Since I was three, maybe four, I’ve been reading.
There were the necessary Dick and Janes, quickly followed by the introduction of the horror genre read during the small hours of the morning when my father would leave me alone, thinking I was asleep, to deliver newspapers. Then there was the year or so when I whipped through whatever books we had in the house – not many, and mostly Readers Digest Abridged Volumes, with their gold-edged pages that smelled of my dead grandmother.
After that came the year when I thought that being a bookworm meant working your way through classics, and work my way through them I did. Shakespeare, Brownings, the romantics – I’ve read so many of them and remembered so few, because I wasn’t yet eight and didn’t have the comprehension necessary to break down the words into meaning. I read the words on the page, then the next and so on, until the book was done. Then I picked up another one.
I didn’t really have friends until I entered junior high, when a move to a new school and city precipitated my reinvention as loud-mouthed, air-headed and skater-boy-loving. But I still read – I just didn’t let anyone catch me, often. And definitely not anything assigned, as I’d made it my new goal to never again be the kid left at the front of a class of peers who had only disgust and sneers for me, teaching a math lesson.
I decided, at the ripe age of 12, that the IQ I’d scored on the 2nd grade evaluation, and that the fact I’d taught myself multiplication in first grade, or was helping (the woman who would go on to be) my sister’s mom with her math homework wouldn’t define me. In fact, it would be a secret.
Because I’d never fit in. Because the real manifestation of socialization hit me most where it hurt. My heart.
I learned two things in school, which were really one thing: I wasn’t good enough.
I was too chubby, too shy, too naive, too trusting, too smart and too unaware of how limiting a combination those can be. I also wasn’t normal in the sense that other kids wanted to play in the sunshine and I wanted to sit with a book in a dimly-lit room, where I could be alone – even though I wanted nothing more than for the other kids to want me to play with them in the sunshine.
I was, from as early as can be, predisposed to mood swings. Self-hatred. Guilt and blame. Everything, until very recently, has always been my fault. You can argue this is what just naturally happens when you grow up in a broken, abusive home, but I was always an extremist, from birth, back and forth, angry and sad, hyper and frustrated.
School magnified those things in me. I wanted to learn and know more, but I didn’t want to be anyone’s target. I wanted to do the math, but fuck you if I had to show my work because I did it in my head, dammit, the answer just came.
School taught me to slow down, because faster was wrong, not worthy of good grades or friendship. School taught me that I would always have a glaring label above my head, even when I tried to shrink as far away from eyes as could be. School taught me to take risks, short-cuts, to feel ashamed and unwelcome.
School also taught me that I deserved no autonomy in my own education. The proof is written across my scholastic record.
The gifted program I was removed from in second grade so that the time could be used to see a school counsellor instead – the third visit from child services really tipped my first school off that something might be amiss (too bad their counsellor was ridiculously unqualified).
In fifth grade, my third school within a calender year, they ripped the seventh grade math book out of my hands, and told me that it was time for woodworking and to remain with the rest of the mathematicians.
The career college I specifically signed up for because their motto was work at your own pace (which actually meant work slower than the rest of the class if you’re new to post-secondary school or taking ESL, not work ahead. Because apparently working ahead is unfair to the rest of the program) and subsequently dropped out of after five weeks.
Education’s gotten me nothing but a far larger sense of failure, because I failed, first purposely as a protest of my history and experience and then accidentally. Someone telling me what, when and how to become educated hasn’t improved my life one bit – and I’d even go so far as to mention that the teachers entrusted with my mind and body during the hours of nine to three actually failed me.
What teacher can continue a first-grade class as usual, when a child is openly bullied for her weight and loudly showed only kindness during homework sessions when other students want answers? What instructor has the ability to look at a black eye on the timid, always-quiet child, and not wonder why the student flinches when she raises her voice to class clowns?
But I love to learn. And I’m still a voracious reader.
So I read a lot. And lately, I’ve been reading a lot about education because as I’ve nearly always planned to homeschool Zoë, I want to know what I don’t know. What I can’t appreciate, never having been the person labelled a teacher by the outside.
Don’t misunderstand me, I won’t consider myself her teacher, just like I haven’t with any of the other lessons life’s brought her, I’m merely here to guide. And to learn as well.
And learning, I’ve been doing. I’ve picked up some awesome books, spanning ideologies on home and compulsory education.
One has taught me how to store materials, integrate hands-on learning into nearly any subject, given guidelines for testing and when to assign reports and essays, and I’ve learned to create lesson and unit plans. It’s also taught me some methods for moving Zoë from me creating her lessons and units, to completely independent learning, such as if I didn’t want to teach calculus. (To that I say, “Who doesn’t want to learn calculus?!“)
Another includes essays on various learning, school and education topics, including Tolstoy, and the following (excerpt), by Grace Llewellyn:
Regardless of what the law or your teacher have to say about this, you are as human as anyone over the age of eighteen or twenty-one. Yet “minors” are one of the most oppressed groups of people in the United States, and certainly the most discriminated against legally.
It starts at home. Essentially, your parent can require you to do almost anything and forbid you to do almost anything. Fortunately, most parents try hard not to abuse this power. Yet, from a legal standpoint, the reason schools have so much tyrannical power over you is that they act in loco parentis – in place of the parent. As legal parental substitutes, they can search your locker or purse, tell you to be quiet, read your mail (notes), sometimes hit or ’spank’ you, speak rudely to you, and commit other atrocities- things I hope your parent(s) would not do with a clean conscience, and things no sensible adult would do to another adult, for fear of losing a job or ending a friendship.
Those, to me, are powerful words. That sums up the shift that took place in my own household between Zoë turning one and the past half-month.
I used to consider her a person, when I was all fresh and pregnant and going to be somebody’s mommy. For her first year of everything new, when she was too young to apply attitude (or at least be blamed, by most people’s accounts), I respected her as a person. I asked her permission for things – little things, like if she wanted my help to do something. Then she shifted and I did and I guess the resentment of permanent motherhood, coupled with lack-of-full-time fatherhood set in, and I found myself grabbing things, to do them for her, “just let me”ing.
Two weeks ago, when I first spent eight hours straight spreading my saggy ass further toward the eastern and western hemispheres in the most uncomfortable chair ever, reading about unschooling and radical unschooling, and deschooling, and homeschooling and eclectic learning, the switch flipped back on.
I started respecting my daughter as the human being she is, again, not merely considering her the pint-sized warrior I often must defeat.
Nearly two weeks ago, we began an experiment. I’ll tell you tomorrow what it was.
