Happy Hanukkah

Amelie is lucky. She gets two holidays, and that adds up to A LOT of presents. In my family, my brother and I were given a gift every night of the eight nights of Hanukkah. That's one big pile o' goods. After all, as Jewish kids we had Christmas to compete with, so we needed some good ammunition for our friends. ("Oh, yeah? Presents under the tree and in your socks? Well, we get a present every night for eight whole nights!")

When I told my husband about the eight gifts he was suitably horrified by the flagrant consumerism, but he was also a bit excited by prospect that we might just have to continue the excessive family tradition. So we're sort of going along with it. For now.

Here's Amelie wildly shaking pepper over play carrots at her new toy kitchen. She went crazy making eggs, pizza, and soup. It was all we could do to lure her to the table to eat some real dinner.

Only five more nights to go....

Reading to Flurry

I'm laid up in bed with a bad cold. Amelie loves coming to my bedside and unwrapping cough drops for me. She has unwrapped more cough drops than I could possibly consume in one day. Since I don't have the brain power or the wrist strength to type out a real blog post, I'm leaving you with a couple of photos of my girl "reading" to Flurry the therapy dog at our local library yesterday. (Thanks, Michael, for these snaps.) Doesn't the dog look like he's really listening?

Worry Less, Live More

My husband thinks I worry too much. Maybe he's right, although sometimes I'm just stating a fact ("Amelie is going to bed too late"), which my hubby quickly translates into worry-speak ("Amelie isn't getting enough sleep and will end up sick or slap-happy or the victim of some other terrible fate").

Who's the real worry wart?

Still, I think he's right that I, and probably the rest of the population of the free world, should worry less.

Last night we finished watching the documentary film Born into Brothels, about a photographer who travels to Calcutta, India, to chronicle the lives of prostitutes and ends up teaching photography to a rag-tag band of red-light-district children. It's an incredible story. I fell in love with these spunky kids, who discovered a new world through the camera lenses provided to them by the impassioned and protective British-American photographer Zana Briski. As she gets closer to the children and learns more about the bleak futures that await them, Briski devotes her boundless energy to getting these kids out of the brothels and into boarding schools, where they can get an education and a chance for a better life.

The photograph at top, taken by 14-year-old Suchitra, is one of my favorites. Sweet-faced Suchitra was not one of the lucky ones. Her mother would not allow her to leave the squalid brothel, where she is likely contributing to its income today.

Seeing this movie I am shamed by my silly little worries about Amelie watching too much television or not eating her veggies. And I am dazzled by the unaccountable flashes of joy and humor and even genius emitting from these scruffy kids as they struggle against enormous odds for a kinder future.

Today's mantra: Worry Less, Live More. Oh, and laugh more too.

Born into Brothels
worrying

Better Than School

Sometimes I wish I had kept my mouth shut about our intention to homeschool Amelie. After all, our girl is only two - which means that I have to listen to people's objections to this scheme for a good 3 or 4 years longer than necessary. Not everyone is unsupportive, of course, but some friends and relatives take every opportunity to tell me why they think homeschooling will turn my kid into a weirdo or a misfit with no friends and no chance of getting into a good university, blah blah blah.

It's always reassuring to learn that people with these ideas usually know very little about the reality of homeschooling.

Of course there's always the chance that a homeschooled kid will turn out to be socially awkward. Yet schooled kids can be pretty weird too. I remember some strange characters from my school days (a boy who ate a piece of the innards of a dissected frog comes to mind) - and in retrospect I believe that the contrived world of compulsory schooling made some kids this way.

But the pushback that I'm receiving from a few friends and family members is nothing compared to the tremendous pressure that trailblazing homeschoolers faced in the 1970s and 80s, when a homeschooling movement quietly started to unfold in this country. Nancy Wallace tells it like it was in her excellent 1983 book Better Than School. Wallace's seven-year-old son was miserable in school, but when his parents inquired into teaching him at home they had to face an unsympathetic and all-too-powerful school board. After a few tense meetings and a lot of paperwork the board reluctantly allowed the Wallaces to homeschool Ishmael. Yet the school officials plagued this poor family with disdain and intrusive surveillance along the way.

Wallace has a slice-of-homeschool-life style that I really enjoyed. We get to see Ishmael and his sister Vita find and explore their passions, from writing stories to working out Bach minuets on the piano. In the chapters on reading and music, Wallace looks so closely, so lovingly, at the way her children learn. She honors her kids' unique learning styles in a way that simply isn't possible for even the most well-meaning schoolteacher, who has 29 other pupils to look after. And when Wallace discovers that her kids have a gift for music she makes piano and violin a centerpiece of their education, creating a conservatory-like environment and filling their lives with musical opportunities.

These kids are lucky. Are they weird? Hell, yes. Who wouldn't call a nine-year-old who writes operettas weird? But what's wrong with that? Seems pretty great to me.

homeschooling
Better Than School

Happiness Is a Pot of Soup

It's getting cold up here in the Catskill foothills. The trees are stripping down to bare essentials, and the deer are wearing thicker coats. The black bear are preparing for their long sleep.

Even though I am from the Northeast, and even though I have Eastern European Jew babushka-wearing genes, I really feel that my soul (if not my body) is of Caribbean descent. This is not my season.

Yet on my way to teach yoga yesterday morning, I couldn't help but notice the delicate shimmer of frost on the grasses. I couldn't help but notice that so many yellow leaves had conspired to fall in one night, blanketing the hillside in gold. There is much beauty this time of year.

Here is my winter survival plan: Make soup. Drink tea. Keep flames dancing in the woodstove.

Yesterday we had one of those rare, lovely Sundays with no plans at all (aside from the morning yoga, which is a joy). I spent the afternoon cooking wholesome things for our little family. For lunch there was quinoa, braised greens from a New Paltz farm, and lemon-pepper tofu. Incredibly, Amelie ate the greens. Heartily. Then Michael made a house-warming fire in the woodstove and Amelie "read" books to Pooh bear (with amazing accuracy, I might add) while I got to work on a pot of soup. The recipe, courtesy of my mother-in-law, is fast becoming a family treasure.

Three Grain Soup

3 medium leeks, white parts only, chopped (I use a big onion when leeks are not available)
2 medium carrots sliced 1/2 inch thick
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 bay leaves
1/2 teaspoon thyme
salt
14-ounce can crushed tomatoes
6 cups water
Head of garlic, peeled but not chopped
1/3 cup brown rice
1/3 cup lentils
1/3 cup wheat berries and/or barley
Big bunch of kale, chopped

Combine the leeks, carrots, oil, bay leaves, thyme, and salt. Cover and cook on low 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add tomatoes, water, and garlic and bring to a boil. Add grains and lentils. Cover and simmer until tender, about an hour. Add kale for the last 15 minutes. Cook to desired thickness, or add more water if necessary.

I always double the recipe, filling two quarts for the freezer for future meals.

