Love in a Time of Homeschooling by Laura Brodie Page A

we’ll do a whole unit on dinosaurs,” I promised.
    â€œAnd what else?”
    â€œDragons,” she answered.
    â€œAnything that does not involve a scaly beast?”
    Julia thought for a while. “Maybe flight, since dragons can fly.”
    â€œAnd we can study flying dinosaurs, like pterodactyls?” I suggested.
    Julia sighed. “How many times do I have to tell you that pterosaurs aren’t dinosaurs.”
    Later that week, she and I visited the local library, looking for children’s books that could form our reading list for the coming year. I discovered a wonderful cartoon book full of stocky little Romans counting vases with L s and X s and I s, and Julia handed me a bright maroon book with a roaring T. rex on the cover: The Beginning, by Peter Ackroyd. Inside were marvelous photographs and drawings, surveying not only dinosaurs, but the whole development of life on Earth, from the Big Bang through Homo erectus . The book was colorful, well written, and ideal for Julia, who liked not only dinosaurs but also all the bizarre fishes and mammals that came before and after. This, I told her, could be the guiding source for our first semester. In August and early September we could study atoms and tectonic plates and volcanoes (all SOL subjects) as we read about the formation of the planet. Then we could spend a few weeks learning about the oceans as we studied how life developed from them. Most of October could be devoted to dinosaurs; November, to early mammals; and December, to a brief survey of primates and cavemen. In January we could skip forward to the Maya, and use the ancient cultures of the Americas as a segue into pre-Columbian Native Americans. We’d reach 1492 by the end of February.
    â€œThat’s ambitious,” one homeschooling mom laughed when I told her our plan. In other words: “That’s too much.” The trouble with trying to balance a public curriculum with private interests is that you can fall into a game of “Anything you cando, I can do better.” If the public school fifth-graders are adding and subtracting fractions, then your child should be multiplying and dividing them. If their history lessons begin in the sixteenth century, then yours should go back to the medieval age. This is not as difficult as it sounds, since the public school day includes a fair amount of repetition and wasted time, but still, you wind up with an agenda that leaves little room for relaxation.
    â€œWhat the heck,” I told myself. It was a rookie’s prerogative to be ambitious, and Julia and I were getting excited about our big plans.
    Even John was starting to get in the spirit. Never wanting to be left out of a family project, he agreed to my request to give Julia lessons in French and the flute on two afternoons each week. “It would be great to spend more time with Julia,” he explained. “You just have to remember that I have a job.” Fortunately, many of John’s musical duties took place at evening rehearsals or weekend sports events, so the afternoons seemed like a good chance for father-daughter learning.
    As a final step in drafting a curriculum, I decided to consult with Julia’s current teacher, Mrs. Gonzalez. Thus far I had hesitated to mention my ideas to anyone at Julia’s school; I had a childish fear that if word got around, I’d be in trouble with the principal. I also felt that telling Mrs. Gonzalez about our homeschooling schemes was sort of like informing your boyfriend that you’ve decided to live with a woman. I didn’t want Mrs. G to think that she had driven us to it.
    Nevertheless, I valued her opinion. She knew Julia; she knew the public system; her husband taught at the middle school that Julia would enter the following year, so she was well acquainted with the expectations for sixth-graders. She was an intelligent woman with decades of experience teaching and raising a daughter. I thought