This is what homeschool is up to; this & the history of Islam in Central Asia. Homeschool heats up in spring!
The Caucasus was one of the cultural features at Folk Life Festival two years ago, so the whole mountain region of rebels and holdouts and people minding their own goddamn business was very "oh, yeah, that" for the kids. But it was news to a lot of people. Oh, people! You!
But, honestly, I think making flower crowns are just as important as anything else 12-year-old girl could be doing with her time. It isn't even about the crowns, really, or the product at all, it is about her generating the idea, researching by which method such a thing can happen, and then executing. Those are skills which are important to develop, which I am sure children develop by different methods in a facility-schooling environment, but in this case, the learning of all the steps along the way from Idea -->Execution were generated by her own self and, as such, we can presume they were more deeply felt.
Then we also have time for grammar, chemistry, literary analysis, a foreign language two should have grown up speaking all this time (shhh), two musical instruments, and the seeing of where current events take us all along the world's history timeline. Plus, dance! Fencing! Lying around in the sun, reading! Repairing bikes! Selling things! Plying trades! Museums! Dance theatre! Endless travel!
Aaand, they grit their teeth and accept the algebra imposed upon them. I have not convinced them yet that algebra is fun, but sometimes it is my favorite part of the day. Wait till geometry! Exciting!
Remember these two?
We were hoofing it to a destination the other day & after about a mile, I saw their hands twine. More proof they are little again!
People (by which I mean strangers), have taken to asking us with a lot of intensity lately, Will you be homeschooling them for high school? Do you know that what I truly wish to say is, None of your fucking business, but since you bring it up: How old will your kid be before anyone teaches [it] to look a grownup in the eye and return a greeting, do you think?
But instead, I just look amiably over their right shoulders while I nod distractedly & make an affirmative mouth noise.
Sometimes, this conversation goes on! It could advance! Unbelievable! The [stranger] will say something like, What will you do if they say they wish to go to high school?
Usually, I get a little aggressive right here.
Mari & I have worked hard with the children to create an ... aristocratic lifestyle that even they recognize is incompatible with the daily grind of high school.
I mean, I would never generate that on my own, but when someone fucking brings it up, sure. It falls under the rubric of Well, you asked.
There was one ballet mom last week who wanted to know if they had ever been in a classroom situation, one where they were expected to take something away from it, something didactic. And I thought about it ... I felt sure there must be a workshop or something on their CV I'd forgotten & then I said, yk, No.
She kept talking about this! What? She wanted to know if the kids wanted to go to college, would they be able to perform in that environment? I felt like a. That is years from now and who the fuck knows? and b. Get out your crystal ball for your own fucking kid, who whines in public at 12 years old, why don't you?
I gave her my standard rejoinder which was, "I don't think more of the classroom paradigm just because someone calls it college." The other ballet moms could scarcely conceal their shock. I helpfully offered that having said that, the fact is that the time for homeschooled kids to try out college is during the high-school years, what since they are free of the daily grind and all. I mean, we are not homeschooling to do all the things the other kids are doing. We opted out of that paradigm when we decided to keep our kids home from school in the first place. Honestly, read a book already.
I mean ... I feel like I have a lot to say about college, mostly that it is too bad that the teen years have a laser-like focus on getting into a good one. Like it is a destination, instead of a resource. Mari & I both feel like there might be things the children want to do, or to learn about, and to do that, they might need to turn their attentions toward the institution known as college. Or, they might just need an HVAC certification. These next few years are for them to figure that out. I want them to have the time to cast a wide net, to investigate things which are interesting to them, to lead me on wild goose chases to help them find people who will answer their questions.
I certainly don't feel like success in college is about classroom training, or mastering note-taking (which both of my kids have, actually, since they have inherited processing-by-penmanship from two parents), or whatever. Those are all skills that can be taught in a summer, if needed.
