by Laura Brodie
But John perceives different legacies in the world around him. He sees children whose natural love of music has been squelched by parents who pushed them to practice. His parents never pushed. Their family piano was used primarily as a mantel for holding framed photographs. John’s first taste of music lessons came in the seventh grade, when band instruments were introduced at his Catholic school. He persuaded his parents to purchase a Bundy student trumpet, and from there he proceeded to be the worst trumpeter in his grade. He didn’t practice; he didn’t learn to read music; band class was a weekly humiliation, so he quit. Music didn’t come up again until the ninth grade, when his brand-new high school started a band program. When the director learned that John owned a trumpet, that was enough qualification to sign him up. Inspired by excellent teachers, John surprised everyone by practicing steadily, majoring in music, and ultimately becoming a college band director. Still, he views instrumental music as a choice, not a requirement—a pleasure for those few people who have the desire and the discipline.
“You should play the violin because you enjoy it,” he often says to Julia, whenever she complains about practicing—which is my cue to glare at him from my seat at the piano bench.
“It takes a few years of practice,” I insist, “to get comfortable enough with an instrument so that you can really enjoy it.” And then I look over at Julia. “Do you want to quit the violin?”
“I want to play,” she invariably responds. “I just don’t want to practice.”
And so we slog on.
Flute lessons, however, were a battle I was not willing to fight. Julia was getting plenty of music education with her violin, and she objected to double duty on instrumental music. The flute had been my concession to our local school system, which has no string program. The small middle school Julia would be attending the following year offered band as its only in-school music, and in preparation, Julia’s peers were picking up trumpets and clarinets and saxophones. If she wanted to join them in the fall, she needed to start practicing.
Julia’s flute, however, soon returned to its shelf in VMI’s instrument room, and I wouldn’t have minded its disappearance, except that her French lessons didn’t seem to be faring much better. John readily admitted that he had no curricular plan for French—no schedule for what they should achieve each week, or each month. His approach to language instruction was entirely free-form; they would start at lesson one and go from there.
“Bonjour!” he said to Julia on the first day. “Je m’appelle John! Et toi?”
On day two he repeated the same few words, as he did on days three and four. Sometimes he offered written assignments; sometimes he skipped French altogether. The results were unsurprisingly slow, since real progress in a foreign language requires daily practice. Two sessions each week couldn’t impress a new vocabulary upon Julia’s brain.
“You know,” John said, sighing, “I’ll go over how you say hello and ‘how old are you,’ and ‘where’s the bathroom,’ and in three days she’s forgotten everything. She has no concept of keeping it in her head and using it as a language that other people actually speak.”
I suggested that he speak a little French to Julia each day at home, but John was even more averse to homework than our daughter. French would have no place in his afterschool hours.
Much as I would have liked for John to throw himself into this homeschooling venture, I couldn’t ask much more of him. A parent must be fully committed to homeschooling in order to make it work, and while in some households that determination is shared by both parents, who feel equally responsible for the child’s progress, in many families the mother serves as the chief homeschooler. A working dad might be more active in the social, athletic, or religious aspects of homeschooling, but mothers often handle the academics. Especially in our case, since John had never been sold on the idea of homeschooling, this was my project, and my burden. If Julia was going to learn French, I would have to learn it, too.
Initially I asked Julia to teach me what she had covered each week with her dad, since teaching is the best way to reinforce one’s own learning. But Julia’s knowledge was too vague for her to pass it along. I tried instead to study the French textbook with her, slowly, page by page, asking her little questions, such as the ages of her family members: “Quel âge a ton père? Quel âge a ta soeur Rachel?” Driving in the car, I would inquire about the time: “Quelle heure est-il?” And where were we going? And what time should we arrive? When grocery shopping, or buying gas, or sitting at the coffee shop, I inserted little French terms and questions into our routine, encouraging her to ask me questions as well, to try to get a tiny conversation going.
In the end, it was the blind leading the blind. I never learned enough French to progress beyond the simplest sentences, and my pronunciation was guesswork. Even when we practiced daily, Julia had little memory for the language. Her vocabulary grew at a snail’s pace.
Pitiful as our efforts proved, we remained far ahead of any foreign language instruction Julia would have received at her elementary school. There, her exposure would have been limited to one hour after school, once a week, for one semester, with a college student who might manage to introduce the children to a smattering of foreign vocabulary, culture, and cuisine. These days, even that one-hour slot has been dropped from the “afterschool enrichment program.”
Waddell’s teachers explain that due to state mandates, there is no time in the day for foreign language instruction. But in my dream elementary school, all of the teachers would use a little bit of Spanish in their daily routine. When asking children to take out their books, why not say it in Spanish? Why not call children in from recess with a Spanish phrase, or teach the numbers one through twenty in Spanish as well as English? With new phrases added each year, the students and teachers might jointly develop a beginning grasp of the sounds and concepts behind an important foreign language. Meanwhile, at our house, I’ve bought the Rosetta Stone package for French, in case any other child wants to give it a try.
