The Gamble That is Homeschooling...and a Narrative Piece by Matthew

Homeschooling has, at times, felt like a bit of a gamble. I suppose that any of the education that we choose for our children carries inherent risk with it...but maybe homeschooling is a little scarier than mainstream, just because it is a little less common??

I'm not sure.

But at any rate, because I was educated in the public and private school systems, following curriculum is what I have always been most comfortable with. So homeschooling seemed like a pretty 'out there' kind of decision years ago when we first made that call.

I have a 14 year old boy who has been homeschooled from the start...he and I are in our 10th year of homeschooling together.  For most of those years, I have lived on a spectrum of discomfort, ranging from mildly uncomfortable to extremely uncomfortable, depending on the year.  When Matthew, at ages four, five, and six, showed an extreme aversion to anything having to do with reading (and most academics, for that matter), I had to move well beyond my comfort zone towards using no curriculum, because what I wanted mostly was for him to not hate learning and to not hate reading.  We did life learning, unschooling...all sorts of things to get around using curriculum.  For years.  I asked the advice of many homeschoolers whom I respected and they all said the same thing: stop being so focused on schooling, and just play with your child and read to him...he'll read when he's ready to read.  So that's most of what Matthew and I did together when he was young.  He was an only child for much of that time, and so we just hung out together...we played, I read books, we did chores and errands together...basically lived life together.

His (and my) world was shaken shortly after he turned seven, when we brought new siblings into his life via adoption. He went from being an only child for 7.25 years to having two siblings who were turning six and four, and whose personalities and tendencies were already fully established.  It was an immense change and so our move into unschooling (where we used no curriculum whatsoever, and simply tried to live life and cultivate interests as much as possible) was both convenient and necessary.

We unschooled for three-and-a-half years...likely closer to four years.  During that time, we adjusted to living life as a new family of five; we read books, learned to play together, and did other sorts of casual learning.  Although Matthew's adjustment to have siblings was very difficult, the transition to unschooling was an easy one. It just made sense for him that he shouldn't be bound by work books and by a way of learning things that was a cookie-cutter approach for all kids rather than for this specific one.  At some point in those years, we found a lovely woman who ended up tutoring Matthew in math-related subjects, but even this closely resembled our unschooling methods, because she used games and play to follow his interests in math subjects; he seemed to learn math at a fairly deep level, although it was unconventional and certainly did not follow curriculum.

During those years, I would pull out a how-to-read curriculum every few months, wondering if the time had come when he was ready to learn how to read. "NO!" he would scream at times. Or he would take one look at the book and shake his head and simply refuse to sit down at the table.  I was so determined that he not hate reading that I never forced the issue. On the inside, however, I was a wreck of anxiety, wondering if my child would ever learn to read, and wondering what his future would look like in a non-reading world.  Would he ever get a job?  Would he be able to go to university if that's what he chose to do?  Had I failed him as a parent?  Had we made the wrong choice by homeschooling?

Finally, just as Matt was soon to turn ten years old, he began to read. In fact, it felt like something of a miracle when he went from non-reading status to grade five-ish reading level in four days.  He was simply ready to learn at that moment, and so it took almost no time whatsoever.  Whew...the sense of relief was profound.

In the four years since, Matthew's reading skills have gradually improved.  He next began to pick up writing skills when he was thirteen years old...arguably late in the game when compared to kids who are publicly schooled, but consistent with his learn-when-he's-ready-to-learn approach to life. Just in the past year, he's learned to brainstorm and write paragraphs, and has learned a lot of grammar and spelling.

After such a lengthy process of learning how to read and write, over the course of years, it has taken me by complete surprise that this is the year that my oldest became both an avid reader and a pretty darn good writer.  For example, just since summer, he has read many novels for pure pleasure. A few that come to mind are: The Book Thief; six of the Artemis Fowl series; Ender's Game; all three in the Hunger Games series; The Shining; the Gunslinger series; and so on.

In addition, he is taking a high school Literature course this year with a group of five other homeschooled kids, and has worked through several assigned books this fall, including Frankenstein, A Jury of Her Peers, Silas Marner, and Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing.  All together, this is a pretty impressive listing of significantly-sized and sometimes-weighty books for a boy who, until this year, would not have been considered a reader by anyone's definition!

In addition, through the Literature course, he prepared several written assignments this fall. I helped in minor ways with all of his writing assignments - but my contributions were 15% at most of the entire effort required and were limited to keyboarding the assignments into the computer and helping with punctuation and spelling and the like. The ideas and the creativity and the words were all Matthew's.

I can hardly believe that my boy, who could not read until four years ago, and who has learned to write in the past year, is now fully capable of taking (and succeeding at!) a high school English Lit class with kids who are mostly older than him, and that he is a fully capable reader!  It actually kinda blows my mind!

Clearly I am proud of the work he has been doing; but truthfully, I feel relief more than any other feeling!  Such relief.  One never really knows, when doing things so differently than the mainstream, how these things will turn out.  Homeschooling is a gamble...it still is.  But sometimes, just sometimes, the risks we take pay off in big ways, and when they do, it is so amazing to see the payoffs manifest in our children.  My 14-year-old is doing stuff...growing, developing, emerging into his own unique and talented (and sometimes difficult) self, and I couldn't be prouder and more relieved than I am to see him begin to take flight.

