Somewhere I have a Dilbert cartoon where the Pointy-Haired Boss is introducing his Pointy-Haired Son. "He's young," says PHB, "But I'm almost certain he went to college." In the next panel, Dilbert is making conversation with PHS. "So," he asks, "Where did you go to college?"

"Actually, I just hid in the attic for four years," says PHS.

Sometimes I did feel that way. But I'm pretty sure I studied some, too.

Having decided to devote my life to the cause of Truth and Justice, I felt a need to learn more about them, and hence thought I should go to law school. (Naive of me, but I was only sixteen.) It seemed like the best option at the time would be to begin racking up college credits through local institutions and distance learning, and then attend law school after completing a four-year degree, at which time I would be of sufficient years and discretion to leave home long-term, if need be.

However, within a few months I received notice that a new law school was opening: Oak Brook College of Law. It allowed you to do the bulk of the work from home, and rather than requiring a four-year degree, it would take two years' worth of credits and you could get them by taking the CLEP exam. When done, you'd be eligible to take the California bar exam. So, always in a hurry to get on with things, I decided to try this option. It certainly didn't hurt that it was affiliated with the family's homeschool program.

I took the CLEP tests over the next few months. To my astonishment, I did the worst at English. (I guess they didn't care for my writing style in the essay, for I'm quite certain I didn't mess up on proofreading.) I got a nearly perfect score on math, without ever studying college math at all, although I had done some of my high school math from college textbooks, if they happened to be lying around the house.

OBCL set a minimum age of 18, but I decided to apply and see if they'd let me in anyway. They did. So off I went to the orientation week, which was held in Oklahoma City.

People are always confused as to why I attended courses in Oklahoma when it was a California school, so follow me closely here. California allows law schools not accredited by the American Bar Association to operate and take its bar exam, which few other states do. (Most don't want the bother of supervising schools themselves and defer to the ABA.) The ABA doesn't permit distance learning, and looks with disfavor on a strong Christian content to the coursework. So OBCL is a California school. Being affiliated with IBLP, it has access to their facilities at a low cost, and Oklahoma City happened to be the one that got assigned to the school.

Anyway, there I was, at the tender age of sixteen, starting law school. I loved it. Finally, somewhere that my passion for arguing could be unleashed without limit! (Well, sometimes people took my knife away when I started arguing at the dinner table.) Finally, people who really liked to hash things out!

After a week there, I went home to hide in the attic and study for a year. I had the unique challenge of not yet having passed my driver's license (an unpleasant incident on my first try had discouraged me from trying again to soon) so I had to beg rides to the law library off of friends.

I found studying independently through law school quite natural; it was what I had been doing all along. It had become my habit to study things because I wanted to know them, and to approach every new topic with the goal of understanding first, remembering second, and passing the exam a distant third. With that approach, passing was easy.

(I should note that homeschooling does not guarantee this approach to study. DOB started at the same school two years later, at 18. He spent his semesters socializing, working, and volunteering on campaigns, and crammed at the last minute. He still passed, even with famously falling asleep on one exam. Although he didn't go into law, most of his school friends did and are building successful careers despite their questionable study habits. They say your enjoyment of law school is inversely proportional to your likelihood of enjoying the practice of law.)

At the end of the first year, students in unaccredited schools must take the "Baby Bar" exam in California. I took that and passed it. I did, thereafter, finally pass my driver's exam, too. Concurrently with study over the next few years I worked part time for NATHHAN for a time and during my last year got called back to work at EFF on a lawsuit they were then engaged in against the teachers' union.

This was real, live legal work, with depositions and interrogatories and the whole works. It was fun, and good to see the actual processes of law, which is quite a different matter from the substance of law taught in law school. Nonetheless, I realized that the practice of law wasn't really my passion and never had been. I liked things a bit more esoteric; I wanted to talk about the way things ought to be, not muck about with tweaking the way they were.