Back in 2005, when faced with Julia’s slow progress in French (and math and spelling), I began to resort to an age-old parenting technique: bribery.
“What use are Roman numerals in our world today?” I asked Julia one afternoon.
“Probably not much,” she answered.
“No, not much” I agreed. “But I’ll give you a quarter every time you find a Roman numeral being used in our town, or in our lives.”
Julia’s eyes lit up.
“Up to a maximum of two dollars,” I added.
Her smile drooped. Still, she reached over to me, took my wrist, and tapped the glass on my watch. “Give me a quarter,” she said. The short hand on my Timex was pointing between XII and I.
When my children were small I thought I would never pay them a penny beyond a weekly allowance in exchange for chores, but my high ideals faltered one afternoon in the public library, when I was speaking to a child whom I admired. She was a highly intelligent and mature girl who excelled at so many activities—music, dancing, writing—that I had occasion to stop and praise her. I don’t recall the exact impetus. A recent recital or a recent poem? Whatever the compliment, she smiled at me, leaned forward, and said very quietly, “My parents pay me to do it.”
I was shocked. Her parents were my vision of the ideal mom and dad—a bright, friendly, and accomplished couple raising bright, friendly, and accomplished children. And they were using money. Or at least that was the child’s perception. Had the parents been present, they probably would have offered a rush of hasty explanations and qualifications.
After my initial, self-righteous tsk-tsk, I paused to consider the matter. All around me parents and teachers were coaxing children with “rewards” of endless variety: toys after a dental appointment, candy at the end of a violin lesson, “Smarties” sweets at school for children who aced a test. Julia’s tennis coach, whom she met for occasional private lessons as part of her homeschooling, wielded quarters like prizes at a ca
rnival game. Knock down the orange cone on the service line, and you’ll get another coin.
I cringe at the thought of paying children for good report cards, dishing out a certain number of dollars for every A. Although some parents swear by it, to me, that sort of financial transaction taints learning with the stench of hard cash. Our family’s alternatives, however, are far from virtuous. Sometimes when our girls all bring home excellent report cards, we “reward” them with a family dinner at a nice restaurant. Or occasionally I’ll buy them small stuffed animals. These are celebratory acts, I assure myself, not bribes. It would probably be less expensive just to pay for each A.
On the one occasion when I resorted to a big cash transaction with a child, there were clear benefits and even clearer drawbacks. It happened because Kathryn had been slower to swim than her sisters, staunchly refusing to put her head underwater. Summer after summer, we paid for swimming lessons, bought fancy goggles, coaxed and pleaded, but Kathryn remained adamant. She watched her friends wiggle like tadpoles through the pool, and envied their joy at jumping off diving boards. Still, she strolled through the water, stirring the pool with her fingertips and sometimes dogpaddling in shallow depths with her neck straining above the surface.
Then, suddenly, one summer day, after offering my usual pointless words of encouragement, all of my parental standards flew out the window. I looked my youngest daughter in the eye and said, “I’ll give you twenty dollars if you’ll put your head underwater right now and swim.”
Her mouth fell open. To Kathryn’s six-year-old mind, twenty dollars was a pirate’s fortune. Andrew Jackson was a rare visitor in my wallet, let alone my children’s piggy banks. Shocked into action, Kathryn eyed the expanse of liquid around her and, with grim determination, she pulled her goggles over her eyes, took a deep breath, and plunged. Lo and behold, she didn’t emerge sputtering and resentful, taking the cash and never wanting to try again. On the contrary, she liked it. She loved it. For the next half hour she dove and splashed and jumped into the deep end from the side of the pool, delighted to be submerged. It was like the conclusion to Green Eggs and Ham—the surprising pleasure in the thing most dreaded. “And I will eat them in a boat, and I will eat them with a goat…”
Amazing, I thought. Maybe a little bribery was not such a bad thing. I had just saved myself a bundle in the swimming lessons I would now cancel for that summer.
But there was a larger price to pay; there is always a larger price. Julia and Rachel, who had overheard the episode, insisted that they, too, be paid twenty dollars for some aquatic feat. Julia would start swimming laps and Rachel would learn to do a head-first dive.
This wasn’t what I had in mind; their achievements would have come eventually without payment, and sixty dollars was going to break my mommy bribery budget. But my girls insist on equal treatment with the unflinching standards of a stern judiciary. They had me, and they knew it.
Any parent who has stooped to pay a child for some miscellaneous achievement knows what comes next: the dreaded day when a nine-year-old stands before you and says, “What will you pay me if I do _____?”
“I will pay you with a hug and a kiss and my sincerest admiration,” I replied when that day occurred in our household.
At which point the child snorts, “Yeah, right.”
Model parents will nod and say, “That’s the problem with our society: young people who don’t act for the sake of pride, only for profit.” And yet, the world of child rearing is never black and white. My girls, like most children, pursue their passions without coaxing. The question is how to encourage children to complete all those other tasks that they might find onerous, but that parents know to be essential. Stern discipline can be effective when it comes to household chores, but it’s probably not the best tactic for getting a child to read. So why not offer a small reward every time a reluctant reader finishes a certain number of books? Our local library includes prizes in its summer reading program. Is that a vice?
