Home Schooling

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Our new neighbors, it may be said, were less than enthusiastic about this "smart city professor" who had the nerve to teach his kids at home. Some, we later heard, went as far as writing letters of complaint to the authorities about those kids who "weren't in school." Others, in typical rural fashion, merely shrugged their shoulders. What Dad did was his business.

So the experience began ...an experience that, as year followed year, Dad and Mother could scarcely have foreseen when I started the first grade. My brother grew up, reached school age, and joined me at the desk. Two more brothers were born, and they grew up and joined us at another desk. The four of us bent over our books in that drafty old living room, watching daily the big yellow school buses haul neighborhood kids off to school. Every day, from 9 A.M. to 3:30 P.m., we pored over our books at a big trestle desk.

My Education

I must admit my education started long before I began formal study. It began on those long winter evenings when Dad would sit and read aloud to Mother and me. (Dad's English class students, it was said, rushed through their lessons just so they'd have time for his next installment of Geoffrey Trease's Cue for Treason.) We read Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (until the footprints and cannibals cost me a couple of bad dreams), Captain Marryat's Masterman Ready (I told Dad it was too sad, so we had to leave it for a few years), and I particularly remember a biography of George Washington Carver, the biochemist born into slavery who invented peanut butter. Then, in addition, there were always selections ready to read aloud from the Reader's Digest. It is only now that I realize this reading aloud was a vital part of my education, for it taught me my essential love of books and made me want to reach beyond the formal confines of lessons and grades. There was no hidden "plot" behind Dad's reading. He did it because he loved to share the experience.

For me, however, school always began on a certain sunny day in August. Dad and I drove more than 30 miles into the city and marched into the Customs Office to collect a heavy cardboard box with a yellow label marked: "Calvert School, Baltimore, Maryland"—a wondrous box filled with books, pencils, paper, and crayons. I couldn't wait to start. I thought I'd be reading like Dad tomorrow, although it actually took quite a while before I was reading on my own. When I succeeded, I began reaching out for ever higher reading levels, grappling with words I couldn't pronounce and digging their meanings out of the context. By the time I was 10 I was reading on an adult level and poor Dad was constantly in libraries searching for new books. When I was in high school it was a bad week when I didn't read at least two books, mostly autobiographies.

The Work Load

Needless to say, teaching us at home required quite an effort on Dad and Mother's part—an effort that steadily increased as the years went along. By the time I started high school, we had four separate grades, starting with grade one, going on in the same room. For some years Dad published handbooks for teachers and later had his own graphic arts studio in the house. This meant both he and Mother were available to help with the lessons. Many were the times we'd be stacked up two or three deep at the drafting board waiting for help. Sometimes I wonder how they got any work done at all.

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