Made by Hand (26 page)

I asked Sarina where she was getting stuck, and she wasn’t able to tell me. She couldn’t even get started. She was fighting back tears; this was a problem she felt she
should
know, because her class had been studying these types of word problems. As calmly as I could, I read the problem to her. Then I said, “After you read the question, you need to ask yourself what the missing information is, what the given information is, and how you can figure out the missing information from the given information. OK, what is the missing information?”

She didn’t have an answer. I couldn’t believe that her school hadn’t prepared her for answering a question like this. But I kept my anger in check and led her along with questions and suggestions, letting her try, haltingly and with little real comprehension, to go through the steps needed to solve the problem.

I knew it would be pointless to have her take the rest of the test on her own, so I stayed at her side and we worked on the next three questions together. It took an hour. She had a great deal of trouble with each question, and there were points where she’d get panicky. I was able to calm her down every time she got emotional. I’m not sure how much she learned about math in that first lesson, but I was sure she now had a better idea of how to approach a test question.

Later that day, when I thought about the time we’d spent together, I realized how much I had enjoyed it. It was not at all boring to tutor her; in fact, it was tremendously interesting. I liked the challenge of teaching my child. What could be more natural than that? It felt right. Forrest Mims was onto something, mentoring his kids with science-fair projects. For most of Sarina’s life, we’d farmed out the job of educating her. I’d never paid much attention to what she was learning, because I believed that paying someone else to take care of her education meant I didn’t have to worry about it. Not only was I wrong; I was also missing out on a rewarding way to spend time with my daughter.

We increased our tutoring sessions to twenty minutes daily. Working together on problems, we connected on a deep level. I enjoyed helping her develop her math skills, and she enjoyed showing me that she was learning. As the days went by I could see her gaining confidence. Sarina was able to distill the essence of the problems and come up with methodical ways to solve them. She was making real progress.

It struck me that the last six years had been a missed opportunity. I could have been helping to teach Sarina for all these years, but I’d avoided it because I didn’t think it would be interesting or useful. I started teaching math to my five-year-old, Jane, who had just entered kindergarten. Instead of telling her a bedtime story, I started giving her math problems. (“If you have six cherries and you want to share them with two of your friends so you all have the same number of cherries, how many cherries should you give to each friend?”) She loved these questions, and ever since I started, she has asked for math problems every night and even in the day. I also bought a bunch of little plastic cubes to teach the powers of ten and percentages, and she has gotten a good grasp of both concepts.

Tutoring my daughters reminded me of an e-mail exchange I had a number of years ago with my friend Andrew Anker. I met Andrew in 1993 when he came to work at
Wired,
where I was an editor. He wrote the business plan for
HotWired,
the magazine’s Web site, and became its CEO when it launched in April 1994. Andrew was a few years younger than me, with a sleepy expression, a couple of days’ beard growth, and a permanent case of bed head. Despite his appearance, he talked quickly and energetically, and once he got going on a subject, his face would light up. I was impressed by his intelligence and knowledge of the Web, which was barely in its infancy in 1993. Andrew was on top of every new development that came along and knew how to incorporate the good ones into
HotWired
in a way that felt absolutely right.

When we both left
Wired
in the late nineties, we stayed in touch through occasional e-mails. Around 2001, we got onto the topic of our kids and their education. His kids were older than mine, so I asked him what kind of school he was sending them to.

“They don’t go to school,” he replied.

“Do you homeschool them? ” I asked.

“No,” he wrote. “We let them teach themselves.”

I thought this was a little nutty, and I wrote it off as a quirk of an odd but brilliant person. But after having spent a little time teaching my own kids, I started wondering how Andrew had fared with his own, much more extreme home education project. I gave him and his wife, Renee, a call.

Today, the Ankers’ three kids are teenagers. The three have never attended a school, public or private. When Zach, the oldest, was still a baby, Andrew said that he and Renee were concerned with the way that schools were becoming “increasingly ugly, regimented places.” The Columbine massacre was in the news at the time, and schools were installing metal detectors and hiring security guards. More and more emphasis was being placed on standardization. Angry parents were demanding to know why their children’s test scores were dropping, and administrators were reacting by increasing homework loads and focusing on highly structured teaching with an emphasis on passing standardized tests, instead of teaching them skills that would help them lead rewarding, responsible lives.

The Ankers wanted no part of that world and began looking for alternatives. It just so happened that the San Francisco Bay Area, where they live, is a hotspot for so-called unschoolers. Andrew says unschooling is popular in the area because it’s full of high-tech entrepreneurs—driven, bright people who are creating online companies that develop and use cutting-edge technologies no school has taught because no school can keep up with the pace of the innovation. People like Andrew. When he was leading the team that started
HotWired
in 1993, there were no classes on how to build a commercial Web site. “We built it
because
we were untrained,” he said. “I am at my most creative when I do something I have no experience with.”

“Why don’t you want to at least homeschool them?” I asked.

“Homeschools are usually for religious parents who want to insulate their kids from secular teaching,” Andrew explained. “It’s the same as school but at home. Unschoolers don’t believe in schools. Most of what you learn in school is how to sit behind a desk and take homework.”

