Home School: Part 1

                 

                          

        

...all images taken at the abandoned District 34 schoolhouse near Florence, Kansas.

This blog is, of course, intended to record the renovation of the house on Wise Road and showcase the “good life” we hope to lead in the country. But I also created this blog to serve as a space in which to explore the idea of home education.

Even before my daughter was born my husband and I contemplated the possibility of homeschooling our children. Over the years many things have attracted us to homeschooling: freedom, academic rigor, consistency, and flexibility, to name a few. But these are not the only or the best reasons to homeschool. Even as I type them I find them so vague/cursory/superficial as to be almost not worth listing. As I post here I hope to explore the deeper/more fundamental reasons that we are considering homeschooling for our family.

When we purchased the property on Wise Road we took the first definite step in the direction of home education, for if we spend half of our time in the country our children will not be attending traditional schools.

This decision has caused me not a little anxiety. For on top of the already daunting decision to take on a major home renovation, to add the work and responsibility of owning a second property, as well as the decision to live part of each week away from our beloved friends and family (not to mention away from our favorite coffee shops), there has been the additional burden of beginning a whole new project: the colossal responsibility of educating our children ourselves. You might be thinking that this in itself is the crowning example of our folly—more than our purchase of the disaster-I-mean-house on Wise Road. And you might be right. But over the years, as I have thought, read, and prayed (though that not nearly enough) I have grown to suspect that *for our family* this *might* be the wise road. Perhaps even the road to wisdom? 

Why? You may ask? Why should you homeschool? What’s wrong with public schools? What’s wrong with Catholic schools? What about socialization? What about your own weaknesses, foibles, preferences, political opinions, etc? Aren’t you just trying to create little mini-mes who reflect every opinion you hold? 

What if they become religious nuts?

Or worse... what if they become...weird?

What if you ruin your kids?

And believe me, these are questions that I have asked myself, will ask myself again. Perhaps, in the end, these questions will lead me back to traditional school, with all its legitimate joys and very real hardships. 

Perhaps.

But perhaps we won’t find out if the road we are on is the “wise road” or the way of folly—unless we walk down it.

And perhaps these questions are not even the right questions. Perhaps this is not the best way to begin a discussion on education, either for those considering home school or those contemplating which (more or less) traditional school to choose. In the following posts I will attempt to start at the beginning. But--where is the beginning?

Surely the first question we should ask is: what is the purpose of education? What is it for? What is it’s end? Surely we cannot answer the queries “which school?” “which curriculum?” until we have determined what school is for.

Stay tuned. 

Gutted

Last week I went to Texas with both children. Devin planned on spending a night at Wise Road. We haven't done this yet; I have resisted. There is no air-conditioning. I know. Wimp I am.

But more than this, the house still didn't feel like "mine." Every time I walked through I felt ill at ease. It didn't smell right. Do you know what I mean? Not that it smelled bad. It didn't. It didn't smell of anything in particular. But still, it smelled...wrong.

In addition it didn't help that we had never been there alone. We had been there with real estate agents, contractors, neighbors, parents, and friends, but never just our family. I had never stood in the empty rooms and stared and thought and stared. It didn't feel like my house.

Anyway, this is all to say that we still hadn't spent a night at the house.  Devin headed out there after work one night, and was shocked to find, when he walked in the door, that the house was--gutted. Our contractors had begun work that day--a fantastic surprise since, you know, you never know what "we will begin work soon" really means in contractor-speak. I guess "soon" meant, like, that day. Awesome!

So Devin didn't spend the night after all. Which is A-OK!

When I returned from abroad we went up together to look things over and argue discuss ceilings, floors, bathtub placement etc. It was a wonderful day. Strangely, taking off the walls suddenly made this house "mine." I can see where things will be. I can imagine myself waking up in the morning and looking out *this* window at *that* field. There is a long way to go, but we are on the road!

