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When Rebecca learned to read earlier this year, it was VERY exciting. Not like, oh, this is awesome, my kid is learning to read. But like a lightning storm is exciting, it was wild and thrilling, it was so fast. She learned to read exactly like she plays those logic games. Like reading is just a big puzzle and she had to look at it for a good long time. She understood what reading was, and the mechanics of phonics, but it didn’t take shape in her head. And then one day, she’d looked at the WHOLE of reading enough and she could read, and then it was just a matter of adding words to her head. She doesn’t sound out words, ever. She asks me, “what’s this word” and I tell her and that’s it, she’s got it. Or she gets words by context and by knowing the first and last sound in the word. It’s really really foreign to me, but also really really interesting! Watching her understand reading was a trip!

Let me start this long, rambly entry about homeschooling with a standard disclaimer. Although I have opinions about public schools, and institutional schooling in general, they’re just mine and I don’t pretend to have any answers to the problems with schools today. Ed and I made this choice for our family, for our reasons. Not everyone can or wants to homeschool, and that’s fine, it’s all good, we all do what we think is best, or our choices are limited by circumstance. I’m not particularly interested in arguing about homeschooling or not homeschooling. I’m interested in writing about why I believe homeschooling is best for my daughter.

Ed and I first started discussing homeschooling when I was still pregnant. Ed’s experiences in Baltimore public schools were really terrible and that was a lot of his motivation for wanting to homeschool (and later, as we got to know our actual daughter better, we realized his experiences were definitely not irrelevant). While I was a successful student in many ways, I still pretty much hated school almost all the time, so there was that. But I also started to feel that the path of public school education was not only not the only way to learn, for some at least, it might not be the best way to learn, either. Before Rebecca was school-aged, I read a lot of John Holt and John Taylor Gatto and it all resounded with me so much, I felt very strongly that we would homeschool. And I was very much leaning toward unschooling. It seemed a natural progression from the attachment parenting we’d been practicing.

Fast forward some years, to when Rebecca was six. I decided to enroll in a charter school. Honestly, I wanted the money (about $800/semester!) for educational materials. But I’d begun to think I wanted to introduce at least a little structure into our lives, something a little more formal than unschooling but much less than school-at-home. We started out with a Waldorf curriculum that I really liked and I was very enthusiastic, it seemed like it would be Right Up Our Alley, with its gentle, natural approach to learning. But it bombed. Rebecca hated it. I thought I was presenting it wrong or something. The next fall, I decided to go even more formal, with a classical curriculum. I thought if the material was interesting and engaging, and we were still relaxed, Rebecca would enjoy our school time. Ha! Some of the stuff was okay (we did like Story of the World and I’m sorry we had to give it back when we left the charter school), but mostly, it was an even bigger bomb than the Waldorf stuff and Rebecca and I started having big battles over school work.

But it wasn’t just normal kid “I’d rather play than do homework” behavior, this was something more, something very clearly Not Right. I wrote about some of Rebecca’s behaviors that baffled me and it was Cindy of Apple Stars who said to me, “sounds like you have a right-brained learner on your hands,” and gave me some links to read. I’m so thankful. Even after that, I continued to try to push “school” on Rebecca, until around this time last year, our teacher from the charter school started giving us materials and pep talks about “studying for testing.” When I’d first joined the charter school, I understood that standardized testing was required for funding purposes, but there would not be hardcore emphasis on scores. When that changed, I knew we had to leave, and we did. We’ve been unschooling since.

Let me tell you how Rebecca learned to read. Well, first, let me tell you how I learned to read. I don’t actually remember learning, but I was very young and self-taught and could read very well when I started kindergarten. In first grade, my best friend Lori and I sat at the back of the room together, messing around mostly, totally separate from the class for most subjects because we were reading so much ahead of everyone else. It was from this perspective that I tried to teach my daughter to read. I tried a number of things, pretty much all phonics-based. And while Rebecca could do the simple exercises, she didn’t actually learn to read from me teaching her. She was able to read very simple things from the time she was about five, along with a bunch of words she just knew the look of (like her name, my name, the word poop, heh), but she couldn’t really read. At five, I didn’t worry. At six, I didn’t worry, but I was a little nervous. When she was seven and still no nearer to reading (by reading, I mean fluent, easy reading), I started to doubt myself, her, everything. That’s when Cindy told me about right-brain learners and I joined a yahoo group and read about how other kids like Rebecca had learned to read.