Cornbread is a nice accompaniment. I made some yesterday and forgot the sugar. So we just drizzled each slice liberally with honey. It was a meal fit for Pooh bear, if not a king.

soup

Back to (Semi)Normal

Well, Amelie and I made it through Daddy's Longest Business Trip Ever. And we are just so glad that's behind us.

Eleven days on our own wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be. Amelie and I were a team, and that felt good. And we had a lot of help from my family. Here's Amelie with her grandpa, dancing on a chair in his greenhouse. She loves it in there, surrounded by colorful finches from South America, painted turtles, giant toads, noisy bullfrogs, well-fed koi fish, and even a water dragon.

We spent Halloween with her cousins in the trick-or-treat paradise known as Montclair, New Jersey. Amelie couldn't believe her luck when she knocked on the doors of complete strangers and they handed her candy. She couldn't understand why she wasn't allowed to tromp through their houses, though. Who would say no to a toddler in a ladybug costume?

The biz trip had its downside, of course. Keeping up with my freelance work was hard. Some mornings Amelie went to her favorite play space, the Sunshine Club, which is like a high-class daycare full of fabulous toys and just 4 or 5 kids on most days. And then there were the times when she just watched A LOT of videos while I tried to bang out a 400-word article or proofread a newsletter. She thought she had won the jackpot, but I wallowed in guilt about her television binge.

It was times like these when I began to doubt our ability to homeschool Amelie. Most homeschooling families have one stay-at-home parent who's completely dedicated to their children's education. Usually Michael and I will both be at home, but we'll be juggling work and homeschooling. Even now we have dedicated work shifts to keep our time structured and make a clear separation between work and childcare. Yet unforeseen trips like this one will inevitably come along and throw us into a tizzy again.

Should one of us quit working? With expenses like ours it doesn't seem possible right now. And since both of us are freelance we have no job security whatsoever. With both of us working, we at least have each other to fall back on if the work dries up.

Michael is back home now, so my confidence level is rising again. We have Amelie recovering from her TV addiction on a 12-step program. We are eating less Halloween candy and more home-cooked meals. Things are looking up.

homeschooling
working mom

An Award, Just When I Need It Most

My husband has never outgrown his childhood love for superheroes. A classic portrait of Superman hangs over his desk, and he never misses a film adaptation of his favorite comic book characters. He can tell you about Spiderman's childhood with a biographer's accuracy, and he knows all about obscure superheroes like The Sandman and Ghost Rider. Now I get to tell my husband that he is in fact married to a superhero, or more precisely, a superheroine, as Fourmother has honored me with a Wonder Woman award. Hence the nifty bouquet of roses and winged "W" insignia.

It couldn't have come at a better time. I could really use some super powers right now. Michael (the aforementioned hubby) is away on a business trip, a ridiculously LONG business trip, and I am now experiencing life as a Single Mother. Ahem. A Single Working Mother. And it is not easy.

I may not have an invisible jet or gold bracelets that can deflect bullets, but I do have a few other secret weapons. I have the Madeline videos that I rented from the library, which can buy me a little time to send work off to a client. I have a hidden stash of chocolate that can stop a tantrum in mid-screech. I can do a pretty good Cookie Monster imitation. And I have an iPhone now - yes, that exorbitantly priced little gadget - which lets me respond to work emails from the playground so no one has to know that I'm not at my desk. Linda Carter, eat your heart out!

But I could use more, many more super powers to get me through this week and all the way to Monday, when hubby will stumble off his red-eye flight and back into our lives. I could use super powers to fill the fridge with nourishing meals for the next few days. I could use super powers to scrub my daughter's potty, keep raccoons out of the garbage, and fold more goddamn laundry. I could use super powers to stay loving and kind toward my hubby despite his maddening absence.

On a happier note, I would like to pass the Wonder Woman award along to Colleen of The New Unschooler for her intrepid foray into unschooling with her 12-year-old son. She tells us in her blog that she just had a birthday, so I think roses are in order. Besides, her boy will be really impressed to hear that his mom is a superheroine.

superheroes
Wonder Woman

Happiness

From the Land of Make-Believe

We have arrived at the age of the Imagination. For the past month or so, we have seen our couch turn into a train, and we've had long conversations on the phone with Charlie Brown. We have strapped Winnie the Pooh into a toy stroller and taken him to the chocolate store. We have carefully wiped our teddy bears' bottoms, patted them dry, and wrapped them in real diapers that we ourselves do not wear anymore. We have eaten slice after slice of pretend pizza.

Come to think of it, I've watched Amelie's imagination slowly begin to bud and flower over the course of several months now. The more skillful my daughter becomes with the English language, the more intricate her world grows. The two forces - language and imagination- are expanding in tandem, as if sprouting from the same seed. And they are moving forward at a furious rate, like fast-growing vines destined to twist themselves around everything in sight.

I've said this many times during the course of Amelie's small life, but I'm saying it with even greater fervency now: I do not want to forget any of this. It's incredible to watch my child begin to make sense of her world by spinning stories around it. What a lush, crazy, wonderful garden the human mind is! We really are all innately creative beings. We begin as artists. Whether or not we are lucky enough to remain so throughout our lives is often another story.

My dream is to protect this fragile, golden kernel of creativity that lives within my daughter. Keeping Amelie out of school - all too often the land of conformity and lowest common denominators - might be one way to go about it. Is it naive to think this way? I wonder. It is certainly not conventional to think this way. And something tells me that's a good thing.

homeschooling
imagination
make-believe

She Eats Bananas, Eggs, and Yes, Chocolate

I'm singing the Picky Eater Blues lately. My girl is oh-so meticulous about what she chooses to put in her mouth. When it comes to dinner entrees we are down to three or four things. Pasta with butter, cheese, and broccoli that she picks out. Couscous with butter, cheese, and peas that she picks out. Scrambled eggs will do in a pinch. (And it's always a pinch. Perhaps I should start raising hens.)

Until very recently Amelie even rejected pizza. I was outraged. A child who won't eat pizza? So I went to work on this. (You would think that I'd choose a more valiant crusade, like kale or spinach. But no. I wanted a normal, pizza-eating child.) And wonder of wonders, she eats some pizza now. But only broccoli pizza. And she won't eat the bread. She carefully picks off the broccoli and cheese and eats those. Just to keep me on my toes, it seems. (Though I suppose I did choose the right crusade.)

I get such a high when Amelie eats something green. It's quite a feeling, like I've just won an all-expenses-paid vacation for two to sunny Jamaica. It's a level of euphoria that's entirely out of proportion to the situation.

Oh, and my girl has so many rules - ridiculous rules! Have you ever heard of a child who will only eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while she's riding in the car? I swear, if I put a pb&j on a plate in front of her at the table, she won't touch it. But I'll stick it in a baggie and five minutes later, as we're rolling down the block, she'll munch it happily en route to the store or playground. Same for baby carrots. She only eats them when she's in motion. When I put them on a plate, alas, they lose all their sex appeal.

