Season 2, episode 11: the lotus eaters //
Thursday, December 3, 2020

This is Shelter in Place, a podcast about coming together in a world that pulls us apart. From Oakland, California to Hamilton, Massachusetts, I’m Laura Joyce Davis.

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Before I get started today, I want to share with you a podcast I love. Emerging Form is a practical and playful exploration of the frustrations and pleasures of the creative life. Poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer and science writer Christie Aschwanden explore things like how envy can be a force for good in creativity, what makes collaborations thrive--or flop, how hula hoops might help you finish your book, how to handle rejection, and when to say no to projects that don’t really serve you. They’ve even done an episode on existential despair. Guests have included journalists, songwriters, artists, a circus performer--and me! I loved being a guest on Emerging Form, and I’ll include a link to that conversation in the show notes for today. Find Emergin Form at Emerging Form Dot Substack Dot Com and subscribe on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen.

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Laura: In Homer’s Odyssey, early in the journey Odysseus and his crew visit a strange place: the land of the Lotus-eaters. When some of the men eat these exotic flowers, they forget everything that came before--but they don’t mind. It’s a blissful forgetfulness, one that releases them from the need to do anything useful. They have to be carried back to the boat and chained to the rowing-benches just so they can return to real life.

In our pandemic Odyssey, my children have become lotus-eaters too. In the early days of distance learning, my kids dreaded getting online. But as we drove from one coast to the other, using our cell phones as hot spots so the kids could login to school, they discovered the blissfully glazed over state of multitasking. They learned the art of mute, of secretly opening another window to watch Frozen 2 clips on YouTube, of claiming they needed headphones because they couldn’t hear their teacher. They also learned how to guiltily slam their laptops shut whenever I twisted around from the passenger seat to peer at their screens. It was a sad initiation into common adult behavior, and the longer we were on the road, the more my kids forgot that school had ever included classrooms or books or learning.

In case you’re just joining us, I want to invite you to check out season 2 from the beginning, starting at the prologue to this Pandemic Odyssey. If you’d rather listen out of order, 

the essential information you need to know is this: after our lives were turned upside down by the pandemic, our family of five made the very sudden decision to travel across the country to be closer to family. That story--and the conversation I had along the way--is the backdrop for season 2. 

When we left Oakland in early September, I was not naive about the challenges of a cross country road trip with three young kids. I packed coloring books, car games, neck pillows, and favorite stuffed animals. I had audio books of the complete Dr. Suess and Beverly Clearey, dozens of CDs of “Adventures in Odyssey,” an audio drama I’d loved as a kid. I’d packed two heavy messenger bags with notebooks, color-coded folders and zippered pouches of rulers and pencils and erasers.  

What I was not prepared for was the way distance learning on the road would turn my kids into forgetful, lethargic grouches.

I have lots to say about the challenges of distance learning, but the truth is that our school troubles predate the pandemic.

When our son Gabe was in 1st grade, we began to see a pattern that would intensify over the next two years: he was quiet and pleasant with his teachers and classmates at school, but he wasn’t completing his work, he was falling behind in math, he was below grade-level in reading. When he was called on in class, he’d get flustered and teary. 

At home, school became a new battleground. We tried homework charts and reward systems, but most nights we couldn't get Gabe to even pick up his pencil. I learned about IEPs, inquired about tutoring we couldn’t afford, started investigating testing for ADHD. His second-grade teacher didn’t think he had a learning disability, but all of my friends in education were urging me to get him tested, if only so we could get some additional support. I read books on the homework hassle, and on managing anger, which was increasingly becoming a problem not just for Gabe, but for me. 

A month before the pandemic, we got several calls from the school when Gabe was found wandering the halls with the bathroom pass when he was supposed to be in class. 

“I want to die,” he sobbed one night that same week, after he’d crumpled the paper where he’d written a single word in the space of an hour.

I spent a lot of time crying, too, in the hours when Gabe was at school. I’d known for a while that school wasn’t working for him, but I had no idea what to do about it. I was spending hours every evening and weekend working with him, but our relationship was suffering. With so much time focused on him, I was spending less and less time with my daughters, who were beginning to act out. The longer this went on, the more discouraged I was. Somehow I’d failed to adequately prepare my son for this very essential area of life: school.

