#Drive 5, 2-hr School Day
And the question of public school socialization.
“Kim, you already know how to read,” said Ms. Childs. She was leaning over at my level to talk, voluminous dark curls in long layers a la Jaclyn Smith tumbled around her shoulders. “Go, read your book and then draw a picture. At any table over there.”
I was in Kindergarten at King’s Highway Elementary School and I didn’t want to listen to her. She had spelled my name wrong, K-i-m-b-e-r-l-y, without the “e” between the “l” and the “y.” I told her my name was “l-e-y”, but she didn’t believe me until I brought a note from Mom. Then, she had to laminate an all new name plate for my place at the table.
Her words were gentle and she was always kind, but in my head, teachers followed The Rules—like Mom. And because I knew how to read and tended to answer all the questions during group reading time, I needed to occupy myself in another room by reading books and drawing what I read. To give other kids a chance or something.
This felt like one more version of standing in the corner to me. My lucky-to-be-illiterate friends would learn the songs about “Mr. M with a Munching Mouth” (“his mouth wants more, more, more”) in the adjacent classroom without me.
I cooperated until the singing lured me out of my seat, away from crayons too fat for drawing, and ugly, pale blue paper that messed up the colors anyway. I’d walk carefully up to the door and peer around the frame to get a glimpse of the week’s letter on the poster Ms. Childs or Mrs. B. held up. When they finished the song, I’d rush to my seat to scrawl a picture.
Before the end of the year, my friend Mark* had learned to read, too. Unfortunately, a minor ruckus broke out among the nonreaders when we were both caught peering into the room. And so, the next time our friends lined up to go sing and read, Mark and I walked the long cinderblock hallway to second grade, where Mrs. Law was waiting for us.
This straight-backed, feisty woman had intense eyes, huge eyelashes, huge golden layered hair, an imposing voice and clacking heels. Her circle of second graders were synchronized to her every instruction—which I immediately messed up.
On that very first day, I sounded out “ack-now-ledg-ments” at the beginning of our new textbook when she asked if anyone could read it. I can still see one huge boy with big brown eyes staring at me when I was done. Weren’t we supposed to answer here, either?
Mark and I agreed on the way back to our Kindergarten class, answering wasn’t a good idea. I don’t think I volunteered to read out loud in that class again. We just wanted to be with our friends. What was so wrong with that?
By the time I officially arrived in second grade two years later, narrowly missing Mrs. Law for homeroom for the gentler, blonde newlywed Mrs. Hopson, I had been officially labeled as “gifted.” This designation qualified me for wildly alienating events and disjointed, half-supported programs around the district (on top of continuing through independent reading and workbook program until fourth grade).
On one outing, we climbed stairs with missing and broken puke green-gray tile to an overheated third-floor library at Craig Ridgeway Elementary. I swear the floor was old and sagged like a haunted house I’d visited. At least there I met a few kids that I’m still in touch with in real life and on Facebook today.
On another trip, I huddled with the same group in Rainbow Elementary School’s cafeteria. I say huddled because the room was dark and too small to fit everyone and had nothing resembling a rainbow anywhere. The cafeteria lady wasn’t happy about having to make room for us. When we weren't allowed to go to recess, I thought for sure that we were in trouble.
Instead, we were led to a vacant room where we took turns squirting acrylic paint into a bucket of water under the watchful eye of our advisor. Then, we each submersed a Coke bottle up to the neck and slowly drew it back out of the water. I can still see the paint swirling into beautiful patterns as it adhered to the bottle, but I wondered how decorating a Coke bottle was better than four-square, kickball or tag.
As it turns out, I still have that bottle, almost 50 years later, and art remained my second favorite class to recess. I think that’s because the art teacher, Mr. Adams, reminded me of Bobby in some way. I can still picture him in his blue smock, jeans, and brown loafers, a great big smile on his face. He was always excited to show us the next project in clay or copper, etching or charcoal. From second to fifth grades, I took extra classes with him during the school day. One summer I took a class that went on trips to sketch landscapes and historic buildings in pencil, pastels and charcoal. I still have the art box and tools we used.
In fourth grade I also joined a Great Books Club that one of the local dad’s taught. I loved reading and talking about those short stories and still have both books, too.
