This year I didn’t go through my usual cycle of Spring = Daydream of Homeschool; Fall = Boot Them Out Now. We had a great summer that was a little crazy with our basement finishing project, and we’re still sucking the marrow out of the warm days and cool evenings. We’re on a hiking-to-waterfalls kick (Stewart Cascades and Battle Creek Falls recently; next up Grotto Falls and Diamond Fork) and finally eating dinner outside.

Avery is at the same charter school as Callie this year and though she still misses her old school, she likes her (male, laid-back) teacher and there’s even a girl from her fourth grade class. I asked if they were friends last year and Avery said, “Well I know her and I don’t hate her.” Here at the smaller school, away from established friend groups, they have progressed to eating lunch together. Could friendship bracelets be far behind?

Avery tried out for the debate team and though it improved my daily prayer habit (tryouts in fifth grade??) it’s an extracurricular activity I can really endorse. There should be no problem ensuring she gets plenty of practice. She’s also swimming and reading too much and I had to take her bra shopping (for fifth grade??) which reminded me of my own mortality and also how much I hate shopping for intimate apparel.

The only fruit fly in our basil is math. You might remember that we worked through half of a Saxon math book last summer after she got a C in third grade. Not that a C is so terrible (though it is, let’s be honest, I got one my sophomore year at BYU so I know), but her attitude is horrible. This summer I took her to a week-long math camp at UVU, after which I got to hear the words “love” and “math” in the same sentence, though the emphasis may have been on the word “camp.”(Seriously, it was their first year doing it and at $45 for 15 hours of a fun, interactive introduction to everything from game theory to cryptography, i.e. A STEAL, I highly recommend.)

Back in the real world Avery enjoys saying she hates math and watching my heart shrivel. Because a) I love math and b) I refuse to raise girls who hate math. I would rather they pierced their noses and tramp-stamped their lower backs than hate math. (Maybe a temporary tattoo on the left forearm.)

Homework is a nightmare. She dawdles, she doodles, she daydreams. We cajole, I yell, Tom commiserates and wanders into bypaths of How This Will Apply When You’re in Algebra. She tested into the 6/5 math group which is right where she should be, and the math groups themselves are small (11-12 kids) and taught by every adult, including the director, at the school first thing every day.

After school she asks me what 6 times 4 is and I want to take the knife I’m cutting up peaches with for their after-school snack and turn it on myself. (I don’t mean to trivialize the mental illness that leads people to cut themselves, but sometimes I honestly think it would be a relief to pull out my eyelashes one by one rather than remind her that 6 times 4 is 24 and always has been, always will be, till the moon turns red and the stars fall from the sky.)

Some days I sit next to her and get frustrated-er and frustrated-er. Some days I don’t say a word and that seems fine: it’s her homework, she’s old enough to be responsible and take the consequences or reap the rewards, but then it’s 9:30 at night and her head droops limply over the heavy book and I even though I know she’ll perk up long enough to read once she’s in bed I just want her to get some sleep.

So I emailed her teacher and asked if I could come watch the math lesson. It seems crazy to have an hour dedicated to math and then have an hour or two of drawn out, make-you-stabby assignment-doing at home. He talked to her math teacher and this morning I went in. They took a test yesterday and Avery was the fourth person to hand it in and she got a 95. She got 100% on the multiplication fact test (I didn’t check to see if 6 times 4 was one of them; I’m assuming not since the nurse didn’t call to report a case of hives, bubonic plague, and dysentery on Wednesday). Avery is fine in class, Mrs. B. said.

Of course she is.

So what do I do then? Mrs. B. said, “Let’s talk to the director, she’s really good about this kind of thing.” We walked over to the director’s office and when Mrs. B. introduced me it took her just a second to say, “You’re here about math right? Though Avery was the fourth done on the test yesterday.” I explained the whole thing and said I was quite open to suggestions. The director said she’d be happy for Avery to do her homework at the school one afternoon. She can sit in Mrs. B’s room and ask her any questions but basically do it on her own. I’m to come after half an hour and then the four of us will sit down and show her the test scores and look over her homework and tell her that since it’s clear she can do it, from now on it’s her responsibility, that it’s up to her whether she does it and gets the points for it or not.