After I passed the California Bar Exam, I continued working at EFF. I did legal work occasionally, but drifted more and more into public policy research and writing. Eventually I began working on a project that became Crossroads, a curriculum on governing principles for teens. This was the fulfillment of my dreams: to be able to travel around and talk about why government existed and how it was supposed to operate. I spoke to many homeschool groups and private schools and marketed my services at their respective conventions. The course is now available on DVD, if you're interested. (It was recorded last spring, while I was pregnant with D2. For the record.)

On the side, I decided I had an obligation to all future OBCL students in my home state of Washington to try to gain entrance to the Washington Bar. Representing myself, I wrote a series of letters exploiting an obscure portion of the rules of practice to argue that I should be permitted to take the Washington Bar Exam. Much to my surprise (and the surprise of the Bar's general counsel, I'm sure), the Board of Governors granted my request, and I gained admission in Washington as well.

(Although most OBCL students have clustered in California, there is now a sizeable group in Washington who have taken advantage of the rules exception. There are also several engaged in practicing federal law exclusively, and some who have found ways to get into a few other states, sometimes only after taking a couple of years' work at a conventional law school. OBCL still doesn't have the prestige of Stanford, but its California bar passage rate is extremely high, and we're starting to make our mark in the world.)

Sometime between those two bar exams, I joined up with the Oak Brook Debating Society, which conducted online debates via e-mail. My first scheduled opponent dropped out, so the president, known online as "Duke Ronald" and about eighty other screen names, took it upon himself to debate me personally. He won. I was mad. We kept arguing. Eventually we got married to do it more conveniently.

And now you know . . . the rest of the story.

The park down the street also serves as the playground for the local elementary school. Today while we were playing a flock of kindergarteners was also there, learning how to line up and go inside, asking which days they would come back to school, and generally finding out how school operated.

I had to admire the teacher's control already established over the class, which has only been in session for a couple of days. I wish I could have done that well when I taught Sunday School, but my sympathy with the children who were crawling in line whenever the teacher's back was turned was always too strong. I don't suppose they'll do that for much longer.

As far as I can remember, I never asked to nor wanted to go to a regular school. When I was about three, I went for awhile to a sort of co-op preschool run by the mothers of our church, but as it was indistinguishable in location or people involved from Sunday School and AWANA, it never stood out in my mind. I remember playing "The Farmer in the Dell," but that's about it.

When I was in fourth grade, my parents evidently decided I should have the chance to find out for myself if I was interested in attending school. They sent me for a day to the large Christian school my older siblings had attended. My impression of school was that it was mind-bogglingly slow and boring. Most of the time was spent waiting for the next thing to do. Write your name down and wait. Work a paper and wait. Wait. Wait. And sit. I never was much good at sitting still for very long.

Our church had a much smaller and rather less academically-oriented school attached; it was where we took our annual tests. This was a relatively familiar place. We knew quite a few of the children there, and testing day was always a great treat, as the tests (Stanford Achievement) were simple. We whipped through all the tests in the morning and then ran outside to play with the other kids while Mom graded them.

Occasionally, when we were being particularly naughty, refusing to turn in assignments or cutting up incessantly when we were supposed to be studying, Mom would moan in frustration, "You wouldn't get away with that if you went to (the church school)." I always wanted to retort, "Well, if you think it's so great, why not send us there?" I don't think I ever did say that, though.

School did always have some of the glamour of the exotic, though. Whenever I was in schools for an event, I wanted to explore all the passages and test all the doors--but then, I've never outgrown that urge in any large building. I loved books where the children went off to boarding school--what an adventure that would be! But I never seriously would have wanted to go there; if one must have an adventure, one with dragons would be superior.

When I was 15, we decided I would take the summer driving course at the local public school rather than waiting until I was 18 to get my license. I admit, I did not fit in and didn't particularly want to do so. Driving never was easy for me (still isn't), but the coursework was quite simple; yet other students struggled and avoided work even though presumably we all wanted our licenses. I tried hard not to be a show-off, but I still felt resented for getting good grades. And it wasn't as if there was time in class to actually get acquainted with anyone.

All my classroom experiences as a student after that were at the college or post-college level, were relatively short-lived, and were on topics of my own choosing. They were all quite enjoyable content-wise, and I shall write about them later. But I never did learn to enjoy sitting in a classroom all day.

