A Thousand Gifts

by Hillary Harvey, September 04, 2008

As the days grow cooler, my mind begins to race.  September approaches, and we are not going to school. My husband, Owen, and I have considered our options, even applied to a local private school and, in the end, decided to keep our 5 ½ year-old daughter, Zoë, home for her kindergarten year.  It’s an experiment. To see if homeschooling is a good fit for us. I’m hopeful about it. But if, after a year, it isn’t working, if Zoë is unhappy and I have lost my nerve, we will reassess our options and take a stab at something else.

As for now, for this year, we are committed.  I’ve been spending the summer obsessing over how to make this homeschool thing gel: eyeing friends’ methods, reading books from the library, buying the ones that offer something I can work with long-term, researching curricula, and talking and talking and talking to Owen. The most important part of this research has been to observe Zoë, to see how much social time she really thrives on, to see which methods of suggestion and styles of teaching she’s receptive to, and to listen to her ideas, interests and to her criticisms of me (how I get impatient, frustrate easily and get distracted with my computer).

I’ve found that some people in our homeschool community do child-led education, sometimes to the point of not verbally suggesting anything ever, while others do structured learning with workbooks and curricula purchased online. Some people have no organized learning time and therefore no time off. While others do various schedules like three months on and one month off, or ten months on and two months off. The investigation has unveiled my original suspicion, now a more educated one: that we’ll be in-between the laid-back and the prepared in a sort of flowing, collaborative style.

During lunch one day, we made up a new game where I asked Zoë questions and she explained things to me. It was textbook child psychology, with Zoë reversing our regular conversations so that she was the one with all the answers. (In our homeschooling, so much of what goes on in a day is simply asking and answering questions, looking things up, talking and reasoning. I’d anticipated this, as I'd read about it in the book The Unschoolers Handbook: How to Use the Whole World as Your Child's Classroom. I'd read it when Zoë was 2, before enrolling her in preschool. At that time, Owen wasn't on-board with homeschooling or experimenting.  Now that we're doing it, I know we won't be doing unschooling per se. But the book was incredibly helpful from the standpoint of seeing the Zen art of parenting and how homeschooling is an extension of the practice of being present.) At one point, I began to give answers, and Zoë said, "Pretend you don't know stuff again." She liked it not only because she was the authority and could help me to understand things, but also because it was fun.  I would pretend to become really bewildered at certain points and ask crazy questions so she could clarify things for me. It was one of those amazing moments as a mom when I got to see the inner workings of my child's mind and watch it tick along with each new thought.
It seems arbitrary to wait for a calendar date to begin our homeschool lessons and activities. In some ways I'd like to just start them right now, to get the waiting over with, and to begin the thing I'm always talking about doing. But we are enjoying our last days of summer. It was Connor's wedding last weekend and Olivia's 3rd birthday party this. In between we've been wandering around the Woodstock Farm Festival, doing scavenger hunts on our walks, and making art at home. Zoë is continuing with her own missions, thinking up projects for herself, exploring the back yard. Recently, she devised a game where we hid five colored pencils and then drew a map to show the other person where to find them.


III.
In watching myself react to this upcoming school year, I have been seeing how much of this homeschooling thing is, for me, a conscious choice to pull away from mainstream culture. Many of our decisions for Zoë have been leading up to this. We've always shunned dressing her like a walking billboard for TV shows. Ballet was not our scene. And when we took Zoë out of a pre-kindergarten program last winter, it was in part because the school wasn't either. After researching homeschooling and reading a lot of John Gatto’s essays, public school is becoming less and less of an option to me, not that it ever really was.

My cousin, who has for the past 40 years taught in one of the top NYC public schools, emailed me the other day that she was "mortified" by my blog (created to help out-of-town family and friends stay up-to-date with Zoe’s studies, as well as for my own sense of organization and keeping tabs on how much learning we "accomplish"). I read that it felt personal to her, our perceived rejection of the system. People think we have no faith in school teachers. They think we are being over protective, that we have no faith in Zoë. It is the strangest feeling to open my arms to a philosophical framework upon which I want to live my life but don't yet feel a part of. As September approaches and many of our friends get ready for the right of passage that school can be, I can't help but feel the uncertainty of turning in a different direction, of swimming upstream.

In the past six months, I've joined the local homeschool email lists, and we’ve met a lot of people. So we enter this already having many friends. There are homeschool co-ops, classes and play groups.  There are people like us who are just beginning and others who have been homeschooling for 15 years or more. I told my cousin, "It's not so much what's wrong with the schools around here, but what's so amazing about the homeschool community."

But I am prone to moments of doubt, feeling like the things I know to be important are also the things that drive a wedge between me and the rest of the world.  I don’t know if homeschooling will prove to be the best fit for us.  I don’t know if I will ever feel a part of the various communities I’m involved with.  I don’t know for certain what’s going to help Zoë grow into the confident, informed and strong person that I hope she will continue to be.  But I know that we all have our inner struggles, whether we share them or not.  And for me, writing these blog posts will help me to process all of this uncertainty.  Maybe it will confirm my larger fears and be fodder for my continued diminution in others’ minds.  Or maybe it will lift me up so that I can lift Zoë and raise her as best I can.

Zoë is somewhat oblivious to my plans for her. She doesn't know about the music class I'm organizing or the workbooks I’m buying. She doesn't know about the conversations Owen and I have going over our budget for her education or working on the schedule so it won't be overwhelming. Zoë just brings me paper plates and cups and asks if we can make something out of them. I get out one of the library books we borrowed for our cultural study of Japan, Traditional Crafts from Japan by Florence Temko.  We read about wind socks, how on May 5 (Children's Day) the Japanese make a koi nobori for each child in the house. The wind socks are hung outside, moving in the breeze like fish swimming. They "represent a wish that the children be healthy and strong, like the carp." Children are resilient. They are determined to flourish. Both in educational settings and in family experiments.