This is my kind of intervention. After 3:30 pm this afternoon in the Year of our Lord 2011, I will not mention the words “math homework” ever again. Amen.

Only, she doesn’t want to. She loves her own school, which is already the fourth elementary school she has attended (because of our moves), and a fine school, as schools goes. A couple weeks ago, as I filled out time requests for next year at the regular school (morning kindergarten for Susan, B Track (an hour later than A Track and more aligned with the kindergarten schedule) for Sally, she begged me to let her stay on A Track, which starts at 8 and gets out at 2:15. It’s a nice schedule since she is so self-sufficient about making her lunch and pouring her cereal if I’m not up in time to make something warm. We both like how early she gets home in the afternoon. But I told her I can’t be coordinating that many different schedules and carpools, especially with the new baby coming.

Then I told her, if she hates being at school so late in the day, we could try a half-day, something allowed in Utah by law, though I’ve never seen anyone do it. Sally doesn’t know anyone who does that, either, so she said it must not really exist. I told her she could homeschool for awhile if she’d like to try that, and she said no one does that either, so she can’t, and besides, how would she ever learn what she needs to know if she doesn’t go to school?

This was the week before the third grade standardized testing, and I tried to counter the propaganda from her teacher by telling her that those tests are measures of how good the teachers are at getting you to memorize certain things that a person far away thinks you should know, and not indicators of how smart you are or what you know or what you’re interested in. (Though they’re both, maybe; I am not against standardized testing, per se, mostly because it was always good to me.)

I even suggested that we see if she could go at the B Track time (when Susan’s kindergarten starts) and then come home at A Track time (which would shave 75 minutes off her school day). And she said, but that’s when we read! I have to go then, otherwise I’ll never get to read.

This from the child who won’t put her book down long enough to eat, except at dinner time, when she’s required to conversate.

I really didn’t know what to say. I thought when we got rid of our TV months ago that we’d have all this extra time (the kids watch approximately one movie a week now, on Friday or Saturday night), but instead, all that time is filled with playing and reading and more playing. There’s no extra time, and I can’t imagine how they ever had time for TV before. (I still have time for TV on hulu, because somehow adult time and kid time are different. Or because I’m in denial/stupid. Whichever.)

But mostly I wanted to tell her that every word coming out of her mouth made me more and more convinced that homeschooling (if only for a few years) would be the best possible thing for her, because here she is, nine years old, and completely brainwashed that if she doesn’t go where she’s “supposed to” and do what she’s told to do at the “right” time by the “right” authority figure in the “right” setting, she won’t be able to learn.

Damn and Hell and five other swear words.

Part of this is semantics. Sally cooks with me and gardens with me and writes stories for her sisters and builds lego towns and roller skates with the neighbor kids and steps in to help Spot change her pants when I’ve lost all patience because the pants she’s wearing are not too big for her and we’re late for the dentist already so JUST GET IN THE CAR.

In April we stayed at my parent’s house for the weekend and Sally spent two days making felt dolls and clothes with fabric, markers, lace, ribbon, and a hot glue gun. When she got tired of dressing dolls for everyone in the family, she got into the real fabric scraps and made pinafores for Susan and Spot and a pieced shirt and skirt outfit for herself. She didn’t tell me until later about the blisters she’d gotten from the hot glue because she didn’t want me to make her stop.

Sewing is a big mystery to me, and the idea of just cutting some fabric and making something without a pattern baffles me at the same time that it tells me there’s hope for Sally. Which is why I’ll stop pressing the merits of the charter school for now, and drop the matter of tracks at the other school for now, and instead make plans to teach her a course of math this summer. Because it’s her least favorite subject and I want to change that, and because I want to show her that our kitchen table is actually a great place to learn.

I hate when my kids feel bad about themselves (except at the end of a long day when Sally clobbers Susan’s feelings ten minutes before dad walks in from work and I stare at her blankly, thinking: what is wrong with you?).

