Why I Began Home-Educating Simon

He wouldn't talk. He was two, then three. He pointed and got what he needed using one and two word utterances: ”Simon, juice.” He could repeat The Cat in the Hat word for word--book in hand, he would “read” it to his cousins . But he would rarely shape a sentence or a question, never a paragraph. He turned four.

We didn't worry too much at first. He was deeply connected to us. He wasn't one to make eye-contact with strangers, but if you lay on the floor with him, plastic lion in hand, roaring loudly, he would look at you, laugh wholeheartedly and say: “Mom--silly.”

On that same floor he built wondrous zoos attached to cities and roads, freely mixing all the toys he had, Lincoln Logs, Legos and Mobilos. And then, over and around all of that, he would lay down sophisticated train tracks that connected zoos and cities and roads. He wasn't like everybody else's kid, but he didn't seem lacking in creativity, intelligence, attachment or affection--as a matter of fact, he seemed more creative and attached than most. Sitting on the floor next to him, I knew no one had ever loved me that much. He rarely made eye-contact for all the trivial stuff—hellos, good-byes--but if you handed him the right hippo for his zoo, he looked at you and said: “Good Mom.” If you gave a dramatic rendition of a story he adored, his eyes were on you non-stop, smiling from ear to ear.

But he didn't talk--and talking was crucial. Simon knew the words for every toy, fruit, vegetable, and type of truck, but he did not use them. So we began the process of having him evaluated.

I don't know what I expected exactly . Back in my twenties, when I had lived in Boston, I had been in therapy off and on; I think I expected an older parental type of person, a therapist not unlike the ones I had had, someone bookish and wise and reassuring, someone who would walk into our lives, commend us on our amazing son and our parenting skills, and then make a couple of thoughtful suggestions.

What we got were two twenty-something-year-old speech therapists in training with an indifferent PhD supervising the evaluation. They put Simon in a room full of toys which included an old, washed out, barely pink plastic oven—I was allowed to watch through a two-way mirror.

Simon proceeded to open the oven door and make a house inside it for some of the stuffed animals—he had never seen or played with such a pink plastic oven. Inside the oven, he made a cozy bed for a bear out of a baby blanket. Then he placed other animals in the oven.

The three page typed evaluation included a full page about how Simon had “sociopathic” tendencies because he had attempted to “bake” the animals. Although they diagnosed a speech delay, they were more concerned about his anti-social tendencies. They suggested a psychiatric consult.

Other evaluations followed (speech, occupational therapy) and hours of therapy. The second speech evaluation involved a non-verbal I.Q. Test—Simon was given pieces of a plastic playground and asked to put them together after he looked at a picture. It took him seconds. “We have answered that question,” the speech therapist said, smiling.

But that nice therapist had no idea what to do with Simon. He kept presenting him with pictures of items and prompting him to name the item—all of which Simon knew; he just didn't use the words in day to day interactions. Moreover, that evaluation, like the previous one, was so poorly written and edited, it knocked the air right out of me. Simon's speech delay meant our lives were now ruled by very nice B and C students.

It's easy to be generous and non-judgmental when the nice and kind schlockmeisters of this world live in a parallel universe from your own. When you find yourself in their offices, listening to their directives, you suddenly discover that all your education and reading have made you incapable of doing anything but make judgments.

This is what we were advised to do: we were supposed to place him in a special school (cost: $23,000.00 per year); we were supposed to then sue the town we lived in to get the money back (lawyer's retainer: $8,000.00)--we lived in Washington, D.C. at the time; we would also need to hire an educational consultant (retainer: $5,000.00). The words autism spectrum were bandied about. We were told of a great school one hour from our home. Little Simon could take the bus. Most of the kids there had severe autism and wore helmets and were completely non-verbal, but, not to worry, they had a class for high-functioning kids.

It really doesn't pay to keep your mouth shut. It doesn't. If you're a kid of very few words, the schlockmeisters will notice that about you, and only that.

I protested. He's so bright. He's so attached. He loves to pretend. He has a wonderful sense of humor. Autistic kids don't pretend or have a sense of humor. He has a speech delay and some atypical development, but that does not mean he needs to be educated in a remedial setting, and at such huge financial and personal cost. So that Simon could attend that school, we were supposed to sue the District of Columbia--sue.

I got very depressed. When the meds kicked in, I started making calls. I called the best pre-schools in Washington, D.C., and told them about Simon and asked about openings. A private Quaker school was willing to take a look at him that week. “Bring the evaluations and bring your son. We make decisions based on our own observations. Be prepared to stay the day.” They placed him in a classroom and watched. Simon didn't say much but he happily played with others and followed directions. He didn't “bake” anyone.

