Schlock, or How Not to Manage a Visit to a Sister Who Is Having Twins

Definition of schlock: Something, such as merchandise or literature, that is inferior or shoddy.

All families have their challenges; homeschooling families have some that are unique, such as how to manage the absence of the parent that does the schooling. In my case, it is implied in the fine print of my job description as Primary Homeschooling Parent that I'm responsible for our son 24/7--I cover weekday school hours and non-school hours. Barring the presence of grandparents, or an extended family, or intimate friends who you could leave your kid with, what to do? George, my husband, is ever so helpful and supportive, but he can't take time off. Somebody has to make some money around here.

In two weeks, I'm going on a trip on my own. I'll be gone for seven days. There is no way around this trip. My baby sister is having twins at a time when she already has two boys under six; she could use some help; I must go; I really want to go. But what to do with Simon? I could take him with me, but Simon bolts any premises if just one newborn begins to wail, never mind two. He's made it abundantly clear he doesn't want to go. "I'm sorry but I hate babies, Mom! Crying hurts my ears! I will run away." So back to the same questions: Who will take care of Simon? Teach him? Tear him away from screens and Legos and bamboozle him into reducing fractions, reading something--anything?

Home-educators are good at fixing problems: my absence would be an opportunity. Simon would go to the office with George and work independently. He is in fifth grade after all. I would assemble a folder of assignments for everyday, trying to stuff them with an abundance of subjects and books he likes: Latin translation and world history, Time Warp Trio and a presidential biography, some drawing, some math, not too much, just enough. I would specify doable daily reading assignments and write up questions which he would have to answer. I would try to reproduce in writing the substance of our daily conversations about texts, asking who, what, where, how and lots of why questions. It would take lots of work on my part, but I would find the time.

But then I had what I thought was an inspired thought: I would order a reading comprehension workbook. Then I wouldn't have to work so hard preparing for my absence. One of the better brands out there seems to be Spectrum; I would spend the extra bucks on Spectrum--Simon is worth it. Simon could do a bit of regular schoolwork, the stuff everyone else does in public school, like reading comp. worksheets. It wouldn't hurt, right? And it would easily keep him busy. He could probably read three to four or more of these little narratives everyday. Surely, he would learn something. A few clicks on Amazon and the Spectrum Reading Comprehension, Updated and Revised, Aligned to State and National Standards--an Excellent Tool for Standardized Test Preparation was on its way to our home.

****

You know where this is going. It arrived last week at our doorstep, in our lives.

That same week we had various interesting conversations with Simon based primarily on his readings. We talked of President Rutherford B. Hayes, who was a great president simply by being honest, responsible, and hard-working--a relief after Ulysses S. Grant, who gave away government jobs to all his corrupt and mendacious cronies. We talked about World War I: how the American Seventy-Seventh Division, stuck in trenches, under attack not only by the Germans but also by the Allies who did not know they were shooting at Americans, was saved by a pigeon who got a message to the Allies, even though the pigeon was shot through the chest and one leg had been blown off. We talked about God. Simon wanted to know if George and I believe, and if, in what and how much. The suffering of Ruby Bridges, the suffering of the people of Haiti, why people are upset with president Obama, and when can we get a cat were some of the other issues discussed. Into the middle of this week, the middle of those conversations, arrived the Spectrum workbook.

It's not that the workbook is so terrible, but it's so much less than it could be. Of the seventy-five narratives, only a third seem interesting at first glance, covering history, the arts, music, science. The rest are narratives about soccer--four of them--and stories about kids who do something, or go somewhere, that leads to learning of some kind: hiking, France, the farmers' market, the library, amusement parks, puppy foster care, etc. Every story in the workbook has an information dump quality. At no point is anything at stake. No lives need to be rescued. Nothing is about to blow up. No guillotine is about to smash down on the neck of a just man. Nothing is at risk. Everything is safe, bland, utterly uncontroversial, utterly forgettable.

I understand that Simon will eventually need to master getting through this type of informational dump, however boring. But he is eleven. Education is about lighting a fire, it's about turning kids on: to reading, to history, to science, to great literature. You cannot do that with a text about going to a farmers' market, or the pleasures of hiking.

From a friend who used to work in educational publishing I learned this weekend that the industry cannot sell anything that is not safe and bland. Controversies of any kind lead to low sales, angry parents, even lawsuits.

The workbook has had me thinking these last few days about my favorite class as a child in Peru: social studies. After we stood and sang the Peruvian anthem with our hands over our hearts, the teacher unlocked a book cabinet next to the chalkboard and then passed out books. Hardcover. Published in Spain. Imported. Expensive.

