Home Education: Four Good Surprises

Working at my standing desk, I hear voices of my wife and son through the open door. We live in a very compact apartment where privacy is a scarce luxury so I got used to this background noise just like tickling of a clock or humming of a vent. Murmuring goes up and down, colors of voices swing from warm to cold and back to warm, now and then outbreaks of laughter or tears happen at difficult or funny tasks.

This time, though, I notice voices grow louder making me lose concentration, air smells with anger. Both the teacher and pupil are rapidly losing temper and a major storm of quarrel is coming.

My sweet curator

Looks like time for a weatherman to step in. I close the netbook's lid and walk into the “classroom”. Sitting silently on the couch and watching the scene, I choose among several peacemaking plans. Mint tea probably? Yeah, that’ll work. I lit gas under the kettle and, while it’s hissing, sit down on the couch again to observe more. According to an old reliable wisdom, a spectator, even a quiet one, forces opponents to hold together. By the time when three steaming mugs appear and the scent of mint and summer herbs spread about the room, the quarrel is almost ceased.

After a sip, my wife turns to me and asks in frustration: “What’m I doing wrong?” I pause for a while, knowing from experience how important it is to put no blame on anyone. The best way is to ask instead of stating anything. Making up my mind, I ask: “As much as I could hear, you’d changed the lesson’s goal on the go, right?” She uh-huhs and rushes to explain why she did so. I listen patiently, then notice: “He’s still thinking that you’re working on the old goal. He’s thinking you’d lost focus so he’s loosing time and that’s maddening him.” The son confirms I was right. Relief is seen on my sweetheart’s face. That’s it to my part, they’ll handle it from now on.

It is a luxury – to have an affectionate and matured mind on beck and call – unavailable to most school teachers. My wife and I moderate, supervise, advice and support, even massage each other.

We grow faster together thanks to sharing experiences. My wife once had learned an original visual note-taking method. Then she taught the son. One day, I’d taken a glance at her notes and was amazed at how pretty and easy to understand they were so I’d adopted the method too.

Last year, my son had shown some inspiring results in science olympiads. I do not believe in his distinguished intelligence – watching kids, I see that they’re all talents. My conclusion is that the system is what makes the difference. The son’s advantage is deeper collaboration. I hope he’ll remember this lesson better than all the dates in history.

Back to the basics

“When I was helping our son with his algebra exercises last year, I could hardly solve them as if my brain was rusted,” my wife recalls. A person with a University diploma in mathematics and huge self-esteem, she could not tolerate this. “So I’d worked this rust out elbows with the child.”

We used to wrongly assume that the school program contains nothing for us adults. But every human head misses some pieces of ‘the puzzle of life’. I was desperately ploughing ‘serious’ sources looking for answers to questions of mine – how high-protein foods are linked to cancer, how to cut bark on a birch to collect sap, why fresh snow retains until spring only if it falls on the wet ground. Althouth school textbooks never gave straight answers, they supplied some essential fragments of knowledge to come to the right conclusions myself.

Why haven't I grasped that knowledge while studying at school many years ago? I wasn't a bad student. Probably, I had neither questions to seek answers to nor skills to separate seeds of useful knowledge from husk.

Teaching our son, my wife and I enthusiastically plunged into biological, chemical and physical lab assignments, computer programming, and mathematics. I’m pretty sure we two had more fun than the child.

Personally, I’d also refreshed my perception of classical literature and music. I found Pushkin's “The Captain's Daughter” to be groovier than “Harry Potter”. Bach's Prelude in C is now in my playlist.

Nevertheless, if someone asked me “would you recommend every adult to undergo the school program”, I would answer “no”. I had benefited from the school subjects because it had also helped me with my own self-education. Were I not a parent, I’d opt for specialized adult-oriented learning. As to Bach, I do enjoy some of his works… still, I love the Beatles more.

