Love in a Time of Homeschooling (5 page)

“What is this?” I asked Mrs. Patrick, the school's coordinator of the gifted program.

“It's a nonverbal test,” Mrs. Patrick explained. “The children are shown black-and-white images, and they have to recognize patterns or differences, or guess what comes next.”

That made sense; Julia's brain had a knack for processing visual information. Once, at the end of a little boy's birthday party, the hostess remarked that Julia had won their party game. Apparently this mom had stood before the children with a cookie sheet full of small objects—toys and kitchen gadgets and knickknacks—and she'd given the kids a brief moment to survey it all. Then she had put the cookie sheet away and asked the children to write down every object they could remember. (A pretty boring game for a bunch of eight-year-olds, if you ask me.) Anyway, Julia won hands down. After a short glance, she could recall almost every object on the sheet.

Clearly, Julia had a unique intelligence churning inside her head, and so Waddell tried her out in its third-grade gifted pro
gram. The experience didn't amount to much: twice a week Julia spent a little time outside the regular classroom, doing special activities in math and English. She didn't last long in the advanced math group, but the Junior Great Books Club seemed right up her alley. There, the children discussed and wrote about stories they read together. “I love having Julia in the group,” Mrs. Patrick said, beaming. “She's so creative. She always has something unusual to say.”

Unusual
was the operative word, a word that sometimes made me sigh. How many mothers of unusual children have occasionally prayed for a little normalcy—just enough to ease their child's passage through the world of averages that constitutes America's public schools? Nevertheless, I was pleased that Julia had been recognized as a bright kid. This gifted program might give her a boost, especially since the regular curriculum was getting very dull.

In Virginia, third grade marks the onset of annual standardized tests, something all states employ, but some are more zealous than others when it comes to dictating the schools' test-driven curriculum. In the 1990s, Virginia instituted a new curriculum called the Standards of Learning, or SOLs—an appropriate acronym, since most parents and teachers I've met seem to feel that when it comes to the SOLs, we are all “shit out of luck.” As one high-school teacher put it, “The SOLs are the monster that is devouring our schools.”

If Julia's wandering mind had been our only challenge—if her school curriculum had been full of exciting materials, taught with creative approaches—I never would have opted for homeschooling. But Virginia's ardent embrace of our nationwide test-prep culture pushed me over the edge. I kept looking at the bland content in Julia's worksheets and tests, and thinking, “Oh, c'mon.
I
could do much better than this.”

Most of Julia's teachers felt the same way. During her early years at Waddell, they consistently lamented the effect of the SOL tests on their program. “We
always
had standards,” one veteran teacher sighed, but now the standards were being dictated by strangers in Richmond, and there was little time left in the day for teachers to use their own imaginations. “More than eighty percent of our curriculum is mandated by the state,” another teacher explained. “And don't let anyone tell you that we don't teach to the test. We
absolutely
teach to the test.”

To make time for extra test preparation, Waddell had abandoned many of the teachers' favorite units. “We used to do a first-grade unit on dinosaurs,” one teacher recalled. “The children loved it.” But since dinosaurs weren't part of the first-grade standards, they had become extinct in the classroom. “I used to do more creative writing,” a fourth-grade teacher noted. “But now with all the testing, we don't have time for it.” The Roots and Shoots Garden was another SOL casualty, incorporated less and less into the children's schedule. By Rachel's fifth-grade year, she would complain that they never visited the garden at all.

John, who had started his career as a K–12 music teacher, felt a personal loathing for the tests. “When I taught in the public schools we didn't have these strict standards. If a teacher had a passion for chemistry or politics, he could share that. Teachers could play to their strengths.” John acknowledged that some teachers and schools were weak, and needed state standards to hold them accountable. But for most conscientious educators, the testing requirements had gone way too far: “Now you don't have the time to elaborate on the finer or more interesting points of a subject. All you want the kids to do is spit out that the symbol for salt is NaCL.”

“In the end,” one local principal explained, “the SOLs make great teachers good and good teachers bad.”

None of Julia's teachers seemed to mind Virginia's math and English requirements. Math and English were the bread and butter of elementary school; it was fine for the state to insist that grade-school teachers hammer home the basics of arithmetic and reading comprehension. The problems stemmed from the state's increasingly specific mandates in science and social studies, which covered everything from elementary economics to Virginia state history. When I told a friend about Virginia's fourth-grade test on state history, this veteran public school principal threw back her head and laughed. “My teachers would revolt if we instituted a standardized test on Pennsylvania history. The whole concept behind
standards
is to cover basic knowledge that is essential for everyone—not to memorize facts that are specific to one region.” Unfortunately, with each successive year, Julia seemed to spend more and more time on rote memorization for multiple-choice exams, preparing for what one teacher called “these horrible trivia tests.”

To me, multiple choice is the greatest sign of the failure of American education—a form of testing developed for the convenience of grading machines, that has little to do with real learning. Genuine education involves writing, making connections, and drawing conclusions, but at Julia's school, as at many schools nationwide, writing played second fiddle to “fill in the bubble.”

Waddell was such a promising place, it was sad to see the teachers dragging around their state-mandated ball and chain. But our little school was a good foot soldier in Virginia's SOL crusade, which meant that Julia and I, along with all the other families and teachers, kept marching in step.

That march became especially dreary at the end of the third grade, as Julia prepared for her first standardized test in social studies. School districts throughout Virginia were issuing flash cards from a private company that gave its package the silly title
“Race for the Governor's Mansion.” Trying to be a dutiful parent, I quizzed Julia on the cards and was dismayed by their poor quality.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are ________ that all Americans enjoy
, one flash card read. “Inalienable rights,” Julia responded, repeating Jefferson's words from the Declaration of Independence. I flipped the card over.
Privileges
, it read. How ridiculous, I thought, to have the children memorize an arbitrary word pulled out of a hat.

