Love in a Time of Homeschooling (28 page)

A few days after my conversation with that homeschooling mom, another friend explained that she had long contemplated just such a “bonus year.” She dreamed of giving her son nine months of what she called “enrichment,” to focus on English, art, and foreign travel. This woman had no interest in keeping up with the usual school curriculum, and if she carried out her scheme, she expected her boy to repeat the grade. That's where her plan hit a brick wall. The child absolutely loathed the stigma of being held back. As John remembered from his own close calls in elementary school, “Being held back is one step above wearing a helmet.”

“So long as you keep up with math,” I assured that boy's mother, “you could carry out your plan and still move him on to the next grade. All the other subjects get repeated year after year.”

The woman smiled and sighed. To her, math was anathema. Homeschooling appealed only if she could avoid all equations. Eventually, she compromised by taking her son abroad for six weeks during the school year, and came back shaking her head.

“I don't know how you did it,” she said when we met again in the library. “It was exhausting, trying to require him to read or write, or just settle down. I could never homeschool for a whole year.”

“Julia and I sometimes drove each other crazy,” I confessed. “It really helped to know that we had a deadline in mind.”

Although that deadline had first arrived back in June, with the official start of summer break, I felt it even more tangibly in August, as Julia prepared to enter middle school. A big part of her education was moving out of my hands, and the prospect made me nervous.

My first year of middle school had been rough. I had attended Raleigh's Carnage Junior High, named after Fred J. Carnage, a lawyer who, in 1949, was the first African American appointed to the local school board. The irony of the name was lost on 90 percent of Carnage's students, whose vocabularies were too limited to appreciate the humor.

Carnage enjoyed a decent academic reputation; the problem was getting there. Each morning and afternoon involved a seventy-minute bus ride, which constituted the adolescent equivalent of Lucifer's descent into hell. In the height of some budget-strapped lunacy, Raleigh's school administrators had decided to let high-school students drive the buses, with predictable results. Our sixteen-year-old driver, armed with her newly laminated license, was an avid smoker who bummed cigarettes from the “cool kids” and allowed the bus to become a foggy den of iniquity. On cold winter days, drivers in adjacent lanes were surprised to see billows of smoke plume from our windows whenever we opened them. Meanwhile, the backseat devolved into a notorious brothel, where girls remained perpetually horizontal.

One morning, in her eagerness to please the oldest ninth-grade boys, our driver stopped at a dilapidated corner grocery two blocks from Carnage and let the boys run in and buy several six-packs. (Those were the days before serious ID checks.) The bus roamed the neighborhood for ten extra minutes while the boys held a chugging contest. Every day at Carnage, first period was disrupted by intercom announcements of all the buses ar
riving fifteen or twenty minutes late, and I often wondered how many of those children had gone on an early morning beer run.

Compared with Carnage, Julia's new school seemed childishly innocent. At Lylburn Downing Middle School there were no buses, and no apparent problems with alcohol, drugs, or tobacco. No girls were visibly pregnant, and in his seven years on the job, the principal had broken up only one fight. “The school is so small,” he explained, “I can stand at the door in the morning and look into every kid's face, and know who might be headed for a bad day.”

The sixth-grade class that Julia was scheduled to join contained about sixty children—mostly the same kids she had known at Waddell. Her English class would be limited to fifteen, a wonderful student-teacher ratio for any public school, and the teachers seemed smart, friendly, and funny.

As for the building, it was an old 1940s and '50s one-story brick affair, with a tiny library, a primitive cafeteria, and no real auditorium, just a gym with a leaky roof and a small curtained stage. The facilities were so limited that whenever the band teacher wanted a child to practice alone or be videotaped for a solo quiz, she had to set the young musician up in the only space available—a tiny handicapped bathroom. There, children took turns sitting on the toilet, the bell of a French horn pressed into the sink, the slide of a trombone hitting the door.

Nevertheless, LDMS seemed like a good place for Julia.

