The three foundations of home school

Approaching six months! 😱🎉

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Elena, recently arrived at the wild Pacific, taking in the view.

The dogs of Puerto Escondido trot in the fizz of breaking waves. They carry frisbees or massive, sea-bleached branches in their maws. They sport little necklaces of twinkling lights shaped like chili peppers. They wander into deeper drifts and paddle the breaks with their owners. They greet each other carefully or ecstatically, then dervish around the sand after one another. They pee sneakily beside the blankets of those blissfully frolicking in the sea. They snarl from time to time at one another, or creep back very carefully as if trying not to set off a bomb, but they do not fight. They do not bark or bite. 

I tell Jorge it’s almost like another species of dog. I don’t necessarily like it – even as a so-called “dog person” I’m not a fan of someone’s semi-feral Jack Russell coming up for a sniff as I dig into my spicy chicken taco – but I am interested in it. 

This would never fly in Pittsburgh. Most dogs are leashed; when they aren’t, they’re either a) ostensibly under their owner’s control, so not interacting with others or b) NOT under their owner’s control and therefore generating consternation and stress and reactions from leashed dogs/humans. But there is no scenario in which dogs are mingling freely with humans in public spaces. It’s just not something you really see.

“It’s like homeschool,” I say to Jorge. “We never get a chance to study dogs just being dogs without all the givens of quote-unquote normal society. We never get a chance to study kids being kids without school. How should they, would they, behave? Do the same rules and expectations apply?” 

Such has been the driving question of the past five months. Do the same rules and expectations apply? If not, which ones do? Any?

What is it “normal” to expect of a nine-year-old, and what does being nine and in “fourth grade” mean outside of an institution and a framework that establishes a “normal” for all children and can grade solely on that curve? 

What are human beings supposed to learn in childhood, and when, and how, and why? How should we be spending our days when we are eight, nine, ten? What does a good day look like, a meaningful one, a productive one? When you leave the system, you have to answer all of this yourself. 

Math? That’s nothing. I’ve learned (after no small initial trepidation) that I can tackle a mixed number fraction. What counts, what weighs, are the big questions about whether to even study math at all, and if so, why. 

I sense here a few alarmed gasps – NO MATH? – so let me say yes, we are studying math. We are learning about the ancient Maya. We are correcting run-on sentences. We are doing all the things that reassure everyone that whew, we’re not so radical or crazy and we’re not depriving our daughter of her right to properly use apostrophes (although one of my family’s most cherished collective memories is of celebrating Jorge’s and my dad’s birthdays with a cake from a local bakery that read “Happy Birthday Boys’!”) 

But we’re doing these things, I think, in quite a different style and rhythm from the way they’re done in school. And we’re not afraid to ditch them to, say, spend a week completely outside on the beach, learning to bodysurf. Or to travel to carnivals deep in the Sierra, sticking our heads out the window as the moon rises. We’re not so wedded to them that we miss out on the opportunity to see the life right in front of us. 

The hardest part of this is the lack of clear metrics: when you don’t outsource, you have to claim all responsibility for yourself, and redefine and remake everything from the ground up.

It can be incredibly difficult to see what’s what when you’re in the thick of it: am I doing it right? Are we making progress?

Only in certain moments does it seem to crystallize: Elena performing a Maya Angelou poem by heart at dusk on a Oaxacan terrace; Elena stepping up to lead a group of local kids with a confidence that I don’t think she had in school, that I can see she’s learned by being allowed and able to do her own thing and claim it as hers.

As I look back over these initial months, I can see three basic foundations emerge, constants throughout all the fluctuations and changes of our “home school,” which in and of itself comes to seem an odd concept because really, it’s just life.

Trust

I keep writing in my diary TRUST HER, with such force and repetition that anyone reading it in twenty years will clearly be like, she had major trust issues! But don’t we all? Isn’t this why school exists? So that we don’t have to trust our kids – we trust instead that over the course of 180 days they’ll be basically capable of writing a functional sentence and multiplying 6x4. We trust they’ll go into the machinery ignorant of the world’s longest river and come out able to spew some basic facts about piranhas and dugout canoes. 

