Homeschooling: A day in the life

(The cover story of the current issue of 'Teacher Plus' is on homeschooling. This article I wrote was published with the cover story. Check out http://www.teacherplus.org if you want to read other related articles) 

There are fast-moving white cotton-puff clouds in the bright blue Bangalore sky and through the big window I can see that it’s a beautiful windy day outside. I am sitting in my home-office from where I manage SeasonWatch, an India-wide tree monitoring program for school children, which brings in just enough income for the family. Teacher Plus asked me to write an article about homeschooling and every day for the last month or so, Dinkar, my 10-year old and I have been writing one story each and sharing it with the family in the evenings. Today, I thought I’d combine these two requirements and write an article-story about our homeschooling day.

As it often happens with us, all five of us are at home. So let us go around the house and see what the others are up to. In the children's room, Aditi, our 16 year old, is watching Bharatanatyam videos on YouTube. Aditi is interested in dance but her first love is photography and she is always experimenting with her high-end DSLR camera. The camera is a gift from her aunt for doing well in her NIOS 10th board exams last year. Aditi maintains a photo blog and many people like her work.

Dinkar, who unlike his brother and sister, has never been to school, is sitting on the floor behind Aditi and drawing something. He learnt to read only when he was eight years old but he has been sketching and painting from a very young age. He has a knack of representing scenes with very few lines and he likes drawing cartoons with speech bubbles.

On the dining table, Srikant is reluctantly going through his 7th standard Hindi textbook, which he should have finished two months ago before the end of the last academic year. For two years now, Srikant has been studying completely on his own, but today Kanti is sitting with him to ensure that he does not quietly move to the baithak and curl up with the Terry Pratchett novel that he has obsessively been reading.

Kanti has taken time out of her busy schedule to sit with Srikant. Her time goes in advanced level cooking, such as the multi-grain sourdough bread that she baked for breakfast today, or in experimenting with the technologies of growing
things for our kitchen on our sunny balconies, or in stitching professional looking clothes for the family, or in the hundred other simple things that keep our household ticking and fun.

Today is a Saturday – a busy day. Except for a loosely structured basketball class in the evenings, the weekdays are very flexible and free for the children but the weekends are busy. They have music and dance classes for which they walk a kilometer, catch a BMTC bus, get off and walk another kilometer to Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan for their one or two-hour class. Aditi learns Bharatanatyam and both the boys are learning to play the tabla. Srikant has an additional carnatic vocal class with a special teacher on Sunday evenings that he is very passionate about. He travels across town spending 3 hours in buses for his one-hour music class.

These weekend times when the children are away and also most weekday afternoons when the sun is bright and the roads empty, Kanti and I go for long walks. Although there is not too much of 'nature' around, I like to look at this as our reconnecting-with-nature walk. All five of us are very interested in nature and culture and a lot of the children's weekday time is spent in mostly non-academic reading, in listening to music and in a lot of free play. And because this is Teacher Plus, I feel the mischievous urge to challenge a myth. Over the year, doing two-three hours a day, with week and sometimes month-long gaps, with self-directed, self-paced, unsupervised self-learning, the children finish their academic curriculum with extreme ease.

The white cotton-puff clouds are still moving across the bright blue sky and Kanti and I have to go walk in the beautiful sunlight outside, so let me wind up this article-story with a really broad perspective on our homeschooling journey. Are you thinking that our family is made up of two stay-at-home adults 'teaching' three children? That is not how I see it! I think our journey has been about five people, who, over the last six years, have had the great good fortune to research, learn and work together with the technologies of happiness and good health and personal growth and sustainable living. And although all these may appear to you like luxuries we do not really need to focus on as we go about our busy lives, I am convinced that these are the technologies that will be valuable in a future that is just around the corner.

Trip to Sikkim

Description:  

6 day trek from Yuksam to Dzongri (Kanchendzonga base camp) and back, West Sikkim

Date: 

Late April, 2010

Why (or why not on Discovery channel):
To stand at the highest point of our trek (14000 ft) at 5 AM in freezing cold surrounded by majestic white mountains to watch the sky lightening as the sun rises over the kanchendzonga mountain range and to feel the incredible joy and incredible sadness of being there

Team:

Family 1: Kanti, Arun, Aditi, Srikant, Dinkar
Family 2: Sangeetha, Sathish, Shalom, Ishaan
Guide: Jeet Bahadur Gurung alias JB 

Cooks: Bir Bahadur alias BB and helper Ashish
Yakmen: Mani alias Baichung and Indra the intrepid Chang drinker
Yaks: Blackie 1, Blackie 2, Snowwhite, Brownie 1, Brownie 2

