Love in a Time of Homeschooling

by Laura Brodie

  That was a mistake. Learning a new skill can be a joy or a duty, but it should never be presented to a child as a form of punishment. Julia complained as much as ever, until, after a few more weeks, she wore me down.

  “I’ll make a deal with you,” I said. (My homeschooling often resembled a domestic version of Let’s Make a Deal.) “If you can complete the level-ten quiz at twenty words per minute, you can quit SpongeBob.”

  Level ten was not very high; I could have insisted that she go much further. But it was high enough to give Julia a solid foundation in typing, while not being so distant that she would despair. That light at the end of the tunnel inspired her to type with added determination, and within a few weeks she had met her goal.

  Letting Julia quit taught me one rather obvious lesson about the value of quitting. Freed from the obligation to type, Julia sometimes revisited the program voluntarily. In moments of boredom, or when fooling around on other computer programs, she would occasionally stray back to Bikini Bottom, and tinny, computerized strains of “The Irish Washerwoman’s Song” would float past my ears as I wiped the kitchen counters.

  All of which brings us back to mid-February, as I assessed the typed and handwritten contents of Julia’s portfolio. Flipping through the pages, I remembered my feelings from the previous afternoon: the impulse to quit, to say, “Enough. Move on.”

  But if Julia was making good progress, why not push forward? Wasn’t her portfolio proof that my method was working?

  Far from it. Although Julia’s writing had clearly improved, the cost of that improvement had been too great. Over the next few days, whenever a friend would ask about our homeschooling, my answer would be blunt: “It’s been an academic success, but a maternal failure.” Sure, Julia could produce excellent work if I behaved like a harpy and held her feet to the fire. But how long should a mother dangle her child’s toes above the flames?

  I thought of my friend Todd, the history professor who had homeschooled his son for six weeks. He, too, had seen clear academic benefits from homeschooling, but the tensions had almost destroyed their relationship, and it seemed that my methods were on the verge of being equally destructive.

  The essays that rested in my hands had not been written with the same joy apparent in Julia’s journal. All of this eloquence and creativity had been produced begrudgingly, every paragraph accompanied by another protest. Admittedly, “joy” might be an unreasonable expectation; few children embrace essay-writing with unfettered glee. Still, part of my goal in homeschooling had been to reduce Julia’s misery, and it seemed that over the past few months I had only managed to give her misery a new name. I had granted her a break from traditional schooling, but not a respite from oppressive expectations. Maybe it was time to give her a break from me.

  But what would it mean to “quit” in mid-February, when three and a half months of the school year remained? We certainly couldn’t quit math—math required daily practice, and our carefully mapped out curriculum filled nine months. Ratios, probability, and variables all lay before us. Besides, I had an English major’s intimidated reverence for math; math was serious business and must progress full speed ahead.

  In other areas we had more leeway. Take the violin, our primary source of conflict. Julia was scheduled to play in a mid-May recital—nothing fancy, just twenty parents gathering in a college music classroom to hear fewer than a dozen children perform one piece each. In preparation, she had started to learn the first movement of a concerto, and reneging on her obligation would set a bad precedent.

  The post-recital months were a different story. The summer offered a lesson-free hiatus, and come September, Julia would be so busy with her new middle-school routine, with its homework and tennis team practice and afterschool clubs that I couldn’t guarantee she would practice five times a week. The prodding required on my part might once again transform me into a maternal version of the Incredible Hulk, a roaring, button-popping, discolored vessel of rage.

  Maybe, come summer, it would be time to try the John Brodie approach to music education. Require nothing of the child, and let her take the initiative. I could offer to play duets with Julia, and encourage her to join the local orchestra, but the weekly pressure to prepare for a lesson could be lifted.

  And what should happen with our other homeschooling subjects? What pressures could I eliminate on that score? I remained at the table for another half hour, imagining all the ways Julia and I could stop what we were doing, or at least change course.

