HOME SCHOOLING FOR DUMMIES
(or, Parenting in the Apocalypse, Part Two)
Here’s a scary thought. The way things are going, the future of our species just might depend on my ability to impart knowledge to my young daughter. In a few year's time she may be leading a band of brave humans in their bid to re-establish culture while fending off The Infected. And that’s a problem. Because I suck at teaching. Here’s a sample exchange of a recent English lesson: She: farter. Me: No, father. She: That’s right, farter. Me: No no. It’s th… it’s father, you know, like Thor. She: farter, farter, farter!
Forcing a writer to home school is like forcing a chef to teach cats how to make meatballs. It’s a matter of time before she swallows twenty of them and chugs a gallon of beer in an attempt to explode. For the first few days, I was in denial. Don’t you know this stuff? I tried to get through everything as fast as possible. Like speed dating for grammar. Right, fifteen seconds in front of the verbs. Got it? Thumbs up? Verbs are in. Moving on!
Being both impatient and didactic, I typically want to give a really long explanation for everything, but can’t be bothered. So speed-teaching didn’t work. I became a kind of politician instead. I promised rewards I couldn’t deliver. I blamed the previous administration. What the hell have they been doing with my tax dollars? After the democratic phase of my teaching career came the dictatorial phase. I was like a North Korean Cultural Education instructor, indignant that you didn’t know the Supreme Leader shits rainbows. How dare you?
Sure, the dictatorial phase pleased my Inner Gaddafi. Because he could cleverly turn it against me. Look, face it, you’re ruining her, buddy, he says with a shrug. Shut up, I say. None of this matters. We’ll be eating grubs and navigating by the stars soon, so who cares? I’ve noticed that speaking this way to your Inner Child often provokes silence in a room. It makes people uncomfortable, I guess. In such quiet moments, Baby Gaddafi doubles down. You really should be able to teach, you know. Plenty of writers have been teachers. Robert Frost, Stephen King, Kurt Vonnegut, George Orwell. You’re better than those guys? That’s different, I say. It was their job. They were paying The Man. You know, they didn’t actually care about teaching.
Baby Gaddafi smirks and slowly lights a cigar, maintaining eye contact. When your seven-year-old beats you in an argument, you can pretend you’re letting her win. When your Inner Child beats you in an argument and flips you off right after, there’s nowhere to go. So I confess that, fine, I’m bad at teaching. But what do you expect, when I was never any good at learning? I never asked a question in class without trying to make a point. I once fell asleep after five minutes of an art film featuring a lonely monk walking around in the woods. I woke up near the end and he was still in the woods. During question time, I lectured the director about Soviet cinema, despite that I literally hadn’t seen his film. What I should have said was, do you realize your film is a medical marvel? It’s an actual anesthetic. You could license it to hospitals.
Ironically, I learned to read at home. Or not ‘home’, exactly. During that period we were itinerant. For a while, we lived with my gran in government housing in Edinburgh. She was a wonderful lady who gave me slices of white bread with butter on them and a thick layer of white sugar poured on top. My first best friend stole my parents’ savings from under the bed. He was caught because he was playing the big man and buying people bags of chips. My second best friend thought he was Superman and I had to talk him out of jumping off the roof of the council flats. That’s right, Batman talked Superman off the ledge. Later that day, a couple of older boys threw him into a fountain for laughs. Stop that, I said lamely. You want to go in too, Batman? Not really, I said. So Batman watched Superman get sloshed about in a fountain. I caught his eye while this was going on. Coward, he seemed to say. You should have let me jump.
My friends in Edinburgh were thieves and lunatics, but my parents were devotees of a Swami, so when I was six they moved us from the gray council building to the acid trip that was India. I’ve been quietly tripping ever since. From the actual crowds of begging kids, to the sacred cows taking dumps in the street, to the sublime potato rotis, to the monks with fruit dangling from hooks shoved through their cheeks, my imagination lit up like the eyes of an arsonist on Diwali. We traveled from what was then Bombay and woke up watching the sunrise over the Taj Mahal. We took a train filled with extras from Gandhi and a taxi driven by a convict. We arrived in Rishikesh at midnight and took up residence in an ashram.