Problems:
- Walking trails full of yak and pony dung, slushy slippery mud, leeches

- Bitter cold, Hailstorms and at Dzongri a proper snowstorm, leaking tents, no proper toilets, no change of clothes
- Mild altitude sickness, low energy on the way up (only for the adults, children were fine throughout)

Discoveries:
- Chang a wonderful millet wine that you have to see and taste to believe
- Our own arrogance (or is that ignorance) in thinking we could do this difficultish walk. (The first people we talked to said we can't take 7 and 8 year olds up)
- Our guide whom we chanced upon and who made the whole experience very very special indeed (Contact JB at 9647888415 if you want to do this or other treks in Sikkim. He comes with a very high recommendation from all of us adults and especially children for his exceptional efficiency and good humor)

Random photos:

 The children. Ever cheerful and ever ahead

 The tents we stayed in on 3 of the 6 nights we were trekking

JB with Ishaan. Believe me, JB is magic!

Viewpoint at Dzongri. The highest point of our trek

Majestic Kanchendzonga range. Praying distance away

Mist on the way down

Dinkar test rides a yak. Yes, I will take this one with the power steering option please!

The adults celebrate with Chang. The smiles on the faces and the haziness of the picture depicts their collective state of mind

What the solar eclipse taught us

The solar eclipse of 22 July 2009 was the longest total solar eclipse during the 21st century, not to be surpassed until June 2132. It lasted a maximum of 6 minutes and 39 seconds off the coast of Southeast Asia, causing tourist interest in eastern China, Japan, India and Nepal.

- From the Wikipedia

All of us were very excited about the eclipse and we wanted to catch it 'live' as it happened. (We have no TV so no 'action replay' option) So we went to Nehru Planetarium and bought the special 'glasses' that would let us watch the eclipse without becoming the first fully blind homeschooling family in the world. The glasses were actually some sort of very dark plastic set in cardboard frames and cost 25 Rupees each. We bought one for each of us because none of us wanted to share the glasses and miss any of the action.

The time for the eclipse in Delhi was between 5:30 and 7:30 in the morning and the children (even 7 year old Dinkar who usually sleeps till 8:30) were all up and ready by 5 in the morning. Where we live, the roofs are connected together without any walls in between so we were thinking that the whole place would be swarming with children and their parents in a Holi or Diwali kind of festival atmosphere. It was cloudy at 5:30 and when we reached the terrace all ready for the crowd and the great experience with our special cardboard glasses we found... Yes you are right, no other children there. The only other people we could see on our terrace and on the vast sea of terraces in our neighborhood were ONE middle aged couple looking at the sky through a big Xray film.

We waited on top till almost 7:00 braving the heat and the flies and watched through the glasses as the sun played hide and seek with us through the clouds. But at around 6:30, the time for the maximum eclipse in Delhi, for about 30 seconds or so, we saw with our naked eyes, and shared amongst ourselves, the miracle of the crescent sun. And Aditi took this picture as a keepsake.

  Yes, I know, YOU went with your children and saw the eclipse but why were all the rest of the children in Delhi not on the roofs? Why didn't every school in Delhi buy the 25 Rupee glasses and make it compulsory for each student to buy it at 50 Rupees from the class teacher? Why didn't they make it compulsory for each student to be on the roof or on the road and for each student/parent to write a 250 word essay on 'The longest eclipse that I will ever see in my life'?

I think the partial answer may lie in a conversation I am almost sure I overheard:

Mother 1: Did you see the eclipse?
Mother 2: Yes. Wasn't it spectacular?
Mother 1: Which channel did you see it on? I saw it on NDTV. I think they are great.
Mother 2: Oh! I saw it on BBC. I don't trust the Indian channels. They are capable of showing us the previous eclipse and saying that it is this one you know.
Mother 2: (sympathetically) Yes, I know. You can't trust the media at all. By the way, you know 'X' is learning about it in school, so he wanted to go on the roof. Finally I had to tell him that his hair will all fall out if it gets exposed to the cosmic rays of the eclipse. That stopped him! He is very attached to his hair.
Mother 1: (Smiles) Good. I didn't let 'Y' and 'Z' go up either. It says in the newspaper that many people have gone fully blind by looking at the sun during the last eclipse.

X, Y and Z, as you may have been taught in school, are unknown variables in Algebra. In fact they are so much unknown that their mothers 1 and 2 are nearly at their wits ends about their unknownness.

Mothers 1 and 2 are post graduates, have lived abroad, dress fashionably, live on the top floors of their apartment blocks and between them have 3 children below the age of 10. Walking up to the roof with their children wouldn't have been very much more effort than pressing the remote buttons on their TVs...

