The Trouble with Word Boy

I have a small e-mail list of friends I send long rambly notes to pretty regularly. Except not lately. A couple of months ago, I started one of these e-mails like this:

A woman whose blog I read recently posted about seeking treatment for her depression, and being really optimistic about a new medication, but worrying that being too happy would stop her from writing. I could have told her she had good reason to worry. I feel like the last few months I just haven't ever gotten to that point I used to get to, where I felt this incredible urgency to write and was going to pop if I didn't get a chance to. I blame my neurologist.

Many of you know that I have been seeing a terrific headache specialist since October. Despite some ups and downs, and some failed medication experiments, and some tweaking, I can tell you that the results have been hardly less than miraculous. After trying a couple of things that didn't help, he put me on Effexor--it's an anti-depressant, but has been very effective at treating Chronic Daily Headache as well. Well, for me, not only has it dramatically improved my headaches, but the anti-depressant part of it has eliminated Psycho Screamer Mom from my PMS (I might get a little bit cranky these days) and also made me more cheerful than I ever knew was possible. I mean, it's more than just not being anxious. It's being basically happy. I've never been a basically cheerful person; I've always tended to be kind of melancholy. This happy thing is really wonderful. I had no idea life could be like this.

It's also true that I am tremendously busy. I tend to be on the go all day long these days, between the house and errands and homeschooling and keeping the Tiny Tornado from setting things on fire. And then, once we get the kids to bed in the evening, I just want my down time. I settle into The Big Chair and read, or sometimes watch TV (if I can pry the remote out of David's hands--he takes his downtime at night by playing video games). Lately, since I took up amigurumi a couple of weeks ago, I might listen to an audiobook while I crochet. So, no urgency to write, no time to write: no writing. Except that I miss it. And I think it's pretty important in my life. And I have a book project in mind that I want to do something with--I've wanted to write a book since I was, what, 3? 4? And no matter how good my life is otherwise (and it is very good), I'm going to regret it on my death bed if I never do it. Even if it's a bad book. Even if no one ever reads it.

So, I decided that in May I would commit to writing 750 words every day. Not necessarily project-related words. Just words. Just practicing. Just seeing what writing might be like in this new time in my life when I am in so much less pain than I ever have been before in my adult life, and so much less driven by anxiety. I suppose it's a good sign that I felt like getting started a day early.

But what shall I write about today?

One thing that has been heavy on my mind is that Word Boy is struggling with anxiety and perfectionism. None of us is exactly the most flexible or resilient of people (except the Tiny Tornado, who swam in from outside our gene pool), and Word Boy has hit a rough patch. He doesn't like questions that don't have right answers; he gets upset if he doesn't understand his math the moment he looks at the page; an art curriculum that gave him open-ended "try this!" assignments reduced him to panic attacks. His perfectionism cripples him; he has practically no problem-solving skills because he's so afraid of getting the wrong answer; he worries so much about making other people happy that it is like pulling teeth to get him to say what he wants.

At least we're past the roughest stage, when he was having anxiety attacks that lasted for hours at a time. Now his "fits," as we call them, during which he breathes rapidly and his whole body shudders, are usually quite short. The improvement has been primarily because of behavioral interventions--to the extent that he can control these things, we have encouraged him to control them, by sending him out of the room to get himself together, say, or simply flogging him along to whatever needs to be done--I remember at the Midwinter Gathering in February, he started to have a fit about going to childcare (which he loved! So, what the heck with the fit?) and I pretty much pushed him down the hall to the childcare room, where he pulled himself together within a couple of minutes of my leaving him, and went on to have a great afternoon. If I'd engaged with him, we could have been stuck all afternoon.

So, now he still has multiple fits per day, at unpredictable intervals, but they're usually short. Still, we'd rather see even fewer of them, and, more importantly, I'd like to see some progress on the cognitive side of things: improvements in his perfectionism, improvements in his problem-solving skills, improvement in his resiliency when faced with minor setbacks.

I don't quite know how to get that. We were seeing an excellent therapist, but by his own admission Word Boy's problems were outside his area of expertise--he was super-good on the specific behavioral stuff (witness the complete extinction of The Lego Savant's elevator phobia, for instance) but completely lost when it came to sussing out the underlying mental issues and helping the kids deal with them. I am looking for someone else--there is a therapist I heard of on the west side of the state who specializes in anxiety in gifted kids, and I'm going to at least ask her for a consultation or a referral. She's probably too far away to work with regularly, but hopefully she's willing to be a resource. Maybe she'd even be willing to consult with Word Boy's old therapist--with whom he has great rapport, and who is willing to educate himself.

The gifted thing matters. I used to think it didn't, and I felt that one advantage of homeschooling was that I didn't have to worry about whether my kids fit some criterion for "giftedness" or not. I have, or at least did have when I was younger, a whole array of issues related to being identified as a gifted kid, and the services I did, and did not, receive, and I have been glad to avoid having to navigate that for them within a school system. I also have dormant issues around academic achievement and hoped that by homeschooling I could avoid re-awakening them, and avoid passing them on to my children.

But the pattern of Word Boy's perfectionism and anxiety is a classic pattern for gifted kids. So I find myself seeking out information on raising gifted kids. Less of it is useful than I had hoped, and it brings me into contact (so far, only virtually) with a lot of parents who are interested in doing competitive bragging and arguing about whether each other's kids are truly gifted.