Leaving for so many clubs and classes always prompted my fourth grade math teacher to ask, “Is it time for ‘Basket Weaving’ today?” or “Going to ‘Sandbox Class’, I see?” There was always a snear in his voice. Although he grinned, his mouth thin and wide above a moustache-less red beard, his eyes didn’t look friendly in any way.
I was glad to get away from him. When kids acted up in his class, he made them stand perfectly at attention with their arms straight out in front of them. One kid named Ronnie even puked from standing there so long.
Looking back though, maybe my math teacher had a point.
As the daughter of a loan officer, was there a benefit to me skipping math class to play with clay or complete exercises like, “If I had to Spend a Million Dollars” with a Sears Roebuck & Co. Catalog, a newspaper, and a little imagination?
Apparently, kids today are still asked to complete that exercise. And they’re still patiently asked to redo it when they provide minimally viable answers like I did: Two $500,000 mansions on the Main Line (1978 prices) from the classified section of The Philadelphia Inquirer, please.
Middle school was a disaster on a whole new level for me. Our home in the hollow proved to be the axis for redistricting efforts. Kids on our street and in nearby neighborhoods have been switched between schools every three years or so since 1982 to maximize grants from Pennsylvania.
This was best for the district budget, I’m sure, but it was rough as a 13 year old, new rider to the hormonal roller coaster, who already felt somewhat out-of-place at home and in one or two classes any given year. Once again, I was pushed out of my friend group to a new school.
Tricia Jones’s older sisters had told us in fourth grade that kids get beaten up getting off the bus in ninth grade and I wanted no part of that. So when I ran into kids selling drugs in a corner bathroom at this new school, I figured the only way out was through. I gave one of the girls my lunch money for a Black Beauty then threw it down the toilet when I went into the bathroom stall.
Another time, I couldn’t get away from an eighth grade boy as he shot up with heroin on the way into the first school dance of the year. He laughed and offered me some when I said, “You’re crazy.” We both laughed when I saw him on a train to Philly decades later.
“You didn’t think I’d still be alive, did you?” he asked me. No, I really didn’t.
And the time a girl challenged me to a fight after field hockey practice for “stealing” her boyfriend, I thought. Welp, I’m really dead this time—although, I hadn’t stolen her boyfriend. The boy she liked was going with a girl from the next town over. I’d seen them together at the roller skating rink and was completely confused by her attack.
But, she kept screaming, “Go outside! I’m going to take care of you.”
She wasn’t getting me to go anywhere. I just stared at her, as she screamed —until a well-muscled second eighth grader swooped in, shoved her right shoulder, and said, “No. You go outside, you white trash bitch.”
My attacker’s face contorted in an ugly scowl as she prepared to yell back, when a third eighth grader, taller than the first two, shoved her on the other side and said, “Hey! Leave that girl alone. She didn’t do anything to you. YOU go outside.”
And so, they went! All three girls went outside where my two protectors slapped that girl silly as the rest of us watched from the safety the glass entryway hall. I shit you not.
It was just alot for the first two months of school. To say things were different from my old school was an understatement. Like Captain Hook’s naughty pirate crew, I’m sure I “needed a mother” based on the paddles, detentions, and all round rabble-rousing I collected like a badge of honor that year.
Years later Mom asked why I never mentioned these events while they were happening. I said, “It didn’t cross my mind that you could help. You weren’t there.”
Ironically, Dad resolved my “disciplinary issues” after a tenth detention and a C (probably in math) with a single visit to West Chester Christian School during spring break. A fundamental Baptist effort, they would make me wear skirts every day but didn’t have field hockey or lacrosse. I swore I could put my rebellious ways behind me, and Dad gave me one final shot.
By the end of that year, I’d magically pulled up my grades and stayed out of Mr. Copeland’s office. To everyone’s surprise, this new kid even convinced her lacrosse coach and an advisor, who knew more about me than I knew about her, to sponsor my run for class president—and managed to get elected.
And yes, I guess the academic part was easy for me, but I was lonely and miserable in those halls whether I had an A or a C, without understanding why. Let’s face it, some of the best YA novels on the planet revolve around lonely kids surviving middle school—Harry Potter, Boxcar Children, Percy Jackson. It’s not an easy time for most.
Fortunately, by high school, I discovered a way to work the public school system that kept me focused on legitimately getting out of school.
