Love in a Time of Homeschooling (25 page)

In art, John had found his homeschooling niche. Years later, I would feel proud to arrive home and see him in the yard with our girls, kitchen chairs arranged in the grass behind short easels, a small table cluttered with brushes and paints and mugs of water, while they all concentrated on acrylic paintings of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Now that spring had come, and I would be leaving Julia with her dad three afternoons each week, I gave John an extra charge. “You can teach Julia about the Civil War,” I announced one morning in his office. Placing our
Children's Encyclopedia of American History
on his desk, I opened it to the 1860s and said, “Knock yourself out.”

John didn't flinch. He's a Civil War enthusiast, the sort who makes a biannual pilgrimage to Gettysburg, and who lies awake at night reading volume after volume on generals and battles and the trials of foot soldiers. In our earliest, child-free years of marriage I followed him to Antietam, Appomattox, and Shiloh, but while John felt something spiritual at most battlefields, I was thoroughly bored, kicking my toes into the side of yet another earthwork.

“What better place to study the Civil War,” I told Julia, “than at VMI, on ground shelled by Union troops?” After VMI's cadets marched up the valley in May of 1864 to help the Confederacy win a brief victory at the Battle of New Market, the Union's General Hunter marched down the same ground, burning crops as he went. When he reached the outskirts of Lexington, he set up cannons across the Maury River from VMI, and proceeded to bombard the place. John showed Julia the Union cannonballs still embedded in the back walls of VMI's barracks.

He also took her to the VMI museum, to see the bullet hole in the sleeve of Stonewall Jackson's leather coat, from the day in 1863 when he was accidentally shot by a Confederate soldier. (Jackson died of the ensuing gangrene.) But Julia was too troubled by Jackson's stuffed horse to care about the general's coat. Little Sorrell, VMI's monument to taxidermy, had recently been refurbished by a Smithsonian conservator, inspiring the cadets to feature in their student newspaper a picture of the horse wearing platform shoes and a tilted ball cap, with a caption that read, “Little Sorrell: Pimp My Ride.”

Julia wasn't impressed. “Little Sorrell looks creepy,” she said. “After all his service to his country he gets cut open and made into a big, dead doll with glass eyes.”

In fact, she was skeptical about VMI's entire culture. Another girl might have become enamored with military regalia, spending so much time on the campus of a military college, surrounded by men in uniforms, gray and green, and young cadets wearing crisp white trousers and gray jackets. College boys who usually slouch around in jeans and T-shirts can resemble Prince Charming when decked out in gold buttons and white gloves. But they didn't interest Julia. VMI's culture was too masculine, too regimented, and too anti-individualistic to appeal to her idiosyncratic mind. In fact, our most memorable homeschooling event that spring turned out to be an antiwar protest, prompted when VMI announced its choice for graduation speaker: Donald Rumsfeld.

VMI's senior class had made the pick, raising groans from the college's moderate professors and quiet grumblings from career Army officers who hadn't liked Rumsfeld even before he became secretary of defense. Now that the Iraq War had descended into a muddled mess, with Rumsfeld hovering on the brink of resignation, he seemed like a bad choice for graduation day. Never
theless, each year VMI's seniors are allowed considerable leeway in choosing their speaker, and Rumsfeld was slightly more legitimate than the cadets' selection a few years earlier: G. Gordon Liddy.

An impending visit from Rumsfeld was a rallying cry to all Lexingtonians who had opposed the Iraq War from the get-go, and I was solidly among those ranks. I had spent seven months prior to the U.S. invasion working with area Quakers to plan local rallies, organize carpools to D.C. marches, and distribute hundreds of self-designed red buttons that looked like little stop signs reading, “No War Against Iraq.” During those months, Julia, Rachel, and Kathryn had become accustomed to waving signs at local protests, and although my activism was a touchy subject at a school like VMI, the best antiwar speech I ever heard took place at that college, when the International Studies Department held a forum on the possibility of war in Iraq. In a surreal moment, General Anthony Zinni explained to a packed crowd of eight hundred cadets and civilians why invading Iraq was a bad idea. As he put it: “I've spent the last ten years watching this guy, Saddam Hussein. And I'm here to tell you, he ain't Adolf Hitler, and he ain't Osama Bin Laden. He's Tony Soprano. He's a gangster…and he's not worth the life of a single lance corporal.” It was like a scene from a Vonnegut novel, to watch hundreds of uniformed cadets howling with cheers as a general told them about the lunacy of a war in which they would soon be fighting.