Rebecca learned to read about six months after I stopped trying to teach her to read. I took advice from other homeschooling parents of right-brainers (mostly called rb’ers on the relevant lists) and backed off and waited. I started giving her more magazines, comic books and graphic novels. These allowed Rebecca to have a very satisfying reading experience without much pressure to read every single word. And one day it was like a light switch was turned on and she started reading more and more and more. And within weeks, she had pretty much caught up to her peers. She still reads differently, I think, than most kids her age, but she can read just about anything she wants. She is heavily into Manga right now, working her way through a couple of series so far. I realized at some point that the whole process of reading, for her, is completely different than the way I read. She reads in pictures, she reads visually, forming pictures in her head, associating images with words. She once told me that when she reads the word “bug,” a picture of a particular bug, the same one every time, pops up in her head. It’s a ladybug. And she reads the word but, it’s not a sum of its letters, B-U-G, it’s a little unit, and there’s not a natural leap for her to see how B-U-G and B-A-G are related, or B-U-G and B-U-T. She knows how they are alike, actually, but it’s not the same. It’s hard for me to explain, as I’ve only had an eight year-old try to tell me what it’s like, and I don’t get it myself.

There are two blogs I read, mothers of right-brained kids. One of them is Throwing Marshmallows, and I really like a couple of her articles (well, I love her whole site, these are just a couple that have been relevant to my thinking lately). Why do right-brained kids seem to struggle?

“The “struggles” that many right-brained kids go through are actually a result of a mis-match in expectations and approach plus not understanding their learning style. Traditional school approaches teach things from a very left-brained perspective which works against the right-brained child’s natural way of learning.”

This completely shows in how things have gone for me and Rebecca. As soon as I stopped trying to teach her in a left-brained way, the more she learned. I am AMAZED at the things she learns through no doing of mine. And:

“Right-brained kids are global thinkers which means that they are “whole to part” learners. Traditional teaching approaches tend to focus on sequential skills (such as phonics) which approach things in a “part to whole” approach. This sequential approach goes completely counter to the way our right-brained kids think.”

I see this with Rebecca all the time. She’s excellent at seeing the whole thing. She has these games, like this one and she’s phenomenal at them. She’s much better at them than I am and it seems almost effortless. But I can see, when she does them, she doesn’t do it sequentially at all, she sees the whole picture and then puts it all together, almost all at once. She sits and looks at the puzzle for a minute, maybe idly pushing a piece around a little bit, then bam bam bam, she solves the problem.

And this post, Is right-brained learning a learning disability? The answer is a resounding no. But right-brained kids often don’t do well in school, sometimes do very poorly in school, despite the fact that they are very bright.

“Right-brained learners often find themselves “struggling” in school, not because they are learning disabled, but because they are being forced to learn on what is, for them, an artificial timetable, using approaches that are weighted heavily towards left-brained strengths (memorization, sequential learning).”

And this is the crux of why I’m even more determined to homeschool Rebecca. Because I know her now, I know who she is, and how she learns, and I feel certain there would be a “diagnosis” or a “label” and she would “need” “special services” or something. She would not do well in school, she would be frustrated and angry and struggling. And I think she would carry that “label” or “diagnosis” with her for a long long time, long after it was relevant, in her heart if not in the scope of her life. And it would be wrong, whatever label was attached to her, would be wrong.

The other blog is Apple Stars, it was Cindy who first pointed me in the right direction. Her blog has been immensely helpful and a great comfort. Before I found her blog (and others after hers), I had no idea what was “wrong” and I felt lost and worried and very very doubtful about my ability to homeschool. When I started reading Cindy’s blog, and her yahoo group, I was so relieved, I could see my child in the writing of other mothers and hear stories of how homeschooling played out for them over the years, and everything started to make sense.

