CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: Owning Up to Being a Home Schooling Parent  Thu Jan 23, 2014 2:09 am | |
| Sitting across from the principal, I tried to argue — in a logical, lawyerly way — that my third grader’s standardized test scores were compelling evidence that she needed more than “Clifford, the Big Red Dog.” Although my daughter was bored to distraction by the simple books the teacher assigned, maybe I should have thought twice before requesting special treatment.
The principal, a no-nonsense woman whom I respect, acknowledged my concern but reminded me that a teacher must move the entire class through a fixed lesson plan. “Clifford,” easy read that it was, worked for every child in the classroom in our Washington-area public school. Then she called my bluff (and maybe, just maybe, she enjoyed putting me on the spot). “We can’t customize the curriculum,” she said, smiling, “but have you thought about home schooling? You could do this yourself — some people do.”
My heart sank. Some people — just not people like me. After years working full time, building a legal career, I had children with a man whose job demanded crazy hours. Wanting my children to be raised by a parent, not a nanny, I went in-house, where I had a part-time schedule but the ever-present possibility, familiar to many part-time professionals, of being “mommy-tracked.”
To avoid this fate, I had always struggled to seem continuously available and fully committed. I took calls while changing diapers, answered emails in the carpool line, worried how many family pictures I could display without seeming unduly distracted by my home life.
And “home schooler” had uncomfortable connotations. Home schoolers lived apart by choice, on remote farms, on boats sailing around the world, in separatist religious communities. Even regular people who home-schooled solely for educational reasons — including my sister, a former professor — shared with the “denim jumper” crowd an unswerving, 24/7 devotion to the project. None were trying to squeeze home education around the demands of a job.
But I had a dilemma. We could try the fanciest private school in town, but it doesn’t have an accelerated track either, and the tuition is a year of mortgage payments. To afford it I would need to return to work full time, losing the precious opportunity to really parent, to do more during the week than kiss my sleeping kids after an endless routine of long days and exhausting commutes.
Plus, as a seasoned working mother, my personal philosophy had evolved: I had adopted the view, expressed by Alain de Botton, Swiss philosopher of the everyday life, that we nurture a ridiculous delusion in aspiring to “work-life balance.” We have only one life. All our pursuits are in tension: No one can work and parent simultaneously. In each day, sometimes in each moment, we are choosing one or the other, and our choices have important consequences for the young lives in our care.
So I chose to try to give my daughter what she needed. Her education happens at home, and I think we make it work. Freed from the tyrannical schedule of a school day, we study at odd hours, using the amazing array of available online resources. While I’m in my office, a sitter drives my daughter to violin and French lessons, swim team, the Smithsonian’s home-school science program. Back home, with my help, my daughter’s agile mind can take a deep, scholarly dive into subjects that interest her — her current passion is medieval history — instead of slogging through the mindless pabulum of a social studies textbook.
Yet home schooling isn’t easy. I wouldn’t recommend it for every parent, or every child. Before I began I felt stretched thin by the effort of working a part-time lawyer’s schedule — with commuting, that occupies 30 hours of my week — while caring for a family of five. Adding home school meant goodbye to leisure: I don’t watch television, I don’t shop except for groceries, my morning run happens at 5 a.m. or not at all. I wish my husband could help, but his job — our livelihood — consumes most of his waking hours. Many days, surrounded by piles of laundry, a messy house and the constant ping of new office email on my iPhone, I’m sure I was crazy to take this on.
What bolsters my wavering confidence are my daughter, who begs to continue home schooling, and, surprisingly, how much fun we are having. Our educational collaboration transcends the mother-daughter conflicts of impending adolescence: Together we are co-conspirators in a counterculture adventure, eating our academic dessert first whenever we like.
The biggest challenge I’ve faced is owning this new identity as a home schooler. I told no one at work, preferring to stay completely in the closet about teaching my daughter at home. My corporation values diversity, but somehow being a home-schooling corporate lawyer felt beyond the pale — a topic simply too taboo to discuss. The corporate world reluctantly accepts a skilled professional working part time while raising small children, but home schooling — so retrograde, so unprofessional — is harder to understand. Acknowledging that I have made this choice feels risky, like an open invitation to question my commitment to a legal career.
Even so, I can’t help thinking that there must be others like me: working professionals who, out of necessity, because the economics are so compelling, or simply for the fun of it, are home-schooling their children sotto voce, on the quiet. If we spoke up, maybe we would dispel the skepticism and the stigma. And we might argue we’re in the vanguard of educational progress: According to Wired magazine, researchers find that children make the greatest academic gains when we spend less time lecturing them and more time equipping them to teach themselves. Done right, that’s home schooling at its best.
Jennifer Kulynych, J.D., Ph.D., is a health care lawyer and mother of three in Maryland. She and her sister, Jessica Kulynych, Ph.D., blog about the theory and practice of home education at home,school (alt-school-life.com).
http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/22/owning-up-to-being-a-home-schooling-parent/ |
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