The pre-school had an immediate opening, and they offered Simon the spot. Six months later, the head teacher pulled me aside. He had wonderful abilities in art, she said. He was so smart, so out of the box, so easy to teach. “A man of few words but such a joy.” (The picture attached is one Simon did at age six. When the drawing didn't fit in the box I had pre-drawn, he busted right out of it.)

I stopped all the therapies and instead invited kids from the pre-school to our home two to three times a week. I picked them up at one and had them stay the afternoon. They helped Simon build zoos and cities. They pummeled him with questions and orders: “What's this? What's that? Can we build this? That? Do this. Do that.” If Simon didn't answer, they persevered: “Why are you ignoring me? I'm asking you a question! Why are you putting the bathtub in the elephant cage?”

“Not a bathtub. It's for food for the elephant,” Simon, eventually, replied.

It was exhausting and exhilarating. The kids played all afternoon while I pulled out more toys to add to the worlds they shaped. By sunset, our little apartment was invariably trashed. But every time a child came over, Simon talked a bit more. The ping pong of play—your turn, my turn—led to the ping pong of conversation—your turn, my turn. At the same time, I learned to get relentlessly in Simon's face. “Hey Buddy, what's it gonna be? Cheerios or a sandwich?”

Although he was talking so much more, I knew that in public school he would be placed in a remedial class. The army of Speech Therapists, Occupational Therapists and other Special Ed. Consultants would see to that. They would come up with an Individual Education Plan. The focus of the IEP would be speech and very basic literacy. He would never learn Latin, or European History, or a foreign language. He would never study art, or engineering, or architecture, so that he could build or paint cities and zoos. He would always be regarded as disabled, and he would be taught only the skills necessary to live out a small and limited life.

The summer Simon turned six we moved to Miami. I didn't bother to look for a school. I ordered $500.00 worth of educational materials. I set a room aside in the house we bought and called it the Learning Room. I got a library card. I joined a homeschooling group. When the summer came to an end, we began.

Lewis and Clark

The Lewis and Clark story was all new to me, I'm embarrassed to say. That Lewis and Clark were explorers of some sort, and that they had explored something in America a long time ago—that was the extent of what I knew. I was aware there had been a big anniversary of their endeavors a few years ago, and various books had been published about them around that time—but I had read neither the reviews, nor the books.

The details of the story are astounding. Having purchased the Louisiana Territory, Thomas Jefferson asked Meriwether Lewis, who was nothing but an acquaintance and an aide in his administration, to head up the Corps of Discovery--a bit like hiring a talented and promising nephew. Lewis was supposed to explore the territory, search for a waterway to the Pacific, and take lots of notes along the way on everything he saw and did. Although Lewis was prone to drinking and depressions, not usually a winning, or safe, combination, he was put in charge of hiring and training thirty men and then taking them west. Lewis was in his mid-twenties; he was twenty-nine by the time the expedition got under way. My hair is very gray, so I can say this: he was a kid—a troubled kid.

And yet he did it. He engaged an army buddy who was in his mid-thirties to help him out. William Clark was not formally schooled—he spelled Sioux twenty-seven different ways in his journals--but he sure could draw maps. Together they gathered thirty men. Then off they went in a keel boat and two small crafts loaded up with food, weapons, and booze, floating out onto the Ohio, the Missouri, and the Columbia Rivers. Along the way, they met the famous Sacagawea and made her their interpreter, they survived various encounters with Indians and harsh environments, they crossed the Rockies, and all the while they drew. They drew wildlife, but most importantly-- Clark drew maps. His maps opened up the continent for settlement, completely changing the character of the country within fifty years.

There are two elements to this story that Simon comments on. They both center around Sacagawea. She gave birth to a boy during the journey. She schlepped this child along on her back. What about diapers? How could she keep him safe? How did she feed him? How did Sacagawea make sure her baby didn't get the measles or smallpox from all those white men? For Simon, who has studied the Aztecs-- Europeans were ticking time-bombs.

The other aspect of Sacagawea's story that interests him is that when Lewis and Clark met her, she had been separated from her family. She was a Shoshone who had been kidnapped as a child, traded as a captive, and ended up as the wife of a French trapper. In her role as translator for Lewis and Clark, she eventually found herself reunited with her people, sitting in front of the latest Shoshone chieftain. When she looked up into his face, he turned out to be the brother she had not seen since she was a child.

There is an illustration of this scene in the book we are using. Over the course of a few days, Simon looks at it again and again.

“What are you thinking, Stinkernoodle?”

“She must have missed her brother. She must have been so happy,” he says.

Simon sees the Lewis and Clark story through the prism of his own obsessions: adults must take extra good care of children; families are at the center of his universe—they must stay together.