My family continued in the ATI program, but at 13 I came down with a chronic illness that limited my participation in--or at least willingness to cooperate with--formal assignments for the next few years. Instead, I lay on the couch and read.

By this time I was editing my mother's writing and working through my brother's college math books, so my mother didn't worry about what particular things I studied. I was most interested in fiction at first, and I read a great deal of that, mostly good stuff, although I also slogged through a lot of twaddle, especially reviewing books donated to the church library.

We had a set of high school literature (A Beka) books which I read; I have heard these criticized as providing little snippets when one should read whole books. But most of the pieces I remember were poems and short stories, which stood on their own well. It was in those books that I first met Tolstoy, Sayers, and Chesterton, and I owe them a great debt. I don't think I would have picked up War and Peace if I hadn't first read "How Much Land Does a Man Need?"

I also had a brief interest in cartooning, which led me in a completely unexpected direction. For Christmas, my mother ordered me a book on cartooning by Vic Lockman, and along with it a book on economics that he had drawn in cartoons. It seems a rather corny idea (although after reading more books later I discovered it follows the classic Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt very closely). But it got me hooked and charted a new course for the next decade. (I did about three pages in the cartooning book and gave it up.)

So the next order of books brought me Whatever Happened to Penny Candy? and Whatever Happened to Justice? by Richard Maybury. Now I was really intrigued with the ideas of liberty and limited government. I read more. I discovered the Foundation for Economic Education; I discovered the Federalist Papers and Frederic Bastiat. I was madly in love, and I bored my family to tears with babbling on about my new passion.

After a couple of years, my health grew more stable and I grew more ambitious. I began attending local political events. I organized a political club for local teenagers. My mother's best friend ran for office, with my sister as her campaign manager, and I tagged along, doing data entry, supervising bulk mailings, and making endless phone calls (a task I always hated and still do). I got my driver's permit during this time and practiced my driving going door-to-door with the candidate.

After the campaign was over, successfully, my sister did a little work for a small think tank in the state capital; the Evergreen Freedom Foundation. She brought me along with her. After she left to work elsewhere, I stayed on for a few months, living with the executive director, Lynn Harsh, who then was still homeschooling her own son. I remember curling up and listening to her read Hans Brinker to him in the evenings, and then, when she was done, I would pull books off her shelf and read Thomas Sowell into the night.

During the day, when no one had anything useful for me to do, I would read back copies of The Freeman (FEE's newsletter). When I did have something useful to do, I learned about state budgets and finally mastered percents; I learned how to do research and how to get information out of a bureaucrat; I squelched my fear of phone calls and collaborated on one project with the ACLU.

After a few months, though, my mother decided it was time I came back home. I was only sixteen, after all. Plus, I had heard about a new law school opening, the Oak Brook College of Law, which would allow me to study law from home. I had already decided I wanted to study law; this made it possible for me to start sooner. So I came home and began cramming to pass enough CLEP tests to have the college credits to start law school that fall.

Looking back, I do feel like my studies during that time were a bit lopsided. I never did study science. Except for the 18th century in England, France and America, I learned little history. But at least I never got the idea that my studies were done. I never did officially graduate high school. It seemed irrelevant.

I believe it was the summer I was ten that my family first started in the Advanced Training Institute. For those not familiar with it, the curriculum itself uses a unit-study approach based on the Sermon on the Mount. However, that's a bit inadequate as ATI and its parent organization, IBLP, are much, much bigger than a curriculum, more like a cross between a denomination, a parachurch ministry, and an international hotel chain.

Those who are familiar with it are probably expecting me to either launch into a paean to its virtues or a diatribe on its evils, but I am not going to do either. It had its good and bad points, and I certainly owe some very important things in my life to it, chief among them being meeting DOB. Most of the good and bad things I have also encountered elsewhere, in various combinations. Life's like that; no organization is as good as its partisans think, or as bad as its enemies fear; and they are all much less powerful than they look.

One immediate benefit was that my college-graduate sister came home to study with us, which was great fun and a great challenge to me. I had never really had the chance to get to know her before, as she was nearly ten years my senior and up until that point had not been home schooled. It was always my goal to find some word or corner of knowledge that she didn't already know. This was very difficult when I was ten. (It became much easier once I went to law school.) My best friend and I finally stumbled on "ecchymosis," which did indeed stump her.

