SO YOU WANT TO HOME-SCHOOL

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This is not to say that we were always quite so orderly. Often we took the day off to visit friends, to go shopping, to take a walk, or just to have a break. We weren't always as productive as I would have liked, and sometimes we went through some really miserable times together. I remember one particularly bad morning when, even before I'd washed the dishes, I began yelling at Ishmael because he couldn't figure out how many twos there were in nine. I managed to set his tears flowing-and mine too, when I sat down to comfort him. About half an hour later, Vita sat down to play the piano, and she just couldn't seem to play anything right. After my experience with Ishmael, I was prepared to be as patient as I had to be, but she wasn't, and she burst into tears . . . . I couldn't help wondering what I was doing with my life. How simple it would be, I thought fleetingly, to send Vita and Ishmael back to school.

Then too, despite the fact that Ishmael did better than ever on his standardized test that spring, I often worried that I wasn't teaching him enough. After all, the rest of the neighborhood kids spent the whole day in school, whereas 1 only taught Ishmael for an hour or two a day. Actually, the longer he was out of school, the more I began to notice that-regardless of how much time I actually spent teaching him-the pattern of his learning was uneven. It took the form of cycles of intense activity followed by rest .... he tended to focus on only one or two primary interests at a time, like playing the piano and reading biographies or putting on plays and writing poetry. And, as though to recuperate from his creative outbursts, he would then spend weeks doing what I considered to be nothing-riding his bike up and down the same stretch of road, making title pages for books which he never wrote, and reading the same books over and over again. It always took an act of faith on my part to believe that he'd snap out of his doldrums. I used to wonder if I really shouldn't make him buckle down and work harder. Once, for example, I was so worried about Ishmael that I went back to his old school and spent the day as an observer in the fourth/fifth-grade classroom, just to get a sense of how much the other kids really learned each day. It was reassuring to be reminded that between roll call, snack time, lunch time, recess, and the natural confusion that takes place when you squash thirty-two kids into a classroom built for twenty-five, not a lot of formal learning takes place. The most striking thing to me, though, was the fact that even though many of the kids read quite well, they still had to read vocabulary-controlled readers and study phonics in class. Certainly it was better for Ishmael to read Ernest Thompson Seton's Two Little Savages . . . than for him to spend year after year reading colorless textbooks. And I far preferred to see him riding his bike up and down in the sun than sitting in a cramped classroom all day.

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