  Our winter had been tainted with too much stress and guilt. We needed a new direction, one that would allow me to express more love and appreciation for Julia, and maybe even feel a little better about myself. We needed time to heal our mother-daughter wounds.

  When Julia eventually came downstairs, shuffling and groggy, she folded her arms on the kitchen table and rested her face on them sideways.

  “What time is it?” she murmured.

  “Nine forty-five.”

  “Why didn’t you wake me?”

  “I wanted to let you sleep.”

  “No math this morning?”

  I nodded. “No math today.”

  Math was our early-morning subject, tackled first each day to make sure that it didn’t fall by the wayside as the afternoon advanced. Even that scheduling decision was probably one of my homeschooling mistakes, for although I am a morning lark, my mind sharpest before noon, Julia is a night owl, drowsy and ill-tempered in early daylight. Maybe that explained why her math facts remained blurry in her mind.

  “No violin today, either,” I said. No out-of-tune scraping. No ugly head-swatting scenes.

  “I want to apologize again for yesterday. I shouldn’t have yelled at you and hit you on the head. There’s no excuse.”

  Julia shrugged. Apologies were useless without some form of action, and in the coming year, she would explain that she didn’t even care about the head-swatting. She only cared about being called a dumbass.

  “I want to make a deal with you,” I continued, sliding into my Monty Hall routine. (Let’s show Julia what’s behind Door Number One!) “In the future, if I ever lose my temper or even raise my voice, we can stop homeschooling for that day. You won’t have to do any more schoolwork. Which doesn’t mean that you can watch TV or play computer games, but you can read whatever you like for the rest of the day. How does that sound?”

  Julia sighed. “Good, I guess.”

  (But wait! There’s more! Show Julia what’s behind Door Number Two!)

  “There’s something else,” I began. “I’ve decided that you don’t have to write any more essays for the rest of the year. You’re done with writing nonfiction. All the writing you’ll do will be your own stories and poems, and your own chapters of novels. Whatever you like.”

  “No more author studies?” she asked.

  “Nope.”

  “And no social studies or science essays?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What will we do, if we aren’t writing?”

  Good question. I had never given Julia a science or social studies test. Although I had verbally quizzed her on names and dates and scientific facts, in our schooling, written tests were reserved for spelling and math. When it came to science and social studies, her only assignments had been to make posters and write essays focused on atoms and molecules, astronomy and prehistoric life. Now we’d be putting an end to all that.

  “Well, with science, you can keep doing experiments.” (We had fiddled haphazardly with balloons and dirt and potatoes and magnets and electrical circuits.) “But you won’t have to write about what you learn. And from here on out you can choose whatever science subjects you want to study for the rest of the year. What interests you?”

  Julia paused for a moment. “Birds,” she said, “and flight.”

  “Okay, so we’ll go to the library and check out books on that.”

  “And what about social studies?” she asked.

  I sighed. Our adventures in s
ocial studies had been a curious, and somewhat depressing, odyssey. History, I had discovered, is a tricky subject to teach when your pupil has an intrinsic bias against human beings.

  When reading The Beginning, Julia had been happy to learn about the evolution of animal life. Walking fish and giant sloths and saber-toothed tigers all sounded great. But when Homo sapiens entered the picture, she had tuned out completely. Mankind was utterly unappealing, especially drawings of hairy Neanderthal men. Perhaps she would have preferred pictures of smooth-skinned Adam and Eve.

  I doubt it. At heart, Julia seemed to nurture a slightly misanthropic streak. She was comfortable with human beings when they appeared in ones or twos, but when people congregated, they produced war, urban blight, bigotry, and the destruction of the rain forests.

  Julia’s art testified to her preference for animals. She frequently drew elaborate pictures of creatures, both mythical and real, devoting hours to the scales on a single snake. As for human beings, she sketched them quickly, thoughtlessly, with a first-grader’s techniques—circular heads, rectangular legs, ears like a heart divided in half. It seemed as if she did not want to observe human beings in detail; stick figures sufficed for the planet’s most destructive occupants.

