Love in a Time of Homeschooling (10 page)

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 re
semble 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 and 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
.

S
CHOOL 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.

When we reached Waddell and pulled up in the drop-off line, my younger girls hopped out, with Rachel pausing to blow me a kiss before taking Kathryn's hand. The day before, I had walked Kathryn inside the building for “Meet the Teacher,” leading her to a classroom just beyond the front door. There we had found her name at a cluster of four desks: “Look! Kelly is sitting across from you!” Kathryn had arranged her notebooks and pencils, donated her glue and tissues to the class supply, and listened shyly while the
teacher showed her where to put her lunch bag, backpack, and coat each morning. Between the brightly painted walls and the teacher's friendly smile, Kathryn felt comfortable enough so that now, on her first day of kindergarten, she didn't need me to hold her hand. Her big sister was sufficient, and much more cool. Meanwhile, a teacher stood outside at our open car door and waited.

“Aren't you coming, Julia?”

“No,” Julia announced, glad to be asked. “I'm being homeschooled!”

The teacher glanced at me with surprise, and I nodded confirmation. Julia would not be coming to school this day or the next. Children within hearing distance turned to stare, and Julia waved, grinning out the back window as we pulled away.

She and I had agreed that if her sisters were going to attend school from 8:30 to 3:00 every day, she should follow a similar routine. No sleeping until ten—a luxury some homeschoolers enjoy. No finishing school by noon, even though much of our academic work could be compressed into less than four hours. For the sake of sibling equality, we would find activities to fill six and a half hours each day.

This didn't mean that Julia needed to ride in the car every morning. On most days she could linger in bed for an extra hour while Rachel and Kathryn dressed and ate. According to our agreement, by 8:45, when I got back from depositing her sisters, Julia had to be sitting at the kitchen table, dressed, fed, and ready to learn.

But this first morning was special. Julia had good reason to ride along in the car, apart from her desire to gloat at her school-bound peers. It was a Wednesday, and on Wednesday mornings the Lexington Coffee Shop opens its back room to any bluegrass musicians who feel inclined. The players range from intermediate to advanced; some perform in weekend bands, some play every blue moon. Some have names like Rooster and Burr, others
answer to Steve and Joe. A few arrive in professional clothes: the upscale real estate agent in his crisp shirt and silk tie who picks at a guitar for an hour before opening his office at ten; the campus minister whose frizzy gray ponytail hangs down the back of a tweed blazer. Most wear denim and flannel.

They trickle in between 8:15 and 8:45, lugging black instrument cases and pouring free cups of the house blend before negotiating a short, narrow hallway into the back room. There they join tunes in progress, with the group growing from duet to trio, quartet to quintet. When Julia and I stepped into the shop at 8:30 we could hear strains of “Old Joe Clark.”

Visitors to Lexington often ask for the nearest Starbucks, but they never seem disappointed by our home-grown alternative. The Lexington Coffee Shop, situated in a 150-year-old stretch of brick-front stores, has wood floors, a white ceiling molded like a frosted wedding cake, and peachy-salmon walls spattered antique-style that provide a gallery for local painters and photographers. Regular customers hang mugs on hooks near the counter, beside the muffins, pound cake, and scones made by a nearby baker. High on the walls behind the counter, chalkboards list flavors that range from the local (Blue Ridge Blend, Lexington Blend, Mrs. Hennis's Blend, named after Julia's beloved first-grade teacher) to the international (Ethiopia Harrar, Sumatra Mandheling, Tanzania Teaberry). Most are made from beans ground in a small warehouse outside of town, next to the drive-in theater.

For years, I had wanted to bring Julia to the coffee shop for a little bluegrass—to share with her the delight of starting the day with hot drinks and warm music. Julia had a wonderful ear for all types of music, but on Wednesday mornings she was usually at school, or sleeping late in the summer. Homeschooling was our chance to sample the local pleasures together.

