Love in a Time of Homeschooling (6 page)

But serving as a homework coach is an exhausting job, and Julia and I butted heads every time she dragged her feet. I didn't enjoy ushering the clouds into so many of her afternoons, bringing out the books and pencils and calling her in from the creek. I feared that her hatred of homework would soon morph into a hatred of me. And then came the closet incident, which threw me into days of worried reflection. We had reached the breaking point, and something had to change.

T
HAT'S WHEN THE HOMESCHOOLING BUG FIRST FLARED
within me. After puzzling over the trajectory of my daughter's education, I knew we had to try something different.

I had always thought of homeschooling as a drastic measure. Homeschooling was for Mormons, for Bible-thumping Baptists, for children with disabilities, mental or physical, and for families who live off the grid, with solar heat and composting toilets. Homeschooling was a little bit weird. But in the chameleonic world of modern parenthood, we mothers must constantly change colors to meet our children's needs. We become accomplished fund-raisers when our preschools need a fruit sale chair; we take up the violin when the Suzuki method calls for parent-child lessons. And when my daughter decided that she would rather hide in a closet than complete her homework, I knew that it was time for me to become a schoolteacher, if only for a little while.

On one level, my motives were entirely selfish. Sure, I wanted to help my child, but I also wanted to save myself from the tortures of our evening homework routine. After dinner, whenever I longed to relax and read or watch a movie, I was stuck at the kitchen table encouraging Julia to make a map of Virginia out of lentils and pinto beans. Homeschooling looked heavenly by comparison. If Julia were homeschooled, I could be off duty by three o'clock.

There was also the matter of my intellectual standards. If I was going to be spending a couple of hours each day on my daughter's schoolwork—supervising, cheering, and prodding—at least let it be on assignments I valued. Not this spelling busywork, this fill-in-the-blank history. Not this state-mandated world of multiple choice. If Julia were homeschooled, she could be writing essays, gathering evidence, forming conclusions, and reading constantly.

As I sat there at our dining room table night after night watching my daughter slog through another column of multiplication, I recalled the first time I had ever heard of homeschooling. It was way back in August of 1983, when I was up late watching
The Tonight Show
, with Johnny Carson. Johnny had a special guest from California, a young man who was going off to Harvard in the fall without ever having completed a year of school. His story caught my attention because I was a Harvard student as well, preparing for my sophomore year.

The incoming freshman was named Grant Colfax, and he had grown up on a remote forty-acre homestead in Northern California. Much of his education had been hands-on, helping his parents to clear land and build a farm. He had learned biology while raising animals, geometry while constructing a house, and his discovery of Indian ruins on the family property had inspired him to study North American archaeology.

Years later, Grant Colfax's name would become legendary in the homeschooling world when his parents, David and Micki, wrote a book called
Homeschooling for Excellence
. By the time of the book's publication, the Colfaxes had three sons at Harvard, and their brief manifesto provided inspiration to tens of thousands of Americans who believed that if they, too, took their children's educations in hand, their kids might end up in the Ivy League.

Back in 1983, the first thing that struck me about the televised Grant Colfax was his handsome face. (I was nineteen, after all.) My second impression was that he seemed so
normal
—articulate and easy-going. Grant and I would eventually wind up living in the same house at Harvard—“house” meaning a cluster of brick buildings that housed and fed more than four hundred students. We never had a conversation; I would pass him on the Radcliffe Quad, nod hello, and think to myself, “There's that guy who never went to school.” Each time, I felt the same emotion that I had experienced watching him on
The Tonight Show
: a mixture of curiosity and envy.

College had opened my eyes to enormous vistas of learning, and I was appalled at how much time had been wasted in my public school years doodling in the margins of dull workbooks. Grant Colfax, I told myself, didn't spend a semester in Consumer Education, learning to balance a checkbook. He didn't suffer through Sex Education and Drug Education and the moronic swamp of multiple choice.

