I thought I had posted this already, but it looks like I haven't.
So, If it's a rerun, I'm sorry:
Homeschool story
It was a typical day at work, trying to get things done. A salesman was on the phone, and he wanted me to think we were best friends.
"Hello, this is Murphy."
"Hi, how's everything going? I just wanted to call and check in."
Times were tight, and the sales folks were getting desperate for some business. Fine, I guess if he wants to chat me up for a little bit, I can spare some small talk.
"Did you have a nice New Years?" he asked.
Oh yes. New Years is always special for me, because it is my birthday.
"Oh really? Oh man! My birthday is in January too. You must have been just like me, behind everyone else in your class in high school. Last to get your driver's license and everything."
Umm...Not really.
"No? I was always the last one. You weren't? How can that be?"
Why does this happen to me? I should lie. I should just lie and say, "Oh yeah, always behinds the thousands of other kids who were a normal age in my big fat normal high school."
I do not lie well. Note to self: practice lying so I have an out in these situations.
Too late now. That will be another day. I was homeschooled. No other kids in my high school class but me.
"Oh wow. That is so amazing." And out it came. Mr. Salesguy was homeschooling his little precious daughter. He had to tell me all about it. Suddenly, I was dishing out advice on proper education and socialization strategies for this earnest and unsure young parent.
Home schooling means you are in constant need of assurance and support. I thought I was done with that. Lord knows I do not wish to support homeschooling.
You see, the summer I was 13, my parents told me that I was going to have the unique and special blessing of being educated at home.
I wish I had heard of a hunger strike, I would have started one right then if I'd known. But there were no appeals.
My parents had always been interested in alternative education. Their 60s anti-establishment credo meant they were into all kinds of alternative things. I am the last child of four; by the time I remember anything, they had settled into the alternative lifestyle of working in a born-again church in Alaska.
They started church schools—more than one. But apparently, that was not cutting edge anymore. Homeschool was the hot education trend, and my parents wanted a piece of it.
They told me it would be hypocritical for them to lead a homeschool group and not homeschool their school age children. And as the youngest, I had four or five good years left to be an example.
I didn't see it that way at all. But my pubescent persuasive powers were not up to the debate, even though I used them at every opportunity to get out of this solitary confinement. Actuallly, it was worse than solitary confinement. I would be stuck with my dorky older brother.
But the homeschooling parents in the church and the outside community flocked to my parents. They were like pigeons coming the sweet old lady on the park bench. Mom and Dad were swarmed with people who wanted a real teacher—and my parents had been teachers all their lives—to tell them they were doing okay.
There were a lot of people in Alaska choosing to keep their kids at home. The majority had young children, kids just learning to read, first- or maybe second-graders. Mostly there were a few kids in each family, so the mom had to teach several grades at once. And it was always the mom who taught.
But dads were not unaffected by this lifestyle choice. While dad is away at work, the kids and the mom work each other into a frenzy of exasperation fueled by a combination of boredom and the Chinese water torture of unrelenting family togetherness.
No family member went unpunished.
But a collective was being formed! A resource for homeschool families, in the form of support meetings, standardized testing and monthly outings for the kids. Mom and Dad were the fount of wisdom, the experienced ones who could answer questions and generously dole out reassurances and affirmations.
Parents who choose to homeschool quickly realize that teaching your kid one-on-one at home takes a lot less time than the 6- or 7-hour day of the traditional classroom. This gives many of them yet another reason to be scornful of schools. “Why should my child waste 3 or four hours a day just because the other kids in the class aren’t as smart? They don’t need to deal with that!â€
What do the schools do with that extra time? Three hours more a day than is really required for the individual children to grasp the necessary subjects.
I will tell you what they teach: how to deal with other people. That’s fifteen hours a week that mainstream kids are spending learning to interact with other kids and the teachers. And fifteen hours a week that homeschooled children are not learning to interact.
It’s no shock to figure out, Homeschool kids are odd. If you’ve ever been around one, you know what I mean. I speak from the inside, as one of the weird ones. It took me a long time to figure stuff out that other kids just seemed to know.
My parents had begun their collective, and the first support group meeting was set. We’d been pressed into service to clean the house. Little snacks and drinks were put out, and we made room for the snacks that others would bring. I couldn’t imagine a more boring evening than sitting around with a bunch of adults talking about educational strategies. I figured I would hide out in my room with a book until it as time for the snacks.