There was one book that gave me some much-needed perspective during that time: Susan Wise Bauer’s Rethinking School. I shared a bit of that story in season one, episode 55: Solve for X. 

Since I wasn’t in the homeschooling world, I didn’t know then that Susan Wise Bauer is something of a homeschool Yoda. She’s the author of dozens of books, including The Well-Trained Mind, which one homeschool mom friend described to me as “the homeschool Bible.” 

What I appreciate most about Susan is that she doesn’t offer pat answers. Her vision is way bigger than homeschool. So a couple of weeks into our pandemic Odyssey, when I was exhausted from trying to motivate my lotus-eaters to do anything other than space out on their screens, I reached out to someone who I hoped might be able to help bring us back to reality.

Susan: My name is Susan Wise Bauer. I'm a writer and historian. I am in Charles City County, Virginia. I have written several narrative world history projects, The Story of the World, which is intended for elementary and middle school students. And then The History of the World series, which is actually for adults. I've written a fair amount about education. My mother and I co-wrote a book called The Well-trained Mind: a guide to education at home, which is a guide towards how to give a good, rigorous liberal arts education at home to your kids. I've also written a book called The Well Educated Mind, which is about how to give yourself a classical education, and another book called Rethinking School, which is a broader challenge to us to think more generally about what schools are trying to achieve . . . what they do well, what they don't do well, and what our responsibility as parents is.

Laura: Susan is also the editor-in-chief of the Well-Trained Mind Press, which publishes K-12 resources for teaching a classical education. For fifteen years she taught at the College of William and Mary. She has a PhD in American Studies, a Masters in English Language and Literature, and an Masters of Divinity in Near Eastern Language and Literature. You could say that she has a well-trained mind. 

Susan also raised four kids of her own, and much of their education was through home schooling. But she doesn’t think homeschooling is the only path to a good education. 

Susan: I've never felt like homeschooling was the only option. My mother decided to homeschool my brother and my sister and myself because we didn't fit well into our local school system. She had limited options. She was a certified teacher, so she had some confidence that she could do this. And this was back in 1972, so it wasn't like there was a homeschooling subculture at that point. When I got married, my husband and I moved back to the family farm. It felt very natural to pursue home education with my children. We also didn't feel like we had other great school options, but it wasn't a mission to homeschool our children. Our mission was to give our children the best education we possibly could. And for many, many years of parenting, home education seemed to be the best way to do that.

The homeschooling wasn't the end. It was a means to an end, which is something I continue to encourage parents to think about. Everything changes every year. And we have certainly seen that in 2020 more than any other year before. I think that every year we have to stop, look at our families, look at our children, evaluate how they're doing, and think, okay, what is the best educational solution for this year? as opposed to getting locked into any particular pattern, whether that's “they have to go to the local school” or “they have to be home educated.” We have to recognize that circumstances outside of us have a lot to do with the decisions we make about our children: the availability of schools, their health, their safety, as we've seen this year. We have to make the decision every year that's right for that year for that child. And sometimes that means homeschooling one child, but sending another to school. With my youngest child, we put her in a Montessori school for three years when she was in middle school. Her next oldest sibling had gone off to college and she was all by herself, and we felt like that would be the best thing for her.

We've got to keep thinking about the individual child, what's best for them, and then what's best for the family, as opposed to getting stuck on some ideological commitment to either public school or private school or home education. 

Laura: When we learned that our kids would be home from school last March, I hoped that the change would be good for the kids, and for Gabe especially--but instead the evening battles we’d had over homework now became all-day battles. When it became clear that there would be no going back to school, despair and doubt crept in. I couldn’t help my son excel in public school, but I wasn’t doing any better as his teacher at home. Even though he’d been homeschooled himself, my husband had no better luck. It wasn’t until I read Rethinking School that I began to reframe our failure as homeschool parents.

Susan: I think the most important thing for parents to keep in mind right now is that children are incredibly resilient, so don't panic. The learning that's going to happen with kids over this coming year is not going to look like the learning that they would have had if we weren't in the middle of a pandemic, and we have to stop trying to make this year look like last year. We have to allow something completely different to happen. There are going to be some deficits. There are going to be some areas in which kids are not going to get everything in the same way that they would have gotten if they were in an undisturbed school situation. 

