Love in a Time of Homeschooling by Laura Brodie Read Free Book Online Page A

would cry and yell and announce my convictions regarding the basic evil of mankind. I hated the changers and the changed. To me, change was nothing less than murder.
    â€œI think Julia might have a touch of Asperger’s syndrome,” I told a cousin who works as an English professor at an ultra-liberal college.
    He shrugged. “I think half of my colleagues have Asperger’s. If you want to talk about highly intelligent and creative people who are socially inept, that covers most of our faculty.”
    I also wondered if Julia’s behavior might be categorized as attention deficit disorder. I never took her to be diagnosed, because her problems weren’t severe, but recent studies have shown that in girls, ADD often manifests itself in “space cadet” behavior, characterized by a wandering mind and lack of organizational skills. That seemed to describe Julia, and it matched John’s childhood memories. “I never could pay attention in school,” he explained. “I sat at my desk with a toy hidden in my lap, and my mind constantly wandered.”
    His mother gave me the full story one afternoon, when I spoke to her about my concerns for Julia. “When John was little, I had a regular weekly conference with the nuns. Every Friday, I was required to go in and hear them complain about how immature John was, and how badly he was doing. Each year they wanted to hold him back…. But look how well he turned out!”
    Somehow these revelations weren’t reassuring. On the one hand, it was good to know that despite his inauspicious start, my husband had gone on to earn a Ph.D. in music education. John had great talents in music and art, aptitudes that Julia shared, along with his blue eyes, dark hair, and fair skin. But at the same time, John’s repeated insistence on what a “moron” he used to be, and how he made Ds and Fs throughout his early school years, sometimes made me doubt the wisdom of having had three children with this man. There’s nothing like parenthood to bring out all the skeletons in one’s childhood closet, and in the comingyears John took pleasure in regaling me with a host of colorful confessions, joking that I would have to help Julia overcome her Brodie genes. Of course I had my own share of childhood vices, but none were academic, and I sometimes found it hard to grasp what could be so difficult about elementary school.
    Julia’s teachers explained that although she was obviously very bright, her work didn’t always show it. Her spelling was poor, her handwriting resembled a caveman’s scrawl, and she could get the right answers in math only if given lots of extra time. I was almost resigned to the idea that Julia’s intellect would never shine in a regular classroom when, at the end of the second grade, I received a letter stating that the school was considering her for its gifted program. Apparently she had scored in the ninety-ninth percentile on something called the Naglieri test.
    â€œWhat is this?” I asked Mrs. Patrick, the school’s coordinator of the gifted program.
    â€œIt’s a nonverbal test,” Mrs. Patrick explained. “The children are shown black-and-white images, and they have to recognize patterns or differences, or guess what comes next.”
    That made sense; Julia’s brain had a knack for processing visual information. Once, at the end of a little boy’s birthday party, the hostess remarked that Julia had won their party game. Apparently this mom had stood before the children with a cookie sheet full of small objects—toys and kitchen gadgets and knickknacks—and she’d given the kids a brief moment to survey it all. Then she had put the cookie sheet away and asked the children to write down every object they could remember. (A pretty boring game for a bunch of eight-year-olds, if you ask me.) Anyway, Julia won hands down. After a short glance, she could recall