Love in a Time of Homeschooling Read Free Page A

of these enormous affairs mandated in today’s McMansions, carpeted havens with skylights and recessed bulbs, the size of a home office or a smallbedroom, where a child could disappear for several placid hours, silent within a carousel of dresses.
    My closet is a disgrace. Two feet deep and five feet wide, with wooden shuttered doors and a hard pine floor piled with old sneakers and broken sandals and wrinkled pumps untouched for a decade. Beneath the sedimentary layers of dirty laundry, one can excavate lost library books, old greeting cards, crayons, earplugs, and scraps of paper that once seemed worth keeping. Above the racks of sloppily hangered blouses, the sweaters are not folded tight on their rows of shelves, but lie sprawled in loose piles, sleeves dangling.
    It is a closet fit for Sarah Sylvia Cynthia Stout. My yearly attempt to clean it feels like Hercules tackling the Augean stables, except that I never finish my task. Nevertheless, there, in that unsightly mess, Julia had chosen to sit for almost an hour, crouched silent on a pile of old shoeboxes.
    â€œDidn’t you hear me calling?” I asked.
    Yes, she nodded.
    â€œWhy have you been hiding there?”
    â€œI heard you say that it was time for me to do my homework.”
    Ah, yes. I should have remembered. Just before her disappearance I had said that Julia must finish her homework before dinner, and rather than taking out pencil and paper, she had crawled into this dark space and closed the door. That, to me, was a sign.
    Every child has a misery quotient, the line at which mere whining turns into real unhappiness. Some children are born miserable, their glass always half empty; some are made miserable by the adult world. And there’s nothing like homework to squash a child’s joy. In Julia’s mind, homework was the shadow haunting every day, the shapeless dread that grew larger with each passing year.
    I don’t recall having so much homework when I was a fourth grader. Today’s public schools seem to have responded to the endless cry for “ achievement !” by adding more worksheets to the homework pile. Math worksheets, grammar worksheets, bland spelling exercises. I wouldn’t mind the work if it seemed more interesting—if Julia were asked to try a fun science experiment, or to walk outside and compose a poem about the sounds in her yard. What rankles is the monotony of colorless paper, the columns of equations and fill-in-the-blank history.
    For Julia, homework had always been a monumental burden. Sometimes I could persuade her to complete the work by reiterating our house rules: she could not have her daily hour of screen time (TV, DVD, or computer) until her homework was finished and she had practiced her violin. But often I had to resort to cajoling and threats, nagging the poor creature all the way to the kitchen table, and hovering for the duration, saying, “That’s good. Keep going.” Without constant prodding Julia’s mind tended to wander out the window, into the meadow, “away down the valley, a hundred miles or more.” A twenty-minute math assignment could take two hours, with Julia staring into the boundless space between each fraction.
    On that April afternoon Julia’s homework was surprisingly minimal. Rather than her usual hour of assignments, which might have dragged on for twice that long, the day’s task barely filled ten minutes. She had spent an hour of hiding to avoid ten minutes of schoolwork, and the thought of that warped equation broke my heart.
    Many parents know the ache of raising a child who doesn’t fit smoothly into a traditional school routine; all children learn in different ways, and for some, the rituals of education are a daily struggle. Although Julia’s younger sisters could navigate social and academic waters with relative ease, for Julia, there were indications even from her toddler years that she would not conform easily to a