Where I feel like I have seen and heard about students falling apart in college is: can't keep up with the reading; can't handle independent work; can't balance newfound social demands and liberty with their scholastic demands; can not do laundry/purvey/self-care/problem-solving/troubleshooting all on their own (with all the other things).
There is just a long list of things that are in conflict with mastery of adulthood, which is my whole long game here at this house, with these two. To paraphrase Jay Z, I am fly and I am not fucking playing. Does anyone think I kept my kids at home so I could treat them like babies? Did no one take care of a baby, ever? They are fucking unbearable! Grow those kids!
The other ballet thing that happened, which is relevant, if you see, was that one girl told her mom that I made Fille go to the laundromat. The mom was dying to know what this meant, because her child has no knowledge of any domestic parlance and must be dead-wrong.
"No," I said. "That's what happened. I told the children that if they did not start taking their laundry out of the dryer & putting it away, they would lose their in-home laundry privileges. She had a week's worth of clean clothes on top of the dryer, so I dropped her at the laundromat by the [supermarket] for a week."
Everyone stopped everything to gape. I shrugged. "I didn't make her pay for it."
The mother who had asked was basically using every word she could put next to any other word to ask OMG, were there poors there?? without using those actual words. Fuck all these Ballet Town bitches, honestly.
We just had a spate of performance things they were electing to do, which I was trying to stay out of because I knew it would be awkward and full of the college-bound-by-proxy parent crowd. Then on top of it, we had a general introduction/orientation parent-meeting for (the kind-of selective filmmaking internship for which Garçon applied & was just chosen), which was a lot more of this heavy-management parenting. And the whole time, at all the things, people are getting into each others' faces, wanting to exchange tips & tricks about How To Make Them Successful Because OMG College. Mari & I were totally useless to these people. Like, because we hire people to do that. I drive & we both sign checks.
Mari confided in one of the instructors in their piano facility -- while I was pretending to step out and take a phone call, I was so tired of talking to these high-stress people -- "When there is any chance the kids have to perform or play or compete or [whatever], Elle's first question is Oh, well, do you want to do that? Her next question is, Do you want us to come to it?"
I was thinking, between the people here & the people there and for God's sake, all the people, I was remembering what I was thinking when I was reading Eliz Wurtzel's essay a few months ago. I thought it is too bad that she eschewed these next chapters as laid out for us in The Second Sex. I forget the actual libretto of Wurtzel's positions, but I remember thinking when I read it, yk, she derides all this marriage & motherhood stuff because she obviously never considered she could be an alienating, overthinking, pain-in-the-ass on a whole new terrain. Lean in, already.
OMG, then closer to home are these homeschooling families who used to seem totally normal to me, until they revealed themselves to be wackos! You know, I used to think that the greatest obstruction to a transformative pedagogy in home-education is what Mari & Charlie & I refer to as the Human Anatomy: Dust + God's Breath crowd. (Read it aloud.) I was wrong. And these people have been under my nose the whole time!
I kind of knew it, a little, when last year I was talking to one of these homeschooling-dad characters about the troubles of getting a 12-year-old son to willingly calculate area & perimeter. Like, it was just a thing, yk, and I was tired of wrestling with the thing & it is hard for me to balance carrot & stick and Garçon doesn't care about sticks and he really doesn't care about the carrot because he sees where are you are trying to manipulate and it is just hard.
It is better now, with him. You know, 11-13, academically, is a transition period where children have to step up to the next phase, developmentally, in the ways of processing and analysis -- like, all the things they learned before were the just the infrastructure, and then it is time to put up sheetrock. But he didn't want to, nor roof, nor frame out windows and doors. He wanted to roll out carpeting! Paint! Wallpaper! Sconces! It was intensely frustrating, as we can easily recall, for everyone.
None of that is the point. The point is that when I told the dad this, he said, "Well, you know, I was reading that because we can actually have computers calculate all of this information for us, there is really no need for math beyond the [simple operations]. We really need people who have human skills computers can't do. Unless you are going to, like, be a mathematician or something like that."
Ok, so let's just parse that sentence & get into all of my issues.
