Love in a Time of Homeschooling (24 page)

She liked it all, even though she realized that the “settlement” didn't capture the ambience of the real colony. Back in the early 1600s, Jamestown was a desperate, marshy place where the vast majority of colonists died of malaria and starvation. These well-fed reenactors, neatly shaven and freshly bathed, wearing straw hats and knee breeches and drawstring cotton shirts, couldn't re-create the anguish of their antecedents, some of whom had dug up dead bodies in order to eat them.

The written materials throughout the settlement acknowledged the grim truth: starvation and slavery and the gradual destruction of the Powhatan culture. Julia was too busy touching tobacco leaves and flintlocks to read the printed placards, but I found them enlightening—another lesson in all that a parent can learn while homeschooling. My childhood memories of Jamestown were limited to visions of Pocahontas saving John Smith's life, but nowhere, in film or painting or book, did the settlement teach that old story; too much doubt had been heaped upon John Smith's journals. I made a mental note to stop repeating the old legend to Rachel and Kathryn.

“Did you know that Pocahontas's real name was Matoaka?” I asked Julia. “Pocahontas was her nickname.” I didn't add that
Pocahontas
meant “little wanton”—a nickname some historians define as “frolicsome,” while others view it as an insulting term for a girl who liked to play games with strange boys from foreign lands.

“It says here that during her teenage years Pocahontas was taken captive by the English and held hostage.” I pointed at a placard. “They wanted to trade her for English prisoners and weapons and tools.”

“I can't believe you read all the little tablets,” Julia replied. “I just walk around and scan everything, but you stop to read the signs.”

“When I was a kid I didn't read them, either,” I explained. “But when you get older you slow down and get curious about the history. Besides,” I added, “these cards show me how much I don't know.”

I had embarked upon nine months of homeschooling with the innocent assumption that Julia and I would be reviewing a lot of the same history and science that I had encountered as a fifth-grader. That assumption was particularly naïve when it came to science. Our knowledge of the universe changes on a daily basis, and much of what Julia had learned in the fall about natural history—the Big Bang, tectonic plates, feathered dinosaurs—was undiscovered country when I was a child. Now, at Jamestown Settlement, I was reminded that history, too, constantly evolves. Narratives are transformed according to each teller's perspective, and are influenced by the ongoing discovery of new records and artifacts.

I realized on that day that if I were to homeschool beyond the elementary grades, I would feel enormous responsibility to learn more than I already know about science and history. At the fifth-grade level I already felt inadequate as a science teacher, knowing so little about chemistry and physics and the scientific method. At Jamestown, I saw that if I were to teach history to a middle-schooler, I would want a few weeks of advance reading on every subject we studied—just to uncover the latest facts, to find the best books to share, and to communicate the importance
of historians' methods, from proper documentation to the value of primary sources. One of the joys of homeschooling comes from how much parents and children discover together, but I can understand why some homeschoolers rely on the Calvert curriculum or the Charlotte Mason method, or any of several models available on the Internet that guide a parent year by year through all the ins and outs of math and history and science. For one year, Julia and I could wander free from prescriptive models, but as a long-term homeschooler, I would probably seek more guidance, just to avoid the worry that my knowledge was out-of-date.

Someday Julia might be similarly humbled by the obsolescence of her knowledge. On that April afternoon, she was concerned only with scraping out charred bits of a tree trunk that a Powhatan reenactor was carefully burning and carving into a canoe.

“Do you like this place?” I asked Julia as we prepared to leave.

“I like dressing up,” she replied, “and I like scraping deer hide with an oyster shell.”

As for me, I liked letting my child learn from other people who knew much more than me.

 

The next day Julia and I drove twenty miles to Colonial Williamsburg. Our family had visited the site twice in the past, walking the gravel lanes and watching horse-drawn carriages led by coachmen in knee breeches and triangular hats. On previous visits, however, we had always been the unticketed second-class citizens, barred from almost every interior, grasping at scraps of history as we glanced into the windows of the millinery and cobbler's shop. Now, in the name of homeschooling, I swallowed hard and paid sixty dollars for two tickets, which granted access to the entire town.

