By kate, on January 21st, 2011 My husband (who I refer to as Bear in everything I write) is kind of a genius. OK, he’s my husband, so obviously I think he’s great, but I’m serious: the man is abnormally smart. He’s smart in the perfect-score-on-every-standardized-test way. In the BA-and- MS-at-Stanford-in-four-years way. He’s smart in the thinking-about-the-world-in-surprisingly-unique-terms way. He’s smart in a way that allows him to be able to solve any problem you put in front of him, whether it’s fixing the toilet, programming a computer , comprehending the details of every kind of derivatives trading, or somehow figuring out what’s bothering me when I get really sullen. He’s smart in a way that enables him to be modest and never talk about how smart he is, and listen to other people instead.
All of this is amazing, until I’m lying in bed with him and he is taking a world geography test for fun, and asking me if I remember the capital of Sri Lanka. I do not. And then I don’t remember where Uzbekistan is on the map. Oh my god. A whole country, and I have no idea. It turns out there are other countries I can’t identify by shape. Many of them. Bear is telling me about how the ethnic minority in such and such a place, which is called this gigantic word that I’m sure he’s pronouncing correctly in a language I can’t identify, has a really interesting alphabet, with a really interesting history. And then there’s their currency. Which he also mysteriously knows everything about. He seems to expect that I will at least know something about the Malay Peninsula. He always casually expects that I know everything he does, like knowing that much is normal. It’s flattering. But also scary.
(I should study this. source)
He’ s just lying there, looking at maps on the laptop, and talking happily about the world, and I am thinking about how incredibly uneducated I am. And immediately, I start thinking about unschooling. It’s all the same stuff I’ve always thought every time I didn’t know something other people knew, or expected me to know. “They will think I should’ve gone to school. I’m making unschooling look bad.” I wonder if I just forgot, for my entire childhood, to study geography. Did I somehow never study any geography, ever? Is that even possible. I feel slightly panicked. Oh my god– what else haven’t I learned? There are enormous gaps in my education! Can I scramble eggs? I’m a failure! The jig is up!
Continue reading Bear is a genius and I forget everything
By kate, on January 20th, 2011 After reading the last post, my father-in-law sent me an article about homeschoolers that Business Week published a few years ago. He said the homeschoolers he’d heard about and come into contact with before me seemed more like the ones Business Week described.
Homeschoolers who are gaming the system. Homeschooling families that are producing super-genius kids who get into Harvard when they’re fifteen and go on to govern small but precocious island nations in preparation for the time when they can achieve world dominance.
My family definitely did not have that much of a plan.
Homeschoolers fall into a lot of different categories, which is confusing for everyone, including me. It’s kinda like Jews. Many non-Jews might think of “the Jews” as a single entity. After all, we’re a very, very numerically minor group. How different could we possibly be? Let’s just say that there are plenty of extremely observant Jewish men who would never speak to me, let alone consider me Jewish. I mean, I wear shorts in the summer and show off my naked legs. I sing on the bima, which isn’t even permitted by very strict interpretations of our tradition. My mother converted. I married a non-Jew.
(I’m scandalous like that. source)
But I am Jewish. I don’t think there are degrees of Jewishness. You are or you’re not. There are a lot of other opinions out there, and most of them come from other Jews.
At least no one can tell me, “You weren’t really homeschooled. Real homeschoolers always have a blackboard in their living room.”
Continue reading Bad at gaming the system
By kate, on January 18th, 2011 Since Kika wanted to know what happened next, I’ll try to summarize the Emily story quickly before I start this post:
Emily left Waldorf after a couple years and we were reunited. She was the maid of honor at my wedding. But for the time that she spent in school, she was too busy learning the social system for me, and I was too busy running around in the woods to worry about it very much. School, even Waldorf, seemed all-encompassing. And when she invited me in for “bring a friend to school day,” I was shocked to discover that in art class, the teacher suggested that everyone draw a rose. The same rose. And all of the students turned to one boy and said, “Yours is the best.” I couldn’t believe that sort of thing was even allowed. (Also, I was a little offended, since I had hoped that my rose would be the best…)
And here is today’s post:
When you’re a kid, people ask you, “What grade are you in?”
I never knew how to answer, because I could never remember what grade I was supposed to be in.
When you’re twenty or so, people ask you, “Where do you go to college?”
And after college, people start to ask you “What do you do?”
Penelope Trunk wrote about the question “what do you do?” and offered some suggestions about how to approach it.
Which is helpful, because I never really know what to say. I do a lot of things. Some of them sound more like legitimate careers than others. Some of them sound ridiculous on their own. Some of them are just boring.
My husband asked me the other day if I knew many homeschoolers who grew up and went into the typical “successful” professions– doctor, lawyer, investment banker, pharmacist, that sort of thing.
I thought about it for a long time. I couldn’t think of anyone. Which is not to say that plenty of homeschoolers don’t go those routes. I’m sure they do. I mean, first of all, I don’t even know an enormous group of homeschoolers who are my age. But the my-age homeschoolers I do know don’t seem that interested in following paths that people think of when they hear words like “secure,” “pillar of the community,” and “money.”