But when we are put in a new and unprecedented situation, new and unprecedented ways of learning are also going to manifest themselves.

Kids are going to learn things this year that we would not have thought to teach them. Kids are going to experience and absorb things that we could not have planned. And I think a big part of what we have to do this year is wait for that to happen and have faith that it will happen. Kids want to learn. Kids want to absorb. They don't always want to learn what we think they should learn, but I think that one of the things that's going to happen this year is that we're going to see a lot of unexpected learning happening. And maybe we won't know exactly what that learning is until a year or two, or maybe even three or more have gone by, but whether it's self-sufficiency, new areas of creativity, the ability to be alone, the ability to be with their siblings, the ability to direct themselves, they are going to learn unexpected things this year. And that is a good thing. And that is a beautiful life affirming thing. We need to hold onto the truth that that is happening.

Laura: I’ve needed this reminder often in 2020, that my kids are learning more than what they’re seeing on their screens. This morning Gabe walked into the kitchen and started unloading the dishrack without being asked. Our six-year-old Grace snuggles up to me on the couch most mornings for her own gratitude journaling. Our three-year-old Mattéa has developed the ability to quietly tend to her babies and play alone. It’s comforting to remember that life is more than school. 

But when I spoke with Susan in September, I was still having trouble with school. I how to motivate my lotus-eaters. 

Susan: There's sort of three stages of dealing with that, and the first is to just take a week off. We get so panicked. We get so afraid. When you make a parenting or learning decision out of fear of what might happen in the future--it's not happening now, but it might happen in the future--it's almost always the wrong decision. So if you are pushing your fourth grader to do something that is getting you nowhere because you're afraid that they won't get into college, that's usually the wrong thing to do. Taking a week off is not going to sabotage or torpedo anything. And sometimes that's just what we need, is just to take a week off. So that's sort of the first level of dealing with it.   

The second is to really take a hard look at maturity. Is this child having difficulty because even though they are “in fourth grade,” they're really not functioning on that maturity level (through no fault of their own, just because they're organisms, they're not machines; they develop at different rates.)? Is it possible that we just need to back up a year? Sometimes back up two years, in one or more areas?  

And then I would say that the third level of dealing with a problem that goes on for a really long time, a learning situation that is continually frustrating, is getting some sort of outside mediator, whether that's a therapist or a tutor, or an educational psychologist, or a family counselor. If you're really at the point where you think ‘I have been struggling with this kid for over a year,  and we're not moving forward,’ go and get some help. That certainly is something that I wish I had done with my kids earlier, rather than continuing to sort of bash my head against a wall and not realize why we weren't moving forward. 

Those are the three levels I'd think about. Do we need a short break? Do we need to rethink the timeframe that we're on? And do we need some outside help? One of those answers is going to be the right one for a kid that's struggling. 

I have four kids. Those three solutions applied to all of them at different points in their educational career. Now that my kids are older, I look back and realize that there was no one given year during their educational journey that made a huge difference. I wish I had had a clearer understanding of what the limitations of teaching your children are. You can't create a love for learning in children. You can't create a thirst for knowledge in children. There's a lot of rhetoric in homeschool circles about doing exactly that. You can provide opportunities for learning and you can do your best not to quench a love for learning, but as a parent, the best thing that you can do is open up doors. You can't shove the kids through them. And I think that's something that is going to become really clear to a lot of parents this year. When your kid’s at school, if the kid isn't learning, it's simpler to say, “well, the schools are not doing the job. The teacher's not doing the job.” And sometimes that's the case. 

But when you've got your kid at home and you're watching your kid get up every day and sit down in front of their books, you can really see that sometimes they're ready to learn. And sometimes they aren't. Kids are not always up for learning at the time when you're up for teaching them. And you have to eventually become okay with that. You have to be willing to provide the work, provide the opportunity, and then to some degree, wait on the kid to be ready to pick it up.