“I think you'll like it,” I said when I dropped her off on the first day. Watching her pale, fragile figure in denim shorts and flip-flops disappear behind the school's heavy doors, I felt the same anxiety as on her first morning of kindergarten—that almost desperate longing for a child to be happy.

Julia entered those doors with a small modicum of confidence.
Over the summer, she had asserted that one year of homeschooling was enough. It was time to rejoin the other kids.

What little enthusiasm she mustered, however, was short-lived. At the end of her first day, Julia collapsed into the backseat of our car and moaned: “There was
no
recess.” For seven hours she had remained confined indoors, spending most of her time slumped in a plastic chair, filling out pieces of paper and signing her name in thick, heavy textbooks. In other words, she hated it as much as she had initially hated kindergarten.

“Can you eat lunch outside?” I asked. The school had a small interior courtyard with a few picnic tables.

“Nobody did.”

“Didn't you go outside for PE?” Her sixth-grade schedule included PE twice each week.

“We played kickball inside the gym, but we might go outside next week.”

For the vast majority of the next nine months, Julia would get no fresh air between 8:15 and 3:00. Although a public park extended to the left of the school, with trees and grass and a covered pavilion perfect for hosting a class of twenty, the teachers rarely used it.

All of this indoor work might have been less irksome if Julia could have spent plenty of time playing outdoors after school. Unfortunately, on the second day she brought home assignments in five subjects, which took all afternoon to complete. In less than forty-eight hours, she had descended back into homework hell.

I suspected that Julia's wandering mind might be dragging out the homework, causing her to spend way too much time, but after polling several parents, I learned that my daughter was not alone. Although some children were breezing through their assignments in ninety minutes, many others shared Julia's plight and were slogging away for twice that long. “Shockwaves of home-
work,” Julia would describe it in later years, when she and Rachel were both struggling with hours of afterschool assignments.

Julia had increased her burden by signing up for Latin, a strong class taught by a quirky veteran teacher who made the students sing their declensions. (Imagine a child warbling “
A…A-E…A-E…A-M
” to the tune of “Tea for Two.”) Mrs. Riley's Latin instruction was far superior to anything I could have mustered—one example of the benefits that this school could offer. But Latin involved homework on every school day, weekend, and holiday.

“I have to build a model of the Roman Coliseum,” Julia remarked one Friday afternoon in October.

“When it is due?” I asked.

“Monday morning.”

My heart sank. Another ruined weekend. One by one our free hours filled with school projects, while family excursions dropped to a minimum.

As for the standard sixth-grade curriculum, it wasn't very hard. Much of it came from old texts that the children followed chapter by chapter, covering Virginia's SOL guidelines. Despite the clear intelligence of Julia's teachers, who engaged their classes in lively conversation, multiple choice still reigned as the most prevalent measure of knowledge, and Julia quickly mastered strategies that had little to do with learning.

“What major strike in 1894 challenged the concept of welfare capitalism?” I asked her one afternoon, reading from one of her quizzes in preparation for a big test.

“It's the answer with a
p
in it,” she replied.

“What does the
p
stand for?”

She shrugged.

“The Pullman strike?” I suggested.

“Yeah, that's it.” She nodded.

“But what was the Pullman strike about?” I asked. “And what is welfare capitalism?”

“Oh Mom,” Julia rolled her eyes. “All I need to know is which word to circle.”

All of my gripes from Julia's elementary school days returned with added vigor in middle school: too much multiple choice, too much homework, too much time prepping for standardized tests, and not enough time writing and thinking. Although the English teachers emphasized writing skills, Lylburn Downing as a whole offered minimal writing across the curriculum, and even when papers were assigned, they often were graded but not critiqued. The total quantity of writing instruction was not nearly enough to hone the children's skills.

Not that Julia cared. She was happy to have a break from all the writing I had required in the fifth grade. Multiple-choice quizzes and tests were fine with her, and most of the time she had little problem mastering basic materials. In terms of grades, her chief stumbling block came on her first math test.