DINGDONG. The Smiths had arrived. Oh, and they brought their two precious daughters. Welcome, come it!
DINGDONG. Oh, it’s the Franklins! And little Franklin jr., come in!
DINGDONG. Oh it’s the Jordans and their children.
DINGDONG. The Mergendorfs and their brood.
DINGDONG. DINGDONG. DINGDONG.
A growing assembly of little kids was pooling.
The adults were greeting one another graciously and congratulated one another on this first support group meeting.
“Oh, I’m so glad we are doing this! We’ve really needed it!†Their children, the darlings of their hearts and focus of their lives, were deposited at the door and forgotten.
They immediately began to swarm to me, an incredibly unwilling Pied Piper. I was the Big Kid, standing out like a pillar in a sea of weird little kids.
“Let’s play! Where are your toys?“
I knew these kids, and I wouldn’t trust any of them near my toys. Besides, I was 13 and I didn’t play with toys anymore.
I needed out of there. “Mom!â€
I jolted her out of her deep discussion with the other homeschool ladies. “What? Oh, honey, go watch the kids for a while. The adults really need to talk with one another.â€
There was no escape. Without parental backup, I would not be able to fend off these kids. The book that beckoned from my room was far out of reach. No way was I taking even one of these kids into my room, let alone a horde of them.
I led them down to the den. They were easy enough to lead. If the parents were starved for conversation, the kids were even more so. They didn’t get to see one another very often; they began chattering the moment they saw each other. I just grabbed one and led him down the stairs. The rest followed like a dish of paperclips strung together.
My brother was there already. There wasn’t much down there. A table made of railroad ties that we used for school, the bottom half of a bunk bed, and two freezers that held all the salmon and moose meat we could get.
There was a lot of room to roam free. The door was heavy, and once you closed it, you couldn’t really hear what was going on from the outside. The parents asked us to close it right away.
Sealed in a room with more children than I could count. All of the kids, used to the undivided attention of their mom, clamored for the undivided attention of every other person in the room. The pent-up conversation spilled out in a cacophony of sound. And every kid began to exert him or herself to impress everyone else.
Social status was at stake. They only had this one chance. Who knew how long it would be before they saw their friends again/ They had to leave them wanting more.
I found the box of old toys my mom kept around for these occasions. The little monsters dove in. Immediately, matchbox cars were running races on the floor. Architectural structures were raised and exploded. The girls gave stuffed animals names and acted out their fantastic lives, dressing them accordingly.
The kids were on the table, under the table, on the bed and looking in the freezer. “Hey what do you have in your freezer†Anything good?“
“Stay out of there!â€
“I’m just looking!â€
Some of the kids were more creative than others. The outgoing ones instructed the rest on how the project would be done. How the road would be built, the tower raised, which story to play.
But other outgoing kids had to get the attention back on them. An older kid, 10 years old, decided the hollow steel tube of the bottom bunk bed post was a pedestal.
"Look at me!" he said. He balanced one foot on the bedpost doing an unintentional imitation of the Greek god Mercury, his arms windmilling.
"Otis! Get off of there!" I yelled.
"Why?" he said.
Homeschool kids always ask why. The classroom doesn’t stifle their natural curiosity and it's need for restrictive rules of order.
Otis was especially unstifled. He was one of those that didn't fit in with regular schools. Translation: he couldn't read. He needed extra one-on-one attention.
His mother was always perfectly dressed. I knew very few women like her; her blond hair was always styled and she was accessorized.
Otis wasn't dumb by any stretch; I suspect that he didn't bother learning to read because he was more interested in everything else that was going on. They lived near the woods, like all of us did. He really liked the outdoors.
The first time I realized that Otis was different was when I heard that he ran a trapline. He had worked out a deal with his mom: she bought him the steel jaw animal traps, and he would try to catch enough mink to make a fur coat. He was about a third of the way there when I met him.
My brother Chris got to be friends with Otis. Chris was 15 and Otis was 10, but social beggars can't be choosers. It's a picked-over selection when you are in home school. I was 16 when our home school program put on a Christmas play. I easily got the coveted role of Mary, with all the great singing parts. Of course, I had to pay the price and be escorted in my great-with-child costume by a 5 year-old Joseph. He wore glasses.
But Otis and Chris had some similar interests. Among other things, they liked killing wild animals. Chris had wanted a gun for a long time, but our family wasn’t hunters. Many other families made a big deal about giving a son his first gun. It didn't occur to our parents to do such a thing. Chris had to save his own money and buy a BB gun.