Continue reading “What do you do?”
By kate, on January 11th, 2011 “It’s still school,” said Mom patiently. She looked concerned but in the way of someone who is trying not to look concerned. Like inside she was telling herself, “This is just a phase. Kate is just testing the boundaries.”
“I know…” I said slowly. “But…”
“We can talk about it,” said Mom.
We were supposed to be able to talk about anything, as long as I brought it up in a polite, mature way. If I just said, “But everyone else is going to the movie theater!” then Mom would say, “You are not everyone else. And I said no.” She hated movie theaters. She hated movies. And television. They were a waste of time. We didn’t watch TV. Not at all.
Emily was going to school. After we’d been homeschooled our whole lives. But she was allowed to watch some TV. And to eat Lucky Charms. She was practically a school kid anyway. No. That wasn’t true. She was supposed to eat healthy, but Christine let her pick out one treat every time they went to the supermarket. And she picked Lucky Charms. Sometimes when I stayed over Emily’s house, all I wanted to do was eat Lucky Charms and watch TV. I tried to be social, and play with the plastic ponies and all of her dolls, but it was like my eyes were stuck. I couldn’t look away from the screen, where everything was happening at once. I felt guilty, like I was stealing something.
Continue reading Emily goes to school, part 2
By kate, on January 10th, 2011 When I was nine or so, my best friend Emily (who had also been homeschooled until then) went to school. This is the story:
Emily was going to go to school. To the Waldorf school, which was definitely not as much school as public school. But still.
“Mom,” I said, “Maybe I can go to school too.” I was standing in the hall, talking through the bathroom door. Mom had just gotten out of the shower. I’d heard the water shut off.
There was a long pause and I could tell she’d stopped drying her hair. “Why do you want to do that?” Her tone was careful.
“Well, Christine says it won’t be that different from being at home,” I said. I wasn’t sure if Christine had actually said that, but she was Emily’s mom, and she was a big part of the reason I was homeschooled in the first place. Mom had met Christine when Emily and I were only two-years-old. Christine knew a lot about natural childbirth and breastfeeding and slings. When Emily and I were six and seven we carried our baby dolls around in miniature cloth slings. Hers was navy blue, dotted with bright red cherries.
Whatever Emily had, I wanted. Her stuff was always better. Even when it was dirty or broken. Her room was full of mixed up colors, everything ran together. There were rainbow silks spilling out of the dressup box. Her furniture was painted chipping blue and dotted with dried glue bubbles. The floor was smeared with crushed pastels and streaked with chalk.
“They bake bread there and go outside in the woods,” I offered. Emily had told me over the phone. She was going to get stockings to wear with her big clunky boots. She’d cut most of her hair off herself and it stuck up in blond tufts, but she still looked like Tinkerbell and she wanted to see what Tinkerbell would look like carrying an actual lunchbox. “I get to have Perrier and a hardboiled egg everyday,” she told me. It sounded incredibly elegant.
Continue reading Emily goes to school, part 1
By kate, on January 6th, 2011 This post is also on Huffpo now, at this link.
The New York Times online feature “Room for Debate” recently held a discussion about homeschoolers and taxes. Should homeschoolers get tax breaks?
Two of the respondents (Rob Reich and Chester Finn Jr) said yes, but only if they take regular standardized tests.
One of the problems with comparing school and everything that unschooling encompasses is that, well, they aren’t comparable. For a lot of unschoolers, not taking tests is part of the point. The main point. Learning shouldn’t be measured by generic standards. It’s individual, it’s differently-paced, it’s organic. That can all sound a little gooey. My husband, who went to conventional school and did extremely well on every test he ever took, thinks that tests are pretty great. They are useful for evaluating progress, they force kids to learn to perform under pressure, and they teach everyone…important things. OK, I forget the rest of his argument.
As I like to remind him in my brattier moments, both he and I graduated college summa cum laude. My GPA was a little higher.* I only took one test as a homeschooler, and it was the SAT. More than that, if I had been tested, randomly, during my childhood, there’s a good chance I would have appeared hopelessly, irredeemably behind on some subjects and almost improbably ahead on others.
I don’t think it’s important that everyone perform at a certain level at any point. I feel radical saying that. Lockstep learning is only important when you’re dealing with a ton of kids, and you have to move them through a ton of material and get them out the other side without losing your job. But the idea that everyone should be on the same level is strange, taken out of the context of large conventional school classrooms. Even inside many of those classrooms, teachers are struggling to accommodate different skill sets, learning styles, and information-processing rates. It will always be a struggle, because school isn’t set up to be accommodating.
Maybe people are concerned that unschoolers will come out the other end illiterate and incompetent. Illiteracy and incompetency are real problems. But they aren’t concerns that have anything to do with unschooling. Of course, there will always be individual families who neglect and abuse their children. Families who ignore their children’s intellectual, emotional, and physical needs. But these families do not hide among the ranks of untested homeschoolers. They’re everywhere.