The next summer it also prompted all of us except the two youngest to travel back east for one of the annual conferences; this was my first chance to see the Northeast and Washington, D.C. and it was a wonderful and memorable trip, even though it was conducted on the budget principle that we could either eat at a restaurant or sleep in a motel on any given day, but not both. I loved Plymouth Plantation and the Smithsonian especially. After awhile, though, I was enthralled by any exhibit that was air conditioned.

I enjoyed being able to study all together; even though we were learning at different levels, having the same topics to study helped tie us together as a family. On the other hand, in retrospect, I think for the age I was, I would have learned more studying science and history in a sequential manner. Unit studies were great at showing the interconnectedness of all knowledge, but not so useful at showing the internal logic of each subject. I think there's a time and place for both. Plus, it seemed like we kept hitting on some particular topics over and over, while others never got covered.

The ATI curriculum places the Bible as the central book of study. With this, I fully agree. However, I don't think one has to force the connection. Not every fact from every subject has to be studied by means of analyzing the Biblical principles and analogies involved. They may be there; they probably are there. But it gets tedious and ultimately trivializes the Bible to insist that they must be found and marked down or no further will we go.

I also question the approach to false ideas and philosophies, though I reserve the right to change my mind on this. I don't think it's true that we can just study the truth and then we can just reject evil when we see it. For one thing, rejecting evil is not enough: we also need to refute it, and that requires some knowledge of it.

For another thing, we cannot simply assume that we have the Truth. Our impressions and concepts are formed by influences we cannot see or trace: comments, actions, and attitudes of those around us. Such things influence even how we read Scripture. Some careful learning of various philosophies and approaches helps us challenge our own assumptions; we may discover that an idea we thought we pulled straight out of the Bible really came from quite secular presuppositions we imposed on the Bible.

On the other hand, I do agree that we cannot blindly trust our own reason to take us wherever it will, because it could take us almost anywhere. So I do understand the concern. But I want my children, someday, to be able to take strong meat because they have exercised their senses to discern good and evil.

I should clarify that my parents were not especially restrictive or disapproving about what I studied, once they knew I could think critically about what I read. Indeed, they often asked me to preview or critique things for them. With the family penchant for lively debate, there was plenty of chance to develop critical thinking skills. But it didn't come from our curriculum.

One thing that was on the whole good, however, was the way ATI encouraged looking for alternatives to mindlessly attending college. This emphasis can be overdone, but it resulted in various young people creating various alternative programs to get training much cheaper and at much less personal cost. One of those programs was the Oak Brook College of Law, about which more later.

My father is an engineer; my mother was an artist. Despite the suggestion of an early boss, I do not need therapy. However, the math genes seem to have been wired backwards in me, and I have always enjoyed the beauty and poetry of mathematics without being particularly good or patient at the nitty-gritty.

Of my early mathematical adventures, I remember little before the age of nine or ten. At that time, my father was teaching a class in Boolean Algebra at the local community college. (Boolean Algebra is what is used with binary code and is the basis for computer systems. You might recognize its more familiar form in database search terms: "Mother AND Hubbard" "Dog NOT bone.") I sat on his lap while he prepared his lessons and must have understood at least a little, for I can still remember it. While I never pursued a career in computer science, it did help me when I got to law school and had to learn to do Lexis searches. (That's the LEXIS-NEXIS database, not the Lexus car, which is usually out of the budget for a while after graduation.)

From sitting in my father's lap while he helped my older siblings, and from reading books I hadn't reached yet, I acquired a smattering of regular algebra by this point, as well. So when I visited the homeschooling convention that year, I was intrigued to find a fellow selling a product that used manipulatives to communicate algebraic ideas. He, in turn, was quite pleased to have a sample student to demonstrate his wares to passers-by. I remained at his booth much of the day, showing the amazing powers of his system of teaching algebra to third-graders. (Not that my understanding demonstrated much, since the equations he used I could already do.) I don't remember if I sold any for him, other than to my mother. When I left, he thanked me by giving me a candy bar, which I bit into with glee, as candy was a rare commodity at our house, only to spit it out in disgust when I tasted carob. It was one of those crushing disappointments of childhood. I've never been willing to try carob since.