“Is it legal?” I asked.

“Apparently, it’s not really
illegal,
” he said, “but states and counties aren’t too happy about it.” Andrew and his wife make an attempt to stay on the right side of the law by submitting an R4 form to the state of California each year, declaring their house to be a school. Renee is the headmaster, and Andrew is the assistant headmaster.

The Ankers are not alone. Unschooling is a movement based on the ideas developed by an educational reformer named John Holt, who died in 1985. In 1981 he told a reporter, “It’s not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It’s a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life.”

Pat Farenga, who is carrying on Holt’s work, defined unschooling as

The idea of unschooling isn’t to make your home more like a school. In fact, unschooling proponents say that parents should try to make their home even
less
like a school than it already is. Andrew agrees.

It sounded interesting, at least in theory, but I doubted it would work in practice. I told Andrew that I thought my kids would sit in front of the TV or the computer all day if I didn’t send them to school or teach them myself.

“Yes, that’ll happen,” he said. “It’s totally fine to let them watch TV for six months. My son would spend six months at a time watching TV, until he got bored. And he did get bored, eventually.”

Andrew admitted this was pretty scary while it was happening. “When we had a thirteen-year-old boy who didn’t want to do anything but watch TV, we couldn’t sleep at night. My wife and I would say to each other, ‘Are we fucking this up?’ ”

Zach didn’t show an interest in reading until he was ten and a half. But around that time, he was playing Super Mario 64 a lot and wanted to know what the characters were saying (their speech is written on the screen). When he asked his parents to read the words for him, they told him he had to figure it out on his own. Because Zach needed to know what they were saying in order to play the game, he taught himself to read.

“Very soon,” Renee told me, “he could read at college level. In a couple of weeks he was doing everything. He is my child that loves to read the most and reads obsessively. My girls don’t love to read nearly as much as he does.”

Zach cracked the problem of decimals (the subject my daughter has been struggling with) when he started writing computer programs involving arithmetic with money. “Working with dollars and cents was what turned the light bulb on in his head,” Andrew said.

I told Renee that another problem I saw with unschooling is that my kids would bug me all day, telling me how bored they were. “Did your kids ever tell you they were bored?” I asked her.

“Oh, definitely,” she said. “They still do that! I loved it when they told me they were bored, because I would always say to them, ‘Sounds like a personal problem to me. I’m not responsible for finding something for you to do.’ I would tell them, ‘You have everything you need at your fingertips, and it’s up to you to solve that problem.’ We didn’t coddle them. It’s up to them to take charge of their learning. I think that what happens in the early teen years is that they start building up resentment for the stuff they don’t know and they go through this period where they kind of blame the parent. They’d say, ‘You haven’t taught me this,’ but meanwhile, of course, they’d been entirely resistant to any of our efforts to help them. But gradually they get that
they
have to come up with the effort. With other kids, that might take them their entire schooling before college to get that.”

Unschooling doesn’t mean locking your kid up in the house. Renee says when her kids were younger, she would take them places three or four times a week: museums, botanical gardens, parks, ponds, factory tours. “We kept so busy,” she said. “There’s so much to explore.” On Friday afternoons, the Ankers would get together with the seven other families in their informal unschooling support network. The other families proved to be invaluable for “trading off” kids when parents’ stress levels hit the roof. “Sometimes I’d just call one of the people in our group and say, ‘Can I drop my kids with you, because otherwise I’m going to kill them!’ And they’d be like, ‘Sure! Drop them off.’ ”

I explained how I had been tutoring Sarina in algebra and asked Renee how her kids learned it. She admitted that “you have to do some sort of workbook work to learn some things,” and that when she sat her kids down to tutor them, she met with some resistance. Mainly, she and Andrew relied on their kids’ own natural curiosity and drive to direct their learning. She said Zach was obsessed with making Lego models “for years and years to the exclusion of pretty much anything else,” and her oldest daughter, Dagmar, loved workbooks. (My six-year-old, Jane, also loves workbooks and constantly asks us to buy them for her.)

Zach, now eighteen, is attending a community college and says he wants to be a lawyer. He developed an interest in legal affairs because he listened to a lot of radio news about the O.J. Simpson trial. His sisters, ages fourteen and sixteen, have also started taking community-college classes.

I asked Zach about his experience with being unschooled. He said that after Legos and video games, he started getting into computers. One of his parents’ friends got him started working with the BASIC programming language. When he wanted to learn more, he referred to “books, what other people were doing, and trial and error.” He moved on to other programming languages: PHP, then Java. “Right now I’m working with LUA, a tiny language you can embed easily,” he said.

“So why are you interested in studying law?” I asked him.

“Two reasons. Mostly you can argue, and the other would be it seems like a fun challenge to work around a set of rules—how do you get someone out of it or convict someone?”

He said attending community college took a “little bit of getting used to the first week or two, but it wasn’t really that bad.”

I still wasn’t convinced that unschooling was a good idea. “You and your wife both went to great universities,” I told Andrew. “Why wouldn’t you want to send your kids to prep schools and Ivy League colleges, too? Aren’t you limiting their options?”