“Set a goal,” I said to Julia a few times during our homeschooling, “and we can agree on an appropriate reward.”
Julia proposed serious goals: to advance through all the exercises in her violin book, or to score 100 percent on a Saxon math test. (Although she learned math concepts quickly, Julia tended to be very careless when taking tests. A perfect test was a rare achievement.) In exchange, she suggested lunch at her favorite restaurant, or a small dragon statuette.
One might imagine that our homeschooling would become an expensive proposition, with all the restaurant bills and little prizes. In fact, although Julia liked the idea of setting goals, she rarely had the daily discipline to see them through. If I pushed and prodded, she could make regular progress toward a chosen reward. More often, the prizes disappeared into the fog of school.
After a while I began to wonder if we were on track to achieve any of our goals. Julia’s knowledge of natural history seemed about as solid as Swiss cheese; her memory for math facts came and went with the tides. Her French vocabulary was minimal, and her spelling remained shaky; words that she mastered one week appeared in mutilated form on the next week’s essay.
By the end of December, I was lying awake at night riddled with self-doubt. Were we making enough progress to legitimize the sacrifices? Or, in Prufrock’s words, Would it have been worth it, after all? Would it have been worth while? Because, make no mistake, homeschooling requires major sacrifices.
I worried, for instance, about the social life that Julia was missing. Back on Halloween day, when all the children at Waddell Elementary had dressed up in costumes and paraded through the school’s neighborhood (with a handful of John’s drummers leading the way), Julia had stood beside me on the curb watching her sisters march by in butterfly wings and princess regalia. When the principal spotted Julia among the crowd, she came over and gave her a hug, and I felt sorry for my daughter, exiled from the happiest rituals of the school year.
“Are you sorry to miss this parade?” I asked.
“No, not really,” Julia replied.
“What do you miss?”
She sighed. “The parties.”
Waddell Elementary was a party heaven, with Thanksgiving mini-feasts and Christmas cookie decorating, Valentine baskets and birthday cupcakes—all the pleasures that craftsy, cake-baking moms can insert into a school day.
Sometimes I would try to offer substitutes. One winter afternoon I took Julia to our local tea room, which offered extravagant hats and scarves and sequined gloves for girls to wear while sipping teas with names like Moroccan Madness. Although I aimed for a festive mood, Julia smiled weakly from beneath her feathered hat. She appreciated the sugar cookies and raspberry sorbet, but a mother in a boa does not constitute a party. Rachel and Kathryn, however, imagined the scene with envy, and the compensatory outing I scheduled for them never fully assuaged their sense that Julia was receiving an inordinate amount of Mom’s attention.
Sibling jealousy soon became a problem in our household. Kathryn suffered the greatest pangs. For years she had been accustomed to monopolizing my attention, beginning each morning by searching me out in the house, climbing onto my knees, and pushing away my computer keyboard or the book I was reading. In restaurants and concert halls, movie theaters and puppet shows, she tended to migrate to my lap, apparently determined to remain as close to my womb as possible.
“We forgot to cut the umbilical cord on that one,” John would often say as she crawled into our bed.
When Kathryn saw my maternal efforts focused on her eldest sister, she responded decisively. In the evening, if Julia and I were lying side by side reading a book, Kathryn would come and pry her way in between us. If Julia refused to budge, Kathryn would lie flat on top of my body until I had to stand and shed her, limb by limb.
“I want to be homeschooled,” she began moaning by November, once the novelty of kindergarten had worn off. “Why can’t I stay home like Julia? I want you to teach me.”
“Maybe when you’re in
the fifth grade,” I answered. Her clinginess seemed like a good reason not to homeschool her.
While Kathryn physically battled for my attention, Rachel often appeared at the side of my bed sporting puppy dog eyes and saying, with sniffling melodrama, “No one loves the middle child.” Then she would laugh and turn away, but only halfheartedly. That winter Rachel developed the habit of standing up in the middle of family dinners and walking over to John or me to speak directly into our faces, insisting on eye contact while she told a long story. If our attention wavered for a second, she would say, “Mom! Dad! Listen!” and start her long tale again from the beginning, so that we might hear the opening sentences three times before she finished.
“I’m jealous of Julia,” she confessed one morning, “because she gets to go to the coffee shop so often.” I’ve paid a fortune on peppermint mochas since that day, trying to even the score in Rachel’s mind.
Back in 2005, John and I attempted to soothe our unloved middle child with plenty of one-on-one Rachel time. When John traveled to France that winter with his jazz band, he didn’t take Julia along to practice her parlez-vous. Instead he invited Rachel, treating her to six days in Paris and two in Normandy. She came home sporting a smile and a pink beret.
And yet, for all our efforts at equally doled out love, by mid-winter the entire family was suffering the strains of homeschooling: Julia was whiny; Kathryn was resentful; Rachel and John were brooding. As for me, I was ready to strangle someone.