Somewhere out there have to be parents and teachers and therapists who have helped kids navigate this as well as it can be navigated. I met one parent just last weekend, a friend-of-a-friend whose kids are grown now but who recognized exactly the kinds of issues we're dealing with, and I glommed onto her like a drowning woman. When she had pried my frantic arms from around her neck and gotten her breath back, she said sure, she'd be glad to talk to me about this stuff. So that's one resource, and a very important one. But I need more. I didn't get effective treatment for my anxiety until I was in my late 20s, and I want to do better by my smart, sweet, splendid children. And I want support for me and David--so we know that we're doing the best we can.

And now--on to all that I've been neglecting: the dishes, the kids, the laundry, my shower, the homeschooling. We are doing a science experiment with radish seedlings and they need to have something done every single day, so there's no slacking on that (I called it "The Tyranny of the Radish Curriculum" and my friend Margaret said, "That right there is a chapter title." So I wrote it down.) Tomorrow: the Tiny Tornado wants a boy swim suit.

Premature Curriculum Review: Home Science Adventures

Last spring and this fall, the boys and I used a science curriculum from McRuffy Press. It's a scripted curriculum, meaning if you want you can just read off the page for the lessons, and comes with a kit that includes everything you need. We liked it pretty well; one of its weaknesses is that, like many elementary science curricula, it jumps around. One lesson you're doing bats, the next you're talking about electricity, and the one after that, classification. But the boys liked how hands-on it was, and I liked having everything in the box. The materials include games based on the lessons; the boys didn't care much for those and we mostly ended up skipping them.

When we finished the year's worth of McRuffy Press science we had, I considered buying another year's worth. But they only go through third grade in science, and the sample lessons looked both repetitive with what we'd already done, and kind of basic even for Carl, who's notionally a first-grader this year but who is a little advanced academically, I think.

I tried Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding. I loved the idea of it--a comprehensive elementary science curriculum that focuses on the underlying practices and concepts of science. It seemed well-structured and like kids would really understand not just specific science facts and concepts but some things about how science works. And I liked the price: just $24 for the book.

In practice, I found it unusable. It's the kind of science curriculum that "just uses objects you have around the house!" But I never have the objects. When I ended up going to three stores to find a certain kind of balloon for one lesson, I was about ready to give up. I am learning to accept about myself that I don't want to have a long planning time for our homeschooling, so a curriculum that required me to think a week or more ahead about what supplies we'd need, plus take the information in the book and figure out how to make a lesson out of it, was just too labor-intensive for me.

In addition, the book is poorly laid-out; there are no chapter headings, for instance, so it can be difficult to navigate to the lesson you're looking for, or tell when you're there.

I've been on an e-mail list for families using BFSU, and so I know that some people have made it work for them and love it. And the lessons we did manage to do went well. But I now admit that I want something more packaged and more structured; with such an up-front commitment in prep time, I found with BFSU that we were ending up not doing science because I hadn't found time for the planning.

When I happened across Home Science Adventures, I knew the boys would love it. It's all hands-on science activities, organized into six topics: light, insects, microscope explorations, astronomy, birds, and magnetism. You can buy individual topics or sets of three. It's designed to be used with multi-age groups of kids.

I wasn't sure, from the website, whether it would provide the kind of information about scientific methodologies or topic-spanning concepts that I also wanted the kids to be exposed to. But I decided to try it, on the strength of the boys' enthusiasm, with the thought that I could supplement it with additional readings if needed.

We bought a three-topic set: Light, Insects, and Microscope Adventures. It comes with one pocket microscope; I paid for two extras, because I am wise.

So far, we've done 3-5 lessons in each topic, and the boys are loving it. The lessons are brief and very much focus on the kids experimenting and thinking about what they find. They're encouraged to record and analyze data; Eric and I did a lesson in the Light topic today that asked him to analyze the chart of data he'd made and predict what would happen next. The Insect Lessons have been less "here is the life cycle of the honeybee" and more, "How do you classify these bugs? Which characteristics define an insect?" I loved that the first couple of lessons in Microscope Explorations taught about using the microscopes not by giving instructions but through experimentation: "OK, now do this. What happens?" The kids were invited to learn through experimentation that the image in the microscope is both reversed and upside-down, and to figure out that, although it says on the side that they magnify 30x, they really magnify about 22x.

So, the stuff I was hoping to expose the boys to, about how science is practiced, and about concepts like classification that transcend a single topic, seem to be worked in.

And, I must say, when they say everything you need is in the box, they mean it. They don't assume you have scotch tape; it's in the box. If you're going to need paper cups for a lesson, the paper cups are in the box. There's a packet of honey, a paper clip, and a spoon in there. The only things you're going to need that aren't included are an onion and a slice of bread, and I'm pretty sure if they could have figured out how to include those, they would have.

The website claims that the 43 lessons in our box will constitute a whole year's science if done once a week. While that's technically true, I suppose, we find that the individual lessons (contained on one double-sided piece of paper) are so short and engaging that we usually do 2-4 at a sitting. In addition, my boys love science, and are enjoying these kits, so much that I expect we'll do science more like 2-4 days a week. So this isn't a year's curriculum for us, I don't think. But I think it's going to be a very fun few months.