Some complications have come to light as the layers have been pealed away. First, there is no insulation. Not a shocker considering the age of the house. But we need to go on and put that in. Our contractors quoted a price for that that seems...a bit ridiculous. So my intrepid spouse plans to do the insulation himself. We'll see how that goes.

The floors are the other issue. There are currently hardwoods throughout. They are okay: recently installed pre-finished tongue and groove. We had planned to salvage the flooring from the room we are demolishing and patch the parts of the floor that would be bare once we removed walls and tile etc. However, this is going to be a tricky (read *expensive*) job, and we are wondering if it might not be better/cheaper to remove all the hardwood and refinish the ORIGINAL FLOOR underneath. This is what I *really* want to do. We will see what state that floor is in soon enough. (Anybody have any experience with a similar job??)

"new" hardwood on left, original hardwoods peeking through the dust on the right.

Anyway, the unforeseens have already pushed Phase II back to next spring--that is residing the exterior. Still, I feel so much happier about the house already. We can live with the shabby exterior for a bit longer!

The weather last weekend was lovely. We took a hike through the fields and found the perfect tree-house tree. It was a good day.

Patriotism?

I must admit that patriotism has always baffled me. Sometimes it has even revolted me. The *feeling* of patriotism has never risen spontaneously in my breast, even as a youngster reciting the pledge of allegiance every morning before school began. The abstract concepts of “indivisibility” and “liberty” struck no chord, aroused no emotion. Even then, these ideas had little to do with my reality, made no reference to the smell of construction paper or the sound of chairs scraping the linoleum on the class-room floor, had nothing to do with the small loves, rivalries, sorrows of my childhood. They had nothing to do with the aroma and warmth of my home, my mother’s constant quiet happiness, her presence. Had nothing to do with pine-sap stuck to the heel of my hand.

I didn’t love my country—or didn’t think I did—until I lived in another country. Suddenly I felt an absence, I yearned for something, the “genius” of my homeland, for lack of a better word. And I was surprised to find that the “genius” was not, after all, the ideas that supposedly define our nation—not “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Not “freedom”—whatever that is. The “genius,” the enervating spirit of my country was, in reality, more like a local diety, a household god. Something mysterious, but most importantly local, concrete, related to the land, rooted in place and the particulars of place.

I was homesick. But I didn’t want “America”—if such a place exists. I wanted Wyandotte Road, I wanted the white pine in our back yard, whose habit and branches I knew. I wanted wheat-fields bleached in late June along I35. I wanted Strong City, Kansas. I wanted ash trees full of singing cardinals, dusty sparrows on the sidewalk in Brookside. I wanted cicadas droning in July. I wanted the faces of my parents and the rooms where I was a child.

As usual, Wendell Berry says it better:

In my teens, when I was away at school, I could comfort myself by recalling in intricate detail the fields I had worked and played in, and hunted over, and ridden through on horseback—and that were richly associated in my mind with people and with stories. I could recall even the casual locations of certain small rocks. I could recall the look of a hundred different kinds of daylight on all those places, the look of animals grazing over them, the postures and attitudes and movements of the men who worked in them, the quality of the grass and the crops that had grown on them. I had come to be aware of it as one is aware of one’s body; it was present to me whether I thought of it or not.

Patriotism, I think, must be this: this local love rooted and growing in a particular home, rather than an abstract idea imposed upon a place. This is the only way we can even begin to serve or even love our country, because it is, first and foremost, our mother and our home.

"When I have thought of the welfare of the earth," Berry writes,

the problems of its health and preservation, the care of its life, I have had this place before me, the part representing the whole more vividly and accurately, making clear and more pressing demands than any *idea* of the whole. When I have thought of kindness or cruelty, weariness or exuberance, devotion or betrayal, carelessness or care, doggedness or awkwardness or grace, I have had in my mind’s eye the men and women of this place, their faces and gestures and movements.

