Former Homeschooled Kid Naval Gazing About Family Culture and Curiosity and Life Lessons Blah Blah Blah

 

1. What does a family culture of curiosity mean?

2. What does it look like to have shared family interests that lead to real-life learning and skills?

3. What have you observed about what kids do with freedom?

So my friend Myra did a cool project for her Masters about unschooling and homeschooling and she kindly let me read her thesis and it has me, as usual THINKING THOUGHTS ABOUT THINGS.

Did ya'll know I was homeschooled? Not forever, not from stem to stern. More like, I dropped out of high school and then haunted the basement for two years. I messed around on my brother's weight-lifting set-up, listened to my dad's record collection (Cat Stevens, Simon and Garfunkle, Joni Mitchell on repeat.) I played around on our 1994 desktop computer and used a CD-Rom to learn the anatomy of the human hand and post dramatic poetry to AOL forums. I read my mom's college textbooks from when she taught Freshman English (Flowers for Algernon, The Rise of Silas Lapham, and Walt Whitman). I taught myself to play the piano. I neglected my flute and filled my journals. I twirled the phone cord around my fingers and talked to my friends. I filled sketchbooks and made drawerfuls of Sculpey beads. Some of these still surface-- they're pretty cool. Somehow I managed to make a scene in tubular clay form. I sliced the log into little disks and the scene appeared in multiples: a palmtree leaning over a little island. I also made tiny black and white chess-sets and trippy little tesselations and baked them into beads. I had an algebra workbook that I 100% ignored, a radio station constantly tuned to "Alternative hits of the 90s", and no TV. I checked in with my mom about what I'd been working on about once a week, but mostly I just did whatever.

My dad worked from home, writing legal briefs for small companies trying to import to the US. Pasta from Italy, honey from Argentina, socks from Korea. My mom sold harps she imported from Japan, and made tiny watercolor portraits of clients on archive-quality paper-doll forms. After she was featured in Better Homes and Gardens, she had a business boom, which meant three or four diminutive portraits a week. My foster brother Duc was two years older than me and was a super popular junior in High School (his earring was fake though, LOL). He'd host massive parties with 300 of his closest friends-- all of the coolest Vietnamese kids from Montgomery Blair High School. The music made my bedroom floor thud-thud-thud. I had an older foster sister Barbara who was already moved out and married, and two younger sisters, Katie and Lizzie, who were in elementary school, and spent their free time with friends, doing gymnastics, and at music lessons.

My friend Myra, smart lady that she is, says that homeschooling depends on a family culture of curiosity. This seems right. My parents were bright and curious folks, independently working on their own interests. My mom played Irish harp in a Klezmer band and sewed Ren Faire costumes. She painted portraits of friends for cash and wrote articles for the local paper. My dad single-handedly rebuilt a crazy old haunted Victorian mansion, including getting it hefted up onto massive airplane tires and rolling it down the block.

Home is, ideally, a place where you learn real-life skills. There's nowhere else you'll learn to tidy up, to apologize, to agree on a meal, to make Beangunk (tm. Secret family recipe.) Homeschooling takes that premise and makes it The Whole Thing. According to Myra, "shared family interests lead to real-life learning and skills." I have to stretch my brain back, crane my mind around that distant corner. Did our shared family culture and interests lead to real-life learning and skills?

As a family, we drove cross-country in a broiler-hot RV to visit family/ We wore the above-mentioned Ren Faire costumes to play Irish tunes, collected interesting people for dinner parties, and tried terrible vegan recipes. We had challenging conversations over the dinner table. My dad let me heave a sledgehammer through walls during the remodel and feed the scrap lumber into the enormous fireplace. We played around with language, entertaining ourselves with puns and word games. My mom spent a weird number of hours translating John Lennon lyrics into Latin. Ah, some things about my family culture and my mastery of "real-life skills" are becoming clear as I write. (Ego sum anatis stricta alba braccas.)

When I was a high school drop-out, eh hem COUGH COUGH I mean homeschooler, my dear mother did want to instill some useful life skills in my softshell crab brain. Bless her heart. She took me to work with her, to her art studio in the basement! She let me attempt to write an address on one of the tidy PaperFaces Paperdoll boxes before she sent it out. I did my best. She looked at my irregular attempt and then at me and said, "Seriously?"

"What??" My dander was all up, immediately (see above about traumatized teenage brain in molt).

"This is unusable." She had to throw the box away in disgust when my handwriting was just too weird to represent her cute business.

She tried grading my essays like she'd graded her freshman English students at BYU, but I was too floppy and pointless to make any corrections. Mostly I just enjoyed following her around and annoying her. Anything that she tried, with intent, to INSTILL in me, failed to install. But lots of things-- everything-- that we did at home-- programmed me into personhood.

Then other things took up her time: a reoccurrence of cancer. Failed treatments. She had to ask herself questions like, "where do I want to die?" Questions like, "Did my kid finish the history book I told her to read?" fell off of the priority list entirely.

After not-quite two years of homeschooling, we moved away from DC, and out to Utah. I bawled to leave my friends and my creek and my oak trees and the metro and downtown Takoma Park. I didn't want to, but my parents insisted I go back to public school in our new city. I had been a stress-case at the massive and overcrowded urban school in DC. All kinds of mental and physical health things made the whole experience hellish for me. I couldn't think, couldn't learn, couldn't be a human. I was just a zinging nerve-spring in an era before we knew words like 'ADHD' or 'Sensory Overwhelm' or 'Anxiety.' I dreaded going back into an environment where I would feel like that again.

But weirdly, I was fine. Class was easy. Talking to people was fine. Moving to a new school for the last bit of high school was not fun, of course, but doable. Sure, it was a smaller school, the halls were wider, the crowds didn't press you against the walls of the stairwell between classes. But I think that two years of doing kinda whatever was the deep ice bath my overheated brain needed.

A big question about loosely structured, kid-led (home) schooling is-- what do kids do with freedom? The fear is that, given a wide open Serengeti of self-learning possibilities, kids will just sit like a lump under an acacia tree instead of, I dunno, chasing down intellectual zebras or bopping academic meerkats on the head. Algebra, BOP, gotcha! Biology, BOP, 4.0!! And then instead of growing into big strong Lions of Industry, they'll become formless, toothless blobs, incapable of survival.

When I was a high school drop out doing nothing in the basement for two years, racking up no accomplishments or awards, I probably looked like a lump. And maybe if I had a smart phone, or interesting internet, or TV even, I would have really been one. But I dunno. I was learning. I was busy making sculpey beads and playing the piano and reading. I was creative and productive. I was chilling out my fevered brain, processing grief, reading deeply, walking slowly through the world.