But in the general swim, kids feeling bad about themselves is just the worst. Time enough for that in middle school, when best friend cliques rally, breaking off a little chunk here and a little chunk there of everything you liked about yourself.

Yesterday Sally came home with her second trimester report card. Three of her grades were great, and then her eyes fell on her math grade. And kept falling. It was a “C”. Wasn’t quite what I was expecting either, after her B+ at parent-teacher conferences a couple weeks ago.

So now I need a good 3rd-4th grade math book (any recommendations? I’ll look on some homeschooler sites) for us to work through this summer. Because it’s important to me that my kids do well in school, that they understand and learn and excel and feel confident. But even more –

Sally sat on the couch a couple hours later, her report card lying next to her, and sang a song about how she isn’t good at math and math is too hard for her, and if I told you that didn’t break my heart a little (or a lot) –

I’d be lying.

Perhaps that is just the rhythm of childhood. Vacation — Christmas break, summer vacation, a trip in the middle of the year — is exciting, special, different. School is everyday, normal, routine, boring at times by definition.

But as I’ve been thinking about homeschooling, I wonder if it is more than that. Rixa commented on my initial homeschooling post that she would love a charter school with a half-day program. The day I read her comment there were two articles in the New York Times in intriguing juxtaposition. The first was about Forest Kindergarten, where kids 3 1/2 to 6 years old spend three hours a day outside in a 325-acre nature reserve, every day, regardless of weather (in New York State, where the weather is a factor). They explore and play, with no formal academic curriculum until first grade. I assume (hope) that even in the upper grades, outdoor exploration/play is emphasized.

The other article was a story of parents with children in Chicago’s public elementary schools trying to raise money to add an hour to the school day, which is currently 5 hours and 8 minutes long. “By comparison, students in New York City go for 6 hours 30 minutes. In Boston, they spend 6 hours in class, and in Los Angeles, most students are there 5 hours 19 minutes.”

I have long had an unarticulated feeling that I wish Sally could go to school, but just not so long every day. She’s at a school with early and late tracks, so her day is 8-2:15, while half of the kids go 9:15-3:30.  (That’s a 6 hour, 15 minute day). I think this schedule might be okay if three hours of it were spent outside, but I think her play time (and not on a nature preserve, but rather a limited schoolyard, is much less than an hour).

The parents (and educators quoted in the article) in the Chicago area are convinced that a longer school day, week, and year is the answer to making their children competitive. Chicago-area charter and contract schools are in session up to two hours longer than the regular schools (that would be over 7 hours in school each day!).

Interestingly, the parents in both articles are relatively well-off (as the Waldorf Schools are private, and one presumes, pricey, and in the Chicago area parents are wanting to spend more money in addition to their property taxes, etc). Often when there is talk of extending the school day, including moving from half-day to full-day kindergarten, and to adding pre-kindergarten, etc, legislators and advocates point out that households with two parents working need the extended child-care that a longer day would provide.

The economic and other logistics of homeschooling are fascinating to me. Homeschooling requires that a family be well-enough off to have a full-time parent, and/or modest enough in their wants and needs to accept the priority of homeschooling over the desire/need for a second income and/or that parent’s willingness to sacrifice temporarily some of their own ambitions.

When I think of Sally going to a half-day of formal education, or the wish to shorten her school day by even an hour (as she could if she attended the middle of the day and neither early or late track), and even when I am vehemently against homework, it is all in the service of providing her with more time in the day to play, preferably outside. This is even more urgent in the winter months, when it gets dark at 5 pm, and yet my three kids are outside in their snow clothes, long past the time when the sun’s rays provided meager warmth.

This again could be simply the rhythm of life in a four-season climate. Summers are for spending outdoors, for gardening, biking, jumping on the trampoline, swimming, running through the sprinklers, and winters are for quietly reading by the fire (or . . . doing homework or sitting in class).

But given what we know about dirt being good for kids, and active play improving sleep, and finally — how excited my kids are by the prospect of a week and a half off to sled, cook with mom, build snowmen and snow forts, and swim in the indoor pool with the big bucket and water slides, I am worried it will be impossibly hard to sentence Sally back to a desk come January.