Love in a Time of Homeschooling (18 page)

If only it had been that simple. My daughter, I soon realized, protested about all structured schoolwork, whether it took place in a classroom or a kitchen. She might have been pleased with pure unschooling if freed to choose her daily direction, but that, from my perspective, was not an option. Math and spelling and science all had to be studied, regardless of a ten-year-old's habitual petulance.

“Glass half full,” I kept saying to Julia. “Glass half
full
.”

“Halfway isn't good enough,” she replied.

I began to wonder if my child had a genetic predisposition toward grumbling. This must be a matter of nature, not nurture, I told myself, because Rachel and Kathryn, born into the same household, the same model of parenting, and attending the same schools, did not share Julia's propensity to balk noisily at all schoolwork. In fact, my chief concern about Rachel was the excessive time she devoted to her homework. Far from complaining about it, she threw herself into her assignments with such high standards that in future years my efforts would be torn between trying to get her to lighten up and encouraging Julia to work harder. As for Kathryn, encountering the rituals of public school for the first time, including weekly homework, she didn't blink. When I mentioned that I never had homework in kindergarten, she found my comment a curiosity, but not a rallying cry. Only
Julia, keenly attuned to social injustice, saw the adult world as infringing way too much upon her childhood. Whether in the form of homeschooling or a traditional classroom, education and lamentation went hand in hand.

Her complaints reminded me of Julia's toddler years, when my pockets were full of pacifiers to soothe her screaming outrage. Now I was offering games and puzzles and outdoor science experiments as intellectual pacifiers with only moderate success, and on her most petulant days I could feel myself getting resentful.

Instead of protests, I think I would have liked a small measure of gratitude. That might sound selfish, but it would have been nice to have a teacher appreciation week in homeschooling—some recognition from Julia that Mom was spending a lot of time trying to make her education livelier and more fun, so maybe she should give the complaints a rest.

My only consolation came from other frazzled moms, similarly exasperated with their querulous children. “It's terrible,” one British mother explained, describing her son's behavior with a term that I liked: whinging. “I asked him just yesterday, when did you become such an incredible whinger?”

Fifth grade, a few mothers explained, was an especially trying time for girls—the beginning of their transition from childhood to adolescence. A few of Julia's classmates had started their periods; some looked like fourteen-year-olds, their bodies had developed so fully, so suddenly. Along with this physical development came a host of emotional struggles: eating disorders, debilitating self-criticism, obsession with popularity and fashion and dating. Sadly, the behaviors once associated with girls' teenage years now seem to be ensconced by the end of elementary school.

Julia displayed none of this preteen angst; she couldn't care less about clothes or boys or social ladders. I told myself that her
loathing for structured schoolwork was mild compared with the self-loathing that some of her peers were expressing. Still, that didn't take the edge out of her complaints, or mine.

Faced with growing frustrations, my first response was predictable—I got mad at my husband. This homeschooling, I told myself, might be less exhausting if John was more supportive.

John had been skeptical about the whole homeschooling concept, predicting that I was going to drive myself crazy. And rather than admit he might have been right (too much to ask of any wife), I started to focus on all the subtle ways he was contributing to my insanity.

At the beginning of the year he had willingly jumped aboard our homeschooling train once it started to leave the station. On Tuesdays and Thursdays from noon until three, John was ready to welcome Julia at his VMI office, for lunch and lessons in the flute and conversational French. In preparation, Julia and I had visited the French teacher at our local middle school and had purchased the same textbook she was using, noting how far the first-year French class usually advanced. We didn't expect Julia to maintain a middle-school pace; our town's sixth-graders study their language five days a week. But we hoped that John's fluency (from years of study and travel in France) would give Julia a solid start.

I was especially adamant about leaving Julia in her father's care, not only for the sake of my mental health, but also to thwart the idea that homeschooling is the sole territory of stay-at-home moms. Homeschooling is sometimes labeled as antifeminist—an enterprise that keeps women occupied at home, focused on their children and incapable of pursuing a career. This label has always bothered me, first, because homeschoolers are a diverse bunch of women and men, and second, because, in my mind, “feminism” is defined not by the voltage of one's career, but by the ability
to make choices—to choose to be a full-time doctor or a full-time mom, or something in between. In my case, I wanted to combine homeschooling with a part-time job, something plenty of homeschoolers, female and male, manage across our country. But flexible options are possible only when homeschooling moms and dads receive support from spouses and partners, grandparents and friends. If I wanted to blend homeschooling with professional work, that meant getting help from John.