I remember he proudly showed this gun to Otis. Otis was happy to show off his gun collection too. He had a whole array of shotguns and rifles. In fact, he was so nice, he gave my brother a present: A beautiful maple-stock shotgun with the barrel sawed off.
Chris took it home and showed it to me. He was thrilled! It was a beautiful weapon. We looked at it in detail, playing with all the moving parts. All he needed now was ammunition.
He checked out the prices on the shells he needed, but quickly realized that he couldn't afford the quantity he wanted. But he’d heard of a way around the expense: a friend of ours knew how to make his own shells. This man would take shot and gunpowder and other ingredients and presto-chango; there was a shotgun shell ready to shoot!
Chris asked mom if she could ask Paul to teach him this valuable skill. Mom thought this was a great idea, because she also thought Paul might Chris how to use a gun properly. She certainly had no idea how to go about it. Paul was happy to help out.
Chris came back from his ammunition-building lesson a changed man. He had tasted the knowledge of good and evil. In full pride and innocence, he brought his beautiful shotgun to show to Paul.
"That weapon is incredibly, incredibly illegal," Paul told him. "Take it and throw it in the bottom of the lake. Today."
It was a hard truth. "Why is it illegal?" I asked Chris. "Can't you go explain the situation to the police and get some kind of permission?"
Paul must not have mentioned the situation to Mom, because Chris held on to the gun for a few days. Call it a mourning period. I thought he might just keep it anyway, it seemed like he could get away with it. But in the end he did toss the pretty gun in the lake.
Paul was a kind-hearted man, and he gave Chris one of his own legal shotguns after the other one was disposed of. Chris was happy to have it, because he needed it to kill rabbits.
Rabbits.
One of his home school hobbies was breeding, raising, and eating rabbits. I'd started the whole thing, when my friend gave me one of her pet bunny's offspring. My brother got all fascinated, and had to get his own rabbit.
He didn't want a mutt rabbit though. He researched it well and settled on a pedigreed meat-production rabbit breed called the California rabbit. It was a cute breed, all white but with black feet, ears, and spots of black on the nose and eyes.
He began to really be a farmer about it. He had to look at the rabbits and figure out how to breed them to get the qualities he wanted. Rabbits are notoriously cooperative about breeding. He soon had quite a few bunnies.
At this level, the pennies were very important. With so many mouths to feed and all.
So he turned his scientific mind towards feeding the rabbits in the cheapest way possible. He found out the nutritional values of different feeds and got it down to a few cents a pound for feed.
But the rabbit hobby gave Chris yet another opportunity to tan a hide. This time he did not use Sourdough starter, He got some directions, I think from the library, on how to tan rabbit hides.
Apparently, the process involved battery acid. This was delightful! Aside from the wonderfulness of getting to play with battery acid, Chris realized that we had a ready supply of the stuff in our front drive yard!
My father’s habit of never spending more than a thousand dollars for a family car had left our driveway with a few automobile corpses. Battery acid comes from car batteries, so Chris told Mom that he wanted to take one of the batteries out of the old cars and use that for his tanning process.
Mom was quite unreasonable about the whole thing. She absolutely forbid it.
So Chris had to buy new battery acid. He kept it by the side door, the one the family always used. He showed it to me, and warned me. “Be careful,†he said. “This can burn the skin right off you.â€
“Really?“ I was impressed. “What do you need it for, then?“
“You have to have it to tan hides.â€
I could see the sourdough tanning method had been abandoned. I never thought it would work anyway, so I didn’t bring it up.
He did manage to tan one hide, and brought it in to the fur trader in Anchorage.
“If you don’t know furs, know your furrier. David Green’s—you’ve got a friend in the fur business.†We grew up with these commercials, and Chris went in to sell his fur to David Green’s. He was disappointed to learn that he would only get a dollar for the rabbit hide, tanned or not.
Tanning took a lot of work! And it was fur! Wasn’t it worth more than a dollar? But our friend in the fur business said no—one rabbit hide, one dollar.
So, the battery acid was abandoned in its ominous container by the door. Chris got the same price for dried hides. No more tanning.
But drying the hide was not effortless. A new process had to be created.
Our big house had been made with four split-level floors. The top floor was meant to be the master bedroom, with it’s own bathroom and in-room Jacuzzi tub.