  For such a creature-centered child, social studies presented a unique challenge. There were few human civilizations that Julia admired. The Incas gained her respect, with their mysterious ability to move five-ton rocks across rivers, valleys, and mountains to build Machu Picchu. “The state made them drink beer,” Julia wrote, “so that even when they were exhausted they would be relaxed.” She composed a seven-paragraph essay on these ancient Peruvians, but three of the seven paragraphs described bloodshed and havoc: the Incan civil war, the slaughter and destruction wreaked by Pizarro (whom Julia always called Bizarro), the pillaging of Machu Picchu by thieves. As for the Spanish invaders:

  None of the soldiers were given a chance to enjoy the riches; they were all killed over a span of time. Francisco Bizarro was killed by his men (before they were). You may feel sorry for the Spanish, but remember that they wiped out three great civilizations; the Maya the Inca and the Aztecs. But don’t be sorry for the Incas either, remember that the Inca captured neighboring tribes and made them work.

  When it came to human history, everybody was guilty.

  After the Maya, Aztecs, and Incas, Julia had transitioned into Native American cultures, where she felt an instinctive sympathy for the Sioux. (I can imagine Julia as a Sioux child in a previous life, a girl with a name like Running Wolf—riding horses, honoring nature, keeping her hair in braids that wouldn’t get tangled.) But the history of the Sioux is a tragic tale. “This is a true story,” Julia wrote at the end of another depressing essay:

  …it is a story of bloodshed and abuse. Crazy Horse was shot while being restrained by soldiers. Sitting Bull was shot when he refused to go into custody. In fact the only Sioux chief that wasn’t murdered was Red Cloud who signed the treaty that closed the Bozeman Trail. Every Indian that was in America was forced onto a reservation or was killed unless they married a white man or accepted the white man’s ways.

  And she didn’t even mention Wounded Knee.

  Julia’s perspective got even darker when we moved on to Caucasians; after studying the Sioux, the lives of the early Pilgrims seemed pretty drab. I suggested that she write an essay on a strong woman in early America, hoping that a woman’s life might provide a counterbalance to all the killing Julia seemed to find in the lives of men. Settling on a female role model, however, was easier said than done. Whom should she choose? Betsy Ross? No way. What 1950s version of gender roles promoted the sewing of a flag as the female contribution to the American Revolution? Pocahontas and Sacagawea seemed a little more exciting, but Julia recognized that their chief role in history was to serve as helpers of men, and they were ultimately co-opted into white expansionist ambitions.

  Abigail Adams and Dolley Madison possessed admirable qualities, but I feared that Julia was unlikely to appreciate the subtleties of these women’s epistolary skills, nor was a ten-year-old liable to grasp how a wife’s sharp intellect could advance the career of a more blunt-witted husband. One book on Molly Pitcher briefly held Julia’s attention; Molly seemed like a model of rough-edged girl power, once she set aside her job as the guys’ water girl. Her glory at the cannons, however, was a momentary flash in the pan.

  I wanted Julia to study a strong woman who consistently challenged the status quo, so I suggested Anne Hutchinson, that famous thorn in the side of the clerical leaders of early Massachusetts. Hutchinson, I explained to Julia, was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony after holding discussions in her home where she questioned the teachings of the male clergy. She and her family were forced south in the footsteps of Roger Williams, the nonconformist minister who founded Providence Plantation. Not far from Providence, Hutchinson and a small band of followers formed a tiny community called Rhode Island.