A Surprisingly Good Day

It's really easy when you blog, or are posting on Facebook, to only mention the glorious moments. So in the interest of full disclosure, I'd like to mention that at 10:00 this morning, the boys and I were having such a dismal time that 1) I was ready to give up on homeschooling, and 2) we had retreated to three different rooms, where we were each weeping in solitary splendor.

I could not think how to salvage the situation. But after awhile I wandered into the hallway and said to the closed doors, "Um, guys, *sniff*, I'm going to go ahead and graph our Mystery Class data so we don't fall behind. Anybody who wants to come help, *snuffle*, can come help."

The boys wandered out to the living room, wiping their noses on their sleeves, and we transferred our sunrise/sunset data to the data sheets, calculated the photoperiods for each of the mystery sites, and charted them on our graph. We found and fixed a couple of our mistakes--calculating photoperiods is surprisingly tricky math--and were astonished that the site that got 24 hours of sunlight just a week ago got only a little more than 18 hours a week later! We checked and double-checked the numbers and that's what they said. I'll be curious to see where it is--the South Pole is still in full-time daylight this week. So it's someplace north of there.

Then we did an activity where you find other locations that are at your latitude and check their photoperiod. We did Sapporo, Japan; Florence, Italy; and Changchun, China; all of which we found by using the globe we got for Christmas. They all had photoperiods within a few minutes of ours. It was fun to see the boys figure out that photoperiod is all about latitude; they had previously thought that places with similar photoperiods must be close to us but now they get that they could be very far away.

Then we worked on this week's Lego Quest challenge. The challenge was to build something using 30 specific bricks, and we made a set for Yehva, so when she got home from preschool, she did it, too. I'd post pictures but the boys are excited that their creations might be on the website next week so I'll save it for then.

Doing fun stuff together got us feeling much less horrible, and the rest of the day went pretty well. Yehva and I had to run to the store at one point to buy eggs so we could make cupcakes, and I was reminded of why I am always running out of things: I simply cannot do the grocery shopping with Yehva. This is what it was like just running into a convenience store for one item:

Me: OK, Yev, just so you know, we're only buying eggs. We're not buying anything else.

Yehva: OK.

We enter the store.

Yehva: Mama, they have candy!

Me: I see.

Yehva: Can I have some?

Me: Not today. Today we are just buying eggs.

Yehva: But I'm hungry.

Me: We'll have lunch when we get home. And we're making cupcakes.

Yehva: Can we get donuts?

Me: No. We're just buying eggs. Another day we can get donuts.

Yehva: I want donuts.

Me: Donuts are certainly tasty.

Yehva, escalating: I want donuts!

Me: No donuts. We're just getting eggs.

Yehva: I see cookies.

Me: I see the cookies, too.

Yehva: I want some cookies.

Me: Sorry, we're just here for eggs.

Yehva stomps her foot: I want cookies!

Me: Not today.

Yehva picks up a package of bakery cupcakes: Can we get cupcakes?

Me: Yehva! We are buying eggs--and only eggs--so we can *make* cupcakes! We are not buying cupcakes!

Yehva: Then can I have some candy?

Our Experiment In Structured Homeschooling

I am sick today; bad headache, dizzy, a little sick to my stomach, and not at my best, brain-wise. I'm so distractible I just set an alarm to remind me to pick up Yehva from preschool at noon. So maybe it's not the best day to try to write something, but I've had this rattling around in my head for awhile, and a few people have actually asked me about why we're doing more structured homeschooling this year and how it's going, so I'll give it a try.

My kids are 9, 6, and 3, just to remind people. And with Eric, my oldest, especially, we haven't done very much organized academics. One reason is that he wasn't ready for it until just a little while ago. It's kind of a gift to have Carl, who is really into schooly stuff, because having a six-year-old who is not only ready for academic work but likes it has given me a picture of what that kind of six-year-old looks like. And Eric really wasn't it.

The other reason we haven't done structured homeschooling is that I really like radical unschooling and many of the people who practice it. I've spent a lot of time in discussions with radical unschoolers, and their deep respect for, and faith in, their children has inspired me, and shaped my parenting for the better. For a long time, I really wanted radical unschooling to be the way we lived our lives.

But we're not doing that right now. The boys and I are doing a pretty conventional assortment of schoolwork five mornings a week: reading, math, language arts, handwriting, science, a daily non-fiction read-aloud. We're adding history soon. I'm teaching Eric some piano basics, and if he likes it, will encourage him to take lessons with a real teacher.

So, the two questions I've gotten are: Why? and How's it going?

There are several reasons why. The first is that I was very sick for the better part of two years (finally better now, thanks for asking--almost back to normal!). Last year, I had really drifted into what RU parents call "unparenting," neither doing structured homeschooling nor creating the kind of enriched life an engaged unschooling parent strives for. I just didn't have the energy to do anything else; I couldn't stay awake for more than about five hours at a time, and even when I was awake, I was exhausted. It wore me out just to stand for five minutes to cook lunch, or to climb one flight of stairs, or to walk from one end of the house to the other.

The boys are both very introverted, so they were not at all unhappy to be left to their own devices. But I was unhappy; I wanted them to have more than that. And I couldn't give it to them. I knew that if things didn't improve, they would be better off in school than at home with a mom who was that sick.