The New York Times recently ran an article called Picky Eaters? They Get It from You. I read it with a guilty sense of recognition. Yes, I was the child who would eat only spaghetti with red sauce. Apparently this is an evolutionary response - a survival mechanism designed to prevent us from ingesting potentially dangerous things. So I suppose I should be more understanding of Amelie's finicky nature, and proud to have such a Darwinian masterpiece of a daughter.

An accompanying article called The Experts Suggest offers a few strategies for us meal-challenged parents. It seems I'm doing everything wrong: Making Amelie a separate dish instead of serving her what her parents eat, and resorting to bribery (if you eat some spinach I'll let you watch that video!).

Well, it's back to the cutting board tonight. Onward I go, clinging to the slender hope that my girl will eat something green, transporting me to a kind of bliss unknown even to the most deeply meditative and enlightened monks of the Himalayas....

picky eaters

3 a.m. Musings, and a Recipe

I can't sleep, so I have redesigned my blog. I've been meaning to do this for some time. It was just, well, too PINK.

What's with the pink, anyway? I never used to like the color particularly, but after I gave birth to a girl child, I started putting it everywhere. This is embarrassing but true. I fell into the pink trap. I latched onto the girlie-girl hue as a way of announcing to the world that yes, my nearly bald, androgynous infant had two X chromosomes, thank you very much. (Why is it so important to most of us parents that people recognize this? I suppose we want even passers-by in the street to know at least the bare basics about the amazing being that is our child.)

So, away with the pink. Except for that pink ribbon of sisterly support. THAT can stay.

Anyway, in the spirit of mommy bloggers always looking to share the latest domestic coup, I am going to offer one of my family's favorite new recipes now. (Yes, this is a complete non sequitur. I am writing this at 3 a.m., so you must forgive me. Try these muffins, and you will forgive me. They are delicious. And besides, I needed a reason to post the image at top of my domestic-goddess-in-training. You will notice that she is wearing a PINK top. Though I prefer now to think of it as a subdued salmon color.)

Carrot Cake Muffins

2 cups shredded carrots (approx. 6 carrots)*
1/2 cup raisins
2 1/2 cups whole-wheat pastry flour
2 tsp baking soda
1 1/4 tsp cinnamon
3/4 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp ground cloves
2 coarsely mashed bananas
1/2 cup canola oil
1/2 cup orange juice
3 Tbsp honey and/or 2 Tbsp molasses
2 tsp vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 375. Line a 12-cup muffin tin with paper baking cups. Brush or spray with canola oil.

Mix the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt, ginger, and cloves in one big bowl.

In another bowl, mix the banana, oil, orange juice, honey/molasses, and vanilla until well blended.

Gradually add the wet ingredients to the dry, blending well with each addition. Stir in the carrots and raisins.

Spoon into the muffin cups and bake 40-45 minutes, or until a tester inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean.

*Note: Use a food processor (not a hand grater) to shred the carrots or you will begin to despair, and to curse me for sharing this recipe with you. And I wouldn't want that to happen.

By the way, this is a modified version of a recipe from Healthy Cooking for Kids. Enjoy.

mommy bloggers
muffin recipe
pink

The Life of a Blog

Thanks to Fourmother for tagging me with the latest meme and inspiring a post today. For this meme I'm asked to choose 5 posts that show "The Evolution of My Blog." Why not?

Playing Hooky is still very young, barely out of diapers as far as blogs go. And I'm not nearly up to speed with my posting yet (though I strive to pick up the pace). But here goes.

1. When I launched this blog with my first post, Busting the Stereotypes, I hadn't yet decided whether or not I wanted to homeschool my daughter. (This photo of Amelie is one of my faves.)

2. Not long after, I wrote about making in-roads into the homeschooling culture in Finding Community. What a relief it was to connect with like-minded people who were really doing the homeschooling thing! Homeschooling was starting to sound not just doable but exciting to me.

3. I often agonize about decisions. But it didn't take me long to decide that homeschooling would really work for our family. School was starting to look less and less appealing as a choice for Amelie, while I could imagine our daughter really thriving under the loving guidance of her natural teachers: her parents. I announced my decision to homeschool in How Can We Not?

4. Big commitments often stir up the darker waters of Doubt. Although I was sure of my decision, I needed to write this post as a way of venting a few reservations I still had about homeschooling.

5. In A Freelance Student I embrace the homeschooling lifestyle as a perfect fit for an unconventional (and, I'd like to believe, free-spirited) family like mine.

And now I ask five bloggers to share the evolution of their blogs:
A Happy Childhood Lasts Forever
Freakmom's Space
Into the Studio
Have Fun * Do Good
Dispatches from the Final Frontier

homeschooling
meme

A Good Read

"Most parents feel fondness for those rare, odd moments when they have knelt close beside a son or daughter to transmit the mystery of some ancient, incidental craft: tying a bowline, weaving a pigtail, nipping the suckers from a tomato plant. These are now Hallmark, quality-time moments, exploited by advertisers and available on weekends--we want more of them, we long for that sort of warm proximity in which what we do is necessary, unforced, and precisely as it should be....

"In the end there are reasons beyond education (Can we really detach education from everything else?) to homeschool--a misnomer, in this context, for doing what human beings have always done in bringing up their children. There is a love to be cultivated, an instinct to be nurtured, a need to be satisfied at both ends."

--David Guterson, Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense

It's been several weeks since I've finished reading Guterson's book, but passages like these have stayed with me. Written by a high school English teacher, novelist, and homeschooling father of four, Family Matters is a defense of homeschooling as a choice "neither extreme nor outlandish." The book is anything if not sharply intelligent and exhaustively comprehensive, looking at homeschooling from all angles, from legal to theoretical to financial. Guterson inserts just enough anecdote to keep it lively, though I did get a bit bogged down in the theory section. The final chapter puts an elegant cap on Guterson's ultimate message: that our culture tends to alienate parents from their kids, and that homeschooling is one way to restore a sense of connection that's often sadly imperiled these days.

Hear, hear.

homeschooling
David Guterson
Family Matters

A Freelance Student

I love working from home. I can show up at my desk in my pajamas if I feel like it. I can see deer and wild turkeys and sometimes even black bear out my window. I can put my laptop on the porch on a gorgeous September day. I can take a walk down our country road when I need a little break. Best of all, I can be here to mother my child and even to homeschool her when the time comes.

Working from home seemed like a far-fetched idea before I started doing it. But my husband insisted upon the freelance lifestyle for himself, being quite literally allergic to offices. (I have seen his reaction to cubicles, and folks, it isn't pretty. It involves quite a few trips to the men's room.) So I quit my brief New York City magazine career and joined him, living by my pen in the Hudson River Valley. We've each cobbled together something of a career and a better income than I ever thought possible out here in the wilds of New York state.