First, I tracked my “days off” (20 allowable absences per year without having to repeat a class or grade). Second, I participated in as many clubs as possible. This allowed me to “get out of class free” to attend a bevy of sports games and field trips, a cappella glee club, choral performances, and student government project days—math, be damned, but finished and turned in on time, if it killed me.
Dad was appalled to learn that Mom permitted days off when I wasn’t sick. But, I knew not to take absences during sports or before performances, which would affect my participation and getting out of class. For all of my tracking efforts, I traveled to New York City, performed in the Washington Cathedral, Acapulco, Taxco and Mexico City, and visited Great Adventure or Hershey Park, or both, at least once a year, all of which I loved. Maybe I had learned something from getting out of class so often for “basket weaving,” after all.
But I was winning a game that I didn’t want to play.
Nope, I wasn’t going to impose that on my own kids if I didn’t have to.
While Josh was still a baby, I stumbled on Homeschool for Excellence (1987) about the Colfax family in California at the library. Their four unschooled sons raised goats on five acres and ultimately, three out of four went to Harvard.
Goats? Um, no. But if a goat business could get a person access to Harvard, well, maybe my kids had a shot at college somewhere.
Within months after I separated from their dad, I started exploring private preschools in the area. Montessori and Waldorf were the most expensive, so I decided to find out why.
Montessori Preschools struck me as activity centers on steroids that produced happy, engaged kids with oodles of creativity. I understood and deeply respected a hands-on approach from my love of art and working with kids at the church. Kids were always more engaged when they could make a mess, dig into a project; own it.
However, Montessori presumed the kids attended their learning center. Lovely as they were, they were adapting concrete block walls, “faking life” in their centers. And it came with a price tag that was double that of Aunt Sandy’s. As someone who made $10,000 that first year, it wasn’t an option. Yikes!
The Waldorf method, developed by Rudolf Steiner, had a curious format and a university-sized cost. Regardless of criticism for Waldorf’s founder, universities such as MIT and Cal-Tech recruited Waldorf graduates every year for their innovative thinking, confidence in life, and test scores. That couldn’t be all bad.
According to a Waldorf website I found, their principles include:
Kids go outside for 2 hours a day, even in bad weather, and wear bright colors for positivity.
Learn competence and confidence with hands-on, manual work.
Reading wasn’t officially pursued until 8 years old or third grade.
A single teacher stayed with the same class of students until eighth grade.
Think: gardening, fence building, animal husbandry outside; sewing, knitting, crafts, and cooking inside; stay with the same adult, day in, day out through eighth grade. Sounded like a wildly expensive family farm or the Colfax goat farm to me.
I definitely wanted my kids to be creative, have a positive mindset, competence and confidence and the opportunity to attend great colleges. Except that we lacked a family farm, California “unschooling” laws, or a personal trust fund.
However, our home in the hollow was seven miles from the edge of Lancaster County farmlands, in the bucolic southwestern region of Chester County. We had national, state and county parks and forests and were surrounded by farms, lakes and fields. Harrisburg, Lancaster, Baltimore, and Philly were roughly an hour away. New York and Washington D.C. were two-and-a-half. They would have plenty of organic opportunities to play, climb and explore if I could keep them out of school.
We already did a lot of camping with my parents and extended family. Josh’s first camping trip was the summer he turned one—and we’d gone every year since. Usually in tents, cooking over a Coleman propane stove or fire.
I just needed to intentionally incorporate some handwork, arts and crafts, right?
I wasn’t sure that Josh sit still long enough for knitting, but we could probably build a bird house or something out of scrap wood. Homeschooling was starting to sound possible.
Hadn’t Mom banished Wayne and I outside after school? As one friend put it, “Oh, were you a feral child, too?” Actually, our whole neighborhood probably was.
Maybe being taught at home would allow active, walking-at-nine-months Josh to remain active, confident, and curious—despite our family circumstances. The more I considered it, the more I was convinced. Homeschooling could keep him free from “pretending” life in school by learning to live his actual life.
Socialization didn’t even come up as a concern for me except when well-meaning educators in our extended family mentioned it. A group of 10-12 families at our church who were choosing to homeschool were organizing a coop. Most of those moms were former teachers. Only two or three of us didn’t have college degrees, that I recall.