I don't recall that we used his manipulatives very much, though. We played with Cuisenaire rods occasionally, but more for the fun of the cool little blocks than for their mathematical properties. Still, I think they helped develop a feel for things.

On the other hand, we constantly were dipping into our favorite math puzzle books, such as the Brown Paper School Books, Math for Smarty Pants and the I Hate Mathematics Book. A whole course that made a great impression on me about this time was A Mathematical Mystery Tour. I loved that book. The Fibonacci numbers and I have been great friends ever since, and I still love a good book of mathematical puzzles or ideas.

One course that made a very negative impression on me about then was Saxon Algebra 1/2. It may brand me a homeschooling heretic, but I hated Saxon math. Truly. Madly. Deeply. I wouldn't say that I will forbid my children from studying Saxon, for I have heard there are some learning styles to which it does appeal, but I certainly would never suggest it. It drained all the poetry and beauty out of math and beat the remaining skeleton into fine powder on the ground. Ugh.

Thinking back, even Saxon might not have been so dreadfully bad if I had simply been permitted to skip problems I already knew how to do. Writing numbers out was the exercise I hated most; it hardly took a year's worth of practice to master and the numbers were always so unreasonably long. The only place I have ever needed to write out numbers was on checks, and as I have never been employed by Publisher's Clearinghouse, I've never found it necessary to write out such large numbers.

Fortunately my love of mathematics was already well enough established that I blamed the problem on the course and not the subject; and even more fortunately my parents were wise enough to help me find something else to try the next year. I used my brother's old public school textbook for Algebra I, not scintillating but much less painful.

I was in such a hurry to get on to the higher mathematics that I'm afraid I skipped over getting a thorough understanding of fractions, decimals and percents. However, I did eventually pick it up, partly from their interaction with algebra, partly from getting a job that involved analyzing statistics, and partly from teaching them to my youngest brother. I'm sure I'll learn them even better as I teach my children.

After a few years of correspondence courses, Mom realized she could select various texts for us just as well as anyone else could and started buying things on her own. This meant trips to the curriculum fair every year. I was permitted to accompany her and even started helping to choose curriculum; this was always a great thrill.

I hated writing when I was a child. I would do everything in my power to avoid it, and if I could not avoid it, I would make sure to write something I didn't like so that I wouldn't care if it was critiqued.

Worst of all were the programs where one had to follow various rules to construct a paragraph: "Begin at least one sentence with an 'ly' word." "Add three vivid adjectives." "Avoid using these words." "Begin one sentence with a prepositional phrase." The results were equally painful to read or write.

The least unpleasant and most productive writing assignments in the early years were simple descriptions and narrations of real things. Although I kicked myself for the idea many times, a family newsletter that I started provided far better practice in writing than anything else we did in those days. Known as the Funny Farm Moooos (that was the name of our farm), it contained various only-slightly exaggerated accounts of our events for the amusement of distant relations. It remained in circulation for about fifteen years, although in later years it was only issued at Christmas.

Grammar workbooks (we mostly used A Beka) were pretty much a waste of time. What little information they conveyed didn't take multiple years of repetition to learn.

Somewhere about 10 or 11 I used a workbook called The Phenomenon of Language, which taught grammar and linguistics from the perspective of Latin. Perhaps it was just that I was getting to a more analytical age, perhaps it was the quirky drawings, perhaps it was the coolness of studying Latin, but that was my all-time favorite course.

I enjoyed the A Reason for Writing penmanship books (at least the way they were 20 years ago; I haven't seen the newer editions), mostly because the sentences, being Bible verses, were not as unspeakably trite as the standard handwriting books; also because of the cool final product pages we got to make at the end of the week. I will confess, however, that my handwriting, though legible, is far from elegant unless I am making a fancy card. It just never seemed important.

