I’m totally behind on my blog reading. Totally. The rss feeds are just piling up like crazy.

My book project got a little stalled last week because for one, I missed Noah’s Hebrew class for some reason. Why was that? I can’t remember now but it was for a good reason. Maybe I had a deadline. Maybe I had a date with someone. I wish I could remember. Anyway so there was that and then I had this idea of what I was going to find and as it turns out, I’m finding something different, which means I’m trying to reorganize my thoughts.

My book idea is related to education and so of course I’m going back and thinking about my own education. I’m realizing how cemented I am in homeschooling and I find it both reassuring (it is what it is) and horrifying (what about my options??).

I realized that I will never ever ever be a good school mom. I have way way too many issues with traditional education. I own these — I have no desire to pin these issues on other people who feel differently. I am not an evangelical homeschooler by any means. I am more than willing to say, “Yeah, I might be wrong,” but I will never be able to wrap my head around so much of it.

I’m going to try really hard to talk about *my* experiences and not get critical about school for any other living person, ok? I know that many of you had positive experiences, that your kids are having positive experiences and that in a different school with different teachers it might all have been good for me, too. I’m trying to specifically talk about why there is something in me that makes me a poor school parent. I just don’t want anyone to feel defensive so I’m laying this all out right up front.

As long-time readers might know, my mom was really really really unhappy with the school experiences of myself and my siblings. As a family we went to four different elementary schools (Erica = 4, Me = 3, Justin = 1) and she faced the same battles in every single one. I remember her coming home frustrated and near tears many times. And I also remember the click-click of her high heels when I would see her coming down the hall (so beautiful — I had the prettiest mother of anyone!) when I was on my way to class. Surprise! There she was, heading back from another meeting with the principal or the teacher trying to get us what she felt we needed.

I also remember how exhausted she got and how she got too tired to fight anymore. At that point (I’d say fifth or sixth grade) she said very clearly that we needed to learn how to play the school game and yes, she understood how bored we were and how inconsequential the rules seemed but that’s how it was. We had to have respect for our teachers, she told us, they had hard jobs. Maybe sometimes it wasn’t easy to have respect for the person but we should at least have respect for the position they held.

My mom never made us do homework. I used to do mine on the bus until I realized that I could manage without. It got to be a race for me — to see how little work I could do in class and then pull it out for a test. I never ever ever studied and it was a point of pride for me. I would scan the chapter before a quiz while the teacher was handing out the tests. Mostly I did ok. Not so much in math though or French.

I got away with too much in school. No one ever taught me how to write a paper. Junior year I wrote my term paper in the study hall before class. I’d been reading books on the subject and I just faked it and I knew I’d get an A because I always got an A whenever there was writing involved. To tell you the truth, I think some of my teachers gave me an A just because they figured it was easier than arguing with me if they tried to slip me something lower. I argued with everybody.

I told my seventh grade English teacher that someone ought to revoke her license. (She told the ending to a book and I figured that was a sure way to guarantee that nobody was going to read it and it was a book I loved so I wanted everybody to read it.)
I told my ninth grade math teacher that he was a chauvinist pig. (He was.)
I told the principal in eleventh grade that he was discriminating against AP English students because the AP math students could take classes at the university and we couldn’t.

I hated school. I hated it. I hated the politics. I hated the cliques. I hated the teachers who played into cliques. I hated that the poor kids mostly disappeared from the gifted classes come middle school and were replaced with rich kids. The classes were so boring that I would zone out and write (unless I could get away with reading under my desk). I fought with teachers just for the excitement.*

When I got to college, I was totally unprepared. I didn’t know how to write a thesis statement. I didn’t know what a thesis statement was. I didn’t know how to study, I didn’t know how to do homework. I still have nightmares where I suddenly realize that I’m 35 years old and have missed more than a decade of math classes and that they’re going to come take my degree away. I also didn’t know how to ask for help and I was still picking fights with my teachers.

