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