The problem? Eric, at 9, couldn't read, couldn't do formal math, couldn't tell time. Although he is very bright and knows a lot, he was way behind grade level in every academic subject. Traditionally, I had pooh-poohed the idea that homeschoolers should pay attention to what the local schools are doing. "If I wanted my kids to do what school kids do," I would say, "I'd send them to school."

But, faced with the possibility that my kids would have to go to school, I simply could not imagine how Eric would make that transition. And I realized that my decision not to do formal academics limited our, and his, options. (Carl, on the other hand, would have no problem, academically, sliding right into a first-grade classroom. He's been doing phonics and math workbooks since he was 4. He likes that kind of thing.)

I'm finally doing better, and I expect the boys to keep homeschooling. But the future is not predictable. I could get sick again, or one of the kids could choose to go to school. I think we need that option to be available to us.

Another reason we're doing structured homeschooling is that I have decided to be honest about who I am. I like academics; I always have. (This is separate from liking school, which I didn't, until I got to college. At least after I grew out of the teacher's-pet elementary school years.) Perhaps the boys would, too, and I was denying them that chance. Also, I never really quite bought some of the RU arguments. "Kids pick up all the math they need by living their lives," people would say. "They learn fractions from measuring ingredients, geometry from laying out garden plots." Sure. But there's a big difference between being able to do the practical part of something, and understanding the concepts that underly it. I have always liked to understand the concepts, and I wanted my kids to have that, too. And finally: I'm a planner, and a checker-off of items on lists. I like knowing where we're at, where we're going, and what steps we have to take to get there. I like routines. This is how I've always been, and it's a challenge (though not impossible) to express that side of me in radical unschooling. I felt adrift.

Finally, the most important reason we're doing structured homeschooling is that I think Eric needs it right now. Carl likes it; that's a different thing. Carl is so cheerfully enthusiastic about everything, so generally easy-going, that I think he would do fine in school, fine with structured homeschooling, fine with unschooling.

Eric, though: Eric is easily frustrated, and he will not stick with something if it's frustrating him (there are exceptions; he can also get kind of fixated on finishing something and will bang his head against a wall even if it would probably be better to take a break and come back to it fresh. But for our purposes here: easily frustrated). And he doesn't like to try something unless he knows he'll be successful. He also has trouble with transitions, and he does not like new things. Our parrots see any new person or thing that comes through the door as a predator that might decide to eat them; Eric's outlook on life has a bit of that, as well.

I wanted to stretch Eric, expose him to new things, and give him the experience of sticking with something regularly, to see how that kind of sustained effort can be fruitful, to feel what it's like to be stuck and keep at it and then have the breakthrough. And he is having this experience, and he likes it.

I know that radical unschoolers will say that there's nothing I'm looking for (except possibly being on-track to go to school if needed) that we couldn't get some other way. And I'm sure they're right--or right, at least, that some other family could find a different way to get the same benefits. But this is what we're doing now.

How's it going? Not always perfectly. Eric had a rough time in November and December and was very resistant and rude to me. We took a long break, and then had a Serious Talk about his options. He told David, spontaneously, that he felt like he had gotten older during the break and would be more able to cooperate. He told me he was bored during the break and wanted to do more; he asked for my help, and he asked me to push him if he resisted me. Since we started up again, he's been into everything we've been doing. He likes his math, he's making big progress in reading, he loves anything science-y, especially if there's a messy experiment to do. We just started language arts, and Eric was surprised to discover he really likes learning about how sentences work and what their parts are. Carl is not sorry when we have a day off, but he simply loves everything. If I tend to talk about Eric more than about Carl, it's because I think about Eric more, because with Eric, there's always some problem I'm trying to solve. Carl? Not so much. I told some friends recently that if Carl were our only child, and didn't have siblings to sometimes annoy him to the point of explosion, people would hate me for the perfection of my life.

I find that we all like having a structure to the day--we start school work when David leaves for work, and it takes us between an hour and three hours depending on the day, how much we're trying to do, whether Yehva's at preschool or here, getting into things. I try to do something with the kids in the afternoon as well: work on Eric's Mindstorms or Carl's Lego WeDo robotics, build something with the snap circuits, bake something, play a board game. Carl, Eric, and I all seem to respond well to having a routine. The rest of the day goes better.

One of the best things that has happened is that Eric, especially, keeps discovering things he didn't know he could do. The other day, I asked him to try to read a paragraph in his science workbook; I wasn't sure he could do it, and normally would have read it aloud to him, but I decided to let him see how he could do. To his delight, he was able to read it, except for the unusually-spelled name of a scientist. Yesterday, his language arts curriculum asked him to write two sentences including adjectives. He has never done much writing--I think it falls into that category of things he can't try because he doesn't already know how to do them. I told him to give it a try, to not worry about spelling things correctly, just to do his best. He wrote two sentences about one of our parrots: "Vito is hapy He is red and green." He asked me to check his spelling of "red" and I helped him sound out "green." And he read Vito's name off the nameplate on his cage. But still!

He was astonished and thrilled. He simply had no idea he could write a sentence. He wanted to cut it out of his workbook and hang it on the wall (I should have just said yes, but my orderly mind said, "But we haven't done the other side of the page yet!" *sigh* I wonder where Eric gets his tendency to inflexibility?)

