I've never been to Jamestown, and we can spend a day in Williamsburg, too.”

“Can we visit Busch Gardens?” Julia piped up.

“No,” I shook my head.

“Can we go to Water Country USA?” she asked.

“That's not even open for the season…But we can stay at a hotel, and eat at restaurants,” I said, trying to coax her.

She was unimpressed.

“And you won't have to play the violin,” I added. “Or do any math.”

“Not even in the car?” she asked.

“Okay,” I bargained. “We'll listen to books on tape instead.”

We had a deal.

Driving though the Virginia Piedmont on an early April morning, past the scrubby pines and into the marshy Tidewater region, I explained to Julia why our state wanted to shine a spotlight on Jamestown. Virginia hoped to remind the rest of the country about the Old Dominion's important role in early American history. This was, in part, another North-South thing. Virginia had long been annoyed that the Massachusetts pilgrims often got top billing for founding America.
Schoolhouse Rock
features cartoon Puritans crashing into Plymouth Rock, but it doesn't ever mention John Smith and the Jamestown crew.

When we reached historic Jamestown's national park and began to walk around, Julia and I overheard a park ranger jokingly curse the “damn Yankees” for stealing Virginia's thunder in the colonization race. The ranger went on to inform his tour group that pilgrims searching for religious freedom made a better founding legend for our country than the truth behind Jamestown: rich members of a joint stock company scouring the New World for profit.

Historic Jamestown featured a small museum and archeological excavations, a church and a statue of Pocahontas, and best of all, a working glass house, where Julia stared for twenty minutes at artisans crafting vases and pitchers from balls of molten sand. The glass house stood beside a small beach, where wavelets from the James River broke onto the white shore. Julia threw bits of pine bark into the water and watched a small ferry crossing the half-mile stretch, where the James widens as it approaches the Chesapeake Bay.

“Who would have thought that there would be beaches at Jamestown?” she said.

“What were you expecting?” I asked.

“A port,” she explained. “A small city with more boats.”

 

Some boats were waiting at the national park's fancy new neighbor, Jamestown Settlement. That's where most of the cars had been headed when Julia and I turned off to see the original Jamestown. Many of those tourists would never visit the authentic site, now that a living history complex had been built next door.

“
We're
the real McCoy,” one miffed ranger complained. “Jamestown Settlement is just a replica.” Julia and I nodded in sympathy before skulking over to contribute our dollars to the newcomer.

When we pulled into the Jamestown Settlement parking lot, we faced a brick building so large it looked more like a hospital than a museum/café/educational center. Inside, the structure boasted not one but three gift shops among acres of museum displays. Julia and I walked straight through the building and outside, to the living history sites. There, on the banks of the muddy James, floated replicas of the three ships that had brought the early colonists: the
Godspeed
, the
Discovery
, and the
Susan Constant
.

These were Virginia's answer to the
Niña
, the
Pinta
, and the
Santa Maria
. Julia and I strolled aboard the surprisingly small decks, then climbed below to see the cannons and supply barrels, and tiny officers' beds built into the wooden hull. The beds were so small that even Julia, who promptly climbed into one, could not stretch out her four-foot-ten-inch frame. She and I sat down on a rough-hewn bench and played crazy eights with a hand-drawn deck of parchment cards.

“It's nice,” Julia said as we exited the
Susan Constant
, “but it's too pretty.” The ship's hull was painted yellow, blue, and brown, with decorative flowers and stripes. “It doesn't look hundreds of years old,” she explained.

“It's supposed to look like it would have in 1607,” I replied, “when the colonists first arrived.”

Julia eyed the ship critically. “After four months at sea, do you think it would look like that?”

She had a point. In fact, the entire settlement had a slightly Disneyfied appearance, with colorful ships neatly docked and a well-maintained wooden fort containing structures built of clay and wood: small storehouses hung with dried tobacco and smoked ham, an armory, a blacksmith's shop, a church. Julia ran from building to building like Goldilocks, trying out all of the straw mattresses and preferring the four-poster bed in the governor's two-room cottage.

Living history was much more fun than social studies on a printed page. Julia loved posing in a soldier's metal helmet and breastplate, and carrying empty water buckets on a wooden beam across her shoulders. While my own inclination was to walk quietly from place to place, Julia had no qualms about noisily questioning the blacksmith and tobacco farmer. “What's this called?” “What does that do?” Could she touch it, throw it, shoot it?