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	growing child education

Slinging a Frisbee at Ten in the Morning: Homeschooling in Africa
By Susan Yoder Ackerman
Issue 97, November/December 1999

Trying to cover up the smell of kerosene, I stood at the window rubbing lotion into my hands. The house was quiet for the first time that morning. The noise had moved out under the thatched roof of the sandbox, where Anje, Hans, and Djebi were shaping bridges and cornfields and Ilse was toweling off her pet monkey Kiki after his bath.

I looked around the room. Math books and reading work pages littered the dining table. The Formula Manual lay open to a an animal flea soap recipe--hence the kerosene on my hands. Several World Books were spread all over the couch with the little book Whoa Joey, whose catchy story-poem had inspired an encyclopedia search: "Are dingoes really blue?" (they aren't), and "How can emus fly with hardly any wings?" (they can't).

My eyes fell on the window weed garden, cups of dirt that had started out as an experiment comparing clay and sandy soils. The lesson seemed to be, however, that native African weed seeds survive neglect much better than Burpee's bean seeds do, and now we were just waiting to see if any of the straggly volunteers would reward us with flowers.

Six months after we moved to Kongolo, Zaire (now the Congo), we took second grade Ilse out of her class at the local school, where children still shared slates and spent half the day marching or sweeping the schoolyard. She had made African friends and become a natural at Swahili; but she was desperate to learn and do much more than was possible at Ecole Primaire Chem-Chem.

In my previous life as a non-mother, I had had five years of teaching experience. Why not teach my children myself? I was apprehensive about the time and commitment it would require. But I was intrigued by the unique teaching experience that it promised--a low teacher-student ratio, hand-selected pupils, and no bells or administrative paperwork. Just pure teaching.

Then there were Djebi and Lenea, our neighbors, whose American father and Congolese mother did not want to send them to boarding school in Kinshasa; they would love having a school right next door. I thought, too, of our own Hans, eager to learn to read. I decided to do it.

Back in Virginia I had enjoyed the excited morning rush of packing Ilse's lunch and signing permission slips. I liked her coming home with new songs, funny stories about her classmates, and special compliments from her teacher. I hoped that someday Hans and Anje would know all those experiences, too. But for the four years in Zaire, 900 miles away from the nearest American school, I was grateful for the necessity, as well as the privilege, of running my own open classroom.

One of the happiest results of this kind of education was that my children came to see learning as a part of their whole life, not as a process that worked only with a blackboard and 29 other children from eight to three on weekdays. A lesson could come out of simply picking up their father's calculator and messing around. For example, one day after punching in his own weight, Ilse's weight, and Anje's weight, Hans exclaimed, "All together we weigh 150 pounds! That's just the same as Daddy.

I guess that means we could pick him up, doesn't it?" We took that opportunity to have a little discussion about the difference between strength and weight.

The same child who would burst into tears when given a sheet of addition facts because "I did those yesterday!" was tireless in adding up repeated dice throws in a game of Parcheesi. And, bored with the same old bananas and peanuts for snack time, the children attacked the fractions and measuring tasks of making a batch of honey milk balls just as heartily as they enjoyed the sweet finished product.

The novelty of our life in Africa turned humdrum composition assignments for Ilse into exciting efforts to explain interesting experiences to family and friends back in Virginia. Instead of just writing to a sheet of paper, she was writing something totally original for eager readers. As a result, her compositions sported original themes. In "Trash Cans," for example, she described the afterlife of paper scraps, tin cans, Scotch tape holders that had been salvaged and inventively recycled by our neighbors as decorations, dippers, or paper cones for hot roasted peanuts.

And that was just the beginning. How could she write convincingly that an elephant had splashed in the swimming pool at a game park where she had gone on a vacation? Or that she had arrived at the game park by flying over a red-hot volcano? Or that the same elephant had chased her father because he was carrying a basket of strawberries?

How about the electrifying moment when a snake had glided under the front door in the middle of a math lesson, and raised its head and looked around before deciding it had made a mistake and scooted back out? Other amazing subjects to write about were an earthquake that had made the ground ripple and roar; a total eclipse of the sun that had provoked people into running for their lives, scattering market produce behind them; and a silverback gorilla that had suddenly charged Ilse and her dad deep in the rain forest.

Art projects featured paintings of the lion that had poked its head through tall grasses, surprising us in the safety of the Land Rover, as well as the less adventurous activity of weaving mats with palm fronds out of our own yard. And an unbelievable animal exhibit came to our door on a daily basis, as people tried to sell us marabou storks, crocodile eggs, pythons, or goliath beetles. We always took a long look before saying no. And once in a while we said yes. That is why one of the children's playmates was a dainty and affectionate bushbuck, and another a monkey that was often recovering from flea baths.

To our youngest child Anje, this playing, reading, and learning became a natural part of daily life. She hovered over Djebi, coaching him as he learned his colors in English, chanting the alphabet with him, grabbing her papers and pressing up to me: "Are you teaching me? I want to do some work, too." Or she'd suddenly suggest around bedtime, "Let's do school!"