When we first started to consider homeschooling our daughter, I said to my husband, "Well, we're freelance writers. Why can't Amelie be a freelance student?" Like us she can cut herself loose from big institutions and impersonal environments. She can be her own boss and set her own schedule. She can use the toilet without a hall pass, for chrissake, or go into the kitchen and make herself a peanut butter and banana sandwich whenever she damn well feels like it.

It's a good life. It's a free life. Why should my daughter have anything less?

homeschooling

School A La Carte

I'm amazed at all the misconceptions floating around out there about homeschooling. People assume there's only one way to do it - a method akin to some half-baked attempt at "school at home," with the parent, having no formal training, taking on the stern role of teacher for everything from phonetics to pre-calculus.

No, thanks. That's not what I'm signing up for. I'd die of boredom and my kid would, too.

Instead my husband and I are attracted to more of a "school a la carte" method. We imagine our daughter taking a little bit of learning from here and a little bit from there, according to her tastes and to what is available in the world around us. As it turns out, there's quite a bit available out there.

I joined a local homeschoolers' Yahoo group this summer, and since September has rolled around the emails have been pouring in about all kinds of classes and programs in the area. Like this one:

Recycled music, Thursdays, 12-12:45 AM, ages 8-10
Want to put that old chip bag to use? Join Zoe Rowan in an introduction to lutherie (instrument building). The class will use cheap and recycled materials to build simple instruments such as drums, reed pipes, and a cigar box "guitar." Students will also listen to and discuss music from around the world. Final class will end in a group jam session. $50.00 + $10.00 materials fee.

How cool is that? Here's another:

Space! Thursdays, 10-10:45 AM ages 7-8
Nita is back! Join her for this fun class about the cosmos. Students will be using children's literature and activities to learn about outer space. Students will work on a lap book about the solar system and other topics. $50.00

Can adults come too?

Really, it's enough to make me wish my daughter were older and ready to homeschool RIGHT NOW. Then again, she's a super-cute two-year-old. There's no rush. But it sure is good to know what's out there waiting for us.

homeschooling

Dreams

In my last post I gave voice to a few doubts I have about homeschooling. To balance that out I'd like to venture in the opposite direction, into the realm of fantasy. Here are my dreams about how amazing homeschooling can be.

> Cutting ourselves loose from the school calendar, we'll be free to travel. In fact, we'll make travel a big part of our daughter's education. Perhaps we'll spend a year in Italy, delving into Renaissance art and architecture...tracing Amelie's paternal roots in Sicily...learning to speak Italian and make a killer pesto sauce.

> Goodbye stuffy school rooms, hello fresh air. When the weather allows, nature will be our daughter's classroom. How anti-life is it to lock kids away from the outdoors, which are more magical than ever when seen through a child's eyes?

> She'll have the time to follow her passions. Maybe our daughter will want to work with animals at the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary. Or she'll become a pro-level mountain biker on the trails up here in the Catskill Mountains. Or she'll become a bad-ass mixed-media artist. My husband has mused that Amelie might want to take flying lessons. I'm not quite as excited about that one. But I'll let him have his little dream.

> We'll avoid most of that ugly teenager stuff. When I hit my teens I became a monster and was very combative, especially with my mother. I think the power of schools to alienate kids from their families has a lot to do with these Jekyll and Hyde post-puberty transformations. Homeschooling will help us stay healthily bonded.

> We'll work less, enjoy life more. Amelie will coax my husband and me away from our computers and all that important grown-up work, showing us what really matters. In fact, she's already doing it.

Aaah. That was nice. A bit of dreaming over a cup of Rooibos tea. Is any of that realistic? I suppose we're bound to find out.

homeschooling

Doubts

I should be sleeping right now. When I'm not sleeping, unwelcome visitors like Doubt show up. And when it comes to the subject of homeschooling, ornery old Doubt has a lot to say.

So I've decided to give Doubt a little time to vent on this subject of homeschooling. I'll just let him blather a bit, get it out of his system so he can leave me alone and let me get some sleep.

1. My daughter will feel that she is missing out. Of course Michael and I will know that she is not missing out on anything by being homeschooled. But maybe A. will feel, later, in retrospect, that she has been deprived of some crucial formative experience, like going to the prom. Maybe she will have bitter misgivings about the fact that her psycho vegetarian yogi parents (these are Doubt's words, not mine) kept her sealed away from some kind of picture-perfect American schooling experience, idealized in her mind because she will never know about its day-to-day drudgeries and demoralizations.

2. My daughter will be lonely. Despite the fact that I have been entertaining fantasies lately about having another child, chances are that Michael and I will stick to our original plan of having just one. And little A. with no schoolmates or siblings will yearn for companionship. Insert a few glycerin tears here.

3. We will make some terrible mistake in our homeschooling efforts. Maybe we'll take a classical approach when we should really be unschooling her. Or maybe Michael and I will forget to expose our girl to some important topic, like the periodic table or the names of the state capitals. Oh, the horror.

4. We will mess up our kid. Don't all parents, no matter how well meaning, mess up their kids? Don't all kids rebel as a protest to just how badly we've messed them up? A. will act out against our crunchy homeschooling lifestyle and she'll end up flipping burgers at McDonald's, or worse, voting Republican.

Okay, that's enough from you, Doubt. You've said your piece. Now scram. I'm off to bed.

homeschooling

When I Played Hooky

In my last post, it seems I gave only seven random facts about myself instead of the requisite eight. So I owe you one. Except instead of giving a fact, I'll give you a story.

When I was about 15 I did perhaps the wildest and craziest thing in my life thus far. I skipped school. It was just so tempting. A beautiful spring day, a bus to New York City pulling up right by my high school. So my friend Mia and I simply hopped on that bus. We were two small-town girls itching for a life beyond suburbia. Thirty minutes later we were in the big city. No strangers to the place, we made our way to Sheep's Meadow in Central Park, that delicious expanse of green ending in a row of far-off skyscrapers. In later years I would make out with a boy on that emerald carpet and even let a tablet of ecstasy melt on my tongue. But this time we didn't do much of anything except sprawl our teen bodies out on the grass, our heads resting on textbook-filled backpacks. I don't know how many hours we passed that way, talking, basking in sunlight and our sumptuous freedom. I'm sure we wandered around the Upper West Side, too, choosing just which prewar brownstones would house our future husbands and kids. But I don't remember that. I only remember being instead of doing. It was a new sensation.

It would have been a perfect day had the juvenile police not spotted us heading home through Port Authority. But the bastards did spot us. At first we thought they were flirting with us (my friend Mia was a blond beauty, a veritable man magnet), but it turns out they were sizing us up and found us looking pretty suspicious with our schoolgirl backpacks and two tickets back to the suburbs. They took us down to the station, called our parents, and thoroughly mortified us both. Didn't those big lugs have anything better to do than piss on one of the most fabulous days of our little lives?