Every time we met we read one story. Every kid had to read half a page. Then we talked about it. Who? What? Where? How? Why? Then the teacher, Mister Villegas, dictated one question and we had to answer it in writing. When we were done, we had to put our books, one by one, back in the cabinet. By the end of class, Mister Villegas counted the books, then locked them up and slipped the key back into his pocket. He knew those books were worth having. I often thought of stealing one.

Almost forty years later, I still remember so many of those stories. My favorite was one about a potter in China who made beautiful red porcelain by dripping a bit of his own blood in the glaze. He was always a little weak and pale. But the porcelain was glorious--so glorious the emperor put in an order for vases, hundreds of them, to be delivered quickly.

The potter made the vases. Then he slashed his wrists and let his blood drip into the glaze. His apprentice finished the job. The emperor was delighted. The vases took his breath away. They looked almost alive. As for the potter, the potter had died.

I still think about that story. Nothing like that in the Spectrum workbook.

****

So I'm back to plan A: writing my own questions to the texts of my choice--and Simon's.

Teddy Bears

Week by week, we continue to read in The American Story: stories about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge; the rebuilding of Chicago; the Johnstown flood; Ellis Island; Lizzie Borden; Mark Twain and Helen Keller; the exploding of the U.S.S. Maine; Thomas Edison; William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer; Teddy Roosevelt and the bear cub; the brothers Wright; Prohibition; Texas' oil; the San Francisco earthquake and the ensuing fire of 1906. Of all those stories, the ones that interest Simon most are the ones that involve floods, explosions, fires and murder.

“I want to learn everything about Lizzie Borden. She was wicked,” he says. The library has one children's book about the trial. It seems to be out on permanent loan. Someone out there shares Simon's obsessions.

I, in turn, am smitten by a little story about Teddy Roosevelt. It's a light tangential story, slipped in between weightier, history altering events--a breezy respite of sorts.

Story goes that Teddy Roosevelt was invited to go on a bear hunt by the governor of Mississippi. After two days, Roosevelt hadn't shot a thing, so his hosts, afraid that the president would emerge from the hunt without a kill and without his dignity, presented him with a bear cub tied to a tree.

They said to him something to the effect of: “Here, Mister President. You can shoot this one pretty easily.”

Roosevelt, horrified, refused. We know that he answered: “If I shot that little fellow, I couldn't be able to look my boys in the face again.”

This story made good copy. The papers went wild. Roosevelt and the bear became symbols of compassion.

A savvy Russian immigrant by the name Michtom suggested to his wife she make a stuffed bear and maybe they could sell it in their candy shop. Within days, she couldn't keep up with the demand. Within a year, the Michtoms had founded at toy company. Everybody had to have a teddy bear.

* * *

Simon loves stuffed animals. He has dozens of them, all over his bed, in his closet, in a trunk. These days, he sleeps with his head on a polar bear and his arms around a huge fat kangaroo he recently bought for himself at IKEA. Near his head sits Sidney, the lion, who used to belong to his sister, keeping watch.

I don't know what all these stuffed animals mean to Simon. Regression, an unwillingness to grow up—there is some of that. A preference for a more merciful world, one in which the strong do not eviscerate the meek, a fanciful world where loving lions and bears guard the sleep of children —there is a lot of that.

* * *

My father had a teddy bear. At the end of the war, after his father had died, his mother and her sisters arranged for him to be sent to a school in southern Bavaria so that he would be safe from the bombs falling on Berlin. He took that teddy bear with him.

When the war ended, the school was at loose ends. They had run out of money and provisions. The kids were sent out to beg from the farmers nearby. If that didn't yield enough food, the kids stole whatever they could get their hands on. Chickens were barbequed. Dogs were slaughtered. My father was eleven. There was no way to get in touch with his mother. Railroad tracks, telephone lines, roads—everything had been destroyed.

A group of older boys at the school decided to just run away--walk home. My father was going to tag along. On the agreed upon morning, all the older boys wimped out. Father and another eleven-year-old decided to leave anyway.

600 kilometers through bombed out, occupied Germany. Along the way, American soldiers gave them some food, a coat, a place to sleep, sparking my father's great love for all things American. Eventually, the other boy and my father parted ways. Father walked on alone. He crossed a ditch full of shot SS, a pond of blood. He saw pyramids of the dead, stacked, or in flooded subway stations, bloated. He swam across a river and was shot at. Somehow he made it home to his widowed mother. The teddy bear was in his coat pocket.

* * *

I have a bear that belonged to my father. For decades, I thought that bear was the one Father had schlepped across Germany. Some years ago, he told me I had it wrong. This bear was not that bear. That bear was smaller and had been pitched way back when. It had been loved too much. It was too shabby.

