this woman’s work

Julia and I were talking homeschooling the other day (a big discussion/gentle debate) and she said, I like to think gently, that maybe I liked being the odd parent out and this had something to do with our homeschooling choice. You know, that much of my identity comes from going against the grain.

I’ve been thinking on this. It’s a charge I’ve had leveled at me before especially when I was a disgruntled teen with bad punk rock hair and questionable taste in clothes. It’s true that when I was a teenager that I reveled in my weirdness but that’s just it — I didn’t like to be weird; I was weird. And when I was a teen and grappling with my identity, I wanted to be very in people’s faces about it as teens will be.

So see, it’s not that my identity is wrapped up in being weird like a status symbol; it’s that I am who I am and I’ve learned to be proud of it as opposed to defensive and worried about it. Am I proud of being a homeschooler? Sure. I’m proud that we’re living out our values even though homeschooling has added to our challenges as a family (financially for the most part) and I don’t need that celebrated although it would be nice to have it accepted instead of questioned.

Back to being weird and how it relates to our homeschooling choices. I was an odd kid and pretty early on I figured it out as odd kids will do. It seemed like I usually wanted to do things differently than my friends or had interests that they didn’t share. I’m fortunate that I wasn’t the kind of kid who got harassed much and I’m sure part of this is that my mom (and I think my dad) like me an awful lot and told me so. What made me weird, I learned early on, was also what made me special so I never wanted to pretend to be something I wasn’t.

I think when it comes to intrinsic weirdness having confidence is what saves you from getting harassed. Also as introverted as I am (and this introversion certainly contributed both to my weirdness and my school misery), I do like people and my social skills were always good. You know, “plays well with others” and stuff like that. I’ve always had close knit friends and generally get along with people and my unhappiness with the social world at school had to do with the way I saw it and experienced it and not with how I was treated.

There are two bullies that stand-out in memory — one being some random kid in Chicago who used to follow me home from school and wash my face in the snow. I don’t know how it started or how it ended but I remember the feeling of trying to get across the wide open field between the school and our house during the blizzard of ‘78. The snow was too deep for me to get across quickly, so I’d struggle huffing and puffing and praying he didn’t catch me. The other bully was in middle school, one Eric Bielke who was a big, dumb, mean guy and who had it in for me for reasons I still don’t understand. He’d wait for the Home Ec teacher to leave and then threaten to strangle me. But mostly I had my friends and things were fine as long as I was comfortable with feeling awkward, which I learned to be. Which is to say, again, that my misery wasn’t social misery.

Some weird kids, they have charisma and can wear their weirdness to the top of the pack (my first boyfriend, Joaquin, was one of these). But the rest of us have to make some choices:

• Pretend to be normal as best you can and hope it sticks (it never does).
• Be weird and say screw ‘em.

My choice was the latter. Like I said, I was never a stand-out weird kid despite the showtunes and chubbiness and extreme bookwormish and tendency to fight with my teachers during class. I posted Harriet up there at the top because — like many awkward, bookish former girl-children, I identified with her.  I liked myself and liked the things I liked enough that I didn’t want to change — much like Harriet. And as she found solace in her notebook and her tomato sandwiches and being able to see her teachers for what they were, I found solace in my own thoughts and interpretations and figured that if other people weren’t seeing what I was seeing, that had to do with their lack of vision but didn’t make me wrong. Except with a flirtation in trying to be my less-weird (or better at hiding it) sister in ninth grade, I pretty much always wanted to be exactly who I was and figured the rest of the world would just have to get used to it.

But I always struggled with what I saw as the hypocrisy of school. Because what I saw were adults holding up these high social standards that they didn’t enforce or practice. Now that I’m a grown-up I can see that the adults were just regular people struggling with a very difficult day-to-day job that didn’t pay what it should but as a kid I was always incensed that the teachers seemed to be a part of this big social stratification. I argued with my teachers constantly starting in about seventh grade (although fifth grade is when I really started to see my teachers fall off of their pedastals). I won’t go into all of the arguments here or all the calls home to my mother because I was making a fuss or the times I stormed into the principal’s office or the guidance counselor’s because I wanted to stand up for a maligned friend, etc. I was never in trouble in school — never had a detention, never had to stay after — but I know that there were teachers who rolled their eyes when they saw my name on their roster. (I know this because I had three siblings come after and some of them were the exact same way. The teachers would see Friedman on the rolls and start to worry. In the case of my brother and littlest sister, they were right to.)

