Homeschooling for Excellence

CHAPTER 1

Teaching Our Own

Winter, 1985. It is a dark, rainy morning. David is at his desk in the loft and Drew, seventeen, is busy helping fifteen-year-old Reed with his algebra. Micki is in the kitchen helping Garth, nine, with his writing as she rolls out bread dough.

If the weather clears, the books will be put aside and Reed and Drew will spend the afternoon hauling and stacking firewood while Garth works on the goat pen fence. After dinner Drew will bury himself in a pile of Sky and Telescope magazines he borrowed from the county library, and Reed will try to finish that Victor Hugo novel that none of the rest of us has ever gotten through.

It is another typical school day at our rural homestead where, for a dozen years, we have educated our children at home.

Shortly after moving to our 47 acres on a remote, logged-over mountainside in northern California in 1973, we met a number of parents who were teaching or planning to teach their children at home. For some of us located in the hills, homeschooling was almost unavoidable: distances, snow, landslides, muddy roads, and swollen rivers made it all but impossible to transport children back and forth to the public schools in winter. Distances between neighbors with school-aged children precluded the formation of alternative backwoods schools. And then there were political, religious, and philosophical objections to the local schools: they were too conservative or too liberal, too rigid or too informal, too academic or not academic enough, too fundamentalist or not fundamentalist enough.

For most of us, however, a mixture of philosophy and geography impelled us toward homeschooling. We had moved to the country without giving much thought to how our children would be educated, or where, or by whom, but we were imbued with a spirit of self-reliance, and it was all but inevitable that we would begin thinking and talking about "teaching our own." Educational theory and practice, like other orthodoxies of the late sixties and early seventies, were in a state of flux, with critics of public education such as John Holt, Ivan Illich, and Jonathan Kozol providing the ideological underpinnings for educational innovation. A little paperback by Hal Bennett, No More Public School (Random House, 1972), had become something of an underground best seller. More inspirational than informational, and disarmingly low-keyed, it suggested strategies for meeting curriculum requirements, dealing with hostile school boards, and teaching children at home "legally or otherwise."

Once we decided to teach our children at home, we tried to avoid any confrontation with state or local authorities. We called ourselves The Mountain School, registered with the state as a private school, established a Mountain School checking account, ordered a ream of letterhead stationery, and, as required by law, assembled a file containing daily attendance records, teacher résumés, and course outlines. Perhaps because our children had never been enrolled in the local schools, or because we asked nobody for permission to teach them ourselves (in dealing with the bureaucracies we proceeded in a matter-of-fact way) we encountered no opposition whatsoever. And of course it worked to our advantage that the local school system, which ranked as one of the worst in the state, was having problems enough with unhappy parents: its administrators were not inclined to create additional problems for themselves by challenging homeschoolers.

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And so we began. In retrospect, we seem to have been almost oblivious to the magnitude of the task we were taking on. Chemistry, trigonometry, and foreign languages were years in the future. The job at hand was to teach the boys—then eight, five, and three—to read and do simple arithmetic, and to get a homestead together. We wrote to a dozen publishers for catalogues and ordered sample copies of books, and after several false starts came across a workbook series of readers that captivated the boys and allowed them to work alone and at their own pace to about a sixth-grade level. Grant, the oldest, finished them in less than two years, as did Drew. Reed, our three-year-old, was well into them at four—he had his older brothers as models—and was an accomplished reader before he was five.

Unfortunately, the reading series, we soon discovered, was unique among texts. Most grade-school-level texts we found badly organized, wooden, and insipid—at best—and after trying several math books, abandoned them all and developed our daily exercise sheets.

Elementary sciences were more easily managed, as we were able to locate a wide variety of non-textbook materials on zoology, botany, astronomy, and physics. On our trips to the city we made it a point to check out the offerings in museum bookstores, as well as the two or three shops which specialized in nature books and materials. At home, our efforts to restore the land, to plant gardens, and to improve our livestock, stimulated interest in biology, chemistry, and, eventually, embryology and genetics. Clearing the badly damaged land provided lessons in ecology, and the construction of a house and outbuildings showed the boys the relevance of seemingly arcane subjects such as geometry. Drew, at seven, understood that the Pythagorean theorem was invaluable in squaring up his sheep shed foundation. Grant, at nine, discovered a Pomo Indian campsite on the ridge and was inspired to delve into North American archaeology, an interest which later broadened into studies of Mayan and Aztec cultures.