Once the war started, I had converted my activism into support-the-troops mode, but Rumsfeld's visit was an irritation too great to be ignored. One faculty wife suggested that a group of VMI spouses should disrupt the speech, standing up halfway through and pulling out banners previously hidden in our purses. Lexington, however, is a very polite community, and the local peace activists opted instead to gather at the northern entrance
to town, where a bridge crosses the Maury into Lexington. With the turreted walls of VMI visible in the background, protesters would occupy the sidewalk along the bridge and advertise their anti-Rumsfeld sentiments to all the passing drivers.

“Julia and I are going to join the protest against Rumsfeld,” I told John a few days before the event. “I think it would make a good civics lesson.”

John looked up from his computer with eyebrows raised. He usually responds to my activism with a “That's nice, honey” wave, and a repetition of his old refrain: “Just don't get me fired.” This time he was more specific.

“Make sure that it's not your face on the evening news, okay?”

The night before the protest, Julia placed a big white poster on our kitchen table and got out our Magic Markers. I wrote the words: “Support Our Troops: Fire Rumsfeld.” Julia handled the pictures: a line of toy soldiers along the bottom and, above them, a cannon with flames emerging from the word
Fire
.

“Do you understand who Rumsfeld is?” I asked Julia.

“Not really,” she admitted.

I explained to her about a president's secretaries, but I think she envisioned female typists. So I told her that Rumsfeld was a man in charge of the military who had pushed hard for war, when peace was still an option. These days, I explained, most Americans feel that our involvement in Iraq was a bad idea, costing a lot of lives and money. Julia could fathom all of that.

The next morning, we gathered at the bridge with forty people—a tiny number by urban standards, but a large crowd for little Lexington, where most peace vigils draw fewer than a dozen usual suspects. One person had dressed as the grim reaper, pacing with his scythe; another wore a grotesque George Bush mask. Everyone brought posters and picket signs and banners,
and drivers who supported the anti-Rumsfeld message honked and waved. Others passed by stone-faced.

Keeping our promise to her dad, Julia held our big poster in front of our faces when two television cameras scanned the scene, and that night, the protest accomplished its objective: major news channels covering VMI's graduation included clips from the bridge. Whether the event accomplished any teaching objectives, I can't say. After fifteen minutes of yelling, “Down with Rumsfeld!” and “Stop the War!” Julia soon lost interest. She disappeared behind the line of sign-waving adults, and when I searched her out after another half hour, I found her sitting with her back to the bridge's concrete railing, hidden behind the crowd, reading a fantasy novel while all the ugly thoughts of war and politics slipped from her mind and into the river below. I supposed I couldn't expect a fifth-grader to be filled with political passions, especially a child like Julia, who had a very limited interest in the troubles of human beings. Had we been trying to save whales, or free monkeys from a science lab, her imagination might have been sparked. I could see Julia as a stubborn tree sitter. But as for some old, stuffy guy named Rumsfeld? Julia didn't really care.

“Can we go eat some lunch?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said. As we walked off the bridge, she rolled our poster into a more useful object: first a megaphone, then a percussion mallet, which she beat on the hood of our station wagon.

“What did you think of the protest?” I asked across the car roof as I looked for my keys.

She held the rolled poster to her eye, telescope-style. “It was okay, I guess.”

“What would have made it better?”

“An after-party,” she replied. “With lots of creamy dips and
crackers. You could have talked politics with the adults, and I could have watched TV.”

Years later, when I showed Julia her comment, she remarked: “Did I really say that? I think what I meant was that if I cared about a political cause, I would rather go to a party than to a protest. Or maybe to a restaurant, where half the profits were going to support the cause. But I'm not the kind of person who wants to stand around holding a sign for hours, and I think most people feel the same. I mean, even at the protests in Washington, they have to have a rock band there just to get people to come.”