But on one of my first visits to a planning meeting, I was convinced that my plan wouldn’t do. I needed curriculum.
On that advice, I attended CHAP, a major homeschool convention an hour away in Harrisburg. It was May 2002 and the $35 two-day ticket plus hotel cost was more than justified by three or four speakers I was interested in, if I never homeschooled a day in my life. Attended largely by fundamentalists and Mennonites, I still can’t look at kerchiefs or full-length denim skirts the same way. But they had acres of curriculum.
Accelerated, workbook-driven programs, software curriculum linked to online video instruction, in-person learning centers for drop-off classes, and simple reading lists bundled with stacks of books.
None of them were less than a month’s income for me to buy outright, so I took scads of brochures, studied them the first night, and went immediately to the used book consignment the next day.
Always one to dork-out on large books, a set of four-inch, three-ring D-binders caught my attention while I browsed. At first glance, The Weaver, Volume I had a cringey cover and 6 or 7 subject dividers.
Still, one of the speakers had referenced the publisher, Alpha Omega. Looking closer, the Weaver dividers covered all of the core subjects, plus art and health. Each subject had different colors of paper, one for each grade, Kindergarten through sixth grades.
In a single binder.
I was astonished. How could a single four-inch binder hold a full eight years of educational content? The programs I oversaw for preschoolers used a four-inch binder for a single 13-week quarter. Some entries, particularly for Kindergarten and primary grades were mere paragraphs. Upper grades were entire pages or multiple pages. Math required a separate binder. Grades 7 to 12 were housed in Volume II.
Impossible.
I had to know how they did it. I paid $50-odd dollars for a lightly used set and dove in over the next week.
I soon learned that The Weaver’s eight years worth of education consisted of unit studies in which multiple ages of kids study the same subject together, the way a one-room schoolhouse might. The difference was in the application. Younger kids did projects or drawings, older kids did more writing. The notebook truly contained 200-days worth of assignments including projects for the various subjects.
By the time I studied their scope and sequence and read assignments across multiple grades, an overwhelming educational process was reduced to something I could carry under one arm—and invited me into homeschooling like an old friend.
Einstein once said that if anyone spends 15 minutes a day learning something new, in a year, he (or she) will be an expert; in 5 years, a national expert.
I deduced that for a primary education, reading, writing, and math were the core subjects that kids needed. This equated to 45 minutes a day tackling new concepts to have a solid foundation in their elementary years. What, then, were the other 5 hours and 15 minutes of public elementary school for?
I really had no idea since it wasn’t for exploring what students enjoyed or exploring. The Colfax family, the Waldorf method and The Weaver seemed to support that conclusion.
The clincher for me was that in 2002, AskPauline.com reported that kindergarten through second grade, primary years, were “non-attendance years” in Pennsylvania. Kids didn’t have to be registered for school until the age of eight. (Note: that has changed.)
Think about that for a minute. The birthplace of public education wouldn’t track the time my kids would be in their halls until third (freaking) grade. If they considered three vital years of their early development unworthy of tracking, then I didn’t need to worry about getting my kids to their schools for any reason.
Because as at-risk kids, every minute counted in those early years.
My original concept was to start each day with a math activity (eat the frog, first) and reading, play outside each day a la Waldorf. After lunch, we’d try whatever free-ish hand arts and projects suited our fancy. Next, we’d do chores, which I was already a fan of, and finally, head to the YMCA for sports or leisure a couple times a week, thanks to their dad—and do it for far, far less than Waldorf’s $8,000 price tag per child (in 2002).
As I pulled out of the Wawa a few days after reading and studying The Weaver, I decided that we would homeschool the next year. Armed with a love of reading and the fantastic Chester County libraries, a creek, and lots of room to play, I would educate Josh from a binder full of colored paper. I didn’t know how long we would homeschool. Probably as long as it made sense.
I hadn’t asked their dad, my parents, or even my therapist for approval or permission. Looking around, I was the only one who would feel the impact of their success or failure—probably for the rest of my life.
My part-time job at the church barely covered more than electric, fuel for our 17 mpg SUV, and food. I wasn’t sure how we would pay rent. To be fair, while the kitchen was still being renovated, Dad graciously wasn’t charging us rent.
That was a future bridge to cross.
*Names have been changed to protect privacy.