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School is out
By Denis Johnson
Why I teach my kids at home

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Mamafesto
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

____________________
ILLUSTRATION BY
DAVID SCOTT SINCLAIR

BY DENIS JOHNSON | I really do look around at times with a little surge of bewilderment, even mild panic, at finding myself here in the middle of the dropout's dream, and it's teaching the kids at home that makes it all happen. Right at this moment, while other parents are starting the day's work and other kids the first week of school, I'm in my ragged bathrobe drinking tea and writing these very notes, and lounging on one couch while my daughter Lana, wrapped in an afghan on another, reads a French-Indian War novel called "Flame-Colored Taffeta" and my wife Cindy and son Dan play chess ... and when, in the interest of being specific for this article, I wonder out loud what time it is, nobody seems to know.

It's hard to recall the moment just yesterday when Dan's struggle against mathematics, waged with subtle strength, with a deadpan face and a deft, not quite deliberate obtuseness, made me feel like killing him. The tears and terrors are fewer now than when we started this experiment, but it's still hard to imagine a public school teacher exciting this kind of stubborn and personal resistance over mere lessons -- to rules and bossing, yes -- but to decimal points? The laws of science feel less important when it's just Mom delivering them in the living room. Even after three years, there's still something not quite right about it: She doesn't bring the weight of a massive modern public institution to bear on the process of conveying that it's time to review math. (Most of Dan's disgust yesterday was with the repetition, the reviewing. Just as I once did in the soul-stifling, uninspiring government schools, he wants to provide the answer, forget the lesson and move on.)

As parents with home-based occupations, we'd always had at least a little time for at least a fumbling interest in the kids' schooling. First we were in the volunteer phase down at the school -- Cindy was anyway, heading over there twice a week to help out. I'd seen plenty of school in my life and didn't go around those places any more. Cindy's volunteer period ended when we moved for a few months to Iowa City, where we'd been told we'd find "the second-best schools in the country," and she found it was just a lot of keeping quiet and forming two lines, and decided that maybe the kids had to go school, but she didn't.

We were back in our country-style North Idaho school district hardly a month before, my hands trembling with rage, I was firing off letters to the local papers:

My family and I just read about the sweep-search of the Sandpoint Middle School. Cops and dogs locked the children down for three hours while they combed through lockers and belongings. They found a pistol and a bag of marijuana, not a big haul, but the principal was satisfied that he'd managed to "send a message." Wow! That's some message! My kids go to Mt. Hall Elementary about 50 miles north, and they heard it all the way up here. A couple of questions: What language is that message in, exactly? And one my son Daniel asked: "How come they didn't just use the intercom?"

NEXT PAGE: My new educational goal -- turn my kids into ignorant savages