When you're in the middle of it, when you've got a seventh grader, for example, you're looking at high school and you're starting to really worry about college admissions and the kid isn't doing well, and they don't seem that interested in their work, it feels like the end of the world. When you're on the other side and you look back, you realize that actually that one seventh grade year didn't matter, and if you had been able to step back, have a sense of humor, spend some time with the kid, figure out what they were enjoying doing and give them more of that, and spend less time on the things that were causing conflicts, you'd have been in exactly the same place academically and in a better place as a family. If there would be one thing that I could give parents a vision of--particularly for this year--it's that this one year is not going to define who your kid is, and what your kid does this year is just that: it's this year. It is a weird, weird time that we have not experienced before. So don't panic.

Laura: We took Susan’s advice. I sent a message to Gabe’s teacher and for the last week of our trip, we were offline. We considered the possibility that he might benefit from repeating a year, or even just slowing down in certain subjects so he could catch up. And it took leaving our home to do it, but after months of deliberating, we were getting help, making this journey to be closer to my mother-in-law, who homeschooled her own five children and had lots of ideas about how to support our kids.

And that last week of the trip was our best. We had fun together as a family, and we finally listened to Ramona’s adventures in kindergarten, and empathized when her dad lost his job. It opened up a conversation about what our family was going through now, and gave us space to share with our kids some of the complex emotions that came with this pandemic Odyssey. It gave us time to reflect on what our kids needed from us, not just what we thought they needed to be learning.

One of the most helpful things I’ve learned from Susan is that the things we’re culturally conditioned to expect of our kids’ education has less to do with child development and more to do with our country’s relatively recent history with public education.

Susan: Public education in its current form really only dates from the late 19th century. It's not an “American” value. It is something that is barely a hundred years old. In the late 19th century, the United States saw a huge rise in immigration, particularly from European nations, and because of this huge influx of families--which was economically and socially wonderful for the United States, it's really the foundation of who we are today--there were these, all of a sudden, rising numbers of children who had not been born here and often didn't really speak English all that well, but had to be assimilated, had to be taught American values, had to be folded into our economic and our social and our cultural systems. The current form of our public schools is really rooted in this late 19th century need to educate the next generation of Americans on the assumption that they were starting from ground zero, that they really did not know how our country worked. 

What went along with that mission also came a real shift in how we taught. The one room school houses of the 18th century, which were designed to serve a very limited number of children, gave way to very large classrooms of children of many different ages, many different backgrounds, many different cultures. And a lot of what we see in our current public education, those systems were put in place to manage this very difficult problem: how do you teach a room full of 30 kids who come from wildly disparate backgrounds and have very widely differing skills in terms of dealing with academic subjects? 

In the late 19th century, the most effective answer to this was to actually borrow from the German--the Prussian in particular--military system, and to organize students basically into squads, you know, into companies, and to do that by age. So every student of the same age went into the same classroom. This was the beginning of our current age grade system. And it's important for us to remember how new it is so that when needed, we can challenge it and say, “actually my kid doesn't really fit into this pattern.” 

If you're 10 years old, there's only about a two grade range in which it is “normal” for you to belong. And what our classroom system assumes about children is that they progress evenly forward. And that is simply not how real children work.

Whether you're homeschooling or whether you're supervising your child at home and your child is enrolled in some other program, it's really helpful to be really frank and honest about five different categories of maturity: ability to deal with problems, deal with difficulty; ability to relate to peers and to adults; language arts skills, because language arts skills are really the foundation of social studies, history, reading, so many other things; math skills, and then physical maturity is there. This gets overlooked a lot. You know, is this a kid who is coordinated and graceful? Is this a kid who's sort of, like, big and all over the place? What level of physical maturity is there? Instead of thinking of this child as being a third grader or a fourth grader or a seventh grader, look at each one of these categories and sort of give a maturity ranking. Don't leave this around the house for the kids to find, by the way. This is for you. But this really helps you start to pitch each part of what you're doing with the child to the maturity level that they have in that particular area.

I live on a farm. I raise horses among other things. And one of the things that happens with the baby horse as it gets to be two years old, and you look out in the pasture one day, and you realize that the rump on this horse is six inches higher than its front. You know, it looks tilted, because the rear end has grown so much faster than the front end. And there's nothing to be done about that except just to wait for the front end to catch up. And kids are the same way; they mature unevenly.