In fact, the flash cards would get worse in upcoming years, containing numerous errors. “What ancient cities farmed on hillsides?”
Greece and Rome
. “What country was home to several great empires?”
Africa
.

Julia didn't mind all the flash cards and multiple choice as much as her homework assignments. By the fourth grade, she had become so bored that homework was a daily struggle. Every day, I tried to allow her time to play outside for a few hours after school, but by five thirty I was usually telling her to start her homework. I offered a little television or computer time as an incentive, but often these weren't enough inspiration. By seven, I'd be unpacking her books myself, insisting that she sit down at the table and concentrate. By eight, when she had finished only a fraction of her work and was complaining about how her sisters were watching
SpongeBob
without her, I could feel my jaw tighten. At nine, when Rachel and Kathryn were in bed and Julia wasn't finished with her math, I usually launched into some lecture about time management and the need to concentrate. By ten o'clock, when my fourth-grader finally went to bed, she and I were both angry and exhausted. I began to dread every single afternoon.

Had I known then what I know now: that in the elementary grades, studies show that the link between homework and academic achievement is minimal at best—its impact grows
in middle and high school—I might have staged my own little homework rebellion. I could have written a letter to Julia's teacher explaining that homework had become counterproductive for my daughter; the tension it produced negated any potential benefits. For the rest of the fourth grade, I would see that Julia devoted forty minutes each school day to homework—the old ten-minutes-per-grade rule. Beyond that, she had my permission to skip the rest.

Julia's teacher, a thoughtful and intelligent woman, would probably have worked with us had she known that Julia's homework was taking so much time, dragging down our family routine. She might have given Julia shorter assignments—ten math problems instead of twenty. And if this woman had not been willing to compromise—so what? So, Julia would get a minus on the “completes homework” line on her report card. What did it matter?

Homework has not always been accepted as a valuable part of education. These days there are plenty of books that argue against America's homework overload:
The Homework Myth
,
The Case Against Homework
,
The End of Homework
. Most of the authors stress that our country's attitude toward homework has fluctuated over time, according to political and social trends. The 1930s and 1940s witnessed a growing movement for the abolition of homework, as doctors and educators emphasized the need for healthy, joyful children who spent plenty of time playing outside. This move for health and happiness mirrored labor advocates' calls for more recreation and no unpaid overtime. But the anti-homework trend ended in 1957, with the Soviet launch of
Sputnik
. In recent years, the desire to produce citizens who can compete in the global economy has produced a spike in homework for American children.

I didn't know any of this back in 2005. Still suffering the residual intimidation from my own public school days, I assumed that Julia should complete all of the teacher's assignments, even if it meant that I must push and prod. Waddell seemed to assume that parents would do some prodding. Every week we were asked to administer practice vocabulary tests, time math quizzes, call out flashcards, and sign forms verifying that our child had completed her reading, her spelling, her arithmetic.

To John, this level of parent involvement was perplexing. His mom and dad had never paid attention to his homework: “I was the fourth of six kids, so their attitude was, ‘Hey, you're on your own.' Their only job was to go to the teachers at the end of each year and say, ‘Pleeease let John go on to the next grade.'”

Given John's laissez-faire attitude, I wondered if I was too wrapped up in Julia's homework. Maybe the problem was me, not my daughter. Maybe I was joining the ranks of helicopter parents—overly ambitious and intrusive.

In her book
Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety
, Judith Warner describes how today's mothers have become a generation of control freaks, frantically prepping children to get their piece of a shrinking American pie, rather than taking political action to ensure that there is enough pie for everyone. The result is stressed-out women and kids, all suffering from an existential crisis that Warner calls “the mess.”

Although Lexington's small-town culture is shielded from the worst extremes of “the mess” (there are no private schools that families compete to enter, no exclusive afterschool lessons, no excess of choices), around me I saw plenty of moms heavily invested in their children's schoolwork and extracurriculars: monitoring homework, helping with projects, driving to dance and lacrosse and Girl Scouts, volunteering in the classroom, and sometimes arguing with teachers. Most of this involvement
seemed appropriate and loving, but some of it was over the top, and I wondered what category I fell under: helpful, concerned parent or stressed-out Uber-Mom?

“Should we let Julia fail?” I sometimes asked John. Should we let her skip her homework and school projects until she had the maturity and desire to complete them without my prodding? At this, John shrugged and offered another confession: “You know, I never did any of my homework until about the fifth grade. That's one of the reasons I was failing.”

I wondered if Julia would benefit from seeing the consequences of failure; maybe a bad report card would ruffle her complacency. And yet, whenever I did step back from the process and allowed my daughter to miss project deadlines or receive zeros on homework, or sometimes go for days without brushing her hair, it never bothered Julia as much as it bothered me. She displayed little interest in whether her papers were marked with As or Fs, and on one level, her utter lack of concern seemed healthy. When I was a child, I had been too intent on pleasing other people—making my teachers and parents happy, wanting to fit in at school. That mind-set can produce good grades, but it can also have dangerous consequences for young girls: trying to please peers who are passing out drugs, wanting to please boys who try to go too far.

Julia's independence would serve her well on future occasions, but for now I couldn't wrap my head around the idea of a smart child doing poorly in school, and neither could Julia's teachers. Whenever I mentioned the thought of stepping back and letting Julia's school fortunes rise or fall as they might, her teachers objected strongly. They cared about Julia's success, and I'm sure they also cared about their school's accreditation. In the era of No Child Left Behind, Waddell needed bright kids like Julia to “perform,” and they encouraged me to serve as her homework
coach. Some children needed a helper, they explained—someone who could sit at the kitchen table and keep the child focused.