The Homeschool Diaries

Paul Elie:

Homeschooling happened to me this way: The same winter I started teaching a graduate class one night a week, my family was compelled to move to a new apartment, 100 yards away from our old one and identical except for a 25 percent rent hike we couldn't afford, so that our 5-year-old twin sons could enroll in a "gifted" program in the Manhattan school district where we'd lived since they were born--until the city decided to redraw the lines. As I wrote yet another e-mail to a city Department of Education supervisor, asking her again if she could please arrange for the department's computer system to recognize our change of address, my wife's interest in homeschooling began to make a lot of sense. After all, I was teaching graduate students at Columbia. Why shouldn't I teach my own children, too? What if I took the time and energy I was putting into arranging our sons' education and devoted it to actually educating them?

Our sons enrolled in the gifted program, and Lenora and I volunteered for the usual parent activities. But when another substantial rent increase prompted a move to Brooklyn (to a lovely, affordable neighborhood whose public-school principal had recently been arrested for assaulting a teacher), and a first-grade teacher in our boys' program went on maternity leave and was replaced by a 23-year-old teaching assistant, and we faced the prospects of transporting them to Manhattan and back for five more years and begging for permission to enroll our youngest son despite our Brooklyn address, and the discounted tuition for three at a nearby Waldorf school came to $27,000--that's when I became a homeschooler.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at January 15, 2013 2:57 AM
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