Slinging a Frisbee at Ten in the Morning

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.