To imagine that the few situations of total educational failure that might result from rogue unschoolers necessitate widespread standardized testing of ALL unschoolers is as ignorant as imagining that the constant testing of children in school is preventing all of them from slipping through the cracks. It’s not. It can’t. To imagine that homeschoolers have to “earn” tax credit by proving that they are exactly in line with their schooled peers is to grossly misunderstand what it means to be unschooled.
But the tax breaks would be nice.
*To be absolutely fair, he was taking scarily hard science classes and I wasn’t.
By kate, on January 5th, 2011 I annoyed my family a lot as a thirteen-year-old. I was always talking about boys.
“You’re boy crazy,” said my dad. He thought it was funny.
But I was homeschooled, so I didn’t really know any boys. (That was a joke.)
I wrote long, detailed entries in my journal about the boys I know, rating and ranking them, assigning them numbers and symbols and giving them code names. My best friend and I played this game where we wrote down the names of the main boys in our lives and then a set of categories like “cute,” “funny,” “good smile,” and “potential to be a good father.” I’m not kidding, that was a real category. And then we rated the boys in each category on a scale of 1-10. When we ran out of real boys, we made them up.
Rafael was a tall, dark-skinned photographer who loved rollerblading. Patrick was blond and hilarious and liked comic books. There was also James and Swan and Jonathan.
(what? rollerblading is totally cool! source)
I had a crush on a boy for every group activity I participated in. Piano performance class. Hebrew school. Jewish homeschool group. Regular homeschool group. Summer camp. The science lectures at the Franklin Institute. Choir. Acting club.
They weren’t serious crushes. When one boy left the group, I’d promptly switch my attention to his friend, or the guy in the back with the glasses. It was fun to like someone.
But I was homeschooled. So I gave boys up and studied all day in my room. (That was also a joke.)
Continue reading Homeschool dating
By kate, on January 4th, 2011 My mom thought she didn’t get to spend enough time with her siblings growing up. That was one of her big reasons for homeschooling us. (Read this post for another reason she homeschooled us.)
I got to spend a lot of time with my siblings. And honestly, it was great. Being with my brothers was one of the best parts of being homeschooled. I make plenty of carefully balanced arguments about the benefits and detriments of stuff like not having to do math all the time, sleeping late, focusing intensely on the arts, and wearing that skintight purple tee-shirt that said “Homeschoolers learn everywhere!” on it. But there can’t be any debate about this: being with my brothers all the time was awesome.
I have two younger brothers, Jake and Gabe. Jake is three years younger than me, and Gabe is six years younger than me. They are best friends with each other. They are also friends with just about everyone else, since they both turned out gregarious, cool, and unfairly good-looking. I am without a doubt the nerdy one. Which is why I am blogging, while they go to parties. Kidding. Sort of. OK, not at all.
(my brothers, doing the same thing)
My mom will hate that statement. She hated it when people said, “So Kate’s the artist?”
“We’re all artists,” she responded.
Continue reading Siblings
By kate, on January 2nd, 2011 I read a post over at Life Without College that I identified with a lot. It was about epic adventures, and feeling like you need to have them all the time. I feel like that. I blame it on unschooling. And a mysterious genetic mutation that may eventually prove the existence of life on other planets.
As a kid, since I was already different (weird), I had to be weird for good reasons, rather than just for weird reasons. I wanted to be exceptional.
Being exceptional makes it OK to be different. You might be a little strange and not always know how to make small talk, but when you’re an international chess champion it sort of comes with the territory.
I was not an international chess champion. I couldn’t beat either one of my younger brothers (who went through a chess phase and played competitively on a homeschooled chess team). But I was in the paper for doing other stuff well. I was precocious.
Really, I was pretty normal for an unschooler. I was good at things because I had lots of time to get good at them. I competed at things because I liked to prove that I was good at them.
(Such a good game. But so very hard. source)
But when you grow up, it’s hard to stay exceptional. It’s easy to be better than other kids in your town at sketching portraits or playing scherzos. And then you meet the other kids who are auditioning at Juilliard. Later on, living in the city, you see them everywhere: exceptional people who are excellent at what they do, who are only here because they’re making it, because they’re different.
Continue reading The trouble with being exceptional
By kate, on December 30th, 2010 This post also appeared on Huffpo here.
College orientation was depressing. At one of the events, I ended up at a table with a lot of other young women, eating a sandwich that I hadn’t realized was vegetarian when I picked it up. We were talking about what we wanted to be when we grew up. Which we were planning on doing as soon as we graduated.
Everyone except for me wanted to be a teacher. Wait–I think someone wanted to be a psychologist, actually. But everyone else wanted to be a teacher. I wanted to be a famous author who also played fierce rock music on a bright red Steinway concert grand for packed stadiums. So it’s not like I had my stuff together. The other girls were definitely practical. Except they didn’t seem that smart.
That’s a mean, judgmental thing to say.
But I said it, and I’m going to stand by it. They weren’t that smart. Maybe they were brilliant, secretly. Maybe they were kinesthetically intelligent. I don’t know.
One girl was saying, “Yeah, like, I just really, like, like kids, y’know?”
“Totally,” said another girl. “Kids are so cute.”
Continue reading The people who teach
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