Our foreign language experience was highly eclectic. We started out with Spanish from when I was five to when I was eight or nine, because Mom had a friend from Colombia. Classes at Mrs. Johannsen's (her husband was not Colombian) house were one of the highlights of the week. She also taught us, and several other homeschooled youngsters, art. And they had a lovely tire swing.

Then the Johannsens moved to Florida, so we were left to find someone new. Eventually we discovered a lady at our church was an Italian raised in French-speaking Africa. We started with French, which I believe was the language of Mom's school days, but then had a  brief flirtation with Italian when my eldest brother married an Italian woman. They lived in Italy, though, so we had little occasion to speak it and went back, finally, to the more familiar Spanish with various tapes and CDs.

As I got older, there was the aforementioned Latin program, plus some standard Latin texts that I started but didn't get very far in. Due to our other curriculum choices, we studied the Greek alphabet and some rudimentary New Testament Greek.

In my mid-teens, a friend of mine found out about some Hebrew classes offered by a local Messianic synagogue. These were fantastic; the teacher mixed basic Hebrew instruction with ramblings on every theological and philosophical matter under the sun. I never got past the first half of the book, but I did learn the alphabet and basic grammar. And I would gladly go back to visit any chance I got.

This same friend and I tackled a video course in elementary Greek later on, but didn't finish it.

So, in sum, I have studied six different languages, and can't read, write, or speak any of them. I think I could pick up Spanish fairly quickly if I had the chance to use it. I at least know enough of the Biblical languages to use the standard reference works. I think human language is fascinating and adore reading things about linguistics.

I rather wish I had just stuck to one thing and learned it. But there's always time to try again.

Nothing much got done on a typical day. But a great deal can get done when you keep doing nothing much for ten years.

We were always supposed to get up early, before Dad left for work. We did this with little enthusiasm, because we had probably stayed up too late the night before. We read the Bible sleepily.

Mom kissed Dad goodbye in the doorway, letting in the cold air on our bare toes as we ate breakfast. After we ate, my brother was to take out the compost and garbages while I did the dishes. For many years we were supposed to then do a quick cleanup of the main rooms of the house, but this was seldom achieved.

More likely we would try to sneak off and read something before the day began--at eight, or whenever Mom made it to the school table. After our opening and the distribution of assignments, and some lamenting over how far behind we were, she would usually take advantage of her first opportunity to go upstairs and get dressed.

We would take advantage of the opportunity to do anything BUT our assignments until we heard her footstep on the creaking stairs, whereupon we would return to our places and pretend like we had been working away the whole time.

The phone would ring and Mom would try to keep us working with snapping fingers at us. After the phone call ended, someone's question would start us down a rabbit trail. Then Mom would fall asleep, which she did several times a day (she had narcolepsy), and we would ask her questions for the amusement value of hearing her talking in her sleep. We were not very kind to our mother, but sometimes we picked her flowers.

After lunch was the best part of the day. Mom read out loud for awhile, and then almost always fell asleep again. For safety reasons, we weren't allowed outside while she was asleep, so this was prime time to get out the legos, the blocks, or go up far, far away into the attic and read--legally, at last.

Once mom woke up we could go outside and play, unless she was feeling unusally moved to make sure we finished a day's worth of work. Even if the weather was too nasty for outside play, we could play on the porch or in the barn if we were all really getting on each other's nerves. Only on rare and painful occasions did schoolwork have to be done in the late afternoon or evening.

Somewhere in there we were supposed to practice the piano. We helped fix supper and clean it up. We read some more. Oddly enough, even though this year's textbooks where always shunned, I often thought those of future years were great fun to read. They had more to say--and I didn't have to answer those stupid questions at the end of the page.

We were always behind the schedule. The laundry room was always piled high with laundry, which we had to vault to get to the bathroom. We didn't always obey. Maybe not even usually. But we stayed out of major trouble, we learned in spite of it all, and we had fun.

As Dad used to say to Mom, "Well, even if you didn't teach them anything today, it was better than them going to public school and learning a lot of stuff that wasn't true."