To this day I still nurse a strong dislike for New York City cops. And I have a sweet, Proust-like nostalgia for playing hooky.

playing hooky
Sheep's Meadow

8 Random Facts Meme

My friend Britt from Have Fun * Do Good has tagged me for a meme called 8 Random Facts about Me. Thanks, Britt, for getting me off my lazy blogging ass to finally post again. (The truth is, I was not lazy but drowning in freelance work. Thank god for a holiday weekend.) Anyway, as part of the deal, I'm supposed to inspire posts for eight more bloggers. See if you're one of them at the end of this post.

The Rules:

1. Post these rules before you give your facts
2. List 8 random facts about yourself
3. At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names, linking to them
4. Leave a comment on their blog, letting them know they've been tagged

The Facts:

1. My first job after college was an internship (read: slave labor) at The Paris Review literary magazine. The office was located in the Manhattan home of editor-in-chief George Plimpton. On my first day I walked in on him in his boxer shorts.

2. I have been to the Greek Islands five times. You might say I'm a little obsessed with a tiny, obscure Cycladic isle called Iraklia. It has a year-round population of 80 and one baker, who delivers his bread in a white pickup truck. It's damn good bread.

3. I love nothing better than a cup of tea and a 19th-century novel. Preferably Austen or Tolstoy.

5. I once posed nude for a famous photographer. I regretted this almost immediately. Thankfully I did not sign a release, so unless someone wants to get sued upside down and sideways, no one will ever see the photographs!

6. It gets zanier than that. I was not just nude...I was doing yoga in the nude with two other women.

7. Might as well add here that when I am not a freelance writer/editor and when I am not a mother and when I am not blogging about homeschooling, I am a yoga teacher at Bliss Yoga Center in Woodstock.

8. What I really want to do is throw it all away and become an artist. I love fooling around with an alternative photography technique called the Polaroid transfer process. The image at top is one of my creations, hand-colored with Prismacolor pencils.

I'm tagging the following blogs:

Dispatches from the Final Frontier
Our Report Card
Like I Have Time for This?
HeartSchooling
Discovertopia
ODonnellWeb
Land of Our Fourmother
Not a Stepford Wife

How Can We Not?

"Monday morning found Tom Sawyer miserable. Monday morning always found him so - because it began another week's slow suffering in school. He generally began that day with wishing he had had no intervening holiday, it made going into captivity and fetters again so much more odious."

- Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer (1876)

If there was ever a book about playing hooky, it was Tom Sawyer. The young hero of this classic American book - a staple of every junior high reading list - is skipping school from the first chapter. That Tom is a smart kid. He knows that all the magic of childhood lies elsewhere, not in a classroom. Escaping school, carefree and barefoot by the Mississippi River, he is at his imaginative, creative, adventurous best.

Is this book an anthem for homeschooling, or what?

I still get a funny feeling once in a while when I'm wandering around town during the daytime. Here I am in my late 30s and I still sometimes feel like I'm supposed to be in school. You know how when school was in session, and you had a doctor's appointment or something, some kind of excuse for not being in school, and it felt deliciously subversive to be out on the street, among the living? I still get that slightly giddy feeling of freedom from time to time.

I want my daughter to feel that freedom is her natural state. Not something that she has to steal a taste of, like forbidden fruit.

Yep, we've pretty much decided that we're going to homeschool Amelie now. When I started this blog the jury was still out. But the more I learn about it the more I think, how can we not?

homeschooling
Tom Sawyer

Preschool at Home: 101 Ideas (Part 1)

1. Fingerpaint.
2. Catch butterflies with a net, observe, and release.
3. Make edible bracelets by stringing Fruit Loops cereal onto plastic cord.
4. Do simple yoga poses with your kid, like Dog, Tree, or Boat Pose. Here’s Amelie doing Boat and Dog. (Pictures courtesy of Grandma & Grandpa.)


5. Make your own playdough: Mix 2 cups flour, 1 cup salt, and 4 tsp cream of tartar into a cooking pot. In a bowl, add 4 tsp of cooking oil and 4 drops of food coloring to 2 cups of water. Pour the liquid into the pot. Cook on medium heat, stirring constantly, until it looks like mashed potatoes. Cool the dough and knead until smooth.
6. Bake your favorite low-sugar muffins.
7. Sing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider,” with hand movements.
8. Spread some glue on paper and drizzle with sand to make sand art.
9. Plant seedlings.
10. Fill plastic eggs with rice (halfway full) and tape shut to make shakers.
11. Make mini pizzas with premade dough, sauce, and cheese.
12. Make sun tea.
13. Make handprints in paint.
14. Create a scavenger hunt for things in nature like pinecones, feathers, and leaves.
15. Make a fort out of sofa cushions and sheets.
16. Paint rocks with washable paint.
17. Give washable toys a “bath” outside with a small bucket, water, sponge, and lots of bubbles.
18. Make masks (and decorate them) with paper plates and string.
19. Make sunprints! Place a fern, flower, or other object on sunprint paper and set in the sun briefly. Rinse with water and viola - a beautiful image appears. You'll need a sunprint kit; find one here.
20. Have a letter of the day and find things/words that begin with that letter.
21. Put up a birdfeeder.
22. Read books about the alphabet.
23. Trace your child’s body on a huge sheet of paper, and have your kid color it in with clothes, a face, or anything.
24. Go to the library and browse for picture books.
25. Make fun-shaped mini sandwiches with cookie cutters.
26. Sing “Ring Around the Rosy,” circling and falling together.
27. Read books about numbers.
28. Put on a 70’s dance song and rock out together.
29. Go into a dark place like a fort or closet and read books with a flashlight. (Amelie loves a good, dark closet these days.)
30. Play in the sand.
31. Make up a song about the sun.
32. Pick wildflowers.
33. Press and dry your flowers in a heavy book. Use them for art projects later.

Unschooling, Unraveled

Potty pride! Amelie is having a bit of a love affair with her potty these days. How did she learn to use it? I can't really say. She was motivated.

The process of learning, whether it's the potty or long division, is an elusive one. And it differs from child to child. That's why I'm interested in the idea of "unschooling" - the most radical form of homeschooling. Unschoolers toss out all formal methods of teaching in favor of a child-led approach to learning. For example, you're in the supermarket with your kid and he notices a starfruit, so you might take that starfruit home and do some research together and find out that it's native to Sri Lanka. And then your child might want to learn about Sri Lanka or botany or fruit cultivation. Etcetera and so on. A lesson unfolds. Sort of like life.

I have a lot of respect for people who unschool. It's like cooking without recipes or performing improv theater. It has a creative and free-spirited feeling to it. It's about surrender and trust. But I wonder about the lack of structure. Would it work for Amelie, for me, for her daddy? Without structure, I feel unmoored. I'm not sure that we will become card-carrying Unschoolers. Instead, I'd rather see unschooling as just one tool in a big grab bag of homeschooling tools. A fun one, at that.

