Memoir of the good and the bad . . . Mom takes her 5th grade daughter out of public school for a "one year sabbatical." ( )

Brodie homeschooled her oldest daughter, Julia, for a year because she just didn’t thrive in an overly structured school environment.

Brodie uses the first few chapters of her book to introduce us to Julia and her particular learning challenges. She’s a bright child, but often lost in her own world, and very adverse to change. By the fourth grade, Julia was of the mind that school exists only to torture children and take all the joy out of their lives. Brodie’s evenings were full of tears and frustration as she attempted to force Julia to do her piles of homework, and she realized something needed to change. Brodie thought a year “sabbatical” from traditional schooling in which Julia could learn at her own pace might renew her soul.

To this end, Brodie did a bunch of research into homeschooling by reading a lot of popular books on the subject – and she started noticing that what was missing in the literature on the subject, by and large, were tales of the daily struggles that arise when a parent and child are alone all the time together.

“Among the millions of homeschoolers in America, there must be plenty who have stormy encounters with their children, and who sometimes doubt the efficacy of their teaching. Those people, however, don’t seem to write books. In the homeschooling volumes I encountered, expressions of serious frustration seemed taboo.” p 67.

Brodie definitely fills this void with her very open and honest account of her missteps and frustrations during her homeschooling experiment. And these chapters – both the ones during Brodie’s excited and hopeful pre-homeschooling research and planning and the ones that delve into the specific examples of what worked with Julia and what didn’t - are insightful and surprisingly fascinating. ( )

Interesting and fun memoir about a mom (and college professor) who decides for a host of reasons to homeschool her oldest daughter for her fifth grade year. Fun, well written and eminently readable. Brodie can at times be a annoyingly academic (well, at least for people who find academics annoying) but her humanity and humility when it comes down to it is totally redeeming. Really good read, with lots of great humor & wisdom for kids and parents alike. ( )