 

Back in 2005, as the cadets packed up their barracks' rooms and drove off with their parents, our year of homeschooling was rapidly drawing to a close. One week after the protest, Julia's violin recital took place, suffering only one glitch. When we arrived at Washington and Lee's music building, the accompanist shuffled through her piles of piano music and exclaimed, “Oh no!” She had left one book at home; Julia would have to perform her movement of the Seitz concerto a cappella.

“Do you mind?” I asked Julia.

“Why should I mind?” she responded.

One of the advantages of tuning out social norms was that Julia never appeared nervous when performing before an audience. As a child, I had suffered through annual violin recitals with my bow arm trembling and my stomach clenched, so I admired my coolly confident daughter, who seemed unconcerned with any eyes upon her. No piano accompaniment? No problem. Julia took the floor unfazed, and in the first long stretch of rests, where a piano should have been playing the orchestral part, she lowered her violin and sang the melody with unself-conscious abandon. Inspired by her gutsy solo, I joined her (though more
quietly), and her violin teacher occasionally piped in as well. In the end, Julia had her accompaniment, and she concluded with a dramatic, deep bow.

Watching her fiddle away, I doubted my decision to stop her violin lessons. She was the most advanced little string player in the room, and now all of her progress would slow to a snail's pace. But I feared that if we continued her lessons, hatred of practicing would turn into hatred of me. We had to choose between progress on the violin and peace in our household, which is why, after the recital, Julia packed her violin away in its case and stuffed it underneath her bed, where it would accumulate dust in the coming months.

Now that we had reached the countdown until the end of the school year, I suffered a major attack of last-minute anxiety. Had Julia learned enough? Would she be prepared for the sixth grade?

I've since learned that end-of-the-year panic is very common among short-term homeschoolers. One acquaintance in Northern Virginia told me that she and her middle-schooler, who had stayed home for a year, spent all of June cramming math, because she feared she had neglected it throughout the spring. In my case, math wasn't the problem. For the past month Julia had been taking Saxon math tests at the rate of three per week, reviewing all of her knowledge, practicing test-taking skills, and reassuring me that no concept had been left behind. As far as I could tell, her math skills were fine; my anxiety came from an unexpected corner.

In early May, Julia and I had visited our local independent bookstore, a comfortable, cat-inhabited space with a big children's section, where we often lingered, reading silently in the cozy chairs. Usually the bookstore offered a calming experience. On that May afternoon, however, I made the mistake of glancing at the children's education shelf, and there was E. D.
Hirsch, perched atop his hill of cultural literacy, espousing
What Your Fifth-Grader Needs to Know
. I picked up the book, flipped through a few pages, and soon found my mind filled with dread. Julia knew nothing of feudal Japan or early Russian civilization. She had never been introduced to scientists such as Elijah McCoy or Ada Lovelace. Even some of Hirsch's third-grade essentials, on Constantine and the Byzantine empire, would have left her dumbfounded. Oh God, I shuddered. Should Julia try to cram in some of these facts before the end of the year?

Hirsch's curriculum is a noble vision, especially in the area of history. While Virginia hammers home American history and government in elementary-, middle-, and high-school classes, giving far less attention to the larger world, Hirsch focuses on international history and geography—a much more colorful approach, suited to our increasingly global lives.

But despite its strengths, for the average parent whose children have never followed Hirsch's sequential plan, his books are an exercise in paranoia. Even with my Ph.D., I didn't know all this stuff, and that recognition alone should have given me a clue. I should have rested assured that it was possible for a person to lead a thoughtful existence, get into a good college, and pursue an intellectual life without having her brain crammed with a specific list of cultural facts. Julia might not know about the dynasties of China, but I bet Hirsch's disciples couldn't tell the difference between a Parasaurolophus and a Pachycephalosaurus. The important thing was to nurture a child's desire to learn, to encourage her intrinsic curiosity about the world, and to show her how to find the answers to cultural questions as they arose. I set Hirsch aside with only a mild sense of guilt.