The Anti-Pinterest

We live in a Pinterest world: a world that promises to gratify our desires instantly and visually.  Described recently as “porn for white women,” Pinterest specifically--and the internet in general--allows us to “visualize our delusional fantasies.” It is a place of yearning, but not, alas, a place of real fulfillment. I think the comparison of Pinterest to pornography is illuminating, for porn feeds on a legitimate and beautiful desire, but whereas sex should bring the individual into actual encounter and fruitful union, porn leads instead to isolation and sterility. No real satisfaction, no consummation. In the same way Pinterest feeds on desires—and our *noble* desires at that!—but delivers no real thing, only images, snippets, memes.

Of course there are legitimate uses for Pinterest—and it is most often a benign source of entertainment. At its best it can help with planning, organize useful information, even connect people (Pinning party anyone??  J ). But at its worst it feeds off of dissatisfaction and something else—greed? Not necessarily greed for money or things (though that happens) but greed for the perfect scene, the glowing day, the fulfilled life.

This is a temptation that I face, and I assume it is something that many of you have struggled with from time to time. It is the temptation of a fast-paced, commercialized, online world: our world. With all this in mind I am sensitive to how my blogging content might interact or contribute to this kind of (falsified, dimished) reality. I am not the best photographer or the most engaging writer on the interwebs, and I have almost no technical know-how. So I am probably not going to be *able* to create a pristine online existence, that will tempt or distress my (limited!) audience. But I am aware that blogs necessarily portray an edited (though not necessarily false) version of reality. This is why we love blogs. So I want to emphasize from the very beginning the flawed nature of my own life.** I want to make sure I blog about the struggles from time to time, without—I hope—resorting to complaining or pity-seeking. 

But I will also strive to portray the beauty I see in my own life. And I am committed to treating my blogging as such: an attempt to *see* the blessings in my own imperfect existence: the beauty of my children, simple daily pleasures.

More specifically I hope to try to understand life better through our time at Wise Road: to gain wisdom from the change in our life, from the renovation, and from learning to live away from the noise and busy-ness (even the *beautiful* noise and *happy* busy-ness) that is our life in the city.

And already I begin to suspect that *this* journey will be, in fact, an antidote to an online existence, an anti-Pinterest. What does renovating a farmhouse look like on Pinterest after all? Before and After, snap, like this:

What does living in the country look like? This:

 

and this:

And, of course, this:

What does working the land look like on Pinterest?

 

But what did it look like for me, from where I stood this past weekend, looking out over fifteen acres on a hillside above Wise Road? It looked like sweat, like grass in my bra, and several ticks in my skin, and many more chiggers. It looked like a thousand trees, every tree in need of pruning, and me with my weak arms and insufficient tools taking almost an hour to remove three or four small branches. It looks like me unable to start the lawnmower. It looks like locking my two small children in a bare room with snacks for twenty minutes at a time so I could cut down individual weeds in a field of weeds.

Pinterest didn’t help me this weekend, with my frustration as the magnitude of the task threatened to overwhelm me. For my legitimate and noble desire is to lovingly cultivate the land. My ideal landscape is the fruitful and cultivated landscape of England, which has been farmed and tended by a race of gardeners for a thousand years. Pinterest feeds this desire instantly thus:

 

With images like this in my mind (and carefully collected on my Board) I remain ill-equipped to even *begin* to tend and cultivate fifteen acres of mismanaged land in Kansas. I walk the paths we cut through the pasture and I see no end to it. Is it any wonder I find it difficult to make a beginning?

But a beginning is what I must make. “It’s a whole life’s work,” Devin told me cheerfully, as he dragged a branch through the gap in the fence. It will probably take a whole lifetime, possibly more than one lifetime, to cultivate this land. But it is this kind of work that speaks most about what life is. Pinterest can’t say it. Life doesn’t have a “Pin it!” button. Life is long and confusing, the work is hard, the results slow in coming. Life is labor. But it is a labor of love, and love always—I trust—bears fruit. 

**For example: right now, in order to finish this post, I am ignoring the fact that my one year old is running around with an open marker and a stinky diaper.