I have a lot more to say about homeschooling, and my beautiful right-brained daughter, but this is getting really long, so I’ll come back to it another day.

Now I’m smokin cigarettes and strive for purity
And I slip just like the stars into obscurity
Cuz every time I hear that melody
Something breaks inside
And a grapefruit moon,
And one star shining,
S’much too big to hide.

It was an old boyfriend who turned me onto Tom Waits. I’m pretty sure I took a couple of his CDs when I left, ahem. He was really into early 70s Waits and that’s what I loved most for the longest time. I’ve since come to love his weird newer stuff, too (I mean weird in a loving way, I think weird is great). And I completely adore him in Shortcuts, he plays Earl, husband to Lily Tomlin’s Doreen. They are so amazing together in that movie. Here’s a little clip. He’s so sad and pathetic when he cries and says he’s been sleeping outside because he didn’t want to sleep in their bed without her. She’s pulling sticks from his hair.

licorice tattoo turned a gunmetal blue scrawled across the shoulders of a dying town

I think part of the reason I love him so much, other than his just general freaky coolness is that he’s a wordsmith. Some artists are vocalists, or rock stars, or pop stars, or self-absorbed pricks. I think Waits is one of the great American poets. It would be easy to draw a line from the Beats to Waits, and it’s a pretty clear line, but it’s too simple. He’s his own self. And I think there’s something so unpretentious and sort of feral about him, something more real that’s missing from a lot of the Beats. I love his growly voice, alternately sad, then wicked, then tender, when he sings “Martha” or “In Between Love,” he sounds so vulnerable, lonely maybe. Then you watch Fishing with John and oh man is that some funny shit, Tom Waits fishing in Jamaica.

just a nickel’s worth of dreams and every wishbone that they saved lies swindled from them on the way to burma shave

and the whores hike up their skirts and fish for drug-store prophylactics with their mouths cut just like razor blades and their eyes are like stilettos

His newer music, initially, sounded so different to me, but when I listen to the lyrics, the old Tom is there, very much there, but with a sort of creeping soulfulness, more drums and gravel than sax and blue lights. I love the album “Mule Variations,” and my favorite song is this one:

It’s mass hysteria, it’s paranoia, it’s creaky stairs and a neighbor who wears all black and drives a black car with tinted windows and doesn’t mow his grass and doesn’t talk to the Good Neighbors Next Door. I adore it, in all it’s scary dark creepy.

I saw Tom Waits at the 2007 Bridge School Benefit and it was right up there with some of the best live music I’ve ever seen (there have been some great moments at the Bridge School Benefits I’ve been to, the year before we saw Trent Reznor do an acoustic set that was phenomenal). He had a small band, the stage was dark with a single bright white light shining UP at Waits, it was dramatic and was perfect for his rough, soulful singing. I went to that show especially to see Waits, because he’s just one of those musicians that is trapped in my heart, and I knew I would love him. But he was so much more than I could have imagined, he was loud and wild, and beautiful.

There’s a toad in the witch grass
There’s a crow in the corn
Wildflowers grow on a cross by the road
And somewhere a baby is crying
For her mom
As the hills turn from green back to gold.
Why wasn’t God watching?
Why wasn’t God listening?
Why wasn’t God there for Georgia Lee?

I snagged the photos from the Official Tom Waits Photostream. There are some great great shots there, not that I’m biased or anything.

When the weather gets rough
And it’s whiskey in the shade
It’s best to wrap your savior
Up in cellophane
He flows like the big muddy
But that’s ok
Pour him over ice cream
For a nice parfait

Well it’s got to be a chocolate Jesus
Good enough for me

Rebecca found this hanging out on the side of a light post.  It was a really awkward place, I had nowhere to brace myself, which is why I could not get a steady, not-blurry shot of it to save my life.  It really looked to me like the moth was eating the dead spider by its head.  Do moths eat spiders?!