I know that there are other ways that all of this could be accomplished. But, given who we are and what we need and what we enjoy, I think this is right for us. Things will probably look different in six months, or next year, but for now we're getting a lot of good out of what we're doing. I'm not at all sorry we waited to do formal academics with Eric; he's bright, but he just wasn't ready. In the last six months, he has really "caught up" developmentally (and even surged ahead in some interesting ways). Now he's ready, and I think it's good.

My More Moderate Views on Education

I enjoyed my rant the other day, but find that I want to say a few words about my more measured opinions about education and the schools.

1. I have been a teacher. Not in the public schools, but in their closest collegiate analog, the community college. In addition, I taught a class (freshman composition) that was required of all incoming students but which almost none of them wanted to take or expected to enjoy. From this, I have first-hand knowledge of how impossible it is to teach students who are in your class by compulsion. I also know first-hand that a system can be less than the sum of its parts; that is, it can be full of mostly-competent people doing their best according to their lights and with as much goodwill as they can muster, and the system overall can still be failing (in my department, after we instituted a portfolio review process, we had a failure rate of about 1/3--and this was of the students who made it to the end of the semester. Another sizeable chunk tended to disappear partway through). So I have tremendous sympathy and respect for individuals in the schools, doing their jobs. And sympathy for the ones who, like me, burn out and leave.

2. I homeschool for what seem to me like good reasons, but I think the truth is that my kids, and the kids of people like me, would probably do OK either in school or homeschooled. There are some reasons of temperament that I think this is less true for Eric than for most kids, but in general the children of middle-class and upper-middle-class families, with educated, involved, loving, functional parents and resources for books, travel, trips to museums, and so on, seem to learn what they need to learn and do all right. You hear a lot about how the American school system is failing--all those media reports that we're second-to-last in some international test of math skills. But we really have at least two different educational systems in American, and my kids (and your kids, probably, if you're reading this) are in the one that works pretty well.

A few years ago I read a book whose title I can never remember, something like Making Sense of Research in Education. It looked at some of the typical education headlines and examined the research behind them. One I remember is those international tests. According to the author, most countries have more explicit tracking than the US does, and when they participate in these tests, they choose students from specific schools to participate. In some cases, they choose the students individually. IIRC, only the US and Canada actually provide random, national samples. So "America came in 26th out of 29 countries," for instance, might be a statistic that compares all American children to only the children who've been tracked into academic schools in other countries, or an even smaller sample than that--like comparing all American kids to the equivalent of kids at the High School of Science and Technology. When the American sample is sorted by race, the white kids move up to second or third; the black kids drop even lower in the rankings.

So, when people urge me to put my kids in school and get involved in my local school district: well, I know my local school district has problems (I've heard the kid culture is unusually toxic, for instance), but for the most part, that school district doesn't need me, or my kids. There's a case to be made that Lansing does, and I know that one woman in my Quaker meeting carries a concern about Quakers taking their kids outside the Lansing school district. But there are bigger problems with education for working-class people, poor people, people of color, immigrants. I don't know what to do about those problems, either as an individual or as a society. But I do think both I and society could be doing better in this regard.

3. For all my bluster, I am not a zealot about home education. I don't think it's necessary or right for all kids (or their parents)--not even necessarily for all of mine. Yehva, for instance, is so high-energy and extroverted that I will not be surprised if we put her in kindergarten just to see how it goes (yes, I know extroverted children homeschool...but poor Yehva was born into a family of introverts, and I think it will always be a challenge to get her enough stimulation if she's stuck with us most days. But we'll see). I am also less sure about what I'm doing than it might seem from my writing; one of my weaknesses as a homeschooler, I told a friend recently, is that I am always second-guessing myself. It's actually one of my weaknesses in general; I'm more likely to have questions than opinions, about a lot of things.

That's all, really. I have my ranty moments, and I have my moderate, see-all-sides moments. I shared one the other day, thought I'd share the other one today.

What It Looks Like When I Finally Snap

Last night, I took an allergy medication with a decongestant in it too late in the evening, and couldn't get to sleep. At 1:36 a.m., on a website I hang out at, I came across someone making a very familiar argument, that people who opt out of the pubic school system (homeschoolers were mentioned specifically) are exercising privilege in an unacceptable way. Why don't they stay in the school system and work to improve? Why do they criticize without proposing solutions to the problem? "I don't see anyone with an alternative, besides pulling out of the system.
I just see a bunch of people who are privileged enough to be able to have an alternative, whether it's having someone homeschool their children, or a private school, dump on the system without giving any kind of path to change," this person said.

I am so tired of this argument. I don't know why my decision to homeschool my children seems like an intolerable expression of my privilege to so many people (including some I've met in real life, and including some friends of mine, as well as various internet commentators), or why they think it's my job but not theirs to fix public education. And last night, sleep-deprived and wired, I snapped at hearing it one more time, and I got ranty. Here's what I wrote:

[name redacted], I think I would fall into your category of people who "are privileged enough to be able to have an alternative," in my case homeschooling my children.

