Mims became a well-known writer in the hobbyist book and magazine trade. One day RadioShack editor Dave Gunzel got a look at one of Mims’s hand-drawn laboratory notebooks and fell in love with the neat lettering and charming anthropomorphic drawings of electronic components. He asked Mims to write a series of how-to books in the same style. “He even suggested using a crayon,” Mims said. “I said, ‘You can’t do a book with a crayon. It has to be a pen or a pencil.’ ” Gunzel conceded the point, and Mims went to work, drawing and lettering two pages a day and suffering terribly from writer’s cramp.
The suffering paid off. The first printing of a hundred thousand copies of Getting Started in Electronics sold out immediately. (The book is still in print by a different publisher and has sold in the neighborhood of 1.3 million copies. All together, Mims’s thirty RadioShack titles have sold more than 7 million copies.)
RadioShack’s books might have met with great success, but that didn’t stop the company from going the way of Popular Science and Scientific American. Founded in Boston in 1921 by Theodore and Milton Deutschmann, two brothers who wanted to cash in on the amateur-radio boom, RadioShack served the electronics-hobbyist market until the 2000s, when it shifted over to hawking cell-phone plans and other consumer electronics products. “RadioShack dropped all their books about five years ago,” Mims said, “which is one of the biggest mistakes they ever made, because the hobby parts were already going down, and then sales of electronic parts really dropped after that because there were no books to support the parts.”
Undaunted, Mims continued to conduct his own experiments and to explore new branches of science to feed his insatiable curiosity. He said he takes a hands-off approach to his three children’s education but has two rules: “If you’re gonna be in my family, you go to church on Sunday and you do a science fair project every year. Those are the two requirements of being in my family.” His children followed the rules, but he admits the teenage years were a little tougher to deal with. After son Eric (who had built a seismometer that picked up vibrations from two underground nuclear tests in Nevada) and eldest daughter Vicki (who calculated the sun’s rotation by tracking the movement of sunspots) had moved out, Mims called to ask them if he had been too strict about his science-project rule. He was wondering whether to stay the course with his youngest daughter, Sarah.
“Those children told me—this was the first time they opened up to me—‘We learned more from doing the science projects you made us do than from anything we learned in high school,’ ” Mims said. “And Sarah wanted to do it. She gave up being a cheerleader, and she’s very good-looking.”
Like her father, Sarah is something of a celebrity in amateur-science circles—“She’s the most famous [of my children], just put her name into Google,” Mims advised me. Sarah won first place at the science fair two years in a row at the Texas Junior Academy of Science. And while still a teenager, she was the lead author of a NASA paper about detecting smoke and dust that had traveled through air currents from thousands of miles away to her home in Seguin, Texas. As an eleventh-grader in 2002, Sarah designed and built an air sampler, sent it aloft in a kite, and examined the samples it collected. She found smoke particles from fires started by farmers in South America burning mold-infected crops in a backfiring attempt to sterilize the land before replanting it. Sarah also found living mold spores from the fires. An article published by NASA stated that “this surprising discovery from a young, amateur scientist has the potential to change the prevailing wisdom on the benefits of burning diseased crops or timber.”
“The agricultural people haven’t yet seen the implications of it,” Mims said. “But they will. Because the inertia is so great, they don’t always realize the significance of a major new discovery. Her discovery explained transport of disease organisms from plants across the ocean.”
Talking to Mims about his children’s education (and self-education) made me think about the way my own children were learning. When Sarina, now a seventh-grader, was in second grade, she told Carla and me that math was “like a rainbow.” I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I figured it was good for her to associate math with something so pleasant. Her teacher told us she was one of her best students when it came to math.
For the next couple of years, Sarina continued to excel, but by the time she finished fifth grade, her standardized-test math score had dropped from the ninetieth percentile to the thirty-fifth. She was now telling us that she disliked math. We were concerned, not only because she had previously enjoyed the subject but because she would soon be attending middle school and we wanted to make sure she would be able to attend a good one. The standardized test she would take in the sixth grade, the ISEE, would be sent to all of the middle schools she’d be applying to.
Carla and I asked the parents of Sarina’s classmates what they were planning to do about preparing their kids for the ISEE. Most said that they were signing their kids up for private tutoring sessions from an agency that specializes in the exam.
I didn’t want Sarina to get tutoring for the test for three reasons. First, it cost $1,700 for ten lessons. Second, we would have to disclose the fact that she’d been tutored for the ISEE on her middle school applications. Third, and most important, I wanted to find out why Sarina was having difficulty with math, and I figured that the only way I could get to the bottom of it was by tutoring her myself.
When I told Carla that I wanted to teach Sarina math, she liked the idea. I was surprised, because Carla usually favors HAP (hire a pro) over DIY. I can’t really blame her, not with my track record of starting ambitious projects and not finishing them, or else doing them badly and not going back to fix them. I insisted on installing tiles on the kitchen floor of our first house in Boulder, Colorado, shortly after we’d gotten married in 1988. I must have done something wrong with the grout, because many of the tiles cracked in the first few days. Every time we walked into the kitchen, the broken tiles served as a reminder of my incompetence and slothfulness. They were still cracked when we moved three years later. (I wonder if the current owners fixed them or not. I doubt it, because the last time I drove by the house, in 2005, the mailbox that had fallen off its mount when we lived there was still sitting on the porch steps where I’d set it down almost twenty years earlier.)