I, of course, read the story through my own obsessions, which turn out not to be that different. If I had to verbalize the one triggered by this story, it would be something like this: we must all take good care of each other. Most people don't. And there's the rub.

But Lewis and Clark did take good care, of each other and the men under their command. The journey took two years, four months and ten days. In that time they lost only one man—historians think he died from acute appendicitis. Everyone else got a chance to live their lives all the way through.

I find myself coming back to this one detail. The fact that almost everyone returned home safely wasn't just the result of luck. Enthralled by this story, I watch Ken Burns' documentary about the expedition—which is thin on documentary footage and thick on grand views of the Colorado River. Still, I learn that Lewis and Clark micro-managed that expedition, from setting tough boundaries, to making thoughtful decisions, to doling out only a bit of liquor at the end of every day. Their men survived because Lewis and Clark made sure they did.

A few years later Lewis killed himself, or so it seems. Maybe, for him, it had been easier to live in extreme circumstances, at the end of the known world, responsible for the lives of so many. Or maybe, he felt that no one cared that deeply about him. He was thirty-five.

The English Language

We read on, three to four stories a week— the witches of Salem, King George III and his taxes, Ben Franklin and his kite, Paul Revere's midnight ride, among others. We get to know the presidents. George Washington, although he seemed wrapped tight, his mouth clamped shut over ill-fitting teeth, was handsome, charming. John Adams, in turn, was not charming. Impatient and hot-tempered, he was a crusty curmudgeon. People did not like him, or re-elect him, a fact Simon perseverates about. The world is a fair place, after all.

I find myself thinking of all the many men, young and not so young, who devoted their lives to shaping this country. They all had full and comfortable lives before the Revolutionary War. But off they went to fight a fierce uneven fight, to lead a rag-tag army with no training, weapons, or line of supplies, to plead for money in countries an endless and unsafe ocean away so they could fight this righteous fight all the way through. And they fought not only with weapons but with words. The wrote. They wrote. They wrote.

How much of this country, its character and principles, is the product of words—the words of thoughtful men debating, revising, and finally writing down truths that were self-evident. The words came first—Thomas Jefferson's words in particular. The rest followed.

I sit in front of my computer, cup of coffee on a coaster nearby in case I need a pick-me-up, and google the Declaration of Independence. Except for the lovely bells and whistles of the opening

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

and the famous second sentence

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

I have never read it. And as for those two sentences, they have become such a commonplace of the English language and of any political discourse that they have long lost, for me, or so I suddenly realize, any sense of the unabashedly radical.

What follows those two sentences is a legal brief that sets out the facts of the case for independence. Its clarity of word and thought, its sparse and tight presentation, its utter unaffected modernity, leaves me breathless. Here is a small sample:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:

Frank Kafka said that writing should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us. It can also impale a flagpole in the middle of your chest.

* * *

My father loves the English language. I had only a few months of English under my belt as a fourth or fifth-grader, when my father pulled out ragged copies of T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost and began to read out loud. We were sitting at the dinner table in Lima, Peru. His accent was strong, Germanic, even after the years in America. My brother Peter and I understood little back then of what he read during these repeated performances, other than that these words mattered to him, greatly.

He said English was precise and muscular, that it put the verb right after the subject--in German it tends to get bumped to the complete final position in the sentence--and that made all the difference.

To my ear, back then, English was an ugly, rough cacophony of consonants. But not to my father. There he sat at our round dining room table, reading out loud, while my mother dished out dessert and then lit a cigarette. Inevitable, his voice would stumble, falter, and choke.

He had told us stories of the war, of the bombings and the hunger, of his father's death, of how, at age ten, he had walked alone across occupied Germany after D-Day to get home to Berlin, holding a teddy-bear and pushing a cart with his belongings, walking through ditches full of the dead--bloody and bloated. He told these stories and never wept. A few lines of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock or The Road Not Taken and he would have to stop and, holding up his hand, steady the storm within.

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet--and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

( from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot)

* * *

I try to share my enthusiasm for the Declaration with Simon. But for all his thoughtfulness and although he just turned eleven, he is young. For him, courage and historical greatness are tied to swords and muskets, to military strategy, to hanging tough in the face of certain death. As it does not involve buckets of blood, writing doesn't count. Besides, written words have not yet touched his heart, defining who he is and will become, or what he might do with his life.

Moreover, being home-educated, he does not have to deal with teachers who restrict his freedom, prescribing what he can or cannot do. George and I do not get any points for being cool, but we are pretty accommodating. For now, Simon has little to rebel against, with either muskets or the English language.

Peter Minuit Buys Manhattan

He bought the island of Manhattan for sixty guilders--about twenty-four dollars. I try to get Simon to understand that this was the greatest real estate deal ever. I'm a daughter of a businessman, always impressed by a savvy deal.