I am very interested in education issues, and over the last few years have read probably 60 to 80 books on the subject (that's a guess that may be wrong, but kind of totting up in my head--if anything it's probably low), including Alfie Kohn's stuff and Diane Ravitch's stuff and books about the history of education in the US and books about how schools shortchange boys and books about how they shortchange girls and every Respected Scholar's theory on the subject and every Nutcase Crank's theory on the subject. I also regularly read journalism on the subject, like Education Next, for instance, which I've found very informative. I did a whole reading project a couple of years ago on school finance, and another on the teachers' unions. I have done some freelance writing and editing work in the field of education and school improvement.

I could list what I see as the major problems with schooling today, and it would range from, oh Jesus, incompetent teachers to testing to a general disrespect for kids that means nobody cares if their time is wasted; from funding problems (both the problem of under-funding and the problem of funds coming from multiple sources for specific purposes so that a school might have the money to put in a swimming pool but not to buy the updated textbooks they need more urgently) to an over-powerful union to parents who protect their children from failure; from the progressive myth that every child under the right circumstances can be an intellectual to, at the other end of the spectrum, rigid tracking; from inadvertent sorting by social class that begins with what first-grade reading groups kids are placed into, to city schools that are so understaffed that one book I read about the Chicago school system said that on any given school day there are dozens of classrooms in the system that literally do not even have an adult presence; from bloated administrations to decaying infrastructure to technology initiatives that throw resources at putting computers at every desk, say, as if that will somehow magically make learning happen with joy while never asking teachers what they really need in their classrooms in order to do their jobs.

How's that for a start? If I put more thought into it, I could come up with more.

Solutions? Well, if I were the Great Omnipotent Being Of The World, I'd start by eliminating poverty, drug abuse, bad parenting in all its guises from neglect and physical abuse to pressuring kids to excel in parent-defined ways. I'd provide so much support for teachers, in the form of grading assistants, say, or a schedule of only 4 contact hours a day, and pay them so much that the profession would attract the very best, enthusiastic young people and not burn them out or spit them out. I'd lavish money and resources on some of the nutcakes who want to try radical alternatives; I'd seed Sudbury Valley-model schools all over the place, and same-sex academies, and year-round schools, and Montessori schools, and Reggio Emilia schools, and I'd make them all free so every parent could try the school she thought would work best for her particular kid. I'd turn the American workplace into a Dolly Parton/Jane Fonda utopia of job-sharing and on-site daycares and sunny little elementary schools right next to the corporate enterprise parks so that parents could be involved with their kids' educations and have the time and energy to also just hang out with them and enjoy them.

Read a little on the subject and you will find that the problems with schooling are many and varied and intractable. I get so tired of people jumping on my back for homeschooling my kids, as if I'm not entitled to do that unless I am somehow the one magic person who knows the secret solution to a decades-old problem.

I know it's an expression of my privilege that I get to be home with my kids full-time and homeschool, but practically everything in my life is an expression of my privilege, from waking up in a warm bed in a home with intact windows in a nice if modest suburb of a decent-if-declining small city, and driving a reliable car, and feeding my kids three meals plus snacks every day. Nobody has ever suggested that I stop feeding my children until I solve the problem of childhood hunger, and yet I'm supposed to know how to fix the American education system before I'm allowed to be critical of it, I'm supposed to somehow make my local schools an edutopia before I'm allowed to sit down and work a few math problems with my kids.

(I forgot to mention bullying, homophobia, sexist teachers, meaningless busywork, the resemblance between American high schools and minimum-security prisons, incoherent curricula, constantly-changing standards, educational fads, excessive oversight of teachers except where they are neglected, declining resources for gifted & talented programs, the over-medication of elementary school children, and a dozen other things, I'm sure, which will come to me later.)

It's Not the Homeschooling

Some of my close friends took their son out of school in December; both his parents work, one of them as an instructor at the University of Michigan, and he spends the two days each week that she has to be on campus with us. I usually pick him up in the mornings; it's about an hour each way, and I find the drive a pleasant chance to drink my coffee and listen to music, or think about stuff. I-96 to M-52 to Territorial: that's my me time.

This morning I was thinking about a long note I wrote on Facebook a few months ago, about how we homeschool. When I posted it, I knew that there would be at least a couple of people who would not be able to resist posting a comment or sending me an e-mail about "this one homeschooling family they know" and how wrong and neglectful and abusive they are, and how terribly their kids are turning out, and this is why they just don't support homeschooling. "I'm gonna de-friend anybody who writes me about that," I said to myself. And I did. I de-friended two people who were guilty of the "this one homeschooling family I know" fallacy.

I could counter with the "this one family I know with their kids in school" fallacy, but I don't think people would necessarily get my point. In my experience, people are more likely to blame the kids for not being able to accommodate themselves to the school, even in situations where it looks to me like school is, at least in part, the problem: a kid is too introverted to spend 30 hours a week in a busy classroom with no downtime and no privacy; a kid is expected to demonstrate competence in a very specific way that sets her up for failure, instead of being offered an alternative; active kids, perhaps especially boys, are expected to sit still for lessons despite recess times dwindling, down to zero in some places; kids who grasp the lessons quickly are expected to "learn to cope with boredom" (an old therapist of mine, an expert in child development, told me this as if it were a universal truth gifted kids just had to accept); a teacher is widely known to be bad at her job in some way, but it's the kids' responsibility to cope with that (and the parents' job to "just hope," as a friend of mine said to me recently, "that she'll have a better teacher next year.")