- I tend toward a kind of lightness where I don't really probe anything anyone says that sounds stupid, mostly because I just want to go along with surface people & that's fine. With friends, I am so interested to have them lay it on me, but everyone can't matter. Before he said that to me, I had actually zero reason to think he was a kook. Because of this new information, I did not change my position in a judgment. I only thought to myself, "Ok, that's weird. Maybe there is a pedagogy that eschews math beyond the four operations! I haven't seen it, so I don't know what to say about that! OK!"
- At the same time, banging around in my head was this very relevant question: How is a child -- a child, ok, and a child you are supposed to be teaching because you signed on for it -- supposed to know they might like to pursue a career as a mathematician if you do not expose them the higher-language functions of math ever?
- But, ok, you know, it could be part of a well-reasoned, time-proven successful pedagogical paradigm. Or even just a slim volume, reviewed in Utne! A magazine article! And if it works for them, A-OK. Sandra Dodd is as goofy to me as Charlotte Mason. I think it is silly to teach a child from the Flying Creatures of the 5th Day zoology text, but good for you, and your child will not be hindered in their application to Bob Jones University. So maybe there is a larger way to resolve that question! E-Z! Sois sage!
- The lingering problem with this idea, for me, which I discussed endlessly with Mari & many of you, was this: I don't think Fille & Garçon need to be aces at, say, figuring for perimeter or area, forever & ever, amen. I do think they need to know that there is a way to quantify this information, so that if ever in their life they need to do that (buying paint! carpeting! fertilizer! converting gallons to cubic feet!), they will know there exists a formula & then they can look up the details somewhere. Good enough!
But mostly, I left the interaction feeling like, yk, this must be a paradigm I don't know. Because you can't know all the paradigms, not even for fun. Plus, you can only work one, usually. It's kind of like the Get Into A Good College paradigm at ballet -- stressing your family out about a good preschool and a good elementary school & a good middle school & forking over the money for tutors + test-taking workshops + the just-right extra-curriculars + volunteering + etc, etc, that will probably work & Get Into A Good College.
I know I just wrote this, but we left that particular paradigm behind when we chose against sending our kids to school. In Fille's case, she has never been to school, not one minute of her life, not if you do not count ballet or her private instructions, which people do not. Garçon has not been to school in ages & did not give a fuck about any of it when he was there. But that does not mean they are not educated. I am not even talking about the foofy kind of "We learned fractions from baking cupcakes!" horseshittery; I mean they have things they have learned and they know how to apply those things to other things.
I have told them that there are things they have to take on & complete & master because not doing such could limit them from doing something they do not even know about right now. I mentioned to them both just recently an interview I'd read with Emma Stone in the Spider-Man publicity, how she quit school at about 14 to be an actress, but she was regretful, a little. She talked about being on the OsCorp set & feeling wistful she was not more well-educated in a book-sense. I remember the quote, "I can learn! Let me try!"
I would never keep them from putting their scholastic work on the back-burner to pursue anything consuming like work in Hollywood, but I do try to convey a sense of education being more of a beeline and less of a zipline. It's fine to loop & swirl, but there are sometimes limits.
Fifille already knows this; she has felt it deeply, like the tasking & execution of flower crowns. Two years ago, all of her little friends, from all of these disparate circles, were all going to the same middle school, suddenly. They were all going to eat lunch & see each other in the bathroom! She wanted to go & expressed this wish to me. I told her she couldn't go and also do ballet, it just wasn't possible. Also, frankly, she was so behind in math she would never pass the test to get in.
The reason she was so behind in math is because I can't do the work for them. She was behind by a whole grade-level, because of willfulness and recalcitrance and dawdling. I wasn't all over her, because she was still working steadily, and would catch up some day, but she was behind.