We began our day with a visit inside the Governor's Palace, where the tour guide earned her money by parrying Julia's constant questions. As usual, I resorted to whispering in my daughter's ear, “Let the other people speak. Be patient. Don't wave your hand so furiously.” Fortunately the tour guide was a matronly good sport who quickly took the situation in hand. She dubbed Julia her junior tour guide, which meant that the ten-year-old “guide” must wait for all the “guests” to ask their questions before she peppered her older “colleague” with inquiries. The tour guide kept Julia at her side, where she could prevent my curious child from touching the swords and armor on the walls. Steel blades seemed to have a magnetic attraction for Julia's fingertips.

At the end of the tour one woman approached me and said, smiling, “Don't worry about your daughter asking too many questions. I'm a schoolteacher, and it's wonderful to see a child who is interested enough to ask any questions at all.”

Of course she was right. My own tendency to be quiet and unobtrusive when clustered in a group of strangers didn't need to be imposed on Julia. Still, that teacher could not see the worrisome trend that my maternal eyes spotted in my child. During that tour, I once again noticed how Julia did not acknowledge herself as one among many. When the group moved from room to room, she initially tried to jostle her way to the front, as if this were a race she must win. She had no instinct for letting others go first, and no inclination to listen to strangers' questions. Call it childish self-absorption or something more clinical, Julia might as well have been enjoying her own private tour, she was so oblivious to the crowd.

I breathed easier when we stepped outside, where Julia could wander the boxwood maze in the Palace Gardens, or skip down Duke of Gloucester Road singing aloud. I bought her a penny-whistle in an outdoor market, and she walked the streets com
posing tunes on the spot, utterly unconcerned that no one else around us was playing a musical instrument.

Her chief delight was
The Revolutionary City
—an outdoor theatrical production consisting of more than thirty professional actors and amateur reenactors, who spread throughout a few cordoned-off blocks on Main Street. That afternoon's performance featured scenes a colonial citizen might have witnessed between 1774 and 1776, when America was on the brink of war. The production began as Julia and I sat in the grass outside the large brick Capitol; an actor playing Lord Dunmore, governor of Virginia, appeared on the balcony to announce that, in response to acts of rebellion in Boston, King George had dissolved the Virginia assembly. From there, Julia followed a procession of actors and tourists down the street, moving from scene to scene. Here was a loyalist daughter dressed in pink calico defending her father's political views and lamenting how all this revolutionary fervor was infringing on her social life. And here, gathered surreptitiously behind one house, a group of African slaves debated whether they should join the Continental Army and gain their freedom at the end of the war. Julia ran from building to building, listening to everyone, asking questions and joining in debates—precisely what the actors encouraged, although most of the onlookers were blasé adults like me, happy enough to watch, but not eager to play the game.

Looking back, I view that day as a great homeschooling pleasure, even though plenty of American families have enjoyed the same Williamsburg experience without ever having to dabble in home education. One might insist that Julia could have absorbed her colonial lessons on any well-planned family weekend; homeschooling wasn't necessary. In our family's case, however, that's not quite true. Had Julia's sisters been present, the event would likely have degenerated into arguing,
poking, and kicking. In less than two hours I would have been hurrying for the exit.

With Julia as my only charge, I managed to find a bench in the shade and settle down with a novel, frequently glancing up the street at my child, safe in the hands of other educators. Julia was happy, and we stayed all afternoon. That night we slept in a motel on the York River, with the tiny historic district of Yorktown at our backs, within a mile of the spot where the French Comte de Rochambeau helped to block the Chesapeake Bay so that a stranded Cornwallis, denied reinforcements, was compelled to surrender.