This is not an anti-school rant, though. It's about how quick people can be to blame homeschooling if something is going badly with your kids--or anybody's kids. School is so widely accepted that individual kids' problems with it are seen as just that: individual problems that ought to be addressed within the school system. But individual homeschooled kids' problems are seen as a problem of homeschooling per se, and sometimes as an indictment of homeschooling altogether. It reminds me of this great xkcd cartoon that so perfectly captures the "girls can't do math" problem: people in a minority are somehow seen to represent the entire minority.

The problem for homeschoolers--other than having to listen to people who want to tell you about this one family--is that we make this mistake, too. On the mailing lists I read, it's not uncommon for a parent to post about a problem their child is having, and wonder if maybe the kid would be better off in school, if maybe they've created this problem by homeschooling. Often it's an academic problem, like a kid reading below "grade level" or not knowing as much math as the parent thinks he ought to; sometimes it's behavioral, or boredom, or lack of motivation or excitement about things that used to be interesting.

Of course, they're asking this question on homeschooling, or unschooling, lists, so people usually don't think putting the kid in school is a good idea. Unschoolers actually have a saying for responding to these situations: "It's not the unschooling!" That is, whatever is going wrong is probably not being caused by homeschooling; there's no guarantee your kid in school would not have the same problem, and certainly no guarantee that putting her in school will fix it.

It's hard for me to think of any problems that might come up that wouldn't be exacerbated by the structure and expectations of school. For my own Eric, for instance, I can think of a couple of challenges we've had. One is that he really really does not like to be told what to do, and can be pretty inflexible once he's made up his mind. There have been rough stretches when he was younger during which we were having so much conflict between us that I sometimes thought, despairingly, that it might be better for him to be in school, if only so he and I could have a break from each other.

On the other hand, schools need kids to submit to authority if they are going to function. Eric hates being told what to do so much that I can only imagine, if he were in school full-time, that he would be "a discipline problem." (He does well in his groups at Quaker gatherings we attend, but they're much more active and less rigid than school, and it's only for a few days. And even so it takes a lot out of him.) I often lament our lack of a "control Eric" we could send to school, because not having a comparison makes any conclusions we make about Eric-in-school unscientific, but I wouldn't be surprised if the parallel-universe Eric who was sent to school had been diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder by now. Poor parallel-universe Eric; how he suffers. While the one in our universe--and our living room--thrives.

A favorite version of the This One Homeschool Family I Know fallacy is, "...and the kids are really weird." Well, I know a few weird homeschooled kids, too (and a lot more I'd call "quirky"), and my reaction when I meet them is not, "Wow, homeschooling really turned those kids weird." It's: "Thank God those kids are being homeschooled. Sending them to school would be like tossing a bleeding puppy into a tank of starving sharks." Some kids are just weird, and homeschooling can give them room to be weird while letting their wonderfulness show, too.

I've drifted a little bit. I meant this to be another post in my ongoing series on Advice To the New Homeschooler, and it turned into more of a rant than I intended. But there you go. I don't have time to make it perfect: I have to go put kitchen towels in the wash; and remind Noah he wanted to take a break from his video game and read for awhile this afternoon; and make sure nobody is starving; and swab down the bathroom real quick because oh-so-very-many-boys; and read up on some projects and games I want to try with the kids before too long; and have my afternoon snack and read a few more pages of The Thirteen-Gun Salute; and do the hand dishes, which I don't like to do so they pile up; and make some lists, because I love making lists.

Please Peruse my New Book Catalog

The other week, I succumbed to an impulse of the moment and ordered a copy of I Am Learning All the Time, a self-published picture book about a 5-year-old bear who is homeschooled. I was overall pleased with it: it's a simple compare-and-contrast story ("My friend who goes to school does this...I do that."), well-written and with quality illustrations. It's printed on good-quality paper and seems well-bound. If it does well enough, the author hopes to write and publish more books about homeschooled kids, and that seems like it would be a good thing.

This morning in the car, though, having lots of thinking time during the 2-hour round trip to fetch Noah, it occurred to me that homeschooling is the only community I've been part of that hasn't produced its own collection of self- or small-press published genre fiction, usually badly written. The lesbian community poured this stuff forth in the 80s and 90s, with everything from romance novels to detective series (some of them quite good) to utopias to the occasional science fiction novel. Quakers are less prolific in this area, but should I be so moved, I could enjoy a Quaker mystery novel or Joan Slonsczewski's story of Quakers in space.

Homeschoolers, on the other hand, have not produced genre literature for their community's pleasure and amusement, that I know of. Sometimes it seems like every homeschool mom in the world has written a book about homeschooling, but bad novels? Alas, no. Probably they're all too busy, but just in case anyone is waiting for inspiration, I offer this short catalog of imaginary books for homeschoolers in several genres:

Mysteries

Death in the Co-op: When the president of the P-CUG (Perfect Children Under God) homeschooling co-op is found dead, there are more potential suspects than slugs in the body: the former president she ousted in a coup two years ago; the member expelled for lying in her statement of faith; even her own teenage daughter, who just wants to wear her hair down and unbutton the very top button of her shirt for once in her life.