We go online and I find a map of Manhattan. I set up a this-for-that situation--this large island for that tiny amount of cash, barely enough to buy a Lego.

“Minuit was a smart guy--what do you think, Simon? You know, Grandpa was like Peter Minuit. When he was younger, he could sell anyone anything, and buy whatever he wanted cheap.”

“I think Peter Minuit was a mean guy. That wasn't fair. That wasn't enough money.”

I persevere: “But Minuit was brilliant. By buying the island, he secured some peace with the Canarsee Mohicans, at least for a while.”

“No,” says Simon, his brow furrowed. “It wasn't fair. If it's not fair, it's not smart.”

My Father

My father came to this country in 1950. He was fifteen. He was the first German boy brought to America on a scholarship after World War II. An American vet had raised the funds. The vet had been touched by the suffering of the German civilian population, the children in particular.

In Boston, my father got off the airplane in a suit painstakingly re-stitched from one that had belonged to his father who had died during the war.

It was immediately decided by the school representatives that the suit and all my father's other clothes would not do--too shabby. Somebody went out and bought him two suits, five shirts, underwear, socks, two pajamas. They were all, to his amazement, new.

In his letters home to his widowed epileptic mother who lived in a one-bedroom with a narrow storage room that held my father's bed--an apartment poorly heated by coal, an apartment in Berlin that still stood among an endless sea of rubble and broken glass--my father wrote about the clothes, the food, the private homes with circular driveways and Ionic columns, his little trips along the East Coast, the skyline of New York, intact and splendid.

Noah's Ark

Over lunch, Simon says, “Hey, Mom--question.”

There is a pause. He shovels spaghetti into his mouth.

“What's the question?”

“Do you know the story of Noah's Ark?”

“Yes, a little bit. Can you help me remember?”

“Well Noah and all these animals float on the ocean for a long time in a big ship with no windows. Noah's Ark is like those people on that ship.”

“Which ship? The Mayflower?”

A mouth full of spaghetti, some of which I can see as he unsuccessfully tries to keep his lips shut while chewing, he nods his head.

“I think that's an excellent comparison,” I say.

Later, I want to bang my head against the wall--hard. So often, I think of all I could have asked or elucidated hours, even days, later. And although I can always return to the topic—and do, the perfect moment is lost.

Long after lunch is over, I realize that Simon had intuited something I hadn't: the biblical quality to these courageous wanderers, straining and struggling to find their way to these shores; the mythic aspect to the hardships they encountered along the way, and once they set foot on this soil.

The Mayflower

We begin with readings that are all about arrivals and firsts: the Native Americans who were here first; the first Spanish who came to Florida; the first English--Roanoke, Jamestown, the Mayflower; a book on George Washington.

Laying on the day-bed with The American Story propped up against my bent legs and Simon's head on my shoulder, I find myself coming back to the word “arrogant.” This word is new to Simon. I explain that the English at Roanoke were probably killed by the Croatoans because the English thought the native inhabitants were no better than dogs or rats. They were arrogant. That got them into trouble.

They should have asked the Indians for help planting crops and building shelters, like the English settlers did in Plymouth and Jamestown, befriending Squanto and Pocahontas. Instead, they believed the Croatoans were not worthy of respect. Instead of offering friendship, the English attacked their village.

“They were arrogant—and they were morons,” says Simon. “They were--,” and he lifts his head, smiles broadly, and runs his index-finger across his throat. “EXE-CUTE-TED!” I've explained to Simon that killing makes me nervous. Simon thinks it's his duty to help me overcome my fears.

“Morons, really? Many of us make bad decisions when we're afraid,” I say. “How do you think these first colonist felt after their long journey, arriving in the New World?”

“Well, I know from The Story of the World that Dorothy Bradford of the Mayflower killed herself. She jumped off the Mayflower and drowned. I think she had no hope.”

“Why did she have no hope?”

Simon lies there in silence and then says, “I think the trip was hard. There was a storm. They vomited.”

“That's right,” I say. “They were mostly locked in that little space below deck. The captain did not let them come up in the fresh air often. It was dark and smelly. Stinkernoodle, you hate airplanes. Sometimes you throw up because you say it smells really bad—”

“Don't talk about it!” he turns to me, looking cross. His Olympic vomiting over the Atlantic Ocean is nothing he's proud of.

“--Imagine being on a plane for 66 days and nights.”

“That would be horrible.” He covers his face with the blanket.

“And then you arrive at a new place, all tired and smelly and hungry, and there is nothing--no hotel, no friends, no bathroom, no Burger King. Just a world you have never seen before with not even a road you could walk on.”

From under the blanket I hear, “STOP! I don't want to talk about it anymore!”