Ten years ago this summer our son Jesse was born, and that's also when I officially dropped out of school teaching. I was always something of a misfit as a teacher in schools, but I didn't quite know then that I'd find my niche as a parent, teaching and learning with my own kids at home. By the time he was 2 1/2, Jesse was firmly announcing that he'd never go to school -- no nursery school, no preschool, not the school where his father taught. No school. About that time I was visiting my mother in Georgia and happened to catch John Holt on The Donahue Show. I remember my sister and mother saying with disgust, "Oh no! Just see what that crazy John Holt is up to now! Have you ever heard of anything so ridiculous?" I admit the idea did sound somewhat ridiculous to me then, but I couldn't get the thought out of my head. Homeschooling -- no school. At all. Ever. Continuing to learn with my kids. No rigmarole of trying to set up our own alternative school, with worries about money and staffing.
Soon afterward I found Growing Without Schooling, the journal founded by the late John Holt, found one friend who was seriously contemplating the whole idea, and after a while I convinced Howard that we should do it. He finally realized how much it meant to me, and that it wasn't one of those decisions that you could come back to in eighteen years. Jesse of course needed no convincing at all -- he'd held firm to his earlier feelings about schooling.
It's funny to think of how we fell into doing a state homeschooling newsletter. In March of 1982 I was riding with a friend down to see John Holt at a Pittsburgh television studio. She began saying how nice it would be if someone would gather the names and addresses of everyone in the audience that day. I agreed wholeheartedly. Then she said someone could even send out copies of that list, so we could all stay in touch. Again I said, "Great idea." She continued, saying it might also be nice if someone could have a file of sample curriculums and letters people had written to their school districts. I agreed again, thinking of course that she was thinking of doing all this herself. I was trying to encourage her in it. Then she added that maybe someone could periodically write up something about what was available in the file and send it out -- like, perhaps, a sort of newsletter. Again I told her that was a great idea. Then she looked me square in the eye and said, "And we all think YOU should be the one to do it!" What could I say but, "Great idea!" And so it began -- a little two-page notice at first, then five pages, then we began getting more responses from readers and more contacts from new folks, and things just grew and grew. As a friend told me, I've really found my niche now.
I sometimes look back at myself as a paid teacher in schools and shudder. I was so green, so unaware, so young. I fancied myself as someone who liked to read aloud to groups of kids, for example, and felt I did it pretty well. But though I tried to stock my classroom with good books, the truth is that I had never read most of them. Or at least hadn't read them like a parent reads children's books, over and over again until you know every nuance of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel or Frog and Toad are Friends. Not like a parent who can leisurely discuss the latest read-aloud over breakfast or toothbrushing, or who can tie it in neatly to an outing (we've seen any number of "prototypes" of Mike Mulligan's Maryanne out rusting away). And I think what a joke it was to imagine that I, as a teacher, actually knew any of the children I taught. Compared to what I know about my own children, I knew nothing about the kids who came to my classroom. Their backgrounds and home lives were blanks to me. I didn't know where they'd been, what they'd read, what they wondered about. How different to know a child intimately, my own child.
Publishing Pennsylvania Homeschoolers has broadened our family so much. We've certainly gained every bit as much as we've given out, and more. When I think of the pallid, complaining conversations of the smoky teacher's lounge at school, and compare them to the friendly, open, in-depth conversations and letters with homeschooling parents we've become close friends with, there is just no comparison. And our kids have friends through this wonderful homeschooling network that's formed in the past ten years. We've been with families that open up whole new worlds to us -- the ballet, owner built homes, piano, science projects we'd never thought of, sculpting with old apple logs, growing orchards of dwarf trees.
So I look about me and think of ten years of changes and how good it's been. I've seen Jesse grow from a toddler pointing chubby fingers at pictures of cows to a competent reader who finishes a book in two days because he just can't put it down. Jacob is almost 7 and always experimenting, concocting new "mixtures" and inventions and discussing air pressure and vacuums and trying to read all the signs he sees around him (this, a child who I know the schools would have quickly labeled LD). And Molly, now four, is writing stories daily, absolutely fearless about putting thoughts into print, and drawing astonishing pictures all the time. And now baby Hannah is here too, and we are all watching her with delight as she invents Bronx cheers and chortles away to us in baby jabber (the "whole conversation" approach to talking, I call it!). I remember once writing in a journal, when Jesse was about 18 months old, about how exciting it was to show him the birds that came to our feeder. I wondered what good things we'd be learning when he was 4. It's gone on long beyond that now, and it's still very exciting.
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