In truth, I knew nothing, then or now, of the real Grant Colfax, but I liked to imagine his education as an Emersonian experiment: immersed by day in the “discipline of nature” and surrounded at night by a pile of books. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his 1837 Phi Beta Kappa address,
The American Scholar
, said that the ideal student should concentrate on three things: nature,
to learn of God's present creation; books, to understand the past and human history; and activity, the sort that the Colfax boys enjoyed on a daily basis (building sheds, tending sheep, fixing plumbing and electrical wiring).

Twenty-two years later, as I called Julia away from her pleasure reading to do yet another science worksheet, I thought of Grant Colfax and how he never had homework. Instead, he had a life in which he learned by doing. I also thought of my childhood and how the most important part of my education had not come from the public schools. It had come from my mother, an educator in the finest sense.

Born in New York City in the 1930s, my mom was a child of German immigrants too poor to treat their children to much more than books from the public library and free opera performances in Central Park. Four years at Manhattan's Hunter High had led her to Hunter College and advanced degrees from Yale and the University of Washington. Married at age thirty, she had three children in four years, and raised us while working on her Ph.D. When her study group met in our dining room, we children sat under the table maneuvering our toys around the graduate students' feet.

My mother filled our house with classical music, and insisted that all her children play instruments. Because she and my father loved the outdoors, we spent more family vacations in tents than hotels. When my father died at forty-two, my mom (by then a full-time political science professor) continued our education on weekends, taking us to museums, parks, and tennis lessons. She included us on trips to Europe with groups of college students, and when I showed an interest in creative writing, she introduced me to poetry readings: Gwendolyn Brooks and Czeslaw Milosz.

As I thought back on my mom, it occurred to me that all good parents are homeschoolers. Homeschooling is what happens
when families turn off their TVs, cell phones, and iPods. It occurs in long, thoughtful conversations at the dinner table, as well as at baseball games and ballet recitals, and in the planting of a vegetable garden. Parents who enrich their children's lives with art and sports and multiple trips to the library provide the backbone of American education. Unfortunately, in our busy lives, parents and children have less and less time for hours of thoughtful interaction, which is one reason why homeschooling has been on the rise. Homeschooling provides families with the quality time that used to occur after school.

Now I began to look at the homeschooling moms around me with a new respect. Maybe they weren't so strange after all. Maybe they weren't overly religious, overly liberal, or overly mothering. Maybe they knew something that I didn't know.

My work as a part-time English professor at Washington and Lee had always left me free to accept or decline courses in any given semester, so I started to consider how I might fit some homeschooling into my schedule. For one year, I told myself, I could teach a minimal load. For one year I could concentrate on fifth-grade mathematics instead of Jane Austen. I could give Julia a break from her homework burnout; a year of intensive writing and one-on-one math tutorials might provide her with a leg up before the sixth grade. Our local middle school was supposed to be very good, and the change in scenery and schedule would hopefully motivate Julia once she reached that school. But for the fifth grade, she might enjoy something totally different.

The idea of taking a one-year hiatus appealed to my academic mind, steeped as I was in the culture of sabbaticals. Julia was approaching her sixth year at Waddell—the sabbatical year at most colleges. Why shouldn't she take time off to try her own line of study? Why shouldn't kids have sabbaticals, too?

Many committed homeschoolers will cringe at the idea of a
one-year experiment. Studies show that the academic benefits of homeschooling (higher test scores and college admission rates) emerge only after several years of work. And the emotional benefits that many homeschoolers cite—enthusiasm for lifetime learning, strengthened family ties—develop slowly over many years.

Still, long-term homeschooling held no allure for me. I wanted plenty of time for my own teaching and writing and solitude. One year was the limit of my excitement.

At the time, a year of homeschooling seemed like an original, even radical idea. How many mothers took their children out of school for one grade to give them an individually tailored education?