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unschooling

MIA No Longer

Having a blog is a lot like having a pet or a houseplant. Neglecting it brings a guilty feeling. I'm back to water my poor little withering plant, this time from California. We're here visiting the inlaws (see Grandpa with Amelie, above), and since the inlaws are crazy in love with their granddaughter and willing to spend countless hours entertaining her, I should have lots of time for things like blogging. But instead I have been buried alive under a landslide of freelance work. This is both good (having money is nice!) and bad (I have all kinds of strange body aches from hunching over this computer).

I don't want to whine about not having enough time. Isn't it funny how time is a kind of currency in our culture? We're all flat broke; nobody has enough of it. And we're always talking about it. I even heard a retired man recently remark on being "pressed for time." There's a good article in this month's Yoga Journal called "Strapped for Time? Try Radically Changing Your Relationship to the Clock." I read it eagerly, wanting to feel time-rich. The author suggests that we start thinking about time in a new way, focusing on not just chronological time (clocks and deadlines) but also extraordinary time ("a state of intense focus, of being in the moment...what musicians and athletes describe as being in the zone"). In other words, make time when you can for activities that let you do this (creativity, gardening, sports).

What if you simply can't make space for these things? Then you can cultivate "timefulness practices" (like mindfulness practices), such as becoming more aware of the time between activities and taking a break instead of just rushing onward to the next task. And here's one piece of advice I really liked: Spend time with someone who follows their own rhythm, like a child. Kids live in the moment and teach us to try to do the same.

Is it possible that homeschooling our kids can help us heal our relationship with time? I like this idea. I will try being on Amelie time for a little while.

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time

I've Been Memed

When I started blogging several weeks ago, I had only the vaguest understanding of blogging culture. I just chose a topic and sent a few posts out into the ether. So I'm surprised and delighted to find that I'm making a few blogging buddies out there. Virtual friends! It's a cozy feeling. The blogosphere isn't such a scary place, after all.

Anyway, I might be new to blogging, but I do realize that "meme" is not really a verb. It's more like a game of "tag, you're it." I responded to RegularMom's meme post, so now she has presented me with five questions to answer. And then if someone comments on this post, I get to meme them back with five questions for them to answer on their blog. Fun.

So here goes.

1. What’s the funniest or strangest thing that happened on your wedding day? Michael and I wanted to low-key it with a small, secular wedding at home. He is allergic to weddings, and I had already done a biggish bonanza the first time around. So we enlisted a local Justice of the Peace to do the honors. We met her once and she seemed nice enough. She had a sweet little script that she let us read beforehand. So we knew the ceremony would be brief. But we didn't know that it would be a drive-by wedding. It really was. Just when the ceremony was set to start, a car pulls up at our place and out of the passenger seat comes the Justice of the Peace. Her friend, the driver, stays in the car. Was the engine still running? That's how I remember it. So out comes the Justice of the Peace, adjusting her robe, and joins our little gathering on the lawn. She performs this tiny service, three minutes, maybe five, tops. And then she jumps back in the car and POOF - she's gone. But this woman is an artist. By the time she leaves, just about everybody is crying. And Michael and I are husband and wife.

2. Are there any artistic talents out there that you WISH you could do, but just aren’t gifted with? Oh, I tried so hard when I was a kid to draw and paint as beautifully as my father does. With some practice I did passably well. I'm rusty now and can hardly draw a simple horse on demand for my two-year-old. It comes out looking like a demented dog. But what I really wish I could do was sing, really belt it out like Aretha Franklin.

3. What is your favorite time of day? It depends on where I am. When I am in Greece (I have been five times) my favorite time is sunrise. You can see the day break open over the sea in the most spectacular way. But here in mid-state New York, with all these trees and hills, you can't see squat at dawn. I suppose right now my favorite time of day is when I realize that my toddler is finally asleep. Tonight it was 9:35 p.m.

4. Describe what you did yesterday. Yesterday was a good day. Since the hubby was traveling, I took my little girl over to this place called the Sunshine Club Playhouse so that I could work for a couple of hours in the morning. They have great toys over there so she was in heaven. I did some editing work and also managed to squeeze in a yoga practice before I picked up Amelie. I am a much nicer person after I do some yoga. Amelie and I had lunch and I took her to music class with Uncle Rock, our local treasure. Rock-and-roll toddler music. It was a blast. Amelie is not one of those kids who sits still and listens. She rocks out! Then we had some quiet time at home, and later two girlfriends came here with their kids for dinner. We had a lovely little feast with a bottle of Pinot Grigio. Amelie really wanted to taste the wine. She is going to be a party girl.

5. Coke or Pepsi? Coke. Although I have to say, it's been a while. I practically marinated myself in Diet Coke when I was in high school/college. I'm afraid to think of what it's done to me. (Not the Coke part so much as the Diet part. Yeesh. What was I thinking?) These days I grab an Izzy natural soda. Every once in a while I get a little hankering for a Coke. But never that Diet crap. I'm so over it.

meme

Look at What My Hubby Did!

Allow me a moment to crow. My fabulous husband has published a book - a real live hardcover book with this sexy, glossy cover. Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots Is Boldly Privatizing Space (Smithsonian Books/Harper Collins) made its debut in bookstores nationwide today. We celebrated with homemade vegan chocolate cupcakes after Michael completed his NINTH radio interview of the morning. The media is really digging this book! Check out the stellar review in this past weekend's Wall Street Journal.

Is that cover some kind of sci-fi fantasy, or what? It should serve as a bit of proof that if we homeschool Amelie she will at least have some science exposure from her artsy Woodstock parents. Maybe she'll be the first kid in town to ride a rocket-powered tricycle. Look out, world!

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Rocketeers
Michael Belfiore

But What about College?

I loved college. My school was a beauty, with a rambling, finely manicured campus lorded over by old-growth trees and darkly Gothic buildings with leaded windows. The library looked and felt like a cathedral to the life of the mind; it was impossible to enter without hushing your voice in reverence. I loved padding around the dorm with my friends or holing up with a pile of books, hopped up on caffeine in an all-night studying binge. To me the yearly course catalog was as enticing as a box of chocolates - the class descriptions sounded that good. Now let's see...what will it be this semester: Italian Cinema (dark hazelnut ganache) or 19th-Century Novel (raspberry fudge truffle)?

Recently at the Denim Jumper a homeschooling mom wondered how the rest of us felt about college regarding our kids. Was college consistent with a homeschooling ethos that's often distrustful of big faceless institutions and bureaucracy? Would sending our kids there be a kind of selling out? And if we wanted to our kids to pursue college, did we worry about how homeschooling might affect their chances of getting into a range of schools, as they would have no formal grades or class rankings to distinguish them?

