An Education of His Own

How demanding better for my son’s education changed us both

I took over my son’s education in January of this year. I took it over because I saw my brown-eyed lanky boy (my boy who felt everything so intensely it filled me with awe) smiling less and hurting more, and because I was tired of my boy failing to meet his potential in a system that didn’t really want to help. What I wanted was to make everyone care as much as I cared. But instead of fighting a losing battle, I took his education into my own hands. I did it because I didn’t know what else to do.

So for 21 weeks this year I homeschooled my boy. Every day I felt scared and overwhelmed and excited and liberated. And the results have been beyond anything I believed possible.

The day he was born, I said to my son, “You’re going to be something special.” We read every night together, spent our days exploring the museum, park, the library, even the flight hangar. He’d spent hours in the cockpits of airplanes my wife and I had come to love during our time in the Navy. I remember those days sweetly, his young head sticking out of the top of the E-2, pretending to land on the aircraft carrier while the sun set over the water with a smile as wide as the ocean.  We worked hard to inspire him with all life could be. We also learned early how to fight. My son was asked to leave two preschools. He was too physical, they said. He’s not welcome here, they said. So we turned to therapists, doctors, and school administrators, begging for a reason. Begging for help. We got none. We learned to stand up for ourselves when they said we must be doing something wrong. We found every sort of therapy imaginable. We led IEP meetings and one-on-ones with teachers. We learned what it meant that he was 2E, and we learned how to advocate that he was still capable even though he was different. It felt like everyone was trying to close off his potential before he had a chance. If we had to fight to give our boy that chance, then we were going to fight.

All the support couldn’t help his inner world. During second grade, he hid under the covers every morning, crying and screaming “school is stupid” until his sheets were soaking wet.  I learned to dread the moment the sun crested the mountains, and I think I cried nearly as often as he did. During third grade, he started refusing to read. He loved reading for an hour every night; suddenly he was pushing the book from my hands after five minutes and declaring “I can’t read and I don’t want to.” He was only eight and he hated learning.

I remember a bike ride one fall afternoon. The air hadn’t yet turned crisp, so we both enjoyed slowly cruising past golden wheat fields. We spent as much time chatting as pedaling. A few minutes in, I asked him what had been on my mind — I asked why he didn't like school.

“It’s not fun,” he said. “We only learn stupid stuff and then I get in trouble for not wanting to do it.”

My boy was too young to already feel that way. I asked about some things he might want to learn instead, and then I asked him if he’d do something for me. “Will you tell your teacher what you want to learn? Tell her what you’re interested in, and I’ll bet she’d love it.” He stared at me with those brown eyes covered up with his dark hair, and he cocked his head sideways. 

“That won’t work Dad. They tell me what I get to learn. You don’t know.” 

*

All I ever wanted for my children was a better world, but it felt like everything around me rejected better. Better wasn’t an option. Not for him. Not for us. The world didn’t believe in better; it wasn’t possible. So I decided to create it.

The decision to take over his education wasn’t easy. My wife and I argued in circles for hours, well into the black night, trying to find another option — something besides public school and the private school we were pulling him out of mid-year. And I begged my wife to let me homeschool him.

“But what about your goals?” my wife pleaded. “What about your sanity and your enjoyment and everything you want to do? Are you sure you want to take this on?” I told her I didn’t know but all of those things felt less important right now.

“What will you teach?” she asked. I said I didn’t know that either. But I would figure it out.

What choice did I have?

She stared at me, shoulders slumped over the table in obvious resignation, and she said yes. “How will we tell him? How do we make sure he knows this isn’t his fault?” she asked. And we both knew we’d have to figure that out too.

When my wife went to bed, I couldn’t sleep. I snuck downstairs and tore through The Well Trained Mind. I reread

Henrik Karlsson

’s Childhoods of Exceptional People and

Erik Hoel

’s Why We Stopped Making Einsteins for the fifth time and feverishly absorbed every post about education on

School of the Unconformed

until my children started stirring with the morning light. My head was spinning.

I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I vowed to try something radically different.

Vowing to try something radically different and actually doing something radically different are not the same. When the stakes are nothing less than your child’s future, it’s even harder to know what to do. Truth be told, I had never seriously considered what I would do. Instead of believing in my own potential to change his future, I had fantasized about out-of-touch experiences like touring the Louvre to appreciate art, visiting the Keck Telescopes to see the stars, and debating the lessons from Montaigne’s essays to understand how the world works. I had created fantasies, but never figured out what an education looked like. 

Now that she had said yes, I needed to get through Monday.

My boy gave me a few helpful suggestions right at the start. He shyly asked if I’d let him learn cursive. “Let you?” I said, and I bought a cursive book that day. I was thrilled (but tried to play cool so I wouldn’t spook him). He also casually mentioned he had memorized a Latin word.

port: to carry
import: to carry in
export: to carry out
transport: to carry across

“Can we learn Latin too?” Mind you, I knew zero Latin, but I was damned if I was going to say no. I bought that too. 

I sat down next to him on the couch and looked into his eyes, trying not to shake. “If we do Latin and cursive, will you let me do reading and math with you? Can we do it together?” I asked him. My heart pounded. I didn’t know what I’d do if he said no. Of course he said yes.

He wouldn’t let my confidence last long. The first math lesson exploded within five minutes. During a word problem, he scribbled in frustration across the page. When I tried to stop him, he stomped his feet on the kitchen floor, and then he jumped up and ran away from me. He paced around the living room for the next hour repeating, “I’m stupid. I hate math” over and over again. I paced near him, paralyzed with fear. Our first reading lesson was nearly as bad. He stared at me with obvious discomfort when I asked him to find the subject of a sentence. I think he was scared to give up. Reading out loud was painfully slow, and I had to stop myself from giving him the answer to almost every word. I wasn’t sure if I could do this.