But at home, I find myself wanting to push so hard, wanting to make sure she does her math or her grammar even when it’s a beautiful day outside and she is perfectly happy cutting out teeny tiny squares of construction paper “for a movie I’m making.”

Trust her. It’s a radical act to trust that a) she will learn, she will not be behind and b) she knows what she’s doing. She’s learning even – especially? – when I am not teaching, when no one is teaching. 

She’s learning by staging an elaborate game of babies for the two of us, assigning me two babies and herself two babies and then building a ship in which we will all travel around the world, getting attacked by sharks and marooned on random islands in between burping, consoling, diaper changing, having Christmas, etc. I am also learning not to claw my eyeballs out with boredom, because I know that even though this is excruciating at the moment I will not regret a second of it when I lie awake that night.    

Letting go of control

For 2.5 seconds at the start of homeschooling I truly believed we would all follow a beautiful color-coded chart I’d made that said things like “outdoor time!” and “cursive” and “grammar practice,” and then I remembered that never once in my parenting have I ever been able to follow a chart of any kind, and out that went along with the promise of perfect little slots filled with tidy little activities in which progress would be oh so easy to measure! 

Instead each day is a half-beautiful half-chaotic careening between tasks depending on vibe, weather, energy, community, etc. Maybe we’ll go visit a friend’s baby for four hours and then do math and read and fall down a rabbit hole on YouTube about octopuses. Maybe we’ll nail geography and grammar and writing and math and then go running on the track and still have time before swimming for practicing cursive by writing a card to Aunt Mary, and I will end the day a flushed paragon of achievement.

Maybe she will dilly-dally re-reading the same graphic novels all morning because I have a work assignment, and then we’ll fail to do math because the (homeschooled) neighbor came over to jump on the trampoline; and then she’ll get really absorbed making her own super-elaborate fake nails out of paper and markers; and then she’ll take a bath and listen to the audiobook Soul Surfer by Bethany Hamilton, which is not only atrociously written but ALSO unabashedly Christian and therefore generates problematic conversations in our household about whether God exists and has plans for us and knows we will be attacked by sharks or not; and then we’ll walk the dog and then it’s 9 pm.

The joy, and also the gritty crazy-making challenge, is letting go of the need to force some kind of order on it. We have to make our own life. 

Relationship

This is really what it comes back to. I see why the number one influence on students’ success is teacher expectations. Teaching is about relationship. We don’t learn material – we learn material from someone. I’m not in love with the current curriculum I’m using to teach the history and geography of the ancient Aztec, Inca, and Maya – it’s a little dry and textbook-y – but I love the conversations it generates with Elena.

The other day, we discussed linear versus cyclical time. What does it mean for time to move in a line? To move in a circle? What are examples of each? How do different cultures think about time? This is the luxury of not being in a classroom: there’s no imperative to keep barreling forward to get to the morphology, or to force half the class into worksheets to deal with the other half that’s throwing glue out the window.

There is a conversation: how do you see the world? How do you? What does it mean? Why does it matter? The questions that never get asked in so many classrooms. 

Relationship also means: learning how to listen to a child. Learning how to see her as more than “just a child”: as a full person with her own deep interests, needs, and desires. Lying side-by-side on the bed in a shaft of afternoon sun, making our fingers talk. 

Being together, because this is it. Her one childhood. My one time to be a mother. This is my why, at the end of the day. Simple, as they say in meditation, but not easy. 

It is hard as can be. Financially, personally, as a family. But it also feels raw, true, in touch with the real in the way growing your first vegetable is raw and real: humbling, revealing to you how much you’ve taken for granted, how magical and beautiful the most fundamental processes can be, how you are in charge of your own life from seed to bloom.

And of course, you can’t try to dominate or control it, but you can tend to it. Carefully, closely, with the gift and the skill of your attention.

Marveling when it dares to unfurl a new leaf into the wild, unknown world. 

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