The wrong bear sits in my bedroom for the last twenty-five years—see above. On one of my many visits to Berlin, my grandmother said I could have him. It sounds silly and sentimental, but he keeps me safe.

Bear Hunting

So many early American presidents were functionally illiterate into adulthood. Of the seventeen presidents we've read about thus far, a significant number learned the three Rs minimally, or late, very late: seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. The most striking examples are Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, and Andrew Johnson.

Jackson was dirt poor and rarely attended the local schoolhouse. By age thirteen he'd joined the revolutionary army. Polk was terribly ill with bladder stones and didn't go to school until he was seventeen. Zachary Taylor grew up in frontier Kentucky and had to work. He was embarrassed all his life by his lousy spelling and penmanship. Millard Fillmore and Andrew Johnson worked with their folks and then became apprentices, Fillmore in a cloth factory and Johnson as a tailor. Both Fillmore and Johnson were schooled only as young adults by their wives. And then there is the example of Abraham Lincoln who, growing up in the backwoods of Indiana and Illinois, only had a few months of formal schooling throughout his life. Whatever he learned, from the classics to the law, he taught himself.

Simon's response to learning about yet another president, who as a child did not have to craft paragraphs or slog through long division, learning instead to shoot, farm, ride, hunt, sew, or fish, is always the same.

“Why do I have to do school? Forget writing—let me learn to hunt instead! Who cares about math? I'll learn how to shoot now—write later.”

He's quick to point out that he's always doing something: building Legos, making flip-books (his latest obsession) and listening to audiobooks.

“It's not like I'm super lazy, you know?”

And there is truth to that. If I'm really honest with myself, I would have to say that most of the information that Simon has thoroughly made his own, he has taught himself with a dogged persistence. I can take no credit. He listens to audiobooks of world history, replaying what he does not understand--until he does. If he's hearing about Peter the Great's siege of Azov, he takes his globe to bed and finds Azov.

I think often about these presidents not learning to read as children. We live in a culture where if a child is not mastering certain skills by a certain age, he's pronounced deficient, delayed--damaged goods. To make sure the child masters these skills at the specified time, they are reviewed and drilled year in, year out, ad nauseam. However, every home-educating parent, if brutally honest, will agree that you can teach all the math covered between 1-8 grade to a twelve year old in three months. Think of all the bears your child could have hunted, the horses he could have ridden, the wheat he could have harvested.

I'm being facetious, I know. All I'm trying to point out is that children who are not being prodded to master reading and writing skills on a strict specified schedule are not necessarily being placed in an intellectual deep-freeze. Children pursue their own interests; they yearn to be independent, to be the masters of their own lives; they make an effort to accumulate skills. Zachary Taylor, one of our greatest military leaders, became a great hunter, horseback rider and fisherman long before he reached puberty, or mastered reading. Andrew Johnson was running a business before he could write. And Abraham Lincoln, with only the most limited of formal reading instruction, read everything he could get his hands on, over and over.

We privilege formal schooling. Our (secretly) class conscious society cannot imagine substituting fishing and farming for fractions when educating a ten-year-old. How will he ever get into college? A good college? Still, not a day goes by where I do not find myself questioning the educational choices I've made.

Teaching Simon at home was the right decision--that's not where the anxiety lies. However, every day I wonder if it wouldn't be best if we closed the books and instead hunted a bear, rode a horse, harpooned a shark, dug up all of our suburban backyard and planted rows of vegetables and berries. Maybe instead of dabbling in non-academic activities, we should put them at the heart of the curriculum. Maybe we should aim at proficiency in something useful and concrete, like sailing or ship-building or farming.

Instead, I write myself a note to borrow a book on canoe-building from the library. I am a coward, bucking convention whole hog is not my thing. But I'm no fool, and I rarely fool myself. I know that if Simon backed off writing and spent a year building a canoe from scratch on the back porch while listening to audiobooks, the gains would be immeasurable. For starters, he would have a canoe, instead of a pile of papers that sooner or later will end up in the recycling bin. And if he can build a canoe from cut lumber schlepped to our house from our local Home Depot, he can do anything with his life.

For now I lack the gumption. Tomorrow we will again hit the books. As for a canoe--I'm thinking about it.

Why I Continue Home-Educating Simon

I can't claim that I continue to home-educate Simon--now in fifth grade--because he couldn't hack a public school. Although he hates writing, and couldn't care less about math, his academic skills are more or less at grade-level. Given the right teacher and a small classroom, he would do well enough. His auditory processing skills still leave a lot to be desired: if the topic is complex and/or I fail to nab his interest, he needs lots of re-focusing and repetition. However, given a little extra attention, he gets through the material. On the up side, if he is reading an exciting novel, or discussing history, I can't shut him up, and I struggle to cajole him onto a new subject. While reading an Usborne abridged edition of a classic this week, he said: “Mom, I'm going to read Great Expectations all the way to the end and skip everything else today. OK, Mom?”