I can trace my problems with educational authority back to kindergarten when Mrs. Frink made me read to the class while she took a smoke break. I knew it wasn’t fair especially because I wasn’t allowed to read at any other time during class. She was teaching us the alphabet and so I sat while she taught the alphabet. Unless she needed a smoke break and then she sat me up on a stool to keep the class busy for her. It wasn’t fair but then, I learned, school is not fair.

Again, I’m not saying all schools are like this or that my experiences are particularly unique (they’re not — I know) but there you go. I came out of that experience with a low disregard for worksheets, curriculum and blackboards. There is simply no way I could tell Noah, “Show your work,” when I hated having to show my work. (And I hated doing it in pencil because I never liked the feel of writing with a pencil.) I couldn’t say to Madison, “You should listen to your teacher,” if I thought the teacher was being ridiculous. And I think it would be incredibly unfair of me to send my kids to school and then disrespect their lives there. I think that would be bullshit.

There are so many stupid vestiges of all of this in my regular life. I love trainings but I distrust almost every trainer for the first ten minutes of any lecture. I have a hard time listening when I’m sitting with a group of people and there’s one person out front talking. I mean, I can do it but the first fifteen or twenty minutes are hard. I have to have a notebook, like a talisman. I can’t explain it. It’s ridiculous.

I know it’s insane. I know that I’m way too emotional about this. (I’m still mad. I’m still angry about my school experiences. I still get teary about it — it’s dumb, I know.) But there you go — it’s one reason I homeschool. I couldn’t risk that happening to my kids. I couldn’t get past my yucky feelings enough to support them. I have no faith — none — in the system. Zero. Zilch. I don’t believe in grades or standardized testing so how could I encourage my kids to get As or score 100? He’d say, “But I don’t feel like doing my homework,” and I’d say, “Yeah, no kidding. Let’s blow it off and read a book.” If I sent Noah to school, I’d be a hypocrite.

So I started reading some of these education-related books thinking that I would find out that I was/am indeed ridiculous and instead what I found out is how incredibly common my experiences were and — more importantly — how incredibly common it is to have these same, silly knee-jerk reactions, which is to say maybe it’s not so silly. Says one of the researchers, being bored is a form of torture. There’s brain chemistry that gets screwed with when you’re bored. And goddamn but I was really fucking bored in school every single day. And what kills me is how so many teachers want you to stay bored: Don’t read ahead. Do every problem. Show your work. Don’t ask so many questions. No extra credit.

Brett got migraines in elementary school because he was so unhappy. Is it any wonder that we’re keeping our kids home now? Not that we don’t question it but whenever we do talk about sending them we say, “Yeah, but it’s school.”

Noah is never bored at home. If he says he is, it’s actually code for “Hey, Mom, can I borrow your computer?” He’s always busy. He always has a project. He stayed up ’til midnight to read his book and then woke up and started reading again. He came home from my sister’s house yesterday with an idea for a story and then sat down and made the longest book he’s written so far. No one ever tells him to slow down and wait for the rest of the class or tells him that if he’s done with that page then he can do another. If he gets a concept, he can move right along to the next one. If he knows how to do a problem he doesn’t have to prove it twelve more times.

Like I said, I know it can be different for people. My old therapist said that I shouldn’t force my own experiences on my kids but I don’t see how I could do otherwise. Whose experiences should I be using to inform my decisions? Brett’s? He’s coming to the same conclusions. My distrust of formal primary and secondary education goes way, way too deep. The more I realize that about myself, the more I know that we’ll be homeschooling for as long as we, the adults, are making the decision. It’s really our only choice.

But this book project — I don’t know. It’s really not turning out like I thought and I’m not sure how I’m feeling about it.

*My brother was a lot like me. When he showed up in high school with combat boots and a black mohawk and the same last name the teachers just sighed. When my half-sisters showed up a few years later, the teachers sighed again.

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