On that first morning, Julia ordered hot chocolate, I bought
an orange juice, and in a back room barely twenty feet by twenty feet, we edged our drinks past a half-dozen musicians and settled at a small table near the elbow of Jay Mills, a man in his late thirties with auburn hair and a broad moustache. Jay leaned over a small round table and opened the clasps on what looked to be a leather briefcase. Inside lay more than a dozen harmonicas tucked into two columns of crushed velvet.

“Look, Julia.” I pointed. “Did you know that harmonicas come in different keys?”

Jay lifted one and it disappeared within his palms, cupped at his lips as if he were blowing on his fingers to warm them. Out came a chord like a train whistle, Jay's fingers flapping in a sideways wave goodbye.

“What instruments do you recognize?”

Julia noted the stand-up bass, the guitars, the harmonica, the violin (a fiddle in this context, I explained).

“But what is that round, twangy one?” she asked.

“That's a banjo.”

“And what is that small instrument hunched in the man's arms?”

“A mandolin.”

In Julia's mind these two words blurred, so that, over the next few weeks, she would sometimes say, “Look at the guy playing on his manjo.”

“Banjo,” I always replied, not mentioning that
manjo
sounded like an obscene Austin Powers euphemism.

On that first morning the group played “Rocky Top,” and Julia did what comes naturally to her: she sang along. No words, just a harmony of ooooos and aahhhs.

A few eyes glanced our way, and I did what comes naturally to me: I shushed my daughter.

“Sing quietly, Julia. Not so loud.”

My daughters are all spontaneous singers, as if life were one big musical, and I welcome their songs as expressions of joy—so long as they limit them to our car, our house, our walks in the woods. In public places I am a coward, determined not to disturb the peace. I tend to care about other people's opinions—although that inclination fades with age—and Rachel and Kathryn share my instincts, confining their melodies to private spaces. But in Julia's early years she was blessedly free of inhibitions. Throughout elementary school she was prone to sing and dance at public concerts, whether the music was classical, bluegrass, or jazz. As a young mother, I learned to take her to loud performances in venues with dark corners where she could dance to her heart's content, for Julia didn't dance with an adult's reserve. She spun, she jumped, she shook with exuberance, like a God-struck devotee at a tent revival. Rock concerts would have suited her well, but our small-town fare leaned toward string quartets and college musicals and John's band performances. Often, we listened to concerts from outside auditorium doors while Julia danced in the lobby.

At the coffee shop there was no room to dance. Listeners filled every table and barstool, some lined the wall, and Julia's singing dwindled as she dipped her lips into her whipped cream and chocolate flakes, emerging with a speckled moustache.

“Oops,” she murmured, spying the hot chocolate that had dribbled onto her shirt. She wiped at her lips and shirt with her palm.

“Use a
napkin
,” I said. Table manners would have to be added to the top of our curriculum.

In the meantime, I took out a small notebook.

“We spent two-fifty on your hot chocolate, one-twenty-five on my juice, and two dollars on that cranberry-walnut muffin. Can you calculate how much we spent?”

I passed the pencil and notebook to Julia, and she dutifully did the math.

“Now, tax is eight percent. Do you know how to translate eight percent into a decimal number?”

8.00?
she wrote, and pushed the notebook back to me.

“Good guess, try again.”

.8?

“No. Think about the word
percent
, how it has the word
cents
in there. How do you write eight cents as a decimal?”

.08?

“Right.”

Eight percent tax, I explained, means that you have to pay eight pennies to the government for every dollar you spend.

“So how much tax did we just pay for our drinks and muffin?” I asked. Julia multiplied the bill by .08.

“That's right, good job,” I nodded. Julia added the result into the total charge, and I showed her that it matched the number on the receipt.

On that first day I had elaborate visions of practical math lessons that could take place throughout our town. At the grocery store, Julia could carry a pocket notebook and pencil and estimate how much money we were spending. She could weigh fruit and vegetables to fulfill Virginia's SOL measurement requirements, and practice multiplication: If we buy three pounds of bananas at fifty-nine cents per pound, what's the total price?