“D?” I gawked when she mentioned the results. “Why did you get a D?”

She shrugged, utterly unconcerned. “I got stuck on a problem halfway through the test, so I stopped to think about it, and before I knew it, the class was over.”

I could envision Julia at her desk, getting lost in the world of a word problem, unmindful of the clock and her classmates carrying their tests up to the teacher. The previous spring we had reviewed test-taking skills, devoting extra attention to time management. Now I repeated the same advice, and over the next few weeks Julia grew accustomed to the norms of middle-school work and began to make excellent grades. Still, she displayed no pride in the accomplishment, no particular concern about whether her quarterly report card contained As
or Cs. Good grades were her concession to me and my academic mind-set; they were signposts from an adult's world of paperwork that she abhorred.

“Would you study for this test if I didn't require you to do it?” I asked her on one occasion.

She shrugged. “Probably not.”

“Would you write the papers for your English class?”

“Maybe,” she said. “It depends on whether I liked the topic.”

I might have called her lazy, except for the pages of unfinished short stories that lay around her bedroom, and for the hours she spent reading and composing tunes on the piano. Julia was not averse to intellectual activity; she was just allergic to school.

Take her out! I can hear the homeschoolers cry. Why subject a child to a traditional school if its academic deficiencies are apparent, and the child is not thriving? Many times I felt the urge to yank Julia out of Lylburn Downing, but I was well aware of the failures in my own teaching, and Julia needed daily exposure to social situations even more than she needed practice writing paragraphs.

Unfortunately, middle school is a miserable place to learn social skills. Especially for girls, early adolescence is at best a difficult journey, at worst, a painful crucible.

“These girls are scary,” one mom of an eleven-year-old boy remarked to me after his second day in the sixth grade. “Have you seen what they are wearing?”

Yes, I had noticed. While some of Julia's peers still preferred their elementary fashions—loose blue jeans and T-shirts and dirty-white sneakers—others seemed to have leaped from fifth grade straight to high school, donning tight high-cut shorts and tighter low-cut shirts. Here were cosmetics in endless variety: lipstick and gloss, eye shadow and liner, rouged cheeks and pedicured toes, all accompanied by high-priced accessories, seventy-
dollar flip-flops, designer purses, and manicured nails thumbing text messages into cell phones.

Julia stood staunchly in the anti-fashion camp. On the days when she chose to exert some effort…behold, the duckling was a swan! But most mornings, when I looked at her wrinkled shirts, unbrushed hair, and dirty fingernails, I felt that I was raising a young Janis Joplin.

For many of Julia's peers, decisions about hair care and clothing seemed calculated to catch the eyes of boys. During the first week of middle school, Julia walked into the bathroom and encountered a couple of girls chatting about which boys were cute, which boys they liked, and, more important, which boys might like
them
.

“Who do you like, Julia?” they asked.

My eleven-year-old replied with absolute honesty, “I'm too young for that.”

“Good for you,” I said when she described the incident later that night, but I dreaded the social minefield that lay ahead. It startled me, in the coming weeks, to overhear sixth-grade girls flirting diligently with boys and dreaming aloud about Saturday night dates.

“How prevalent is dating in the sixth grade?” I asked one of Julia's peers.

“Oh,
everyone
dates,” she asserted, although I had my doubts. From what I could tell, a “date” usually meant a group gathering at the movies. Still, many of the middle-school girls seemed obsessed with the idea that if they weren't dating, they should be, and Lylburn Downing contributed to the carnival of prepubescent hormones by holding monthly dances.

“A dance every
month
?” I gasped when a friend first told me about the middle-school social calendar. I couldn't recall my junior high ever holding a dance, and my high school managed it only three times each year, thank God.

“Isn't that a lot of social pressure for the kids?”

“Oh, the dances are tame,” this mom assured me. “The kids enjoy them.”