Romance 1: The Romeo and Juliet Story

Sam and Annie: Can the unschooled son of atheist intellectuals find love with the modestly-dressed daughter of a QuiverFull wife? Can these two divergent communities find common ground in time to save their children from tragedy?

Romance 2: The Coming-Out Story

The Well of Homeschooliness: When two women meet to plan the annual Catholic curriculum fair, they have no idea that their new friendship will blossom into sexual attraction. Is it love, or sin?

The Post-Apocalyptic Tale

Panic for the Peaceful Parents: When absolutely incontrovertible evidence is discovered that early, structured phonics-based instruction is really the best way for children to learn to read, a Radical Unschooling community must face its deepest fears and darkest demons. Will they come out stronger on the other side, or will the shock destroy them?

Science Fiction

SpaceSchoolers: In the year 2060, all instruction has been replaced with PLUGs--Personal Learning Universal Gadgets--that are implanted in children at age 6. But are the children just learning--or being controlled by a sinister unknown force? A plucky group of tweens, who've been secretly homeschooled, set out to learn the truth about the PLUGs. It is a journey that will take them to places they've never imagined, and rock the very foundation of the society they live in. (Soon to be a major motion picture directed by James Cameron.)

A Little Musing about Race & Class

This post on pink science equipment for girls at Love Isn't Enough (formerly the Anti-Racist Parents blog) touches on the intersection of race and class, and the way that racial segregation is at least partly class-based segregation as well. It reminds me that I was thinking the other day about a book I read a few months ago, Paula Penn-Nasbrit's book Morning by Morning: How we Homeschooled Our African-American Sons to the Ivy League.

Penn-Nasbrit's book was fascinating to me because her family suffers from racism but has a great deal of class privilege. She and her husband both attended Ivy League schools after secondary education at elite prep schools; she comes from at least three generations of professors, lawyers, and doctors--one of her uncles was one of the lawyers who argued Brown v. The Board of Education before the Supreme Court. So when she talks about homeschooling her kids into Ivy League schools, she's not talking about someone like me doing that, someone who went to a highly-ranked state college but was only the second in the family to earn a bachelor's degree (dad was the first) and who would be in many ways culturally out of place at an Ivy League school. She and her husband grew up and lived in that environment; she was wanting to find places for her children in an educational culture she was already very familiar with.

On the other hand, it was primarily issues of racism at the private prep school her kids were attending that led her and her husband to decide to homeschool. The local public schools were not a good place for black children, and when they decided they could no longer stay with the private school, they didn't see other options.

Examples of the kinds of things they experienced included her being called on the rug for organizing a Back-to-School picnic for African-American families at the school; problems with her sons being blamed for problems they didn't create, or being held to higher standards of behavior than white students; and an administrator asking her what she was doing to provide "male role models" for her sons. She was taken aback; what did he mean? Turns out he assumed, because she was black, that she was a single mother.

She was concerned about how these assumptions and expectations would damage her boys and hold them back. So she decided to homeschool.

I wished Penn-Nasbrit had talked more about the complex intersection of class and race in her family's life; she didn't really tackle it in depth at all, and seemed in some ways as oblivious to her class privilege as she was sensitive to the careless racism of white people at the school. On the other hand, though, she describes her family's commitment, over several generations, to not just good education but the best education as a direct response to American racism, a deliberate decision made somewhere along the line not to settle for less than the very best.

Penn-Nasbrit's book was hard for me to read because as a parent and a homeschooler my values, my goals for my kids, and my expectations, are so different from hers--I would never push my kids academically, against their will, as hard as she did, and it was hard to read sometimes about the steps she took to get them to comply with her educational plan. At the same time, I think my willingness to be on the very relaxed end of the homeschooling continuum is partly an expression of how confident I feel of my place in middle-class culture--as was my own approach to college, which was very intellectual and liberal-education focused.

My dad, on the other hand, tends to see college as a really good vocational school where you can educate yourself into a good job that won't break your back and ruin your health, and my mom saw his college education as a means to being able to buy her kids shoes that fit and get their teeth fixed. Their very pragmatic approach to college reflects their own upbringings, and my dad's early adult years working as an auto mechanic and seeing the toll that work took on men's bodies as they aged.

So, even as I found Penn-Nasbrit's values and approach somewhat distasteful, I thought I understood something about why she was making the choices she did. If I were raising black boys, I think the insecurity of their position in American culture would be on my mind too--especially if I'd already seen them treated as if they were likely to explode into misbehavior if not carefully watched and tightly regulated.

Penn-Nasbrit also gave me a gift in one of those small, unexpected passages that opens things up. She was called to the school to talk about a problem with two of her sons, who were (I think) two years apart in age. It seems that the two of them were seeking each other out during recess, and when one was sent to the principal's office, the other went with him. She was told that her boys needed to seek friends outside their own family.

"Nonsense," she replied. "In a Black family, there is no such thing as siblings who are too close."

This was a fascinating tidbit for me. I have at times fretted over how close Eric and Carl are, even as I celebrate it, because I have this nagging notion that it is more "healthy" to socialize outside the family. I don't mean to suggest that I think the kids need no outside friends, but her matter-of-fact statement in favor of siblings being friends to each other reminded me of how culturally-bound my assumptions still are.