OH, she was crushed. She was ashamed. She was sad. I was not too sympathetic, since she was in this fix because she didn't even do what she was told. (Honestly.) I counseled her & told her to cling to what is good: To learn there are things you might want which you can fuck up because you don't even know about them yet is a good lesson to learn; to learn it about something dull & totally I'm-so-10 like middle school is good, because now she has her whole life to live with this lesson already learned.
The thing that I least want to happen, homeschool-wise, is that the children come to us 5 or 8 or 10 years from now & say, Why did you never tell/teach/show me about [whatever]? They are interested in a lot of things, like probably all the children, but these two have a lot of time to pursue any of the things. There are times, lots of times, where I have to find a person who can tell me more because I don't have any idea. This happens with ballet all the time, this happens with all this filmmaking/content-generation/animation my son is into, I am accustomed to stopping strangers talking in a supermarket -- Pardon me, I heard you say [whatever] ... I have a son who is [whatever and/or redacted] and I wonder if you have any ideas for a place to start. (Give me a push!)
I am always looking around and also encouraging them to get out there to keep their eyes open, for so very many things that will give them a jump-start to get what they feel like they are going to need. So there is no fucking way in hell that together, Mari & I are going to not take them down a path as prosaic and well-worn to us as freaking STEM education, or writing, or literary analysis. God.
I had to put a fire in the stove last night. Brrr!
Man, I'm so fussy! Where was I? OH, right so, the homeschool people by us who are not the Dust & God's Breath crowd, but seemed normal until they didn't. This was the group we were kind of tangentially interfacing with during the play the kids did a couple of years ago. But then, the next year came & the next play was being set up & it just seemed too-too managed. Like, these kids are really big now -- if they want to put on a play, they need to put on a play. Stop treating them like little babies, or puppets. I don't understand a homeschool where one does not avail themselves of the luxury of time to turn things over to them entirely, and particularly elective activities. That plus also homeschools where one does not teach math beyond the four operations. I mean, what?
Earlier this year, like just last month, I was included in a massive email from this crowd, looking to crowdsource How to Stem the Tide of Homeschooled Teens to High School. Like, evidently, this is a thing, and I wasn't surprised to hear it because of all the Neighborhood Facility-School People (and, again, by people, I mean strangers) with synchro-kids who wanted to know if Garçon was going to high school & then when I said no, they wanted to give me chapter & verse & marketing extemporaneity on the high schools their kids are choosing. And I was like, yk, "That's nice. Hey, what did you have for lunch?"
The email went around a lot of volleys and I did not read it for a long time because too many words in my inbox are too many words. I just presumed, as people seem to presume, that the kids going to high school had parents who were ready to resume the steady course of Get Into A Good College. I mean, children who are homeschooled do get into college. Usually, it's because they want to go to college & they aren't just marking the next thing on the list & the admissions people like to accept the kids who want to be there. At the same time, the timekeeping & navigation of all those different byways and short-courses and pontoon planes and rope-swinging to get there, without the tour-bus of high school probably requires, yk, interrupting people at the supermarket, at a minimum. I can see wanting to just do the direct route, for sure.
When I finally sat down to read the emails, I was absolutely stricken by the kind of fear and anxiety that was on display in these missives, the kind of loss of control. This is a group that is almost clannish in their interactions. There were equal amounts of handwringing about how the children can be kept from wanting to go to school -- how do we make homeschool attractive to the teen mind? -- but also a certain kind of resignation that if the child truly wanted to attend school the parent would have to relent, since after all they homeschooled to respect the child's wishes. But in the meantime, lots of designs would have to be drafted, because they had to try and, this is a quote, "Maybe playdates aren't enough any more."
Say what now? (Is that a Becky-ism? I love it so often.)
I mean, it was shocking to me to read about how sheltered and managed these kids are, and with no real pen-on-paper work behind them, no endlessness in the production of independence or life skills. It was also shocking to me that if people value home education, and then they have teenagers brought up with these values, how is it that their children do not see the parents as reflecting a inassailable value? I know that Mari & I have a pretty transparent parenting engine in place, so that, but also, somehow, at the same time, we don't live in a child-led household. So, for example, if our kids for [whatever reason] turned their backs to the value of home-education and wanted to go to school, we would be pretty likely to say, "Oh. Tough." But also, see: we have spent a lot of time creating a life they want which is also incompatible with the facetime of school.
