Love in a Time of Homeschooling (9 page)

Overall, Virginia's homeschooling regulations struck me as very lax. There were no attendance or recordkeeping requirements, no specific subjects that I needed to teach. In fact, parents in Virginia can ignore all of the regulations if they file for a religious exemption.

I had assumed that most states would require homeschooling parents to have a college degree, but as I clicked on all the states that had earned HSLDA's red light, North Dakota was the only one that asked for a BA. Even there, parents who had never finished college could still homeschool, as long as they passed the state teacher's examination.

I respected stodgy old North Dakota, with its mild attempt at holding homeschoolers accountable. The thought that in forty-nine states any parent who'd scraped through high school with a D average could then teach high school to their own children struck me as setting the bar very low. In my case, however, the lack of regulation was highly convenient. To homeschool Julia, I needed only to produce a curriculum, and although HSLDA advises against telling local school districts much of anything about one's plans—the less you reveal, the less they can challenge—I felt compelled to justify my decision to homeschool by assembling an impressive program.

I began by examining Virginia's fifth-grade Standards of Learning, available on the Internet, to see what Julia's peers would be taught. The English requirements were basic—all the grammar and spelling and reading comprehension that most kids can absorb through constant reading and writing—but they did inspire me to add one line to my to-do list: “Buy the
Schoolhouse Rock
DVD.” After thirty years, “Conjunction Junction” still has no rival.

Next came math, the nemesis of my own school days. Virginia's fifth-grade requirements include decimals and fractions, geometry and probability, measurement and a tiny smattering of statistics. I supposed I was going to need a refresher course in dividing with decimals. Otherwise, the nice thing about homeschooling in the elementary grades is that the math still falls within most parents' comfort zones. By high school, many homeschoolers hire private tutors, or enroll their kids in college
classes, but the early years are a different story. Even when it came to math, I felt that I was as smart as a fifth-grader.

One notable absence from Virginia's fifth-grade requirements was Roman numerals. In our school district, Roman numerals had become the exclusive knowledge of Latin students, but I still had a fondness for all those capital letters—those
V
s and
X
s and
L
s that almost made numbers into words.

“Hey, Julia,” I asked, “did you ever talk about Roman numerals at school?”

“I don't think so,” she responded.

“Would you like to learn them?”

“Sure,” she said, shrugging, and I added them to our list.

I was also surprised that Julia couldn't guess where Arabic numerals came from. “
Arab-ic
,” I said to her. “
ARAB-ic
?” She had no clue. (Actually, they originated in India, but the Arabs brought them to Europe's attention.) Neither did Julia (nor I) know much about the history of zero. Why didn't the Romans use it? Before embarking on Virginia's math essentials, I thought we should back up and learn about the history of mathematics: where numbers came from and why.

Math was the sole subject where I planned to buy a textbook; generally I avoid them. There's nothing like a heavy, dull text to drain the pleasure from literature or history. Most of my homeschooling friends recommended the Saxon math method, and the
Saxon 65
book seemed well organized and clear. In one area, however, the book couldn't help me.

Julia had not been learning her multiplication tables in the same manner I remembered as a child. I had learned my twos and threes and fours sequentially, in times tables, but Julia's instruction had hopped around, starting with easy numbers, such as two, five, and ten. This approach didn't seem to have worked for her, because her retention was entirely piecemeal. She needed to back
up and relearn her math facts one number at a time: first two, then three, then four. I thought that we might spend a month (or less, as needed) on the number three—multiplying and dividing by 33.33, computing the area and perimeter of rectangles three inches long, cutting pies into thirds, then ninths, then twelfths. Whatever the mathematical concept at hand, we could practice it while saturated in our number of the week. This meant that I would have to write out a lot of math worksheets separate from the Saxon supply—but so be it. A weekly schedule for math was taking shape in my head.

When it came to social studies, Virginia's fifth-graders focused entirely on American history, from pre-Columbian times through the Civil War. Neither Julia nor I was impressed with that plan.

“Do you want to study American history next year?” I asked her. She replied by sticking her finger in the back of her throat and pretending to vomit.

Julia had been studying American history ever since kindergarten, in Virginia's “spiral method,” where students return again and again to the same material at a slightly higher level, year after year. American history had dominated her elementary curriculum, and in middle school, Julia would face two more years of American history and government, followed by two more years in the second half of high school. Forget about the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. Forget about most foreign cultures; they could be crammed into a few years of world geography and history. In Virginia's model, America was the only country that merited in-depth study, which meant in-depth boredom for the children.

“Okay.” I hastened to stop Julia's simulated barfing. “We'll race through American history in the last four months of the year. We can visit the new Museum of Native American History in Washington when we study Indians, and for the Colonial pe
riod, we can spend three days in the spring exploring Williamsburg and Yorktown.” Since we reside in a town where Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson lived and are buried, Julia already knew plenty about the “War of Northern Aggression.”

“So what should we study instead of America?” I asked Julia. “Are there any ancient cultures you'd like to know more about?” I thought she would choose the Egyptians, or maybe Greece or Rome, but one of Julia's greatest strengths is that she never does what one expects.

“The Maya,” she said. Fair enough. I had always wanted to learn more about the Incas, so I persuaded Julia that they would complement the Maya well, and we threw in the Aztecs to complete the trio. Her school had touched upon Montezuma's world in the past, but they hadn't gone into detail.

“And what about science?” Virginia's SOLs seemed haphazard on that score. Fifth-graders were supposed to study the oceans, and sound and light, and loads of other topics. But what did it matter whether a ten-year-old focused on the sea or sky? Who cared whether she studied weather in the third grade or the fourth? Julia's interests were clear: “I want to study dinosaurs.”

