Back to School--In the Dining Room.(home schooling)(Brief Article)

PELHAM, MASSACHUSETTS--On a wintry morning, two masculine heads are hovering over a textbook on my scuffed dining room table. The heads begin talking about radicals. No, not the Che Guevara or Abbie Hoffman kind. Rather, the radicals familiar to students of algebra. Willard III, who is fifteen and goes by the family nickname "Bebe," is being taught by his father and namesake Willard II (who goes by the nickname Wid). Dad's tools for teaching his son math are old-fashioned but effective--pencil, paper, and oodles of sample problems. He requires mastery before advancement.

For the past year, my husband has worked part-time as a house painter and laborer while training for triathlons, but he devotes the bulk of his day to homeschooling Bebe. In addition to algebra, Wid conducts classes in physical science, the Bible, and Dirt Biking 101. On occasion, he will invite Mr. Bach, Mr. Chopin, and Mr. Rachmaninov to provide background concertos for his classes. He also escorts our younger child around western Massachusetts and southern Vermont to ice hockey games and snowboarding excursions.

I pitch in by dispensing fiction and non-fiction reading assignments, as well as checking compositions and driving Bebe to his job at a service station. The three of us often watch news shows like "The O'Reilly Factor" and discuss current events. One day a week, Bebe attends an American history seminar at the Victorian home of Whitney Robinson, age 14, a fellow homeschooler who lives nearby. Whitney is taught by her lawyer dad, who delivers the succinct weekly lectures.

Our family has been homeschooling for over a decade, and no year has resembled the previous one. Dan, our alder son, was taught at home for many semesters while we lived on a small farm with chickens and cows. During a subsequent year, we went on sabbatical to Oklahoma and received a crash course in tornados and Sooners. When Dan turned sixteen, he yearned to try public school and play football. We grudgingly agreed to this experiment in school choice, and his experience--he just graduated from Amherst Regional High School--has only confirmed our opinion of government schools as tax-funded temples to socialism and adolescent foolishness.

My husband has worked as a high school teacher, a college math instructor, and a long-haul trucker. I think of him as a contemporary renaissance man, one of the ...