Another time, in 2003, Carla wanted to change the color of some doors in our house in Los Angeles from white to red. She wanted to call a painter, but I told her that I’d be able to handle a small job like that myself. I’d remembered seeing some red paint in our garage, left there by the people who had lived in the house before us. She agreed to let me do it, but not without reservation.
“Don’t make it look bad,” she warned.
“Of course I won’t,” I said, hurt at the insinuation that I could screw up such a simple task. I spread newspapers on the floor, found a brush, and began painting. It didn’t take long to realize that something wasn’t quite right with the paint. It was going on in streaks, thin and shiny. I had been hoping for more of a flat, even look. After I gave both doors a coat, the can was just about empty. I planned to buy more in the next day or two so I could apply another coat—and hopefully get rid of the streaky look—but I never made it to the paint store. Fortunately, guests assumed the streaky paint job was an intentional bit of flair and complimented us on the artistic touch, so Carla wasn’t too upset. Even so, the lucky result did nothing to boost my reputation as a competent handyman.
With so many failed projects behind me, why did Carla so readily agree to let me tutor Sarina in math? After all, if I screwed up this project, the consequences might be far worse than cracked tiles. Our daughter’s future was at stake. I couldn’t risk letting that happen. And that’s precisely why Carla let me do it. She knew that my sense of parental responsibility was too strong to let me slack off.
Deep down, I also hoped that my recent more-or-less successful DIY efforts had shown her that I was on my way to becoming a handyman of my word.
I o
rdered a copy of the ISEE preparation handbook, which contained sample tests, resolving that Sarina and I would work for one hour each week, on Sunday morning, for the twelve weeks until it was time for her to take the test. Sarina didn’t complain about our plan—she wanted to get into a good school.
On the first Sunday, she and I went into the guesthouse and sat at my desk. I opened the book to the Quantitative Reasoning practice test, which had twelve questions. I told her I wanted her to take the practice test so we could find out which areas of math she needed to work on: algebra, fractions, decimals, percentages, or geometry.
“I’ll just sit in this chair over here while you work,” I said. “When you’re done, we’ll go over the answers together.” I gave her several sharpened number-two pencils and a photocopy of the sheet used to mark her answers. I picked up a magazine and started reading.
After a couple of minutes of silence, Sarina sobbed, “I can’t do this!” and threw her pencil on the desk. I jumped out of my chair and sat down next to her. She was stuck on the very first problem: 1. Of the 500 people responding to a local survey, 238 answered “yes,” 212 answered “no,” and the rest were undecided. What percent of the people were undecided? 47% 42% 10% 5%
I asked Sarina where she was getting stuck, and she wasn’t able to tell me. She couldn’t even get started. She was fighting back tears; this was a problem she felt she should know, because her class had been studying these types of word problems. As calmly as I could, I read the problem to her. Then I said, “After you read the question, you need to ask yourself what the missing information is, what the given information is, and how you can figure out the missing information from the given information. OK, what is the missing information?”
She didn’t have an answer. I couldn’t believe that her school hadn’t prepared her for answering a question like this. But I kept my anger in check and led her along with questions and suggestions, letting her try, haltingly and with little real comprehension, to go through the steps needed to solve the problem.
I knew it would be pointless to have her take the rest of the test on her own, so I stayed at her side and we worked on the next three questions together. It took an hour. She had a great deal of trouble with each question, and there were points where she’d get panicky. I was able to calm her down every time she got emotional. I’m not sure how much she learned about math in that first lesson, but I was sure she now had a better idea of how to approach a test question.
Later that day, when I thought about the time we’d spent together, I realized how much I had enjoyed it. It was not at all boring to tutor her; in fact, it was tremendously interesting. I liked the challenge of teaching my child. What could be more natural than that? It felt right. Forrest Mims was onto something, mentoring his kids with science-fair projects. For most of Sarina’s life, we’d farmed out the job of educating her. I’d never paid much attention to what she was learning, because I believed that paying someone else to take care of her education meant I didn’t have to worry about it. Not only was I wrong; I was also missing out on a rewarding way to spend time with my daughter.
We increased our tutoring sessions to twenty minutes daily. Working together on problems, we connected on a deep level. I enjoyed helping her develop her math skills, and she enjoyed showing me that she was learning. As the days went by I could see her gaining confidence. Sarina was able to distill the essence of the problems and come up with methodical ways to solve them. She was making real progress.
