Category: Parenting

As I wrote last week, my daughter decided that this year she wanted to check out school. As homeschoolers, we were never completely out of the school world since we took part in a public homeschool program. But she really wanted to find out what schools are like, and she’s the sort of kid who doesn’t just want to read about it—she wants to get in and get her hands dirty.

So this week she went to school every day and seems thrilled with all the novelty: Getting up early and actually eating breakfast without having time to sit in bed and read before. Riding her bike to school or getting a ride and sitting in the long line of cars in the drop-off lane. Meeting 31 new kids all at once. Taking a class with a complete stranger who didn’t have to audition for the kids. Having homework 3 nights out of 5. Having folders for different subjects. And the biggest novelty: Mom caving in when at Target buying the folders and letting her get a commercial tie-in (Angry Birds).

I may be a diehard fan of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. But sometimes having folders with Angry Birds on them is an urgent matter of self-expression. Or so my 10-year-old tells me.

Partly because of the novelty, and partly because this a path she chose completely independently of everyone—her parents, her homeschool program teacher, and all of her homeschool friends—, the week went well. Ironically, however, it ended in my speaking at the inaugural Online Homeschool Conference. I had the uncomfortable feeling of being half-imposter, speaking so glowingly about an educational choice my daughter has rejected.

The thing is, I’ve trod this path before and I know it doesn’t lead to Homeschooler Purgatory. There are homeschoolers who say that any and all structured learning is evil and will ruin your children. I love some of these people and I have to respectfully say that they are wrong. School will not ruin most children. Think about it: If your kids are so weak-willed that school will ruin their lives forever, don’t you have a much bigger problem than your educational choice?

School is an integral part of our culture, and I applaud my daughter for going into this with her eyes open and with the intellectual curiosity that we nurtured in homeschool. For the most part she’s still enjoying the novelty and getting to know so many people. (Unlike the rest of her family, she is a happy extravert, and the idea of getting to know 31 new kids at one time didn’t send her to hide quivering under her bed.)

But the things she hasn’t enjoyed are also learning experiences for her, knowledge that she will bring forward as she continues to choose her educational path. This week her teacher needed to get to know the level of math that his 32 students are on, so he sent home some worksheets. The worksheets had, of course, impossibly small spaces in which to write the answers, and my girl with her handwriting troubles became furious and inconsolable at not being able to fit the numbers where they were supposed to go. We discussed her dilemma, and then I left her to make her choice. In the end, she wrote in microscopic writing that, she was sure, her teacher wouldn’t be able to read. But she did in fact do the assignment…her way…and learned that there are ways to cope.

I haven’t heard a lot about what’s happening at school outside of a description of the cafeteria food. But she did tell me this anecdote about math class. Her teacher was teaching the kids about number lines, “which,” my daughter points out, “I taught myself in kindergarten.” (Actually, I think it was first grade, but she’s pretty much on target.) So she got out her new graph paper notebook, purchased for school—and heck, she had to buy it so why not use it? She plotted a parabola on an axis, and then, heck, if you’re going to plot one parabola, why not its inverse?

Then she wrote “For Mr. X” on top and presented it to him as a gift.

I have heard teachers talk about the trials of having former homeschoolers in their classes. How they respond to the challenges these kids raise is a measure of how much they really value the individual learning of each child. My daughter says that Mr. X thanked her for the gift, which is about as good of a reaction as I could hope for.

The fact is, asynchronous learners like my daughter are the hardest kids to fit into a classroom, no matter whether they’re former homeschoolers or not. Yes, my daughter can plot a parabola, a skill which most kids her age haven’t been exposed to yet. But I desperately hope that he doesn’t ask her to do long division on a worksheet with a small space and instructions on how to do long division “the right way.” This skill, which most kids her age can do without thinking much about, is quite a trial for her.

I’ll probably be able to hear the screams wafting up the hill the day he tests that skill!

The longer children homeschool, the further they get from a school-based model of learning. As I pointed out in my conference session this morning, waiting for instructions and giving the teacher what s/he wants are two important aspects of being a good school student. Neither of those is an asset to a homeschooler. The will that led my daughter to learn about negative numbers at the age of 6 and to be fascinated with Fibonacci sequences at 8 did not lead her to enjoy long division. The will that leads her to invent and create is not strong enough to keep her sitting in a chair and following instructions if she’s bored. I know that she’s going to be a challenge in a classroom—that’s why we homeschooled in the first place.

Some may think that I am no longer a homeschooler because I’m allowing one of my kids to go to school, but I know better: My daughter is a homeschooler whether she goes to school or not. She has chosen a goal and she is applying all her skills to attaining and succeeding at that goal. Her yearlong social science experiment is going along splendidly, all planned and orchestrated by herself.

And if that’s not a description of a homeschooler, what is?

It’s not something that happens on a specific day or with any identifiable milestones. You go along for years with “little” kids, who need at first to be cared for in every way: you feed them, bathe them, dress them, soothe them, talk to them, sing to them, teach them, and amuse them.

Then as time goes on, one of these jobs will drop away. One day your toddler grabs the spoon and now all you have to do is set the food him front of him. Another day your preschooler will decide to dress herself (and you get to live with the mismatched consequences). Like magic your children learn to walk, fix their grammatical errors, and no longer need help with the remote control (that probably happened first, though).

But still, you have little kids. You always know where they are in the house even if you aren’t directly taking care of them. You might still hold their hands crossing roads and help them with their seatbelts. Whenever they are not with you, you make sure that someone else is directly responsible for them.