I hoped to show her that our everyday lives are filled with arithmetic. If regular gas costs $2.92 per gallon, and we buy 15 gallons, how much will we pay? How much more will it cost if we buy the premium gas for $3.12? (We never do.)

Home improvements could provide lessons in geometry: “If we want to cover this
L
-shaped porch in green tile, how do we calculate the area of the space? And how many pieces of six-by-six tile will we need?” Menus might be more interesting than math worksheets: “Julia, how much will both of our lunches
cost? If we tip the waitress eighteen percent, what does that come to? And what about the tax? Why do you think the tax at a restaurant is more than the tax at a grocery store?”

Oh, how naïve I was on that inaugural morning. I thought that Julia would appreciate these calculations, that they might be a kind of game, as well as a useful lesson in how quickly the daily expenses of life add up. But our first math lesson at the coffee shop offered a sign of things to come. Although Julia was willing to calculate our total for that day, when I gave her another problem, with hypothetical numbers (“What if we had ordered two coffees and a blueberry scone?”), she rolled her eyes.

“Can't I just enjoy the music, Mom?”

Good for her, you might say. Here was a child who knew what she wanted: to learn through sensory experience, to see and smell and touch and taste the world, and not be asked to add decimals when she could be watching a fiddler's bow. Which is all well and good, but it doesn't get you far when it comes to mastering long division. Practical math would require that Julia calculate more than one problem in an hour. Julia, however, clearly felt that the coffee shop was not a setting for math. As she put it: “Nothing ruins a good time like math equations.”

Part of our challenge lay in the matter of de-schooling. Children from public schools are often locked into the belief that “education” happens at a desk, slumped over a textbook. It can take months of deprogramming for new homeschoolers to break their institutionalized habits—to open their minds to all the math and science and history lessons unfolding in the community around them, and be willing to spend time doing “schoolwork” outside a classroom setting.

Had I been more clever, I might have presented practical math to Julia in the form of a written contract: no math lessons at home on Wednesdays and Fridays so long as you agree to do a dozen
math problems during our errands outside the house. Julia, a child enamored with making deals, who has a strong belief in justice and the sanctity of promises, would probably have signed on the dotted line. Then I could have waved the contract whenever she balked at calculating the fines on our overdue library books. Perhaps this would have worked, perhaps not. Homeschooling is a matter of constant experimentation.

When I saw that Julia resisted doing math problems at the coffee shop, I changed tack.

“Want to play cards?” Gin rummy could offer a brief lesson in arithmetic.

While Jay sang “Mustang Sally,” taking a break from the bluegrass mode, Julia added up trios of kings and queens, threes and sevens, multiplying by fives and tens. Thus began a ritual that she and I would maintain on most Wednesday mornings for the rest of the year: listening to live music while playing cards, checkers, backgammon, dominoes, or mancala, all provided on the coffee shop's game table. Occasionally Julia would calculate three or four math equations. More often, I settled for the logic lessons that come from playing chess. As the weeks went by and Julia learned some basic French, we would also begin to converse in tiny foreign fragments:

 

“Tu as soif?”

“Oui, Maman.”

“Qu'est-ce que tu veux boire?”

 

On that first morning, we left the coffee shop after forty-five minutes and drove less than a mile to the Virginia Military Institute. A drive through VMI's Post (what we civilians would call a “campus”) provides an education in itself. Founded in 1837 as a kind of Southern West Point, VMI was the last all-
male military college in the United States up until 1997, when it admitted women grudgingly in obedience to a Supreme Court ruling. VMI argued that women weren't suited to the school's “adversative method” for training freshmen, a system that was on display as Julia and I drove by. Cadets were clustered on the parade ground, sophomore cadre members in black T-shirts, camouflage pants, and army boots, barking into the faces of freshman “rats” with shaved heads. (Cadre members sometimes get so close that the rats' faces are showered with spit.) Graduates explain that VMI's program instills discipline and camaraderie, but in John's darkest moments he just shrugs and says, “VMI—where fun goes to die.”