My concern is with the latter question. I absolutely do want college in my daughter's future - only if she is willing, naturally, though I will strongly encourage her to go. I'm sure it's true that universities can get bogged down in bureaucracy and other nonsense (I experienced this in graduate school, at an institution much larger than my cozy liberal arts college). Yet college can be just the place to challenge the so-called establishment. To me, college stood for freedom, creativity, original thinking, autonomy, joy in learning. In short, it was everything that high school was not. College was where I "unschooled" all the BS of my prior schooling.

The other day I called the admissions office at my alma mater, Vassar College, and asked about their policy on homeschooling. It turns out they don't have an official policy; they welcome homeschooled applicants and recently accepted a "handful" for the incoming class. But they do have a few caveats. They want to see that a homeschooled candidate has covered the same kind of material as a conventionally schooled applicant, with no one subject neglected, like math or science. And the applicant has to be "competitive," whatever that means. They mentioned SAT or ACT scores, which I've heard weigh more heavily for homeschoolers.

Interestingly, the admissions officer told me that she's seen an increase recently in homeschooled applicants. Though before receiving my call, she'd never heard from the mother of a two-year-old prospective homeschooler. I laughed. It was true - I was jumping the gun. In the name of research, of course.

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college
Vassar College

What Does It Mean to Be Well-Educated?

A friend of mine recently told me about two boys she knows who were homeschooled partly in New York City, where at an early age they had incredible experiences like working backstage at the Metropolitan Opera and studying martial arts in Chinatown. Yet when comparing these boys to her own son, who attends our local high school, she said she believed they were "not as well-educated."

I didn't question this comment at the time, but I wish I had asked her what she meant by "well-educated." Is there a measuring stick for a so-called good education, and if so, what is it? Who gets to decide? Is the meaning of "well-educated" the same across cultures? Across time?

I did a quick Internet search today, hoping to find something like an Oxford English Dictionary definition of "well-educated," but I found something better. I found an article by Alfie Kohn called What Does It Mean to Be Well-Educated? In it, he completely deconstructs the word "well-educated," asking those same questions posed above along with many more, until the jig is up and "well-educated" is revealed as the emperor who's wearing no clothes.

Kohn is incisive and thorough, looking at such yardsticks as standardized tests (which he connects with short-term memorization and "a shallow approach to learning") and labels like "cultural literacy" (which "have the effect of taking time away from more meaningful objectives, such as knowing how to think"). Instead he favors schooling arranged around in-depth projects, problems, and questions - schooling that involves active participation with the larger goal of having kids think for themselves. Imagine that.

The quote at top? That's Nel Noddings, professor emerita at Stanford University. Now that's wisdom.

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Alfie Kohn

In Memoriam

I had a perfectly good childhood. Here I am at four years old, lit with happiness, as any four-year-old should be. Yet I can't help but feel lately, after delving into this subject of homeschooling and looking critically at the state of education in our country, that I was gypped as a kid. I can't help but feel that school as I experienced it robbed me of countless golden hours from childhood, what Rainer Maria Rilke called "that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories." And what school didn't take, television snatched right up.

Funny, isn't it, to put school and television in the same category this way, when we are supposed to see school as the vitamin and television as the junk food of our culture. Yet to me the two look more alike every day, with a similar narcotic effect on the mind and spirit.

I would like to write more on these themes when I am feeling more rested. (My two-year-old kept me up last night from 2 to 5 am, fighting sleep, and then she boycotted her nap today. I am completely flattened.) But for now I wanted to acknowledge a strange feeling of grief for a lost piece of my childhood. And in acknowledging it, I would like to let the feeling pass.

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On the Move

My girl is always in motion. Even as an infant she found ways to get around. When she learned to roll over she used it as transportation, sometimes rolling across an entire room.

I've been reading about the connection between movement and learning in a book called Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius, and it makes perfect sense. Maria Montessori recognized the absurdity of sitting kids down at desks all day and "learning at them." She championed mobile, hands-on schooling - the kind that actively engages kids. Take a look into a Montessori classroom and you won't see any desks; instead kids move about to work at different stations, alone or in groups, throughout the day. How refreshing. The kids seem like artisans, absorbed in their chosen tasks, instead of like factory workers on auto-pilot. Where was Montessori when I was a kid? Not in my town.

If school taught me anything, it was inertia. I was not allowed to leave my desk so I had no choice but to master art of utter passivity. Even gym was, in a sense, passive: It did not teach me joy in movement. And television after school strongly reinforced this lesson of inertia over and over again.

At two my daughter literally dances with life. There is a freedom to her limbs, a sense of boundless energy entwined with joy. Am I going to let her dance card run out when school age hits? Not if I can help it.

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Montessori

Where Are All the Men?

Okay, I know there are some homeschooling fathers out there. I'm just not meeting them.

This shouldn't come as a surprise. After all, once I entered the world of babies and kids I realized pretty quickly that despite a supposed feminist movement in our culture, home life is still very much divided along gender lines, with care-giving mamas and bread-winning papas. Once in a great while I meet a couple that has managed to reverse this, but for the most part these roles seem etched in stone, a fact of nature.

Just as scarce, it seems, are couples who practice a tag-team parenting style. My husband, Michael, and I fall into this unusual category. We both work at home with fairly flexible schedules, so this largely untried way of life is possible for us. After our daughter, Amelie, was born we developed a parenting strategy called "pass the baby." We continue to work and to parent in shifts and have made an art of dividing up our time fairly and evenly.

Naturally, homeschooling Amelie - should we commit to doing it (and we are both leaning strongly toward it) - will also be a fifty-fifty affair. Since we've managed to tandem-parent successfully for two years now, I'm pretty confident that we'll succeed at this collaboration as well. I do worry, though, about the biases and prejudices that a homeschooling father would encounter along the way. It seems that homeschooling folk have to explain themselves to death to everyone from Great Aunt Sally to that random stranger in the grocery store. And stay-at-home dads have to explain themselves with equal fervor. Imagine combining the two in the form of the (drum roll, please...) Homeschooling Dad. Is the world ready for him?

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homeschooling dads

Big Pile o' Books

I've got some reading to do. Here's my list-in-progress. Now I just need to get me some TIME to read them. Have I left anything out? Let me know if you have a favorite.

Teach Your Own by John Holt. They say this is the unofficial treatise for homeschooling from the granddaddy of the homeschooling movement. I expect it to be an empowering read, filled with encouragement for parents who've "got the bug."

Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense by David Guterson. A former English teacher, Guterson also wrote the evocative fiction bestseller Snow Falling on Cedars. I hear he has issues with the word "homeschooling" (me too - see my last post!). I'm looking forward to getting his dual point-of-view as a teacher both at home and in a traditional classroom.