Ok, I’ll tell you one argument and I still think I was right and the principal was wrong. See, in fifth grade they started TAG, which stood for talented and gifted and then in seventh grade TAG ended but the identified gifted kids got pulled out to play Dungeons & Dragons once a week. (Which is bizarre, when you think about it.) The first thing that made me angry is that the working class TAG kids disappeared from the roster and some rich kids whose TAG-worthiness I found doubtful showed up. That bothered me a lot and I remember asking the organizer about it but don’t remember what he said. (Those other kids were shuttled off to tech school.) The second thing is that I was getting a D in French and this made the principal angry because gifted kids shouldn’t be getting Ds. And he told me (and Todd Lathem who was flunking something and was an original TAG kid and on whom I was crushing madly although that’s not part of the story) that if I didn’t bring my grade up to a B, that I couldn’t do D&D. Well, that didn’t seem fair because they way I saw it giftedness was something that had nothing to do with performance anyway and just because I couldn’t get French was no reason to deny me this enrichment opportunity. It was pretty clear to me that gifted kids learned differently and that the TAG program had been about honoring those differences and not about rewarding some kids for being smart anymore than any other kind of special ed was about rewarding those kids for having needs that were different. But the principal wouldn’t budge so I brought my grade up to a B and when he invited me back, I refused on the principal of the thing and he said good riddance to you and I quietly made another black mark in my imaginary book labeled “School Sucks.”

THAT’s the kind of kid I was and THAT is how I saw school. And seventh grade is when I well and truly checked out of school emotionally and sank into a pit of despair from which I didn’t emerge until college.

I was consumed with injustice and I saw it everywhere in school and what I couldn’t understand is that other people seemed to see it, too, but didn’t want to do anything about it. And coming of age in the early 80s means I was growing up on Robert Cormier and Paul Zindel books where injustice/hypocrisy were the common themes and I didn’t get why teachers would assign these books to us (and Catcher in the Rye) but then wanted us to keep toeing the line. They’d tell us to ask questions then get mad when we did.

By the time I hit tenth grade I was miserable and spitting mad, which is why I graduated in eleventh grade (on the recommendation of a counselor and the blessing of my exhausted teachers) and I spent the last year just trying not to lose my mind. I’ve written about that a little bit but it’s hard to do, frankly, because my unhappiness ran so deep that it’s hard to convey just how much it consumed me.

So what I’m saying here is that I come by my antagonism towards school honestly and being weird already, stepping out and being a weird homeschooler isn’t a far stretch.

My therapist, who didn’t love homeschooling and had a bias that it was too much for a parent to take on, used to tell me that I shouldn’t make decisions for my kids from the limits of my own experiences and I hear that from other folks, too. But then I wonder whose experiences should I use instead? Why is my experience — my values and beliefs — less valid because they’re less mainstream? Weird kids and formerly weird kids are used to having their realities dismissed but it doesn’t mean we like it.

I try not to talk much about homeschooling these days because I feel less passionate about defending it although I am just as happy as I’ve always been about doing it. While I haven’t grown out of my antipathy towards school, I have grown enough to recognize that if I want my own experience validated than I have an obligation to honor everyone else’s. Which is why I have no interest in talking people into seeing things my way. But I do have an interest in having them understand that our choice to keep our kids out of school is reasonable, too.

Sometimes I see people who were weird, anti-school teenagers right along with me and inevitably their kids (if they have them) are in school and it always surprises me even though it shouldn’t. (And they’re often surprised by my homeschooling even though they shouldn’t be either.) I get that for some folks, their “we don’t need no education” rants were part of being a hormonal teen but my antagonism started young — in kindergarten I decided my teacher was a hypocrite for making me read to the class so she could catch a smoke break — and stuck around. I don’t have the same hostility, mind you, because I no longer feel personally abused by the system (the way I did as a kid and then as a teen) but there’s no love lost either.

So how does Brett feel about this? He says, “School was not such a great experience for me” in the understated way that he has. He wasn’t as angry as I was (and it was my anger that saved me, honestly) but he was deeply unhappy. Of course we wouldn’t just send our kids, right?

There’s a strong possiblity that Noah will go one of these days (who knows about Madison) and he’ll go with my blessing because I think the foundation we’ve given him is a good one and will shore him up to understand that school is simply a place to go and get what you need/want to get out of it while I saw it as this thing that was taking up my whole life against my will. Noah’s perspective will be different and hopefully Madison’s will be, too. But I believe that this perspective is due to having this time with us, learning at home and being who they are and having safe room to do this.

To me, choosing to homeschool is a lot like my choice to be Jewish and raise interfaith Jewish kids. It’d be easier to be a Christian and go along with the majority faith but it wouldn’t be true to my beliefs and values. Folks don’t tend to confront us on our religious choices when it comes to raising Madison and Noah but homeschooling seems to be fair game. (I’m not picking on Julia here, who wasn’t asking me to get defensive about MY choice — just so you know, Julia! It’s come up elsewhere recently.)

Anway, that’s my manifesto, I guess. Or something like it. I’m a homeschooler. I stand by it, I’m proud of it and I’m glad that everyone else gets to raise their kids as they see fit, too. Ain’t America grand?

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