These days, if you ask Julia who Cornwallis was, she usually doesn't remember. She does recall, however, the jellyfish in the shallow York River, small and white translucent creatures pulsing up to the water's surface then sinking back down to the sandy bottom, trailing little fish in their tentacles. To Julia, the lessons of the landscape were more memorable than history lessons, and that was okay with me. When she revisited Cornwallis in high school, in the two years when all of her American history would be repeated, I hoped she would recall wading in the York River, peering into the cave where Cornwallis hid, and walking around the battlefield. Our field trip had given her a tangible reference for bringing to life the words in a textbook.

 

Arriving home from our mid-April travels, Julia and I had reached the final stretch of the school year, and once again we had to adjust our daily schedule. I was committed to teach a six-week intensive class at Washington and Lee called Reading Lolita in Lexington, based on Azar Nafisi's memoir,
Reading Lolita in Tehran
. Now I would be spending six hours each week discussing Nabokov, Fitzgerald, and Austen with twenty-five students,
while guiding them through the history of Iran and Islam, from Cyrus the Great to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Every second week would bring another stack of student papers.

“You're going to have to spend more time with Dad,” I explained to Julia. “I'll be home on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons you'll need to stay at VMI.”

Not a good plan, one might think, given John's busy schedule and the lure of the VMI weight room. But John's work always settled down by late April, with the cadets busy preparing for exams and mid-May graduation, and in recent months John had begun to show some promise as a homeschooler.

The previous fall, in the wake of Julia's aborted flute lessons, John had picked up some of the home-ed slack by assuming a new role: art teacher. He was much better suited to the task than I. After Julia's knitting lessons, I had assigned her various art projects; “Sculpt a velociraptor. Draw some Mayan hieroglyphs. Sketch a medieval knight according to the instructions in this how-to drawing book.” I had tried to think of projects that matched Julia's units in science and history, but in my artless ignorance, I could offer her no practical advice. “Looks good to me” was my constant refrain as I admired her sketches and clay creations.

My own artistic efforts had withered in the sixth grade, when a teacher presented my drawing to the class as an example of what
not
to do. She had told the class to draw her face, of which she was obviously proud, and although I had tried my best, at the end of the period she had held my paper up beside her aquiline nose and lamented: “This doesn't look anything like me!” Couldn't I see that her hair had a dark sheen far superior to the generic straw that I had sketched? After that I carefully avoided art for the rest of my school years, such is the power of one bad teacher.

John's encounters with art were consistently happy. He came from a family blessed with artistic genes, from his sister painting murals in her daughter's bedroom, to his great-grandfather painting murals inside Rockefeller Center. John preferred sculpting; he specialized in small, cartoonish clay figures—four-inch cadets in full regalia with sabers at their sides, or three-inch hockey goalies doing half-splits to block a puck. Two years ago, after teaching Julia to play chess, he had sculpted a set for her: dinosaurs confronting dragons. Gathered on one side stood pterodactyl knights, triceratops bishops, and his-and-her T. rexes serving as king and queen. Facing them were purple dragons perched on turreted castles, Chinese dragon knights holding emerald balls, and pawn hatchlings breaking through oval eggs. When I saw him paint the figures, I remember thinking: Does this child know how much she is loved?

Since November, John had been overseeing Julia's art projects, and in the process he had learned to appreciate all the art teachers from his past. “Now I know why those teachers always started with an apple or a glass,” he remarked one afternoon. “Julia and I started out trying to draw the front of Scott Shipp Hall” (one of VMI's castle-like buildings). “I was planning to do the whole thing, so I could show her how to draw shadows. But you know what? We spent an hour just drawing part of the roof.”

Art lessons gave John and Julia a wonderful chance for father-daughter time. “We'd do drawings together,” John recalled months later. “I'd do one and she'd do one. We drew faces, we drew each other, we tried to draw trees. Art was so much easier than music.”

This was a strange comment from a band director, but apart from reading and creative writing, art was the only activity Julia would happily pursue for hours, without constant oversight. While John met with cadets, Julia painted still life watercolors of fruit that he had arranged on his desk. While he conferred
with administrators, she built an Aztec temple out of sugar cubes, painting it gold with red drops spattered on the stairs. “Blood,” she explained. “They threw the bodies of their sacrificial victims down the temple steps.”