Homeschooling was, initially, something my parents were trying as a low-cost alternative to private school. So we began in a very schoolish manner. We signed up for Christian Liberty Academy and got a big box full of workbooks. At some point in my early years my parents had added a room on the south of the house, and it was fitted up with blackboards, alphabet cards, a flag, and desks or tables (the furniture arrangement varied over the years).

We followed the same schedule as other schools. We opened each day with a pledge to the flag and the Bible, with a prayer and a hymn. Mom tried to see to it that we worked through the workbooks as instructed. We even had a school name for official correspondence, though I always felt rather silly about it and now can't even remember what it was.

I have heard workbooks work well for some people. But none of us were well adapted to them. My older brother, not too impressed with the social circle provided by his younger siblings, spent most of the year working with our grandfather, building my great-aunt's house. (Rather a good plan for a 13 year old boy anyway, I would think.)

The workbooks didn't terrorize me, but they certainly bored me. I can still remember a few of them, but none from the early years come back with any fondness. The history books were too thin and barren of real stories; the math books were tedious; the phonics and language books tended to be superfluous.

As I recall, my younger brother got along with them the least well. He was only four, after all, and definitely not academically inclined. He never liked school work, and he still doesn't. (He did, however, become a good reader and though he never writes for entertainment, I have never changed the oil in my own car, while he rebuilt his first engine at 13. Talents differ.)

Fortunately my mother was no good at teaching from workbooks or following a set schedule for more than a couple of weeks. We would start out with grand intentions and then everything would fall apart after a few days. What she was good with was coming up with huge and intriguing projects, especially in art and science. I still remember the fantastic murals we would make for Christmas and Easter, and the models of molecules made of spray-painted styrofoam balls.

Several years she supported us in designing entries for the state Science Fair, and we always made a good showing. In second grade my next younger brother carried away all the honors with a project on how different-colored lenses affected the sight of normal and color-blind people. I never got quite that successful, but I learned a great deal of use to me in later life from my first grade project on weather and my fourth-grade project on statistical manipulation. Especially the latter one. I also learned a lot about layout from these projects, which was itself a very useful skill to have.

There were always the books. While other mothers apparently were devising ways to bribe their children to read, my mother was striving, with tears and prayers, to get us to stop reading long enough to finish our chores. She never quite succeeded. Not that she was entirely free from guilt in this matter, either. The best part of school was if she had decided to read out loud to us. Once she got going, we did everything in our power to keep her going. We would put the baby down for its nap, bring glass after glass of water, even voluntarily fold laundry, if only she would "Read on!"

In fact, it was only through real books that she finally found a way to get us to finish our workbooks. Near the end of the school year, she bought a shelf full of brand new children's fiction and set it on the top shelf. For every workbook we brought to her completed, we were allowed to choose a book from the shelf. With that incentive, I could finish half a year's history in two days. And I did.

For the full series, click on The Things I Remember.

There's still a ways to go before the first day we sat down in our home "school room" with a shiny new pile of textbooks and a plastic box full of new school supplies.

Long before I was school aged, it seemed like everybody wanted to teach me something. My oldest brother taught me the basic addition facts. My sister's friend sat down one day at our old upright piano and taught me "First March" from the piano books. I sat on my dad's lap and watched him coach the older kids with their algebra. My next older brother may have done more than any of them by building 3D mazes in the hay that had to be solved blind and crawling.

One magical day when I was four, I remember looking at the first page of Go, Dogs, Go and seeing the connection between the letters I saw and the sounds I heard. After that moment, I don't remember ever wanting to read a book and not being able to do so.

I'm not sure exactly what led up to that moment. Lots of people read me lots of books. I seem to recall that Mom had a scrapbook made of a comic strip that introduced the letters and their sounds: for "h," for instance, there was a fellow sitting in an h-shaped chair and puffing from running, "h-h-h." We had probably already gone through that. And that was that. A few years ago I came across a letter I wrote to my grandmother shortly after I turned five, so apparently I had learned to write by that time, too.

Meanwhile, my parents were reconsidering their educational options. At the time they had at least two children in a private Christian school some forty minutes away. It must have been a significant burden both logistically and financially. Adding me to the equation would have further complicated things.