Before we moved in, Mom was so excited about the Jacuzzi. But the third time she used it and discovered that the water jets leaked. Visions of dry rot and decay floated through my parent’s minds, and the Jacuzzi was decommissioned.
Around about the same time, my folks discovered that the master bedroom had no sound inhibiting barrier between it and the floor directly below. That floor had the living room, kitchen and dining room. Given that they enjoyed their marital privacy, they moved to a smaller but more private bedroom. The top floor became our classroom.
A classroom with a big white Jacuzzi tub against the wall. What can you do with a Jacuzzi that no longer jacuzzes? My brother knew. Drying the rabbit hides required soaking in a saline process for a few days.
Fill the Jacuzzi with salt water and soak rabbit hides. A formerly useless item revitalized! Wouldn’t Martha Stewart be proud?
As he discovered, a dollar made a good dent in the feeding costs of his rabbit horde. He diligently processed and sold his hides.
It occurred to him that other rabbit by-products could be profit centers as well. As a matter of fact, underneath the cages he was accumulating a large pile of rabbit by-product.
“This is valuable fertilizer!†he would tell us.
No one disputed that, but no one wanted to pay for it. But Chris was carried away in his own sales pitch. He was convinced that rabbit droppings were a marvelous fertilizer, and set out to prove it by growing things.
He converted a patch of our untamed backyard into tilled land. We had a mightily productive garden, full of the kind of winter crops that grow in Alaskaâ€s summer. Carrots, potatoes, and brussel sprouts so exuberant they were inedible, occupied a decent-sized patch of the otherwise feral vegetation.
But our front yard was untouched. That is, until the government put in the gas line. They had the easement of our front yard, and chopped down a swath of the graceful slow-growing birch trees that had been there for years. My father walked the ground sadly observing the hewn trunks.
My brother saw opportunity.
Remember that one Star Trek Episode with the Fuzzy Tribbles? The little puffballs that eat everything and reproduce like mad? A true Trekkie might also remember that the grain shipment these Tribbles were feeding on was called Quadro Triticale. Quadro Triticale is a fictional kind of grain.
But my dorky Trekkie brother discovered that Triticale was indeed a real kind of grain, and he thought it would grow very well in the newly cleared patch of land in front of our house.
He worked hard; I’ll give him that. He finished clearing the dirt, and tilled it up with a hoe. He found some Triticale seed, and planted it up there. He really hoped it would work, and the rest of us were curious to see what it would look like.
Picture this: a big cedar front home, set back from the road by about 40 feet of virgin birch forest. At the edge of this forest, a little two-foot deep border of goldening grain gently waved in the breeze.
This is the sight the greeted my oldest brother’s girlfriend as he drove her down from the big city Anchorage to meet his folks. Remember? There were four kids in this family, and two of them escaped the homeschool blessing. I think Chris was about to graduate. Bryan, the oldest was in his mid-twenties by then, and terribly pleased with Karen.
As they drove into our driveway, Karen leaned over and asked Bryan, “Is that wheat growing around the front yard?“
He escorted her up to front door. Chris answered the doorbell brandishing a bloody butcher knife. He had on a rubber apron with blood all over it too; he’d been butchering his rabbits.
Mom rushed up the stairs, “Oh Karen, it’s so nice to meet you. Chris,†she said offhandedly, “Go put those rabbits away and get cleaned up.â€
Karen barely had much of a chance to say pleased to meet you before the rest of the clan gathered to say hello and give her the tour of the house.
“Well, let’s start at the top,†Mom said, and we trooped up the stairs. “This used to be the master bedroom, but we converted it to a classroom.â€
“Oh, Look!†Karen said, “A Jacuz…“ She stopped short as she leaned over and saw the hairy and slightly bloody hides floating inside. “Um…What are those?“
“Oh,†mom laughed her hostess laugh. “Those are just Chris’s rabbit hides. Let go downstairs now.â€
You know, which came first? The weird homeschooled kids, or the weird parents who would choose to homeschool kids? I will say this; none of us had any idea of the strange impression we made on outsiders.
Karen did end up becoming my sister-in-law, and she told me her version of this first meeting later. It was very different than how I remembered it.
It’s a long climb from the woods to the desk job. But Mr. Salesguy and his little precious daughter shot me right back to the woods. All I can say is, think very seriously about it sir. You may not like the system that is already in place, but you don’t know the consequences of the system you’re about to try.