My Education, part 2: Homeschooling with My Mother

Luckily for my brother and me we did not begin our education in public school, where we both would have been stuck with labels that could have damaged his sense of self worth and my easily inflated ego irreparably. My mother decided to teach us at home after I had attended I believe a couple of months of first grade. I wasn’t a problem student, and I remember having fun with classmates, but I wasn’t happy there and she wasn’t happy with the methods and especially the priorities that are employed in public schools.

We spent our days learning, and mostly trying not to label it too carefully. I don’t have very clear memories separating years except when we moved between houses when I was seven or eight years old. My mother worked hard to make sure we were learning things in all of the subjects we would have been taught in school, mostly so she could record this and keep us officially official. She was always flexible and happy if we had our own ideas about what or how to study. I remember being delighted to learn one year that  a person could read about a subject and then write down what they had learned and then, if one provided a name or some designation of topic, other people would be happy to read it—I had discovered essays! I proceeded to write I think thirty-two of them that year (as I have said before, I was very fond of numbers and of documenting my accomplishments). Most of these were a short paragraph or two long. One was entitled “Dolls” and I believe was the result of original research. The longest was on King Tutankhamen, for which I drew my own reconstruction of the Nile on our computer.

My mother was also very considerate of our different learning needs, which along with our age difference (which is only a year and a half, but a year and a half can be a big deal in grade school) required a lot of creativity and careful thought. Isaac, as I began to describe in my last post, is I think a kinesthetic, visual, aural learner. He could listen to my mother read to him for very long periods of time as long as he had something to do with his hands, and would remember just about everything he had heard. I loved to be read to as well, but more often needed to stop doing anything else so I could focus on seeing what was being described or just the words themselves in my mind. 

Most of my memories of day to day learning are by myself, with frequent projects with Mom and Isaac. We spent a lot of time in parks talking about biology and ecology. We spent time with craft projects, often in a weeklong craze that petered out rather abruptly. Mom bought a loom and I learned to weave. I journaled and thought about my mind. I read books—sitting in the branches of trees when possible.

Learning this way taught me to respect my mind and to take responsibility for what I was learning. I decided myself how best to test what I was learning (for things like math, anyway, which I felt benefitted from checking to see what I remembered. Many things, like vocabulary and history, can just be re-looked up if you really need to know them and find you have forgotten) I would wait until at least a week had past since I had studied a chapter and then do as many of the questions at the end as I could. If I ended up getting more than fifty percent, I was proud. I knew that I had really internalized this knowledge, and was not just parroting back things I managed to keep in my short-term memory. These skills of knowing my mind, knowing how to learn something and how to check if I had have served me well all my life.