Masks off

It’s for sure, no one of the children I know thinks that school is real funny. Even school staff admits it. Well, the educational system is working hard to give children the environment they need but school remains too boring, too crowded, too much full of sinister expectations. Shall I be bullied today? Will the teacher madden and shout at us? Shall I be assigned to speak before the class? Shall we be given a test today? The environment is better with every year but today, it is better defined as ‘less stressful’ than ‘more attractive’.

Things are a bit different for my son – and surprisingly, for his parents. We regularly attend one of the local schools to have his progress monitored, the school staff also consult us and supply educational resources. Meetings with the teachers typically happen in a circle of three: a teacher, a parent and the student. After an interview, the son is given a written test. Meanwhile, the teacher and I have a small talk. School workers can tell a lot of useful things and want to talk to someone heart-to-heart – complain about annoying bureaucracy, or share excitement about “that new gear we’re having installed now in the classroom” (that’s why we are sitted for the math exam at the school counselor’s office). In return, I tell anecdotes from our homeschooling practice.

It was the time when we just moved to a new town. We were strangers – no friends, no one to talk in person, and the teachers had filled this emptiness to some degree. For the first time in my life, I opened the school door with bright expectations.

This is completely different to belonging to a class. When in a group, each child can get just a one little second of the teacher’s full attention. And what's the kid seeing in that instance? A professional mask of politeness, benevolence, and moderate emotions. The talk is all around the kid’s academic needs. “I don't think we'd be allowed the same friendly chat if we were just parents from the crowd,” my wife said once. I agreed with all my heart.

As to the kid, I hope these meetings will help him to work out how to get along well with the whole range of human characters. Take that lady who seems to be always angry because of her habit to frown and interrupt others with loud and sharp sentences. Anything but right. She's kind-hearted but to notice this, one needs to be able to see farther than the first impression.

The kid learns to adapt. Talk calm and quiet to timid people. Mirror energetic and pushing ones with energy and assertiveness. Adjust to faster or slower speech and get rhythm. Generalize and philosophize or work with sharp facts, whatever the examiner wants.

He will cry at meetings and that's good

“Senior management had to endure his temper tantrums.”

Walter Isaacson, “Steve Jobs”.

I totally understand the Apple managers because my child is a champion of emoting. In his fourteen, he's still a puppy who runs around with abandon when feeling fine, jumps as a deer at sudden sounds, cries over difficult math tasks and seeks consolation in blankets. He's the only person I know who expresses emotions with great ease and, not accidentally, the only homeschooler. With this ability to free from hard feelings, he’s got a good chance to live an easier life than his parents.

For me, it turned out that living under one roof with a natural emotioner was a grand discomfort. I was raised in the society of tabooed strong feelings, where you are expected to show off an "I'm okay" look even if your pet had died an hour earlier. Where boys are taught that “men don't cry” and girls “can stop a galloping horse and enter a burning house”. I was cool at this.

Or, so I thought before discovering a shocking truth: in fact, the brave front was hiding a freight of feelings. Living in the society where everyone holds together, I had gathered no experience of dealing with emotions, mine or others’. And here I was: a mere exclamation of surprise painfully punctured me, I panicked at flashes of joy or surprise or vexation extorted by my son and rushed in to alleviate him as fast as possible. My wife used to repel me with a sharp “get out the room if you can’t let others be themselves”.

But I chalk it to bonuses of home education because finally, all the three of us learned how to manage emotions instead of suppressing them. Even I, the worst performer in the family, had gradually changed to better. Five yeas ago, angry “stop crying” was my amen. These days, I’m much more likely to produce something like “I understand that it hurts. How ‘bout a pause and a tea?” I had even learned to recognize and express my own feelings – not so frantically but in a meek verbal form, a kind of “I'm scared” or “you've hurt me”. Better now.

Your story is about to be different

Each family gets unique homeschooling experience. Just think of the number of things that can influence – local education practices and related laws, religion, parents’ personalities and their relationships with the community, and more, and more.

The story of us is a story of a well-educated couple settled in a Russian province, working from home and actively engaging in tutoring their child. And it’s not over yet. It’ll take the son’s whole life to understand the impact of home education on him.