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

almost every object on the sheet.
    Clearly, Julia had a unique intelligence churning inside her head, and so Waddell tried her out in its third-grade gifted program. The experience didn’t amount to much: twice a week Julia spent a little time outside the regular classroom, doing special activities in math and English. She didn’t last long in the advanced math group, but the Junior Great Books Club seemed right up her alley. There, the children discussed and wrote about stories they read together. “I love having Julia in the group,” Mrs. Patrick said, beaming. “She’s so creative. She always has something unusual to say.”
    Unusual was the operative word, a word that sometimes made me sigh. How many mothers of unusual children have occasionally prayed for a little normalcy—just enough to ease their child’s passage through the world of averages that constitutes America’s public schools? Nevertheless, I was pleased that Julia had been recognized as a bright kid. This gifted program might give her a boost, especially since the regular curriculum was getting very dull.
    In Virginia, third grade marks the onset of annual standardized tests, something all states employ, but some are more zealous than others when it comes to dictating the schools’ test-driven curriculum. In the 1990s, Virginia instituted a new curriculum called the Standards of Learning, or SOLs—an appropriate acronym, since most parents and teachers I’ve met seem to feel that when it comes to the SOLs, we are all “shit out of luck.” As one high-school teacher put it, “The SOLs are the monster that is devouring our schools.”
    If Julia’s wandering mind had been our only challenge—if her school curriculum had been full of exciting materials, taught with creative approaches—I never would have opted for homeschooling. But Virginia’s ardent embrace of our nationwide test-prep culture pushed me over the edge. I kept looking at the bland content in Julia’s worksheets and tests, and thinking, “Oh, c’mon. I could do much better than this.”
    Most of Julia’s teachers felt the same way. During her early years at Waddell, they consistently lamented the effect of the SOL tests on their program. “We always had standards,” one veteran teacher sighed, but now the standards were being dictated by strangers in Richmond, and there was little time left in the day for teachers to use their own imaginations. “More than eighty percent of our curriculum is mandated by the state,” another teacher explained. “And don’t let anyone tell you that we don’t teach to the test. We absolutely teach to the test.”
    To make time for extra test preparation, Waddell had abandoned many of the teachers’ favorite units. “We used to do a first-grade unit on dinosaurs,” one teacher recalled. “The children loved it.” But since dinosaurs weren’t part of the first-grade standards, they had become extinct in the classroom. “I used to do more creative writing,” a fourth-grade teacher noted. “But now with all the testing, we don’t have time for it.” The Roots and Shoots Garden was another SOL casualty, incorporated less and less into the children’s schedule. By Rachel’s fifth-grade year, she would complain that they never visited the garden at all.
    John, who had started his career as a K–12 music teacher, felt a personal loathing for the tests. “When I taught in the public schools we didn’t have these strict standards. If a teacher had a passion for chemistry or politics, he could share that. Teachers could play to their strengths.” John acknowledged that some teachers and schools were weak, and needed state standards to hold them accountable. But for most conscientious educators, the testing requirements had gone way too far: “Now you don’t have the time to