Don't know how most people
spend their second morning home schooling. I spent mine hyperventilating into a
paper bag. After less than 24 hours of educating my child at home, I was struck
by the realization that I wasn't up to the task and should move immediately to
Plan B. Except I didn't have a Plan B.
For two years leading up to this I had watched my daughter convince experienced,
well-meaning teachers that she was incapable of mastering long division when, in
fact, she simply didn't like long division. Alice's ploy raised a larger
concern: At age 9, she appeared to be cruising along in school without actually
doing any work. To my sorrow, it appeared I had given birth to myself, another
pleasant slacker fated to a lifetime of successfully studying for midterms
between classes until barely paying attention stopped working. Alice wasn't
learning how to learn, she was learning how to coast. Maybe I could wait and see
if she came to learning on her own. Or maybe she needed a different kind of
education.
Her father and I checked out a few middle-school programs known for their rigor.
Each promised to challenge Alice academically but also promised hours of
homework every night. I'm greedy. I want my child challenged, but I don't want
her staying up until 2 a.m. every night translating "The Aeneid." I knew we had
a small window of opportunity to teach Alice to love learning, but I also knew
there was an equally small window for her to be a child. Her academic options
seemed to lie on either side of a wide chasm: a fluffy pillow on one side, a
jackhammer on the other. I tried home schooling because I couldn't find a better
alternative.
It turns out I'm not alone. Today in the U.S., some two million children are
home schooled, growing at an annual rate of 7% to 15% for over a decade,
according to the president of the National Home Education Research Institute.
The term "home schooler" once implied "isolationist religious zealot" or
"off-the-grid anarchist who makes her own yogurt." Today, it also means military
parents who hate to see their kids keep changing schools; or the family with a
future Olympian who ice skates five hours a day; or your cousin whose daughter
is gifted but has a learning disability. The average home schooler is no longer
a sideshow oddity.
"I could never ever teach math," more than a few parents told me in horror at
the very idea of home schooling. Or science. Or a foreign language. But mostly,
it was math. Here's my secret: I can't teach math either. Once they start
calling them integers instead of numbers, I recoil as from a fat, angry snake,
which is why Alice takes an online math class, with great lashings of help from
her father.