We don't have great vocabulary words for this. A lot of times we'll talk about a kid as being “gifted,” when what we mean is that in this particular area, the kid is just maturing more quickly than others. In the same way, it's easy for us to use the word “weaknesses” or “behind” or “delayed”--delayed is a very telling word--when what we really mean is in this particular area, this kid needs the earth to go around the sun a couple more times before they're going to be able to really cope with this particular skill well. And I think as parents, when our kids are home, whether that's by choice or whether it's because the school system has suddenly shifted on us and we don't have any other plan, it really gives us the opportunity to start thinking about our children as complex, uneven beings who are maturing differently in different areas. And it gives us the opportunity to tailor what we're doing in each of these different areas, rather than pushing our kids to have the same level of achievement across the board.

Laura: We’ve been in Massachusetts for a little over two months now, and in that time I’ve gotten to see Susan’s words play out in real life. My kids aren’t maturing eveningly; they’re complex. They constantly surprise me--and themselves.

My 3-year-old doesn’t know what a president or a United state is, but she can name them all. My six-year-old is doing her big brother’s math, and they really like working together. They’ve become friends. And Gabe? He’s doing better than we ever could have imagined.

It turns out that what Gabe needed most was something that I couldn’t give him--something he could only get here: my mother-in-law Robin Davis, the best teacher I’ve ever met, who could see Gabe as the wonderfully complex and sensitive kid that he is, and tailor her teaching to fit him. 

He’s taken off in every subject. He talks about maybe wanting to be an engineer, and he loves math, and anything mechanical where he can make things happen. We often find him with a flashlight reading in bed when he’s supposed to be asleep. Instead of daily Zoom meetings, he meets with his teacher back in Oakland for a progress report once a week. He’s confident now when he tells her about what he’s learning, excited when she tells him how proud she is of him. She’s been incredibly supportive of this very different approach to learning, which has been a gift to us all. Gabe is no longer a lotus-eater, and we don’t fight about school anymore either. Our relationship has become incredibly sweet. For most of the past year he refused to give us kisses when we told him goodnight; now he gives them willingly, one one each cheek. When we were out on a hike together last weekend, he asked me to stop with him and sit beside a mossy stream. “I like this spot,” he said as we watched the sunlight on the water. “It would be a perfect place to live if it weren’t in the middle of a hike.”

Not a day goes by when we don’t miss our life in Oakland--but we’re also grateful every day for this spot, and for my mother-in-law Robin. She’s changed everything--not just for Gabe, but for our family. 

But here’s the thing: what Gabe is getting right now--what we’re getting--is a gift--a miracle, really. My mother-in-law is a force of nature, who raised five lifelong learners. She’s read Susan Wise Bauer’s books. Hers is an exceptionally well-trained mind, and she’s passing on that knowledge to our kids. To say that we are lucky is an understatement. Most families don’t have the option of going to someone who can take over their kids’ education. And also, there is no match anywhere for Robin Davis. 

This week we got news that our public school could be reopening in the spring. We love our school, but it’s not perfect--no school is. If we’d stayed in Oakland, we’d still be struggling to support Gabe. When we go back to Oakland, we won’t be able to give Gabe what he’s getting now. We have to hope that this experience with my mother-in-law will prepare him for whatever is ahead. 

I asked Susan what it would take for public schools to serve our kids better, particularly in families where homeschooling will never be an option. 

Susan: There's no one answer to this. Public education is the most obvious way in which the community at large, the taxpaying community, is serving families that have fewer resources. 

As a parent, your first responsibility is to keep that child clothed, fed, safe, and to do the very best job you can to educate that child. That is not a selfish thing--as long as we remember that there are many other children out there. Whether or not you keep your child in a public school classroom or bring them home, your attitude towards the other children in your community has to be the same, which is what can I also do to help these children?

It's really important that we not conflate how we are educating, caring for, parenting our own children with our responsibility to the community. We don't have to have the same answer to both of those challenges. Life is complicated. We are intelligent, multitasking people. We can have two different answers to two different questions. We don't have to have the same answer to both questions. I do think it's very easy for homeschooling parents to forget about the fact that the public school down the road is struggling. 

For public education to really be transformed, it takes massive community buy-in. It takes local investment. It takes local pride. And it takes local effort. 