...But then post graduate degrees by themselves do not necessarily make you less superstitious and high levels of intelligence do not necessarily lead to wisdom.

Shared holidays

Sathish and Sangeetha and their two lovely children Shalom and Ishaan recently introduced us to the joys of walking in nature. They travelled from Bangalore to Delhi, stayed with us for a day and all of us (4 adults and 5 homeschooled children) went to pay our respects to the beauty of the Kumaon Himalayas. The place was called Munsiyari and it was a 13 hour jeep ride from Kathgodam, the rail head which we got to after an overnight train journey from Delhi. On the beautiful, pine-forested, surprisingly good but steep and curvy roads up we had to make many stops to get the children unsick. Our stay and the walking trips into the mountains around town were organized by an eco-tourism NGO that works with the villagers there. We stayed in quaint small houses in a village on the outskirts of town. Like this 50 year old traditional house. Munsiyari is the end of the road. Literally! It is the place from where people start walking towards the Tibet and Nepal borders and the place from which the few tourists, who brave the 13 hours in the jeep, start their treks towards the Milam glacier. None of our city distractions worked here. No credit card, no ATM card, no cell phone (Only BSNL connectivity) and no Internet. So in the 12 full days we spent here- all of us- pizza loving kids and sedentary adults- all of us got used to eating aaloo in its many forms and to walking till our shoes wore off. Every day a local guide would take us up through the forests around our village- a little higher and to a little more spectacular place- acclimatising us till we were surprised at ourselves and at our presumption, at our easy new familiarity with slippery and cold and wet mountain heights . We also spent two days camping up at 10000 feet where we realized the inherent superiority of women and children. The people who trekked up to 12500 feet, the highest point in the neighborhood, were the two mothers and two of the older kids. The men were down with altitude sickness and by the time Sathish and I recovered it was time to walk back to the village. But I see now that the Himalayas have hijacked my post. What i wanted to talk about was the idea of two families with homeschooled children taking a holiday together to get to know each other better and to learn from their combined experience. But then maybe the photos have already told you more than I could have in my usual tongue-tied manner. So let me wind this up with a- Thank you Sathish and Sangeetha for making this trip happen. Thank you for introducing us to the fears and pleasures of communing with nature in the raw form. All of us here are eagerly looking forward to the next outing.

Unconditional something

The children were excited about their trip to Kerala. They were going to meet their friends in Thrissur after 8 months. They wanted me to come too but I had to finish some work and couldn't go with them so they went with their mother. Whenever the children called from Kerala and asked me when I would come my reply would be that I would come as soon as my work finishes and when they asked when that would be I usually told them that the work was a mountain and I was only a small mouse making a small hole in its very bottom. Well after the first few days in Kerala, Aditi and Srikant (13 and 9 respectively) stopped asking. Only 7 year old Dinkar persisted, calling up every day or so to give me the latest news and to ask me when I would come. 14th April was Vishu and my brother and sister and our family were all converging to my parents place in Kerala. Everybody except me! So I decided to surprise them all by dropping in unannounced for the Vishu lunch. I caught an early morning flight and after a full nine hours in various modes of transport (Taxi, plane, auto, bus, camel, elephant... Oh sorry no camel and elephant:-)) I found myself outside the boundary wall of our house in Kerala. I called up Dinkar on my cellphone. And as this is climax of this story let me switch to drama-mode to make it, well you know, more dramatic: 

Me: Hello Dinkar how are you?  

Dinkar: Fine.  

Me: Have you had the Vishu lunch already?  

Dinkar: Not yet. They are setting all the banana leaves for it. 

Me: What are you doing?  

Dinkar: Playing with my new car that Saniatta gave me today.  

Me: Oh! What car is that?  

Dinkar: It is a Volkswagen Taureg.  

Me: Show me!  

Dinkar: (Short silence and then...) How?  

Me: Just walk out to the gate and just show me no.  

Dinkar: Oh! (Sound of phone getting hurriedly cut)  

Srikant: (To Dinkar running out from the house towards the gate) Where are you going?  

Dinkar: (Not stopping running) Naana is standing outside the gate! Come quickly! 

Srikant convinced by the urgency in the voice joins in the race and they reach the gate together to find me standing crouched behind the wall. I don't know why but I think there is some big important point hiding here that I cant put my finger on. Is it the fact that Dinkar had no doubt in his mind that his father was standing outside? And anyway what has all this got to do with homeschooling and the fact that Dinkar has never been inside a school. I can't tell! But I still think there is some important... (Quickly illustrated by Dinkar)