  I had hoped that the life of a strong woman might inspire Julia. Instead, she found the reading boring and the writing tortuous. Our library had no children’s book on Hutchinson, although they had ten on Betsy Ross. (They’ve since acquired two Hutchinson books, at my suggestion.) Julia’s research was limited to a few Internet sources and one page in a history text devoted to dozens of Puritan men. Although she had produced eight paragraphs on the Sioux with little coaxing, when it came to Hutchinson, she managed only three, and that trio came as easily as blood from a stone. Even to most adults, the nuances of Puritan religious doctrine are about as comprehensible as Mandarin. I didn’t expect a fifth-grader to grasp the subtleties of Hutchinson’s trial, but I hoped she might be impressed with this woman’s tough-mindedness. Instead, Julia absorbed another lesson in the evils of mankind:

  Hutchinson was known for having meetings with women where she expressed her beliefs that Indians should be free, all you have to do is have faith to get into heaven, and women should not be men’s slaves. In other words they should have freedom of thought and religion. But then in a trial she was banished from the colony because of it.

  For Julia, history always morphed into antisocial studies.

  She wasn’t alone in her skepticism. Today, plenty of children express doubts about the inherent greatness of America and the supremacy of mankind above all other creatures. Some parents blame the public schools’ emphasis on “political correctness” for producing a cynical generation, and wonder how our children will ever learn to be patriots if we dwell on the horrors of slavery, the slaughter of Native Americans, and the centuries of discrimination against women. Better to emphasize classic tales of blue-eyed heroism.

  But what some folks call “political correctness,” I call honesty. Julia, I had determined from the start of our homeschooling, would be educated with forthright discussions about racism, sexism, and all the other nasty “isms” of human existence. If that made her less than idealistic about the world around her, so be it. Love of country, I once told Julia, should be open-eyed, just like love of family. You should see all the flaws and yet still know that you are a part of the group and should struggle to preserve it.

  So—should Julia keep writing about social studies?

  “No,” I told her. “But you do have to keep reading American history, since by the end of the fifth grade you’re supposed to be familiar with all the highlights, up through the Civil War.” Midway through the year I had purchased the Smithsonian’s Children’s Encyclopedia of American History, which offered three hundred glossy pages of colored photos and drawings, documents and timelines, mixed with lively text. That snazzy book summed up the major events in every era; if Julia carefully reviewed the first 110 pages, she’d have a good survey of all the American history a fifth-grader needed to know.

  “Reading? That’s all I have to do?” Julia asked.

  “Reading and conversing and thinking,” I responded. “Can you handle that?”

  Julia stood, walked to my side of the table, and gave me
a big hug. “Thanks, Mom.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Rites of Spring

  Spring is so freeing, when the weather is warm but there are cool winds that smell like water and the color green.

  JULIA

  THUS BEGAN A NEW CHAPTER IN OUR HOMESCHOOLING. With history and science relegated to afternoon reading and conversation, Julia embarked upon seven weeks of creative writing, devoting all of her computer time to short stories, poems, and scraps of soon-to-be-abandoned novels. She wrote twenty-five typed pages of fiction, and as always, her mind dwelled upon a fantasy world in which creatures were the heroes, oppressed by human villains.

  “Once there was a beautiful palace in the sky where unicorns grazed on clouds,” her longest story began,

  …in fact they had a whole sky kingdom! The sky palace seemed to be made out of fog and glass. The king and queen, however, were not so enjoyable.

  The queen came from a place called Rome, and had flown up on a kite. She was rarely seen without having puffy dresses on, and had raven black hair now, but when she came she had an old robe, tattered old shoes, and some kind of smell about her like horses, dust, and sweat. She, in fact, was a woman gladiator who had been in an arena busy fighting men when she stole a giant kite from the grasp of the emperor’s children and flew off.

  Watching Julia absorbed in her stories for hours, I understood the impetus behind unschooling. John Holt, who spurred the unschooling movement in the 1970s with his revolutionary book Teach Your Own, believed that children were natural learners who would absorb the most knowledge and skills if freed to pursue their individual interests, and if encouraged to gain insight from the daily activities of life. It’s a pedagogical approach too loose and liberal for most parents, but in Julia’s case, there was clear value in letting her throw herself into her passions, without a parent or teacher forever interrupting, dividing the day into fifty-minute segments and saying, “Stop what you’re doing…Change gears…Time for math…. Time for social studies.”