Furthermore, I can't claim that there is absolutely no school out there in this great country that would fit my exacting demands. Somewhere there is the perfect classroom for Simon. Maybe not in Miami. School might require a move. But if Simon woke up tomorrow and said he wanted to go to regular school because schools have girls, or a computer animation class, it would take a lot of work, and maybe lots of money, but George and I would find an appropriate placement. The school might not be academically challenging enough, but the library is a three minute drive away.

Finally, I can't argue that the larger home-schooling environment is throbbing with academic challenges that could never be matched by a school. Home-educators tend to organize themselves into online social networks. Once organized, members arrange for enrichment classes, field trips, and weekly social gatherings. However, with some exceptions, the enrichment classes here in Miami are fun but not demanding enough for us to leave the house; the academically challenging field trips are few and far between and, sadly, poorly attended; and, the social gatherings, usually in the form of a park group, although much enjoyed by all, have a very fluid and unpredictable quality. Families move in and out of home-educating, and they move in and out of park groups. Every time Simon gets attached to a home-educated child, it seems that child moves across town, or matriculates in the public school system, or goes to Europe for half a year.

As I write this, I have already decided on the curriculum we will be using for middle school. Simon thus far has expressed no interest in going to school—from the neighborhood kids, he's learned that schools have nasty teachers and lots of homework. For as long as he does not demand to go, George and I will not send him.

Without elaborating too much on the problems of the public school system in Florida and nationwide, what follows are the reasons why I continue to home-educate.

It boils down to two reasons—content and conversation.

I can choose the content Simon masters in one academic year. I get to do that, and not a public school teacher with 900 SAT scores (average for teachers in the US) and a mandate to teach No Child Left Behind. I can buy a curriculum and add to it, or I can make it up piecemeal. Hours and hours on the internet and at the library, and I can come up with a challenging and compelling reading list that stays as far away from textbooks and mind-numbing worksheets as possible. I can find the best foreign language program, the most enjoyable Latin course, the most appropriate history books, the right math program, art history introduction, and music appreciation teaching tool. Day by day, I try to light a fire--or two-- trying to elicit curiosity and interest in Dickens, or Lincoln, or Louis XIV, or Beethoven, or Velasquez, here and there taking a break to write a paragraph, or practice long division.

Once he has a head full of stories, full of interesting content, I can ask him to think critically about those stories, teaching him how to frame and answer questions imaginatively, always entertaining multiple perspectives. This is what it means to be educated: To have a head full of stories and facts that one can deploy imaginatively and critically.

Being home-educated, Simon has the time and the means (the curriculum I cobble together) to read and poder shelves and shelves and shelves of content. He can do it lying on his bed, at the table, at the beach, at the computer, with a friend, over cookies. It's a pretty grand way to spend the day.

The second reason I home-educate is the conversations I have with Simon. Unlike the mothers of schooled children, I know exactly what my son is reading every minute of the day—often I am the audience for his reading. If he is reading Great Expectations, we can talk about it over lunch, and some more over dinner with George. A little visit to wikipedia, and over dessert I can explain what the word Bildungsroman means. I can ask Simon to think about all the ways in which Pip grows up in the course of the novel. I can mention that Dickens wrote the novel because like Pip, Dickens' heart had been broken by a woman. I can explain the words unrequited love. We can rent the David Lean movie. We can talk about how Great Expectations compares to other Dickens Simon has already read (all abridged). We can talk about the mines, the factories, and the orphanages in England; the very poor, the destitute and the wealthy; the terrible inequities—a word I would need to define. We can get a documentary about Dickens, and then talk about that some more.

Last weekend I found myself in Boston having lunch with old friends. They asked about Simon. Would I continue teaching him through high school? I could hear in their voice their doubts about where all this might lead. My friends are the products of New England private schools and good colleges. Their daughter teaches history at a public middle school in a posh Boston suburb. I took a deep breath and said it all depended on Simon. I told them about the power of girls. I tried to make them laugh. Of late, Simon notices girls. Their hair. Their interests. Who is beautiful and nice, who is not. My best made academic plans may crumble in the face of Simon's prurient interests.

But I hope they will not. I dearly wish I can make his days enjoyable, and keep his mind turned on by ideas and concepts and texts, because I want the conversation to continue. For him. But also for me. For now, I get to read and think about Dickens and Lincoln, and unrequited love, and grave inequities. My mind and my days are hitched to work that matters.