Things got better quickly though. At first it was little signs, like when he came downstairs and got out his writing book on his own. Then he worked through a multiplication problem, realized he had made a mistake, and went back to find his error, all without me saying anything. He was starting to try. Then things really started to take off.

Reading went from a struggle to fun. At first, he could barely sound out multi-syllable words. We finished a full year phonics program in 12 weeks. We read Gillian Cross’s juvenile version of The Odyssey; The Magician’s Nephew; The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe; The Horse and his Boy, and DK’s Greek Myths: Meet the heroes, gods, and monsters of ancient Greece. He devoured Greek Mythology and suddenly every car ride was filled with tales of the Olympians, the Titans, and the various demigods. Before long he was reading for two hours on his own every night. He’s excited to read Dune and White Fang next year — both books he chose.

We blew through the cursive curriculum in six weeks (it’s a year long course). His cursive is beautiful. He copied Genesis Chapters 1 and 2 and Tolstoy’s A Calendar of Wisdom and he went from copying what he saw to writing what I read aloud. His math and problem solving skills picked up quickly, and before long we finished the 3rd grade curriculum. He decided he wanted to go right into 4th grade math. Near the end of our school year, I walked by his room and discovered him standing at his chalkboard, his younger sister sitting raptly on the floor as he taught her how and when to do long division. I hid behind the door and watched. For five minutes he walked her through what he was doing. He got it all perfect.

Latin was more fun than I expected. He memorized the first declension and conjugations of Latin verbs. We spent walks reviewing Latin flash cards and practiced sentences while throwing the football in the driveway, bundled up against the snow. He even began calling me magister (Latin for teacher) and I called him discipulus (Latin for student). At the same time, we began memorizing poetry. I made him recite the poems we memorized in front of a crowd. His favorite poem was The World's Greatest Need. He stood on the beam of our playset and confidently showed off to the small crowd. My boy had some swagger. As he finished, he jumped off the beam to a loud gasp from the crowd. He smiled proudly and took a bow. My wife and I held each other tightly, both of us beaming.

I felt like this was working. We both began to take pleasure in our days together, pride in what we were accomplishing.

If the story had ended there, all would be well enough. He would have learned that he could learn, all he needed was individual attention and patience. We would have done some deep healing. He even spent mornings bragging to his little sister that he was homeschooled while she had to go to school. “Maybe if you want, you could be homeschooled next year. You just need to talk to Dad,” he often said as she packed up her backpack. 

Yet we both began to get restless. Not all at once, mind you, but throughout the weeks. Some days reading was a chore, even as we were breezing through the curriculum. Other days math just didn’t click, and he rushed to finish so that he could take a break. We were doing well, but I began to feel that we had recreated school at home. I had vowed to do something radically different. 

My first inclination was to clear our schedule. We needed room to think, to imagine, to be bored and see where that led us. When I suggested that today’s lesson was to lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling, he started giggling, his dimpled chin lighting up as he wondered if Dad had lost his marbles. He also lied down. We both stared at the stucco ceiling eighteen feet above us, in total silence for maybe thirty seconds. Then he couldn’t help talking.

“Dad, can we learn Greek next year? Latin is fun and I want to do another language too. And math is okay, but can you teach me square roots and about infinity? I want to learn real math. Plus, I want to work on our science project today instead of reading.”

It took everything I had not to interrupt. My arms reached towards him on their own, and I had to stop them from hugging him yet. I was smiling larger than I’d smiled in months, so excited to see my son taking control over what he learned. I made a note to buy a Greek book, and to subscribe to 3Blue1Brown. “Is there anything else you want?” I asked.

“Can we learn about sea turtles for our next science project?  They’re so cool.”

“Of course buddy, I’d love to teach you about sea turtles.”

“Actually Dad, I want to teach you. I’m pretty sure I’m a much better teacher than you are.” 

That was the moment I’d been waiting for. With tears in my eyes, I leaned over and squeezed him so tightly he gasped for breath. 

I could never have guessed how much that moment unlocked in him. Buying the books was easy. Explaining square roots, fractals, why we can’t divide by zero, and infinity was fun (I was a physics major after all). We gave ourselves more freedom to be curious, and we both blossomed. I felt so much closer to him, and I stopped worrying about whether I was living up to my own potential. His confidence bloomed. He started talking more, and louder, with authority I had never seen in him. Not just to me, but to everyone. I realized it when his therapist texted me during a session. “I’ve never seen him so relaxed before. He’s talking so freely to me. Whatever you guys are doing, it’s working.” 

During our last week of school, we sat down to reflect on what we wanted for next year. We were side by side at a coffee shop: me enjoying my black coffee and him loving the croissant that had exploded all over his face. I told him I thought we should try for more next year. He looked interested, so I suggested maybe a project day every week. I told him he could pick the project and I’d help him with the ideas, tools, and execution. I even mentioned giving him reign on the power tools. What boy wouldn’t get excited about that? He smiled at me. Then the floodgates opened. 

“Let’s do it! I’ve already picked out the first project. I want to build an airplane. And then you can teach me to fly. Let’s build this one.”

I had no clue how to build an airplane and it wasn’t exactly in the budget. It was barely in my imagination. My rational mind came up with a million reasons to say no. But this was our chance to do something exceptional. Something unique. This was my son asking to take control of his own learning. How could I say no? So together we’re going to figure out how to build (and pay for) an airplane. 

Together we’re building an education.

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