Then one day you realize you’re not exactly sure where you child is. You know that she went to a friend’s house to play, and then at some point she’ll end up at another friend’s house where you’ll pick her up. Or he went over to a friend’s house to “do stuff,” and that stuff could involve anything from going to the beach or to the movies.

You realize that when you have to go do errands, you just yell “be back soon!” up the stairs and leave. You realize that when you try to grab her hand at a crosswalk, the look on her face reminds you she hasn’t been willing to do that for two years at least. You realize that you aren’t choosing your clothing in the morning based on whether it hides baby drool, can stand up to being embedded with ooblick, or has enough pockets to hold all the treasures your kids find on a walk.

You realize that you have “big kids.”

I broke one of my longstanding rules recently when I offered a photo of my daughter to accompany an article I had written. I asked my daughter if it was OK, given that she was half-naked in the photo. She was fine with it, and so was I: If anyone could recognize my big kid from that photo, I’d be shocked. Her curly blond hair is gone. (Straight now, and recently dyed black just for kicks.) Her bright blue eyes are now more of a light green. She’s twice as tall and you’ll never find her, these days, wearing a diaper like in the photo. Though she still does like to wear fun rain boots, she no longer calls them her “motorcycle boots” as she did back then.

After I asked her, she pointed out my own rule about not using photos of my kids if they are recognizable. I asked her to find a similarity in the photo, and it was hard. Yes, the photo looks just like her, but if it were on the cover of Time Magazine, people would hardly be stopping her on the streets to congratulate her.

It’s a strange thing to realize that your little child is gone and will never come back. Certainly, she’s in there somewhere. One of the things I love about the photo is that you can see her personality shining through. But big kids build containers for their inner little selves. If we parents do our jobs right, we and others who have loving relationships with our kids will still know that inner little self. But out in the big world where our kids spend more and more of their time, it’s necessary to keep the little person contained and protected.

While I’m writing this, my daughter is off at another summer camp (see this piece, this one, and this one about why we love summer camp so much), and I actually don’t know what she’s doing, who she’s with, and what she’s learning. She loves this independence, and likes to tease us by pretending when she comes home that she’s not going to tell us anything about her day. We are experiencing that feeling of letting go, our little kids growing into their big kid selves, and onward, watching our teen growing into the man he will be.

It’s a bittersweet time: On the one hand, I am happily wearing a dress today and not worrying about ooblick. On the other, that little kid time is so sweet and so irreplaceable. It seems like forever when you’re in it, but once it’s gone, you realize how fleeting it was.

Saturday my husband, son and I completed something I’ve wanted to do since moving to Santa Cruz County: We started up in Big Basin and hiked the Skyline to the Sea trail down to the ocean. It was a glorious day and we are now very tired. But I have the Santa Cruz Metro bus system (and a friend who alerted me to their new service) to thank for being able to do this great hike.

For those of you who don’t know, the trail from Big Basin breaks off of the Skyline trail (which I have also never hiked – something for another time!). The problem with doing this hike normally is that if you leave a car in Big Basin and hike down, you have two pretty difficult solutions: Either you hike back up to get your car or you do the crazy preparation of leaving one car at the beach, driving up, hiking down, driving the beach car back up to Big Basin (over an hour drive) and then back down again in two cars. Not exactly your best solution. However, a friend alerted me to the fact that the SC Metro had reinstated their excellent summer service that extends two bus lines out to the two end points of this hike. At 8:30 in the morning, we took a Metro bus up from Santa Cruz, and at 5:15 we grabbed the bus down at Waddell Creek State Beach. It cost $12 for the three of us, and worked like a charm. It was sort of amusing, also, to ride up in the morning with largely the same folks we rode back into town with in the afternoon (including a family that did the hike with a jogging stoller – don’t ask me how!).

The hike starts in redwoods, first the old growth of Big Basin and then younger second-growth forest. Part of the way through, you can go up to Berry Creek Falls, a lovely little waterfall with a nice overlook platform. Because we went on a Saturday in the summer, it was pretty full. There were about a dozen people at the platform with us, and as we started to leave, and enormous group started to come up the trail. (They turned out to be a group of older Vietnamese American adults from San Jose who regularly do trips together. This time they parked at the beach, hiked up to the falls, and then back to the beach.) So if you’re looking for solitude, this isn’t the trail for you, at least in high season.

Not far below the falls, the trail became much wider and was maintained for bikers and horses. There is a bike rack there for bikers who want to park and hike up to the waterfall, which is another option we discussed doing at a later time. From that point the trail was quite easy and almost all downhill. We got to the beach about 3:15, which left 2 hours to kill before the bus came.

At the beach, there’s a nice little nature center, Rancho del Oso, which is open until 4 p.m. To get there, once you get down to the ranger station which is on the mountain side of the highway, take a left to the marsh trail and follow that for about 10 minutes. The nature center offers very nice bathrooms, some exhibits about the local animals and plants (including some impressive taxidermy, such as the grizzly and mountain lion), and free filtered water.

The beach is a favorite place for kiteboarders, which made the rest of the wait pretty fun. We got to watch them struggling into and out of the water (the wind was quite brisk) and while in the water, sailing above the waves.

I highly recommend this trip. We paid for parking ($5 all day at the garage at the corner of Soquel and Front), but theoretically you could park further out for free and walk in. The bus pretty much filled up at the Metro station, though, so if you get on at a later stop, you’ll probably find standing room only, at least in high season. If you’re not a family of serious backpackers, this hike will be strenuous enough to make you feel like you’ve achieved something, and definitely doable for younger ones who like to hike. Watching as the ecosystem changed from redwood to chaparral to beach was a lovely way to spend a day.

Read more details about the hike and bus service in this excellent article.