I hesitated to spend a lot of time on dinosaurs, since they were the one subject Julia knew inside and out. She had read every children's dinosaur book at our local public library, and we had taken her to see fossil collections at museums of natural history in New York, London, Philadelphia, and Washington. The first rule of homeschooling, however, is to encourage the child's interests.

“Sure, we'll do a whole unit on dinosaurs,” I promised.

“And what else?”

“Dragons,” she answered.

“Anything that does not involve a scaly beast?”

Julia thought for a while. “Maybe flight, since dragons can fly.”

“And we can study flying dinosaurs, like pterodactyls?” I suggested.

Julia sighed. “How many times do I have to tell you that pterosaurs aren't dinosaurs.”

Later that week, she and I visited the local library, looking for children's books that could form our reading list for the coming year. I discovered a wonderful cartoon book full of stocky little Romans counting vases with
L
s and
X
s and
I
s, and Julia handed me a bright maroon book with a roaring T. rex on the cover:
The Beginning,
by Peter Ackroyd. Inside were marvelous photographs and drawings, surveying not only dinosaurs, but the whole development of life on Earth, from the Big Bang through
Homo erectus
. The book was colorful, well written, and ideal for Julia, who liked not only dinosaurs but also all the bizarre fishes and mammals that came before and after. This, I told her, could be the guiding source for our first semester. In August and early September we could study atoms and tectonic plates and volcanoes (all SOL subjects) as we read about the formation of the planet. Then we could spend a few weeks learning about the oceans as we studied how life developed from them. Most of October could be devoted to dinosaurs; November, to early mammals; and December, to a brief survey of primates and cavemen. In January we could skip forward to the Maya, and use the ancient cultures of the Americas as a segue into pre-Columbian Native Americans. We'd reach 1492 by the end of February.

“That's ambitious,” one homeschooling mom laughed when I told her our plan. In other words: “That's too much.” The trouble with trying to balance a public curriculum with private interests is that you can fall into a game of “Anything you can
do, I can do better.” If the public school fifth-graders are adding and subtracting fractions, then your child should be multiplying and dividing them. If their history lessons begin in the sixteenth century, then yours should go back to the medieval age. This is not as difficult as it sounds, since the public school day includes a fair amount of repetition and wasted time, but still, you wind up with an agenda that leaves little room for relaxation.

“What the heck,” I told myself. It was a rookie's prerogative to be ambitious, and Julia and I were getting excited about our big plans.

Even John was starting to get in the spirit. Never wanting to be left out of a family project, he agreed to my request to give Julia lessons in French and the flute on two afternoons each week. “It would be great to spend more time with Julia,” he explained. “You just have to remember that I have a job.” Fortunately, many of John's musical duties took place at evening rehearsals or weekend sports events, so the afternoons seemed like a good chance for father-daughter learning.

As a final step in drafting a curriculum, I decided to consult with Julia's current teacher, Mrs. Gonzalez. Thus far I had hesitated to mention my ideas to anyone at Julia's school; I had a childish fear that if word got around, I'd be in trouble with the principal. I also felt that telling Mrs. Gonzalez about our homeschooling schemes was sort of like informing your boyfriend that you've decided to live with a woman. I didn't want Mrs. G to think that she had driven us to it.

Nevertheless, I valued her opinion. She knew Julia; she knew the public system; her husband taught at the middle school that Julia would enter the following year, so she was well acquainted with the expectations for sixth-graders. She was an intelligent woman with decades of experience teaching and raising a daughter. I thought she might lend a sympathetic ear.

The two of us sat down after school one day in early May, and I explained that Julia and I would be taking a one-year break from the public schools. We were fine with the teachers at Waddell, I assured her, but Julia was exhausted, and I had a long-term predilection toward homeschooling, dating back to my own miserable public school days.

Mrs. Gonzalez nodded, completely unsurprised. “I think a year of homeschooling could be a really good thing for Julia.”

“So,” I continued, “I've started to put together a curriculum, and I've been wondering: If you were free from the SOLs, and could teach whatever you pleased, what would you spend your time on?”

She thought for a moment. “Well, I wouldn't worry about Virginia's history and science guidelines if I were you. Just read what you like in those areas. But if I had the choice, I'd do more author studies. I'd like to have the children read three or four books by one author at a time, learn about that person's life, and do class presentations. There are so many great writers that we never get to.” She recommended Avi, Susan Cooper, and Natalie Babbitt. “And creative writing,” she added. “We used to do much more writing in the fourth grade.”

I had often heard this lament from Waddell's veteran teachers, as if there had been a paradisal state before the fall. “Just make sure that Julia doesn't lag behind in math,” Mrs. Gonzalez added. “She has a gift for math.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Math is her worst subject. She hasn't even learned all of her multiplication tables.”

“There's a difference between arithmetic and mathematics,” Mrs. G. explained. “Julia struggles with arithmetic. So did my daughter. It took her years to learn her times tables. But once Julia gets those math facts down, she'll have a great mind for math.”

With many thanks to Mrs. G., I continued in the next few weeks to ask other teachers the same question: “What would you teach in your classroom if you were entirely free from the SOLs?”

“More science experiments,” said one. “Children love them. Right now we don't get enough time to teach the scientific method.”

“More hours in the garden,” another said. “The children learn best from hands-on work.”

“Typing,” said Mrs. Patrick, the coordinator of Waddell's gifted program. “Students who can type have a real advantage in middle school.”

With each conversation, I felt more convinced that Julia and I were lucky to have the freedom to take a year off. Here, in the public schools, all of these bright women and men, with years of experience and training, were constricted by bureaucratic guidelines, never teaching what they really wanted, never fully playing to their strengths, never left alone. What a gift it was for a parent and child to study whatever they valued most.