In a normal school situation, parents expect--rightly so or not--that their children will be exposed to an adequate number of different people and viewpoints every day. Being the parent-teacher-librarian-coach rolled into one, I was all too aware of my biases, and was always looking for other adults who could enrich the educational experience.

Being part of an integrated rural development project had its advantages. Once the children spent the morning spotting ants, bugs, and spiders with a visiting entomologist. Sometimes the boys stopped by the pilot's house to check out the aerodynamics of their latest paper airplane creation. An occupational therapist took them to watch workmen who were making simple furniture. They came back with giant wood shavings, and after a morning of patiently (the eight year old) and not so patiently (the six year olds) tying knots and balancing, they presented me with delicate windblown mobiles.

Needing Swahili to negotiate the buying of eggs and pineapple or to join in the afternoon games of the neighborhood children, using French when Belgians or project workers came to visit, my children learned not only to work in other languages, but to observe, question, and enjoy their own. When school began, Djebi knew less English than French, Swahili, and Lingala, so explanations could become quite complicated, with everyone getting into the act:

Djebi (looking at a picture of a tool): That's a scie.
Hans: That's not a see, it's a saw!
Me: In French, it's a scie. In English, it's a saw.
(Everybody laughs uproariously.)
Hans: Yeah, like I see you, and I saw you with my eyes!
Ilse: And you play on a seesaw!
(More laughter. The children will forever remember the French and the English words for the tool.)

Being schoolmistress required few personal sacrifices on my part. I had lively company all morning. I had an excuse to play--messing around with paints, cooking up a batch of Play-Doh, reading four chapters of Charlotte's Web out loud at a stretch, collaborating on a huge cartoon map of our town to send back to our families. Since this was my work, other adults didn't raise their eyebrows at finding me slinging a Frisbee at ten in the morning.

Another personal benefit was being a participant in my children's education. As the light broke through and Hans started snatching up new words like a hen pecking at corn, I was right there, just as thrilled as he was. I needed to relearn mythology, history, and geography in order to discuss Ilse's lessons with her, and I found them more fun this time around.

Ilse chose geography first one morning, and then said, "I think I'll read back over the whole book, it's so interesting." I was speechless, remembering how even the word geography was heavy and gloomy, permeated with a palpable dread, when I was a child in school. But to her things like the equator, time zones, tropical climates, and termite mounds were more than just abstract words. She was living them.

Happy as we were, there were days when juggling noise levels, interest levels, and grade levels around one table I dreamed of the rattle of a school bus, hurried good-byes, and then many blissful hours for my own projects. And it wasn't only to give myself some space. On bad days I regretted that my children's teaching was subject to the very same faults that their mothering suffered from.

In fact, the children themselves were a sort of self-correcting device to keep me on course as a teacher. I started out very informally, giving them lots of freedom in choosing the day's activities. But as time passed, they began developing patterns and goals, wanting to accomplish a certain amount of work in an orderly, predictable way.

For the boys, it was no doubt due to their maturing from illiterates into schoolboys. For the oldest, it was partly nostalgia for the routine she remembered from beloved schools back in Virginia. This surprising tendency towards more order and structure taught us all the value of disciplined learning.

At times, I worried that the freedom we enjoyed would not serve the children well in some future classroom. Another teacher might not be thrilled to hear, "I don't want to do any math today. Let's read instead." I hoped that whatever resilience enabled them to adjust to and love an African life with a home classroom would come to their aid in the future as well.

Sometimes, I worried that the children would lack in some necessary area if they reentered school life-handwriting, sitting still, fitting into the routine. Other times I feared that they would be so far ahead as to be bored. But mostly I just enjoyed the gift of the African present--taking my children's hands and splashing into the infinite pool of things to know and feel about our world.

In the years that followed, some of my worst fears--as well as my fondest hopes--were confirmed. Yes, third grade Hans had to slip back to writing classes with the second graders when we returned to Virginia, to get his handwriting right. And fitting into the routine of the morning salute to the flag met with some resistance: "We're supposed to talk to a piece of cloth?" But these were temporary setbacks.

Now they are all in their 20s--Ilse is studying leafcutter ants in the Amazon while in a graduate program at Cornell University; Hans is a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University doing research on the DNA of children who have died of malaria in the Gambia; and Anje, who is graduating this spring from Eastern Mennonite University, has lived and worked with a village midwife in Benin as part of her interest in public health.

As these three grown children enter their chosen worlds, I like to think that somewhere in the back of their minds and hearts lies the treasured memory of golden African days, of Kiki's chatter from the backyard, and of the joy of shared discovery.

Susan Yoder Ackerman is a writer and teacher of French who alternates between periods of reclaiming roots and testing wings. When in Virginia, she lives with her husband Robby in the farmhouse her grandfather built just after the turn of the century. But from time to time, especially since flying off to Africa to marry Robby, she has lived in faraway places like the savannahs of the Congo or the deserts of Mauritania. She is the author of Copper Moons and The Flying Pie and Other Stories, as well as many articles for adults and children both at home and abroad. Her three grown children come home when they can to enjoy the affection of three cats and the aroma of homemade bread.