It struck me that the last six years had been a missed opportunity. I could have been helping to teach Sarina for all these years, but I’d avoided it because I didn’t think it would be interesting or useful. I started teaching math to my five-year-old, Jane, who had just entered kindergarten. Instead of telling her a bedtime story, I started giving her math problems. (“If you have six cherries and you want to share them with two of your friends so you all have the same number of cherries, how many cherries should you give to each friend?”) She loved these questions, and ever since I started, she has asked for math problems every night and even in the day. I also bought a bunch of little plastic cubes to teach the powers of ten and percentages, and she has gotten a good grasp of both concepts.
Tutoring my daughters reminded me of an e-mail exchange I had a number of years ago with my friend Andrew Anker. I met Andrew in 1993 when he came to work at Wired, where I was an editor. He wrote the business plan for HotWired, the magazine’s Web site, and became its CEO when it launched in April 1994. Andrew was a few years younger than me, with a sleepy expression, a couple of days’ beard growth, and a permanent case of bed head. Despite his appearance, he talked quickly and energetically, and once he got going on a subject, his face would light up. I was impressed by his intelligence and knowledge of the Web, which was barely in its infancy in 1993. Andrew was on top of every new development that came along and knew how to incorporate the good ones into HotWired in a way that felt absolutely right.
When we both left Wired in the late nineties, we stayed in touch through occasional e-mails. Around 2001, we got onto the topic of our kids and their education. His kids were older than mine, so I asked him what kind of school he was sending them to.
“They don’t go to school,” he replied.
“Do you homeschool them? ” I asked.
“No,” he wrote. “We let them teach themselves.”
I thought this was a little nutty, and I wrote it off as a quirk of an odd but brilliant person. But after having spent a little time teaching my own kids, I started wondering how Andrew had fared with his own, much more extreme home education project. I gave him and his wife, Renee, a call.
Today, the Ankers’ three kids are teenagers. The three have never attended a school, public or private. When Zach, the oldest, was still a baby, Andrew said that he and Renee were concerned with the way that schools were becoming “increasingly ugly, regimented places.” The Columbine massacre was in the news at the time, and schools were installing metal detectors and hiring security guards. More and more emphasis was being placed on standardization. Angry parents were demanding to know why their children’s test scores were dropping, and administrators were reacting by increasing homework loads and focusing on highly structured teaching with an emphasis on passing standardized tests, instead of teaching them skills that would help them lead rewarding, responsible lives.
The Ankers wanted no part of that world and began looking for alternatives. It just so happened that the San Francisco Bay Area, where they live, is a hotspot for so-called unschoolers. Andrew says unschooling is popular in the area because it’s full of high-tech entrepreneurs—driven, bright people who are creating online companies that develop and use cutting-edge technologies no school has taught because no school can keep up with the pace of the innovation. People like Andrew. When he was leading the team that started HotWired in 1993, there were no classes on how to build a commercial Web site. “We built it because we were untrained,” he said. “I am at my most creative when I do something I have no experience with.”
“Why don’t you want to at least homeschool them?” I asked.
“Homeschools are usually for religious parents who want to insulate their kids from secular teaching,” Andrew explained. “It’s the same as school but at home. Unschoolers don’t believe in schools. Most of what you learn in school is how to sit behind a desk and take homework.”
“Is it legal?” I asked.
“Apparently, it’s not really illegal,” he said, “but states and counties aren’t too happy about it.” Andrew and his wife make an attempt to stay on the right side of the law by submitting an R4 form to the state of California each year, declaring their house to be a school. Renee is the headmaster, and Andrew is the assistant headmaster.
The Ankers are not alone. Unschooling is a movement based on the ideas developed by an educational reformer named John Holt, who died in 1985. In 1981 he told a reporter, “It’s not that I feel that school is a good idea gone
wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It’s a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life.”
Pat Farenga, who is carrying on Holt’s work, defined unschooling as allowing children as much freedom to learn in the world as their parents can comfortably bear. The advantage of this method is that it doesn’t require you, the parent, to become someone else, i.e., a professional teacher pouring knowledge into child-vessels on a planned basis. Instead you live and learn together, pursuing questions and interests as they arise and using conventional schooling on an “on demand” basis, if at all. This is the way we learn before going to school and the way we learn when we leave school and enter the world of work.
The idea of unschooling isn’t to make your home more like a school. In fact, unschooling proponents say that parents should try to make their home even less like a school than it already is. Andrew agrees.
It sounded interesting, at least in theory, but I doubted it would work in practice. I told Andrew that I thought my kids would sit in front of the TV or the computer all day if I didn’t send them to school or teach them myself.
“Yes, that’ll happen,” he said. “It’s totally fine to let them watch TV for six months. My son would spend six months at a time watching TV, until he got bored. And he did get bored, eventually.”
Andrew admitted this was pretty scary while it was happening. “When we had a thirteen-year-old boy who didn’t want to do anything but watch TV, we couldn’t sleep at night. My wife and I would say to each other, ‘Are we fucking this up?’ ”
Zach didn’t show an interest in reading until he was ten and a half. But around that time, he was playing Super Mario 64 a lot and wanted to know what the characters were saying (their speech is written on the screen). When he asked his parents to read the words for him, they told him he had to figure it out on his own. Because Zach needed to know what they were saying in order to play the game, he taught himself to read.
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