And so, through whatever mysterious means parents use to make decisions (I'm still trying to figure it out), they decided that my oldest sister would switch to the local public high school, my eighth grade brother would come home, and they would try homeschooling him, me, and for convenience my next younger brother, who had just turned four. Just for a year, to see how things turned out.

Thus we began.

For the whole series, click on The Things I Remember.

Before there was school, there were people. My mom and dad, my older brothers and sister (entering their teens by the time I could remember them), my next younger brother, the babies, my grandparents, my aunts and great-aunts. Lots of people. Every one of them had more of an impact on my education as anything I might have studied.

The people in my family did things. They built houses and sheds. They planted gardens. They canned food. They ran a business selling honey and bee supplies out of a converted garage and a ramshackle old chicken house out back, whose air was heavy with the scent of honeycomb and Grandpa's cigarettes. My dad and brothers spent Saturdays laboring over a fleet of dilapidated cars. All the women sewed for one reason or another. Even my chair-bound grandmother knitted and played endless games of Scrabble and cribbage with anyone who would sit down.

We had a TV, but watching it was something you did after dark on a Saturday night. Day was for doing things. Children were by no means excluded. You were expected to be there, helping in whatever capacity someone could figure out for you to do. And when you managed to escape from work, there were bikes to ride and hay forts to explore and mud to dig in, and books . . . but I'll get to those in a minute.

The people in my family talked. They told family stories. They endured the same collection of riddles as each new child discovered it. Every family gathering was an excuse for a heated, though never unfriendly, discussion--usually on one of those two forbidden topics, religion and politics. Children were quite welcome to participate, and their questions were answered--yes, even when my 7-year-old brother asked my maiden great-aunts what "rape" meant. (They tried to distract him, via etymological history, into a discussion of corporate crime.)

Disagreeing with grown-ups was not only permitted, it was deliberately taught. I have seen my dad do it with every new crop of toddlers. 

"How old are you?" he asks.

"Three!" says the tot proudly, holding up three fingers.

"Oh, you're three, are you?" says Dad, holding up two fingers.

The child stops, the wheels turning in his mind. Something is wrong here. He reasserts the third finger. "That's not three--this is three!"

Supposing their attention turned to reading a story--something that also happened quite a lot. Dad would pick up the book:

"Read, read, read."

"No, read the story."

"Oh, ok. One day George went out . . . "

"There's no George in this book!"

"No George? Are you sure?"

"No George!"

"What good is a book without George?"

Before there was school, there were books. Shelves upon shelves of books. Books in a little hidey hole behind the couch. Books to the ceiling in the attic, far from Mom's wandering eye should she happen upon a chore that needed to be done. We wore second-hand clothes and owned every piece of good hard-to-find children's fiction Mom could get her hands on.

The library was still quite a distance when I was little. Taking a trip there was the one thing we coveted most. No one needed a trip to the amusement park, when there was a hay swing and a tractor and a swimming pool to enjoy. But more books . . . now there was a  trip worth taking.

Before there was school, there was time and space to think and imagine things and run and wrestle. There was a big box of scrap paper and a can of half-broken crayons. There was a pile of games that was always a mess. There were babies to play with and old people who needed errands run. There were the fields and the cows and the woods and the creek always running, running, down to the bay and the Sound and the great ocean beyond.

For the whole series, click on The Things I Remember. 

Memories of Homeschooling, Introduction

Tests end. Books go back on the shelf. Papers slide into boxes and gather dust in a dark corner of the attic. What remains is only what became part of the student.

In the last few months, as we try to scale down our possessions into a smaller location, I've thrown out many old papers and notes. I've emptied old notebooks to make room for new things. A few things I will never throw away. A few more things I cannot.

This will be a series of posts--possibly a long series, the more I think about it, the more it grows--in which I try to assess what is left of my education now that my schooling is done. What ideas, what skills, what lessons from the thousands of days of homeschooling are still a part of me?

In this series, I will ponder what my parents did right and what they did wrong; what I can duplicate, what I can't but wish I could, and what I want to avoid. I will ramble shamelessly.

Perhaps some parents wondering now what their children will remember might find it helpful. At the least, when my own children can someday read it they may perhaps understand the way I did things.