by Laura Brodie
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 period, 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 Ls and Xs and Is, 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 m
athematics,” 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.
For some parents, an ideal curriculum might include carpentry or auto mechanics, geology or etymology, film study or Bible study—all of it is possible in homeschooling. All I knew was that the best education comes from sharing one’s passions. My passions lay in literature and music, while Julia loved dinosaurs and art, so those four subjects would get center stage in the coming year.
Now I felt prepared to write a “letter of intent” to our school superintendent, Dr. Lane, but I wanted to phrase it delicately. Notifying a school system of your intention to homeschool resembles the break-up of a long-term love affair. You’ve been involved in a close daily relationship for years, but somehow it hasn’t met your needs. You have to tell your significant other that you want out. For permanent homeschoolers, the process can resemble a divorce, complete with verbal nastiness and legal battles over custody of the kids. In my case, I basically wanted to say, “I’d like to date other people for a year, but at the end, I want you to take me back, okay?”
Our school system was not obliged to take Julia back. We are county residents who pay tuition (currently one thousand dollars a year per child) to have our kids attend the Lexington city schools. Each year, we must reapply for admission and put down a deposit. Normally the city schools gladly welcome rural children and their dollars, since Lexington’s population is increasingly geriatric. But what if Dr. Lane didn’t like homeschoolers? Would he bump Julia out to the county middle school?
Dr. Lane was a little unpredictable when it came to homeschooling. When another mom had told him about her plans to homeschool her son from eighth grade forward, he tried to talk her out of it. High school was crucial for college preparation, so he insisted. Homeschooling might hurt her son’s chances of admission. That mom wound up being a one-year homeschooler like me, although not because of the superintendent’s concerns.
In the end, I wrote a groveling letter that essentially translated as “It’s not you, it’s me.” The local school system was fine, I explained to Dr. Lane (swallowing my impulse to write a ten-page critique of the excessive test preparations). My other two daughters would still attend, but Julia needed something different.
The superintendent offered no objections. Perhaps because I was talking about only the fifth grade, or perhaps because this man had once taken a turn searching for Julia in the Waddell halls, he was perfectly open to my homeschooling plans. “You’ve obviously thought this through,” he wrote back; he hoped the experience “would renew Julia’s love of learning.” Dr. Lane foresaw no problems with Julia entering the sixth grade the following year, and although he wasn’t obliged to do so, he returned our deposit for the fall.
That letter of blessing, with its assumption that middle school waited for Julia in another year, regardless of how well or badly we managed at home, felt like the wave of a starting flag. With my plans officially on record, I now shared them with all of my acquaintances and relatives. Most seemed to think it was a good idea, or at least that’s what they said to my face. What they thought behind those indulgent smiles, I’ll never know.
Now came one of the most fun aspects of homeschooling: the shopping. Some homeschoolers buy stacks of textbooks and worksheets; I bought toys and games and rockets, puzzles of human anatomy and world geography, and science kits for crystals and electric circuits. I bought card games that ranged from The Scrambled States of America to Fraction Jugglers, and I purchased season tickets to the American Shakespeare Theater, which performed in a small nearby city that boasted a reproduction of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars Playhouse.
My favorite store for homeschooling supplies turned out to be the children’s shop at the National Gallery in Washington. After all, why settle for Barbie coloring books when you could be coloring Van Gogh? And instead of painting kittens by number, how about mandalas? I purchased a card game that was a cross between gin rummy and Go Fish, where each card featured an impressionist painting; Julia would collect groups of masterpieces by Monet, Manet, Degas, and Berthe Morisot.
Thus our homeschooling began not with the first school day in August, but with all of our summer preparations. In June, I told Julia that she must choose a few authors to study in the coming fall. Would she please read one book by each of the writers on our list and decide which ones she’d like to examine further? And would she try out this puzzle of the United States and let me know if it was any good? And what about this Quantum Leap geography game? Julia’s learning was well under way as she sampled all our new products.
I also became much more diligent about including Julia in any cultural event that might be educational. In early August, when my sister asked if I’d like to join her and a friend at Madama Butterfly, performed outdoors at James Monroe’s historic mansion, Ash Lawn–Highland, I asked, “Can Julia come along?” My ten-year-old proved to be a good opera companion, able to follow the story and appreciate the arias, although what she enjoyed most was the skunk that kept wandering in and out of the boxwoods, making the audience twitter.
“The skunk comes out whenever the soprano sings,” Julia whispered.
By mid-August, as the first day of the new school year approached, I was feeling quite confident, thinking that Julia and I could handle this homeschooling thing, no problem. Of course there would be ups and downs, but how bad could they be?
Then came an ominous note of warning.
I was eating lunch at a local café when I ran into my friend Todd, a professor of history.
“You’re going to homeschool?” he said when I told him about my plans. “I tried that once.” He shook his head and sighed. Apparently the memories weren’t very good.
“What happened?” I asked.
“When my son was in high school he got into a terrible bike accident and was out of school for six weeks, so I homeschooled him. I was a single parent at the time. My wife and I were in a commuting marriage, and she was only home on weekends, so I was on my own. Anyway, I knew what my son was capable of, so I was demanding. But as I pushed, he resisted, and the result was very unpleasant.”
From the expression on his face, I could tell that “unpleasant” was an understatement.
“The level of frustration was so painful”—Todd hesitated—“our relationship was deteriorating. It’s not the academics that are the problem, you know. When my son went back to school and took his tests, he got the best grades he had all year. But those grades did not mean as much to me as our relationship.”
“There is a natural role for the parent as teacher,” Todd continued. “But that is primarily for the teaching of values. When it comes to teaching math and English, I’d rather let a third party do the pushing.”
Seeing my slightly crestfallen expression, Todd tried to be kind: “If there’s anyone I would trust as homeschoolers, it would be you and John. You two have the knowledge a
nd the socialization skills to pass along to your daughter. But for me, it was a disaster.”
Todd’s words were especially sobering because he expressed with blunt honesty the fears that had been lingering in the back of my mind. I knew that I could handle the academic side of homeschooling; what mattered was how I tackled the emotional turmoil of a parent and child bound in close contact. At stake was nothing less than a mother and daughter’s love.
With three days before the start of school, Todd’s final word hovered above my head like an angel’s sword: disaster.
CHAPTER FOUR
Day One
I was a little nervous about starting homeschooling. I mean, it’s kind of like riding on a roller coaster—you don’t know what’s going to happen, and you’re really scared before you take the first plunge.
JULIA
SCHOOL BEGAN ON A WARM MORNING IN THE THIRD WEEK OF August, as my three daughters climbed into the backseat of our car. Rachel and Kathryn lugged backpacks and lunch-boxes stuffed with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, apples and string cheese and chocolate chip cookies. Beneath their napkins lay cartoons that John inserts on special occasions: bug-eyed caricatures of the two of us saying, “Hope your day is going great!” Julia carried nothing but a five-by-eight notebook and a pencil.