When we met with that spate of people two years ago, I remembered, reading all these bizarre emails, the one old psychologist who was on the verge of being put out to pasture dismissed something (I forget), by saying, "Well, and he's sheltered because he's homeschooled, too."
I was instantly on him, What does that mean? He goes to things, all the things.
And the guy waved his hand & said, "Yeah, but it's a highly-managed, controlled situation --"
I cut him off to icily inform him that County Parks & Rec Programs, where we live, is hardly managed, and barely controlled. I mean, Jesus, remember? And good for the kids, because while they made some friends there, they don't really see what everyone is talking about when they talk about how Great it is to be in Groups, especially when there is a 36:1 child/adult ratio. They pretty much left those years of programming thinking, That was great, but we have choices. We choose against chaos & infantilization.
I hazarded a question to this emailing group to ask why they didn't do a summer camp or an afterschool-group, and they responded like I had asked them something entirely crazy. One woman countered with how her daughter had expressed a desire to go to sleepaway camp and she could not think of such a thing, then later in the same email confessed to preparing herself with a heavy heart to send her daughter to a private high school.
Say what again? The high school she was talking about costs each year 200% of the limit of one of the nicer, granola-y, all-summer-sleepaway camps on the Eastern Seaboard. I realized, sitting there & reading the messages and messages, that these people are the people with whose brush my family is endlessly painted. What the hell? No wonder people are in such a fuss about homeschoolers! My God!
Also, and this is something Fille just talked about the other day, while we were taking a whole day to go over the river for a half-day at an Open University Engineering-Demo Day for 7-12th grades: We never see these people anywhere, ever, out in the wild. Like, I know that we have plenty of money for performances and trips and museum memberships and all manner of travel, but we live on a university campus where there is always something happening, something educational, something free, led in just a really smart, casual, we're-always-learnin' kind of way that we sometimes go to because it seems like it MIGHT BE COOL. And it usually is. Sometimes, it leads to a greater study of the topic. Sometimes, we leave it where it is. It depends, but it send the message that everyone is learning all the time, and also when you want to know more about something, here are the ways people can find out.
Also, I taught my kids to take the bus, for God's sake. Also, also, they are allowed to go places by themselves, if it comes up. Sometimes only alone in the sense that they are unchaperoned-yet-together, but alone-alone sometimes, too.
Garçon's interview for the internship came up on short notice, mostly because we were in Chicago the week before that. It had to be scheduled for the same time as a ballet class. I went to Fille.
"Honey, Garçon needs to be at his interview, at the office right by our house, while you are supposed to be in class. I was wondering if you are OK with ... going on transit both ways?"
I can not describe the pleased gleam my daughter had in her eye when she assured me she was certain of her ability to confidently manage exactly that. It felt like it must have been exactly like the day which made an impression on my dear friend Charlie, years ago, when I asked a then-five Fille to go to a neighbor's and see if they had an ice-cream scoop. Fille bounded from the house & I didn't pay attention any more, but Charlie watched her & has since spoken delightedly of the freedom & exuberance-in-independence my daughter displayed SKIPPING AWAY FROM HER HOUSE DOWN THE STREET ALONE, YES, BIG, and then she cracks up remembering, every time.
But seriously: what a relief, both of them. It's like, yk, high school, college, HVAC, beauty school, whatever. They can do their laundry & make enough food to feed themselves when necessary (or sometimes just because they want to, Garçon, who can't stop eating.) Things are good. This is the payoff for having two kids in diapers and tandem nursing, I promise. This is a good life. My little girl inventory is increased by 100% for a lot of this weekend! Exciting!
National Poetry month cannot be swept aside by the fleuve.
Joy Harjo, from Secrets from the Center of the World, 1989
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