This was 1980. Thatcher had just been elected. Reagan was about to be. Mark David Chapman had begun stalking Lennon. The mood was changing. Hippies were not what they used to be. A year later, Bagwan would move to Oregon and get a Rolls Royce and a DIY bio-terror kit. Idealism became tinged with another flavor, something considerably more sinister. I loved Rishikesh because it brimmed with odd characters. One of them was a blonde Swedish pilgrim who I’ll call Isabella. She had been asked to hike to the top of a mountain with an Indian yoga instructor I’ll call Raj. She clearly didn’t trust Raj, and for some reason thought that a) it would be a good idea to still go and b) it would be great to bring a six-year-old child with her. As her wing boy. Probably because an ashram isn’t a tremendous place for a young child not content to meditate for six hours a day and smoke weed the rest of it, my parents agreed. Raj arrived with food and water and an appreciative eye for Isabella’s hiking shorts. On the way up the mountain, we passed a dead man with a horseshoe on his chest who looked very peaceful. Should we do something? Isabella asked. No, no, Raj said. It’s too late for that. He was eager to get to the summit, where he had planned everything.
Upon arriving at the simple one-room dwelling atop the mountain, we ate Raj’s food and then he and Isabella got high. He suggested that they do some après-diner yoga together, but she declined. He thoughtfully tried to help her limber up, which is difficult when your subject is squirming. Eventually, he desisted, we rolled out three mattresses on the floor, and the lights went out. For the next two hours, the sounds of scuffling and Isabella’s flat refusals were punctuated by her lilting Swedish accent saying, “Jay, turn the lights on!” I’d dutifully rise and find the switch, illuminating grim tableaux of sweaty Raj in his wife-beater, gazing lustfully at Isabella, who had mummified herself in blankets in an effort to thwart him. This went on until I passed out. I don’t think Isabella slept that night. She woke me around dawn fully dressed and insisted that we leave without Raj. In retrospect, she was clearly trying to escape. But Raj woke anyway, and making no mention of the previous night’s ardors, sullenly dressed and followed us down the mountain, sulking.
I didn’t speak a word of Hindi, so my parents put me in a tiny Indian school. During classes, I would wait until the teacher turned to the blackboard. Then I’d jump out of the window and run around the entire building, climbing in the other window and returning to my chair before she turned around. When I was naturally expelled, my parents faced a dilemma. Wasn’t it more hippy to raise an illiterate unwashed feral child than force the fascist rigors of sentence structure upon him? What would Timothy Leary do? My saving grace was that they were working-class hippies. Hippies that could see the eighties looming on the horizon like a giant inflatable missile wearing shoulder pads and neon pink socks. Hippies that felt the mood shifting too, and wanted in. By the time we returned to Durban, South Africa, where my mom and I were born, I had read an entire cartoon cycle of the Bhagavad Gita and was looking forward to Real School. I was in for a shock.
Firstly, there were only white people in the school. I hadn’t seen so little melanin in one place since the Royal Edinburgh Tattoo. The principal of the elementary school was a guy with a fish decal on his bumper who was always red in the face and screaming at the walls. When the boys misbehaved he made them take their pants down and whipped them across their naked buttocks with a cane. So there was that. And the boys misbehaved a lot. They beat up a Special Ed kid once. They hid the wood-working teacher’s whiskey so that he got the shakes while operating a lathe. Religious instruction consisted of a priest explaining why the Bible supported Apartheid. Broadly speaking, school was a disappointment. I read Frank Herbert’s Dune series instead, and found Arrakis far preferable to Durban. My companions became books. I started social distancing way ahead of the curve.
When South Africa’s innovative blend of Neo-Colonialism and Neo-Nazism started to go up in flames and conscription loomed on the glowing horizon, my parents moved to Vancouver, British Columbia. I expected joyful liberation from an absurdly brutal system and found Vancouver instead. It was like if Hong Kong and Seattle went to a Halloween party dressed as The Lost Boys. There were the Chinese gangs and the Italian gangs. There was a ninja who threw eggs at the blackboard when the teacher’s back was turned and the Hungarian twins who joined a Latin street gang. My mom opened a metaphysical bookstore and got mugged at knifepoint. You know, for all the swag just lying around in those joints. When I learned that Philip K. Dick had moved to Vancouver while experiencing visions of a pink beam of light that he called Zebra who exposed the hidden truth of reality, it made perfect sense. After all, this was the city where William Gibson invented the notion of a vast consensual hallucination called cyberspace. That was just another name for Vancouver.
See, reading science fiction helped me understand a world that I otherwise wouldn’t have understood one fucking bit. And pleasure in reading started at home, with my parents. I was worried that I had spoiled this legacy until I saw my quarantined oldest reading Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar the other day. That’s the spirit! Who needs friends? I’ve been practicing anti-social proximity most of my life, and look at me, I’m fine!
So yes, those writers cared about teaching. Because they cared about language. I’m slowing down and learning how to teach it, and becoming a student in the process. Not just of words, but of how they shape us. How they bind us to one another. It’s beautiful, and a privilege. And the stakes are huge. After all, if my youngest daughter does lead a band of survivors across the empty plains of post-viral America, who knows? One day I might be considered the Farter of the Nation.
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