The Monkey and Hippo Loved Each Other

by Hillary Harvey, February 27, 2009

When Zoë was a baby, I taught her all sorts of things, every single day. I taught her how to eat, to kiss and hug, to speak English, to walk, to tie a knot, to make and keep friends. So what's the big deal with reading, spelling, addition and subtraction? Well, nothing really. But also, sort of, everything. I mean, eating, kissing, walking, talking, those are things that Zoë would inevitably have learned, just by being around people. Maybe even reading, spelling, and adding, too. And yet... Is it just that it's ridiculously daunting to teach? Or is it really that hard to explain?

Aside from my note-taking in the weekly calendar, keeping track of the accomplishments of the day, I've begun to knit while Zoë does her book work. I explain the page of work ahead and talk her through the first problem, and then sit quietly as she finishes the rest of the page. During phonics lessons, I sit and listen to her read, correcting where necessary. Occupying my hands helps breed my patience.

Zoë is progressing so nicely. I'm infinitely impressed by how well the curricula we chose works. I had never any doubts in Zoë’s learning abilities. I just felt doubtful about my ability to teach. I am not a teacher. I know what a gift and a talent teaching is, and I know that I do not have it. Perhaps if I were teaching her photography and darkroom skills, I might feel more confident in my abilities. Not that I'm not confident in my ability to read, spell and do math. But I learned those things just long enough ago that I don't remember what steps I took to learn them. And I have practiced English and math for so long that I don't even realize when I’m doing them, as they've become second nature. But Zoë is reading and writing and spelling and adding and subtracting. She is sounding out the sign at the Hess station as we drive past it. She is counting out how many more stuffed animals she needs to fill in the place settings at her tea parties. Zoë has begun to write books, where she sounds out words to put down next to her illustrations. My favorite line: “The mugy and Hipo luv ychudr.”

Up until now, the work in Zoë's math texts has been pretty smooth sailing and sort of fun. It's been a lot of matching, counting, writing numbers, things like that. The most challenging thing was when we did the unit on shapes. Zoë can't seem to remember the word, “triangle”, for some reason.

Recently, we got to something much harder. Something I had all but forgotten about. We'd spent the day before determining what a set of 10 looks like and counting the amount of things (kittens' bowls of milk, strings on balloons, etc.) that were left over in each given set. This led yesterday to counting out sets of ten and remainders. It necessitated my explaining about the tens and ones places in two digit numbers.

This was the moment I had been afraid of. I'm not a math teacher! How would I explain something so sort of abstract and theoretical? Would I even have enough of a grasp on various math concepts (not specifically this one we were up against, but in general terms of overall worrying) to be able to explain them to someone at a different comprehension level?

Well, we were challenged, and we overcame. All I’d had to do was follow the curriculum. I began to explain the idea of tens and ones places in numbers, and Zoë sort of nodded absently. Then there was an exercise with manipulatives. I don't have any of the recommended manipulatives, actually, so I've been raiding Zoë's room each day to find something that would work. This time, it was the dried beans that she uses for art projects. We did the activity, and then related the activity back to the workbook page, which got her to think about the concept abstractly again. By the end of the two lessons and all the practice, Zoë had got it! She understood that the tens place represented how many sets of tens there are; she understood what a set was; and she understood that the ones place represented the number of things left over that were too few to be counted into another set of ten. And I was still feeling patient! More than patient… excited!

We stopped the lesson there, since it’d been so challenging and since it was a good stopping point before starting a different exercise. We moved on to phonics and handwriting. I think Zoë was so pumped from her achievement with the math, that she fearlessly tackled her reading work, even inviting Pata afterwards to sit with her on the couch to hear her read. And rather than choosing a book she knows by heart, which was her first impulse, she decided to struggle through something else that she didn’t already know.

When all is said and done, even if I am not the most gifted or natural teacher in the world, I really think that this homeschooling thing works. First of all, I think fierce love and devotion to your child is enough to encourage even the most minute feelings of accomplishment and success within her. Secondly, Zoë does not have minute feelings of accomplishment and success. She has great, big, grand ones, and really enjoys being included in this adult world of thought and reason. One-on-one tutoring really works! It works because it has the space to be fun and responsive Zoë’s particular strengths and weaknesses. It works because I am her mother and I’m going to make sure that she gets it.

Now that I’m feeling so much more pumped myself about homeschooling, how well we’re doing, what we’ve accomplished in such a short period of time, it is especially heartbreaking to me that Zoë still misses school. She went to a Montessori preschool when she was 3 and 4. Yesterday we were driving through Kingston and noticed that a new Montessori school was opening in uptown. I absently read the sign as we drove by, and Zoë actually started to cry. I said, “You stay home because I like to be with you.” And she said, “I know you love me, but I want time to myself with my friends!” I felt awful for the rest of the day. I mean, I’m not only homeschooling Zoë because I want to spend more time with her than I would if she were off at school for 6 or more hours a day. It’s also honestly because I think we can give her a better, more rounded education at home. Zoë is a budding scientist, and we can go to the zoo when she’s interested in zoology; we can do experiments all day long to test gravity and physics; we can go for long nature walks and make journals around our discoveries. I feel like we can nourish her interests and encourage her confidence when we’re studying these things at home. My husband and I want her to realize her full potential without the peer pressure of some of the disagreeable and even inane values that we reject in general society. But those aren’t really things to mention in conversation with my 6-year-old who is crying in the back seat of the car and just wants to play on the playground with a group of friends everyday. Maybe when we move, I’ll ask the principal at the public school if Zoë can go to school there for a few days in a row, to check it out. I think if she goes and sees what public school is like, how different it is from a private, Montessori preschool, she might see my point. Or maybe I’ll see hers.