As it turns out, plenty. The more I looked into it, the more I discovered that short-term homeschooling is a growing trend in America, for a vast array of reasons. Some parents have academic motives: they want to expose their kids to ideas and experiences beyond the usual curriculum, but they don't have the time or desire to pull their children from traditional schools permanently. Other families fall into temporary homeschooling unexpectedly, as the result of sudden crises; Hurricane Katrina made homeschoolers out of many reluctant moms and dads. Severe bullying can also drive parents to homeschool for the short term. In our town, I met one mother who withdrew her daughter midyear from the seventh grade when the preteen nastiness of the middle-school girls became too painful. “She was up at midnight crying,” the woman explained. One semester sufficed to steer that child past the social tempest, and she was a happy eighth-grader the following year. Another mom explained that she removed her daughter from middle school in South Carolina when the girl came home with choking marks on her neck. That child was
scheduled to return to the public system once ninth grade began, with hopes that her high school would be better policed.

When parents become teachers in response to short-term crises,
Home Education Magazine
calls it “emergency homeschooling.” For Julia and me, however, there was no emergency. Julia's stint in the closet was a wake-up call, not a crisis. It was the proverbial straw that broke my back, providing just enough of a jolt to force me into action.

A few weeks after the incident, I presented Julia with the words that had been running through my mind.

“Would you like to try a year of homeschooling?”

She looked up from her copy of
Dragons of Deltora
. “What does that mean?”

“It means you wouldn't go to Waddell for the fifth grade. I'd be your teacher.” Julia crinkled her nose. Apparently the vision of Mom as her teacher was not a strong selling point. “You'd get to study things that interest you,” I added, “not just the usual school stuff. And we could plan lots of field trips, to Washington and Williamsburg, and all around town.”

“I dunno.” Julia shrugged and returned to her book.

I stood there mutely embarrassed, amazed at her lack of enthusiasm. I had thought she would jump at the chance, embracing me as the best mom ever. In my eyes, Julia was a caged bird, and I was opening the door, offering her the sky, the clouds, the freedom to let her mind soar. But like so many imprisoned creatures, when the cage door opened, Julia remained perched in the back, wary and bored.

“Don't you think homeschooling might be fun?” I prodded.

She sighed. “How is it any better than what I've got right now?”

“You wouldn't have the usual homework. The only home
work I'd require is that you read for an hour every day and write one page in a journal.”

“Write about what?” I had caught my daughter's attention, and I could sense her inching toward the door of her cage.

“Whatever you want.”

Those were the magic words. “I like that.” Julia smiled. “That sounds good.”

“Think about it for a while,” I said. “It's a serious decision. Think about what you'd miss at school, and what you'd gain at home. We don't have to make any commitment yet.” Nevertheless, it was clear from that point forward that Julia and I were harboring a special secret. We were contemplating playing hooky for a year.

A few days later, standing at the edge of the Waddell playground, watching children slide and climb and swing in the last few minutes before the final bell, I approached my friend Ruth. Ruth is a woman of sturdy good sense, with children roughly the same age as mine.

When she asked, “What's up with you?” I replied, “I'm thinking about homeschooling Julia for the fifth grade.”

She didn't express surprise or ask a single question. Instead, she looked me straight in the eye and said, “You're crazy.”

Ruth is famous for being blunt, but “crazy” seemed harsh. While I spluttered some self-defensive nonsense, she shrugged in a “choose your own poison” gesture. “No way I'd ever do that.”

No way Ruth ever could, since she works as a full-time lawyer. But she wasn't talking about her job; she was referring to her temperament. Ruth is a high-energy, career-oriented, contemporary woman. Staying home with a child day after day, reviewing multiplication tables and rules of grammar, would be her idea of hell. Or at least Purgatory. Obviously, she was not the best audience for trying out my fledgling idea.

Smoothing my slightly ruffled feathers, I collected my girls and drove home, hoping for a better response from John. His cooperation would be crucial in the coming year, not only for moral support, but because I wanted him to teach Julia flute lessons and French on the two afternoons each week when I would be busy at Washington and Lee.

That evening I waited until he was relaxed and well fed, lounging at the computer, before I mentioned the idea casually from my armchair across the room.