I set down my second cup of coffee and leaned back in my chair, rubbing my eyes. “Okay. Write these two things down.” I paused while Hannah turned to a new page in her spiral notebook (past one that read If Hannah finds the broken pieces of the yo-yo on the floor Ben will pay her 25 cents, signed Ben, Witnessed Hannah). “First. ONE ROOM SCHOOLHOUSE. Second. SINGLE LARGE HOMESCHOOLING FAMILY.”
We were at a Caribou Coffee in a little strip mall, not far away from Hannah’s house, where presumably our husbands were playing chess, cleaning up chili, or turning on a DVD for our total of six children.
We were looking for a new paradigm.
Hannah said at one point, “The problem is not that we don’t know how to let go of the we-do-it-differently-in-different-families paradigm. The problem is we haven’t taken it past the Naptime Level.” I had to get her to explain that, and she reminded me:
When our children were all small and we would excitedly explain to other mothers, weary, isolated at-home mothers, how we had brought more balance and fun and connection to our lives by spending one or two whole days together every single week and sharing our work, the other mothers would listen, sometimes with a longing expression on their faces, and tell us how wonderful it sounded. “You could do it,” we would tell them. “You could find a friend and just start spending lots of time at each others’ houses. We hardly even knew each other when we started. You just have to make it happen.”
And the other mothers would say, “It sounds great. But it would never work for me, because my baby has to take his nap at one. We would have to be home for his nap.” End of discussion.
We’d always been pretty proud of ourselves that we decided we would forget this whole “gotta be home for naptime” thing. OK, so our children have a need that we usually meet by going back home, isolating ourselves once again in our own houses? We won’t ignore the need, but we’ll find a way to meet it that meets our goal of staying together, of not being isolated. Babies learn. Our babies did. They nap pretty easily in each others’ houses.
That was the naptime level.
Fast forward five or six years and we have some school-aged kids.
The other mothers now ask us, “So, you co-teach?” and we say, “Um, no, not really.” They can’t imagine why we would be going to such trouble to spend all this time together without seeking the benefits of co-teaching.
Hannah and I don’t teach the same way. Our kids don’t learn the same way (a superficial example: my Oscar does well with a list of stuff to finish each day; her Ben, all last year, thrived on a schedule of so many minutes studying one subject, so many minutes working on the next, and so on). We don’t teach the same subjects. We have assumed all along that our differences mean we cannot really integrate our schooling. When I spent a day at Hannah’s, I lugged a big bag of “our school” to her house, unpacked it all, and we did “our school” at the table next to Hannah and Hannah’s kids, then packed it all up at the end and carried it back to my van. When she came to my house, she did the same. Small wonder that we both have come to store our kids’ school stuff in sturdy tote bags hanging on hooks in the schoolroom!
It’s exhausting, and it’s kind of dumb. We have to get past the Naptime Level. OK, fine. So Oscar “needs” to learn one way, and Ben “needs” to learn another. So Hannah likes to teach one way, and I like to teach another. So we plan differently, pace differently, organize differently. This is not insurmountable. If we decide we NEED to work together, we can find a way.
Toddlers have different nap schedules BECAUSE they are in different families. They are not in different families because they have different nap schedules.
And though we thought we had to do school separately because we approached it so differently — the truth is that we approach school differently on Tuesdays and Thursdays BECAUSE we have not done it together. If we set out to work together on those days, we reasoned, we will find a way — not the way that Hannah’s family works — not the way that my family works — not some compromise, halfway between — but the way that our families work when they work together.
We’re going to tear out the page that says TWO FAMILIES HOMESCHOOLING AT THE SAME TABLE.
* * *
We’ve made up our minds not to mess with the curriculum for this year; next year, I guess we’ll be choosing curricula together. This year, though, we can take a look at the schedule. Can the boys do their spelling together? (They can at least administer the daily spelling tests, one to the other, even if they are spelling from different lists.) Can the boys do math together, one with Saxon, one with Singapore? (They can at least listen in on each other’s lessons.) Can Silas and Milo learn to read together, even though they’re at different levels in the same program? (We tried it yesterday and found a pattern: Milo reads one of his workbook pages, and Silas reads one of his; they pass the pencil back and forth to trace their letters on their pages, taking turns.)
Yes, I think we can do this: we’ve done it with Naptime, we’ve done it with Teaching Kids To Get Along, we’ve done it with Housework, we now have to do it with School On Tuesdays. It is going to knock us out of our comfort zones, but then… we’ve been through this before. Making connections means resisting the culturally programmed impulse that says I have to do it my way and you have to do it your way. But every time we’ve figured out an our way, that has turned out to be just as comfortable, and a lot more companionable.
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