I leave you with a story Matthew wrote for his Lit class last month.  He was to write a narrative essay of no more than two pages, and the subject was about WWII and the importance of friendship. He was to employ the use of similes, metaphors and personification, and to engage his senses as he wrote scenes. This was also a great opportunity for Matthew to do some research about WWII: he researched concentration camps and the cities nearby; what bombs sounded like when they fell; about the people who hid Jewish families at great risk to themselves; the role of the SS; how some Jewish people were able to be out and about and others not; the methodical processes undertaken by the Nazis as they burned books and closed down Jewish businesses; when the concentration camps were liberated; how people were rescued from the concentration camps and found their way home; and so on.  It was a great learning experience.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this little piece by Matthew!

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Every day was the same. The same dusty little shop. The same worn out faces. The same terror that I might never see my father again or that I'd lose my mother, too. The war was in full swing, with bombs dropping like flies on the city of Munich, where we lived. My family lived in fear of the Nazis; they were burning the books and possessions of Jewish people, and hunting them down to kill them or take them into concentration camps. My mother and I looked a little more German than Jewish, with our dirty blond hair and pale blue eyes, so we still enjoyed some freedom to be outside, but I'd seen my father ripped away from our family a few months ago, presumably dragged off to Dachau. I had taken his place as the head of the family, tending to the shop by myself because my mother, Berta, was growing older and weaker every day from the struggle for existence. There was almost no work to be done anymore, though; Jewish businesses were being boycotted and many of them had been barricaded and shut down. Any business we still did get was from my neighbour Hans; he and his parents brought me their work to do, and gave us most of the food we ate.

Hans and I were both fifteen. We'd known each other since we were toddlers running around on the street we shared, and we'd gone to school together until all of the craziness started a couple of years ago. We were best friends, and somehow more than that in the past couple of years when his family had done so much to keep mine safe. We knew each other's houses and parents almost as well as we knew our own, and it had never mattered to either of our families that they were German and we were Jewish. In this crazy world where friends and neighbours had been ripped apart all too often, they had a depth of goodness in their hearts that I could barely comprehend. The Kramers had stuck with us, providing not just food but also shelter when the bombs dropped or when we heard rumours of an SS raid coming to our street. Even thought they risked their lives for us with every act of kindness, they did so simply and quietly and without question.

Standing there in the shop, I was pulled deep into an undertow of overwhelming thoughts. Was my father ok? Was he dead or alive? Would I make it through today? What if we were caught, or the Kramers were discovered to be protecting us?

Somewhere in the distance, I heard a familiar, high pitched whistling sound just as Hans burst through the shop door and snapped me out of my daze. "A bomb," he shouted. "Lots of them. Sol, quick. Bring your sister into our basement. Your mother is there already." Hans gave orders like a commander giving orders to soldiers. I sprinted to the back of the shop where our home was, and grabbed my little sister, Miriam, who was sleeping in a bundle of old blankets. I'd been looking after her that afternoon while my mother did some cleaning for Hans' mother. I ran through the back door of the shop, and bolted down the lane for Hans' house a few doors down. Terrified, I could feel my heart pounding, a drum in my chest. Bombs screamed all around me, and the all-too-familiar smell of sulphur singed the inside of my nose. I could feel every point of gravel digging into the soles of my bare feet, and my body tensed in anticipation of the next shock wave to hit the ground.

I shoved the Kramers' back door open and raced down the stairs to the basement, holding a crying Miriam in trembling arms. I glanced around quickly at our home away from home. The corner below the stairs held blankets and the various meagre possessions that we'd accumulated over time since we'd been invited to use the Kramers' basement for protection. Hans was already there, with his parents and my mother. Mrs. Kramer breathed a sigh of relief and smiled shakily at me while my mother ran to us, taking Miriam and thanking God that we were safe and together. Outside the whistling sound of bombs dropped lower in pitch as the weapons fell low and struck somewhere nearby. Their lust for destruction was endless. Tremors like from the aftershock of an earthquake rippled through me from the floor, knocking me to the cold cement. It was Mr. Kramer who picked me up and smiled at me, comforting me. We all sat down against a wall and held hands, praying, waiting it out.

And then it was over. Silent. The whistling was no more and we five still sat together, unwilling to give up the comfort of each other's presence. Miriam slept. Dust from the ceiling still drifted down, and a few pieces of plaster fell like chunks of salt; the air, our skin, everything was grimy. Finally, Mrs. Kramer stood up and said that we should wait, that we would have some food before we went out to see the destruction. Kind, even hospitable, to the last.

+++

Soon after that last time in the Kramers' basement we heard that the war was ending. The bombings stopped and we heard rumours that the Allies had freed Dachau. We waited forever to hear news of my father. Minutes felt like hours; hours felt like days; days felt like weeks.

In early May, 1945, while I was tending to the shop, I heard a truck outside. I went to the window and looked out the door. There was a white truck with a red cross on it, and a man who appeared to be in his forties got out of the passenger seat. When he looked up, I saw the man I had been wondering about and waiting for for so long. It was my father. As I ran towards him, I knew in that moment that those terrible and endless days of war were over. In the coming months and years, as we gradually rebuilt our lives, we kept our close connection with the friends who had become family. In honour of the Kramers' unforgettable kindness to us, I would spend those years finding ways to help build community and structure in our broken world.