Better Than School: One Family's Declaration of Independence by Nancy Wallace. Thanks to Tara of Eames Learning Project for telling me about this in her comment to one of my posts. She says, "Rather than a how-to guide, it's a slice of her life as a homeschooling mom in the 1970s in New England, back when homeschoolers had to deal with much more pushback than we do now." I'm looking forward to learning about Wallace's "unschooling" philosophy.

Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn. This guy turns a traditional schooling model on its head, pointing out the failures of using punishments and rewards (like gold stars and A's) to promote lasting change and real learning. Instead Kohn champions collaboration (teamwork), content (meaningfulness), and choice (autonomy).

The Well-Adjusted Child: The Social Benefits of Homeschooling by Rachel Gathercole. Imagine: A book that says homeschooling is the right way to socialize your kids! This book is coming out at the end of July.

The Well-Trained Mind by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise. I hear this book offers a game plan for a Classical approach to homeschooling based on the "trivium" (grammar, logic, and rhetoric).

The Successful Homeschool Family Handbook by Dr. Raymond & Dorothy Moore. This was suggested to me on a message board at the Denim Jumper. Apparently the authors have an approach that's low on stress/cost and high on creativity/initiative.

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Out and About

We're already doing it, aren't we - this homeschooling thing? Amelie at just two already has a full schedule: gymnastics for tykes on Monday, library story hour on Tuesday, social time and art at the Sunshine Club on Wednesday, playgroup on Thursday, toddler music group on Friday. Michael took this picture at Little Gym today, catching Amelie in a rare pensive moment between swinging and tumbling.

This is the kind of life I want for my little bean: rich, full, active, completely engaged with the world. My heart is telling me not to coop her up in a school, but if we do homeschool Amelie I don't want the "home" part to take over. I have a fear, perhaps irrational, of what I call "festering around the house." So can we think of a better word than "homeschool," please? Lifeschool, loveschool, getmeouttadahouse school?

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Inspirational Pages, Explosive Ideas

Blame it all on this skinny little book. Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling is what lit a fire in me about homeschooling. The author, John Taylor Gatto, was a New York City public school teacher for 30 years. Each time he won an award for his exemplary teaching (and he won quite a few of these), he would accept it with a brilliant and incendiary speech critiquing the system and even the very idea of school.

School is passe, says Gatto. Its original purpose was to regulate the poor, to teach the underclasses not to think for themselves but to obey orders. School as we know it teaches not ideas, self-reliance, and character-building but confusion, indifference, and dependence. Through Gatto's eyes school looks strange and oppressive - a place where you need a pass just to go to the bathroom and move your bowels, a place where the ringing of bells shuts off intellectual curiosity like a light switch.

Gatto likes independent study - the idea of giving kids time, space, and privacy to figure things out for themselves. It's a kind of study you're never going to find in school, but its available in spades for homeschooled kids.

You might not want to agree with Gatto, who says things like "School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned." But you can't say the guy's not talking from experience. And bleak and Dickensian as they are, his descriptions of school sound eerily familiar, don't they?

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John Taylor Gatto
Dumbing Us Down

Finding Community

The other day I set out into the world of cyberspace to meet some homeschooling folk. After a few minutes of web surfing, I was starting to feel very low. I found some homeschooling blogs and message boards, yes. Quite a bit of chatting going on. But the conversation seemed to always get around to Jesus somehow. Now I have nothing against Jesus, but this was a little hard for me, a Jewish girl from New Jersey. Where was the new wave of homeschoolers, the more mainstream and secular (dare I say sexy?) bunch I'd been hearing about?

A little more digging around on Technorati and I hit pay dirt. It arrived in the form of a smart, funny little blog called Like I Have Time For This? The author calls herself RegularMom, a self-described "Reader. Writer. Thinker. Homeschooler. Insomniac." A kindred spirit - I don't sleep so much either! A link from her blog took me to a place called The Denim Jumper, billed as "your sassy, secular home away from homeschool." The home page promised, "If you don't fit in at other places, chances are you'll fit in here." I signed myself right up.

Community, I'm finding, is crucial for the homeschooling kind. You're up against a lot: stereotypes, prejudices, funny sidelong looks. It helps to link arms (virtually or otherwise) with the like-minded and draw support from one another. When I told the DJ that I was getting a lot of flak for thinking about homeschooling my daughter, I got this great reply from Katherine of Our Report Card, who imagined telling the naysayers: "If you don't like it, go have your own babies and throw them into the huge anonymous meat grinder of institutional education. That's your business and these children are mine!" You tell 'em, sister!


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homeschooling community

Naysayers and Skeptics

I never realized what a storm of strong opinions swirls around this topic of homeschooling. After I unveiled this blog yesterday, I spent much of my time replying to emails, mostly addressing a few fervent objections to the idea of homeschooling. I did also receive enthusiastic encouragement from some quarters. It seems I have tapped into a subject that is very rich, very charged. This excites me.

The naysayers and skeptics have their arguments down. Here are the top three.

1. Homeschooled kids are weird.
Too much time with mom and dad makes kids a little, well, different, right? That's the worry. "Socialization" is the buzzword. Where do the homeschooled kids get it if they have no teachers, no lunchroom monitors, no Lord of the Flies reenactments on the playground?

I have to admit this was one of my chief concerns at the outset. Then Michael and I met Emma, a 15-year-old girl who has become my poster child for the homeschooling movement. Emma is self-possessed, pretty, and forthright in her opinions. When Michael asked her if it's hard for homeschooled kids to make friends she said no, then added, "Well, maybe if they're socially awkward!" Emma spent most of our visit running to and from her computer so she could instant-message with her friends.

2. Parents who homeschool their kids are weird.
They're either born again, or they live somewhere off the grid in Montana, making their own shoes out of tree bark. They're definitely vegetarians from Woodstock. (Ahem! That describes me and Michael perfectly. Does that mean I can't argue with this one?)

But really, a little research has found that homeschooling in America is growing by about 7 to 10% a year. The born-again vegetarians might have started it, but the new wave of homeschoolers is a pretty mainstream bunch. Either that or the population of American weirdos is growing exponentially.

3. I could never offer my kids the kind of stimulation that school provides.
Another concern that I shared. Until I began to recall what passed for stimulation in my public school when I was growing up in suburban New Jersey in the 1970s and 80s. We began with macaroni art and graduated to dull classroom lectures. My friends and I passed notes and doodled in the margins to keep awake. My brain slumbered on until college, when it woke with a jolt.

Emma probably gets more stimulation in one day than I had in one year as a high school sophomore. Here are just a few of her activities. Creative writing sessions with a local author. Irish dance classes. A weekly apprenticeship working with animals at a local farm. Voice lessons. Higher math with a family friend. A private-school enrichment program offering photography, yoga, and horseback riding. Lucky Emma. She has the space, the freedom, the time to find herself and follow her passions. Something most of us don't get to do until college, if at all.

These are certainly not the only objections I've encountered to homeschooling. I hope to touch on more in future posts. Meanwhile, tell me yours if you've got 'em.

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