One of the things that I would love to see happen is more grandparent involvement in public schools. When you're a parent, if the public school is not the right place for your kid and you are teaching your kid at home, you don't have a lot of excess energy to invest in that public school system. If your kid is in the public school, chances are you're working. You are absolutely run off your feet. You are doing everything you can to support your child and to make sure that they're getting their homework done and they're in school on time and they have healthy lunch and all of that. Raising children is an all consuming activity, particularly because you're doing it at a time in life when you're struggling for your own economic survival. Reaching out to other families and other children when you're at that particular phase in your life--a phase that I'm now coming out of, so I can recognize exactly how exhausting it was--is overwhelming. 

But once your kids are out of the house and you become a grandparent, that's the time to turn around and invest in your public school system, to volunteer, to run for school board, to donate--any way in which you can reach into that public school system and support not just the kids, but those incredibly exhausted parents, is a huge gift to your community. You, your children, your siblings, your parents--the whole larger family system--has to remember that there is a community out there that we are part of, and how to think about how can we help build up, give our time, give our money, give our expertise to those who are outside of our family system. 

There's no intrinsic contradiction in homeschooling your children and volunteering at your public school…

in homeschooling your children and running for school board, or however it is that you choose to be involved in this institution which serves families that do not have the option to homeschool. Unfortunately, home education circles have too long seen this as an either/or. We've got to either support public education or we have to homeschool. That's not the case. Life  actually doesn't contain that many either/ors. It has a lot more, both/ands. We're homeschooling and we can support our public education system.

Laura: 2020 has exposed many of the cracks in our public education, but it’s also reframed what our family expects of the school. And Susan says this is a good thing, that it helps us get a view for family life that is bigger than school.

Susan: There are so many things that parents rely on schools to do: childcare, meals, entertainment--not just education. And having to step out of the school system, I would hope that parents would be able to identify what schools can do for their kids that are really valuable and hold onto that--but then stepped back a bit, and maybe take back some of the other aspects of raising children from the school, and think of other ways in which to fulfill those. 

The number one question that you get from people who are not homeschoolers is, “but if your kids aren't in school, how will they have a social life?” Socialization and academics are not naturally connected. They're only connected in the system that we inherited from the late 19th century. So beginning to sort of tease apart the different strands of what parents have traditionally relied on schools to do, and figuring out if there are new and different ways to meet those needs.

Not every family should or needs to homeschool. But I do hope that families who've had their kids home unexpectedly this year will figure out that there are some things they don't need the school to do.

Laura: I’ve been ending each episode of season 2 with an invitation, some way to take the words we’re hearing and apply them to life, to find a tangible way to embrace the hope instead of letting the fear overtake us. So today I want to extend Susan’s invitation to you. If you’re a parent, think about what you used to rely on the school for, and ask yourself if there’s any aspects of life you’d like to reclaim for your family. For us, we’ve embraced Sunday morning hikes as a family no matter what the weather is. Recess and after school activities were fine, but we’re realizing it’s more lifegiving for all of us when we get out into nature together as a family.

If you’re not a parent, or if your kids are grown, consider how you can serve your local public school. Maybe with so many schools closed down or imposing COVID restrictions, your phone call to the principal or teachers might be the thing they’ve been wishing for. Or if you can’t do that, look around at the exhausted parents on your street or in your neighborhood. Figure out some tangible way to encourage them. Send them a gift card for takeout, or offer to social distance babysit while their kids play outdoors. Our friends did that for us a couple of times in Oakland the week before we left, and it was a gift we desperately needed. 

As always, if you listen to the end of this episode, you’ll hear some outtakes that we hope will make you laugh, but first I think it’s only fitting that I end this episode by thanking my mother-in-law Robin Davis.

Mum, it may be true that no one year makes all the difference in our kids’ education, but because of you, this year has changed everything. Thank you for giving our kids the gift of learning, for spending so many hours thinking about how to teach them in the way that is just right for them. We’ve incurred a debt to you that we can never repay--not just an education, but a time to heal and grow as a family. Thank you for bringing our boy back to life, for showing him how much he is capable of, and for giving him a love of learning that will serve him all his life.