He seemed willing enough when September rolled around. “Today was great!” Julia wrote in her journal after her first day with Dad. “I went to the library, and I even had Dad start to tutor me in French and flute. Which is great because I don't get to see him that often anymore.” John's typical schedule involved evening rehearsals three days a week, football or basketball games on weekends, and out-of-town trips every month. A three-hour block of time with her father was a special treat.

Unfortunately, after the first week, those three-hour blocks quickly dissolved into fifteen-minute chunks. It seemed that John's office was a bad setting for homeschooling (no surprise there, many working parents will affirm). With 150 band students, John often had cadets streaming in and out of the room. A thirty-minute flute lesson might suffer two or three interruptions, and with his telephone and computer beckoning, John spent as much time on email as on Julia's French.

Meanwhile, once the novelty wore off, Julia began to lose interest.

“When we started,” John explained, “it was all new and interesting, so she paid attention to me. In the first two weeks we'd spend an hour on French and an hour on the flute each day, and everything went well. But after that, she figured out that she could just blow me off.”

Like me, John assumed that if he got Julia started on an as
signment, she should be able to work independently for half an hour. Occasionally that worked; more often, when I came to pick her up at three o'clock, John would be off at a meeting while she was absorbed in computer games.

“What did you do with your dad today?” I'd ask.

“A little bit of French,” she'd reply, not looking up from the screen. “A little bit of music. Mostly we hung out at the weight room.”

The VMI weight room. Imagine a vast monument to sweaty testosterone, full of football players and warriors-in-training, working their abs and biceps and pecs while blasting songs from The Killers and Drowning Pool. That family-friendly space was destined to become Julia's alternate classroom, as John's need for daily exercise competed with her need for academic instruction. While Dad tried to break his latest bench press record, Julia went next door to the cardio room, full of treadmills and stationary bicycles and, most important, a TV hanging down from the ceiling. Julia had no qualms about monopolizing the remote control; John was often amused to walk in and find a room full of macho cadets watching the Powerpuff Girls—Bubbles, Blossom, and Buttercup—saving the world with their tiny, muscle-free physiques.

As the weeks passed and the weight room prevailed, I thought, “Okay. No problem.” Since John thrived on daily exercise, he could be Julia's PE teacher. In the coming months, they ran the steps at VMI's football stadium, jogged around the parade ground, and practiced sit-ups and push-ups. They tried a little racquetball, and John timed Julia running around the outdoor track. When it came to physical education, he had one clear objective: “All I have to do is get Julia sweating.”

This all sounded great to me, so long as John and Julia kept up with their other subjects. Sadly, that didn't happen.

One evening in October, John came home from a late jazz band rehearsal, dropped his keys and trumpet case on the hall table, and collapsed on the couch.

“Julia's stopping flute,” he announced.

“But you've only tried it for one month,” I protested.

“She isn't making progress.”

Julia, he explained, had learned the first few notes with ease, but when it came to “going over the break” (when all the lifted fingers must be placed back on the air holes at once, while pressing down an octave key), she'd hit a brick wall. It was hard. She got frustrated. She fell into tearful tantrums, which provoked dry-eyed tantrums from John. The two of them spent as much time arguing as playing.

“Anyway, she's not practicing,” he said.

“You've never practiced with her at home,” I responded.

“She should practice on her own.”

By then I was gritting my teeth, a habit I had developed after the birth of my children. My maternal frustrations are recorded on the whittled-down edge of my left incisor. “I've spent four days a week for the past four years,” I said, “getting Julia to practice her violin. You could spend one night a week working on the flute with her.”

John shook his head. “That's your thing, not mine.”

There we were, caught in an old family argument—the same argument that echoes in households across America, wherever parents debate whether a child should be required to practice a musical instrument.

John and I have very different perspectives on the matter. I come from a family where, at age seven, every child was signed up for one year of piano lessons, followed by several years of any instrument the child preferred. My mother viewed music as an essential part of a child's education, as relevant as science, his
tory, or math. Although my brother gave up his French horn after a few years, my sister is now an excellent cellist as well as a doctor. As for me, I earned money with my violin all through high school, playing at weddings and parties and pops concerts, and working as a strolling, gypsy-clad violinist in an Italian restaurant that my mother described as “whorehouse red.” These days I still perform with a small local symphony—the legacy of a mother who sat her children down and required them to practice.

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.”