spinofflive
a small brown girl wearing a brown skirt and running shoes, is slightly out of focus as she strides across a grassy path, with big mountains and a blue sky in the background
Cross-country, homeschool style (Image: courtesy Mathias family)

SocietyOctober 10, 2024

What I learned (and didn’t learn) from four years of home education

a small brown girl wearing a brown skirt and running shoes, is slightly out of focus as she strides across a grassy path, with big mountains and a blue sky in the background
Cross-country, homeschool style (Image: courtesy Mathias family)

For four years, Shanti Mathias learned at home, with her siblings as her only classmates. She reflects on the experience.

Every now and then, when I go to my parents’ house, I find a relic of my years of homeschooling in the back of a drawer. For the four years that my siblings and I were homeschooled, regular packages would arrive from The Correspondence School, now known as Te Kura. The bags were dark green, with flaps on the top, sturdy. Inside were booklets to fill out, art supplies and copies of School Journals. Once they were empty, we reused them to hold muesli or keep books dry on camping trips.

We were homeschooled because we lived in a remote area of India with no English-language schools, and the resources from Te Kura were our connection back to the place we’d been born. Outside, wildflower meadows grew high and lush and the khaki river nibbled at the last dirty remnants of snow; inside our house, we were reading about ice creams and beaches. New Zealand sometimes seemed like a dream, revealed in textbooks and attempts to make ginger crunch, not direct experience. 

a valley with big mountains and mud brick houses with rainbows arching over them
A view in one of the northern Indian valleys where Shanti was homeschooled. (Image: courtesy Mathias family)

School would finish at lunchtime so my parents could do some work; in the afternoons, my siblings and I would do ironically-named homework – spelling, addition, reading Danny The Champion of the World to debate the morals therein – then be free to do what we wanted. 

I remember lots of hours reading the encyclopaedia while shelling sweet, juicy peas from the fields next door. My siblings and I played a spy game, and would have meetings on the rock in the river to take notes about whether any of our neighbours had done anything suspicious (they never had). We made little rafts to float down the irrigation ditches and trained for cross country – a three kilometre loop through the fields, which my brother won every year – or played badminton. Family videos from that time, when I was between the ages of six and 10, are chaotic: four loud children surrounding my mum with the camera, demanding attention, making faces, full of opinions. 

The possibility for projects was endless, taking full advantage of whichever adults around had time to help. My dad used the dial-up internet to look up the size of the planets, so we could attempt to make to-scale models of the first five planets of the solar system. I felt sorry for my sister, who had chosen Jupiter and discovered it was a lot of work. A visiting surveyor taught us some basic orienteering skills, and we followed the compass across the bridge, marking landmarks on the way; when heavy snowfall meant we had to stay inside at the hospital that had employed my parents, we did a unit on blood, making models of arteries and visiting the lab to test our blood types with little droppers to see which antigens we had. (I learned something from this about the composition of blood – so much of it is plasma – and the genetic inheritance of blood types, but have no memory of what an antigen actually is.) 

a grid background with a photo of an educational poster about blood
A poster about blood and a hanging planet installation, made as part of homeschooling (Image: courtesy Mathias family)

For about six months, our family lived in Delhi, the big city a stark contrast to the Himalayas. I read a lot of books with castles and forts, and being in a city full of them was a dream, even if it was always crowded. Along with the families of some friends, every Wednesday our parents would take turns taking us on a field trip to a museum or garden or palace. As the weather got hotter into the summertime, we would buy ice blocks from stalls at the side of the road, and get the Metro home with lips and tongues stained bright green. 

It’s hard not to be nostalgic for those four years of homeschooling. The opportunity to do PE classes in a valley carved out by a glacier, learn Indian history by going on trips to old buildings made of warm sandstone, and take holidays at times when the weather was good was wonderful in so many ways. The flexibility allowed by the Te Kura packs, as well as the support of a family friend who would come and teach us for several months at a time so my parents could work, made those experiences in that unique place possible. I didn’t care much about that as a kid, though, mostly gloating during visits to New Zealand that I only had to do school until lunchtime.

As a sometimes-sullen, introverted kid, I liked home education because I didn’t have to interact with people beyond my household. I was the co-star of the play (four actors, one of whom was my mother), always second or third in cross-country (in a bid to make sure everyone was a winner, I was often also Most Improved), top of the class for English (all those books read in the long afternoons, scribbling stories with my twin sister), put in the extension class for maths (my dad tried to teach us algebra at age 10, and I didn’t understand how a letter could be a number that we didn’t actually know), and flailing, along with the other two students, at Hindi (external help – someone’s niece from the next village was a very patient teacher). 

I don’t like the stereotype of homeschooled kids not knowing how to socialise, but when I consider my mostly happy memories of learning at home, it’s hard not to spot loneliness I couldn’t identify at the time. When I started going to a “normal school” a few months before turning 11, I found the learning easy, and liked that convoluted projects were still on the cards (making a diorama to learn different prepositions). 

At the same time, I had a hunger to learn all the things other kids seemed to know easily, a lack of familiarity I sometimes associated with the years of home education. I went to a sleepover and was asked who my crush was: I picked a boy no one else had named at random, and tried to learn the rules. Crushes weren’t supposed to last for too long, so for the next few years I tried to rotate the crushes I named every few months. Suddenly, little brothers were supposed to be considered annoying, not key playmates (who were at times annoying). I tried to share an enthusiasm for One Direction, even though I never learned to tell Liam and Louis apart. 

A SMALL GIRL WITH PATCHES ON HER STRIPED LEGGINS WEARING A SOFT ORANGE HOODED SWEATER WALKS AcROSS a pipe with polluted air and some men standing in the background
Shanti Mathias walks across a bridge on the way to a park in Delhi, 2010. (Image: courtesy Mathias family)

Things slowly got easier. I made a few friends who also liked to read Guinness World Records in the school library at lunchtime, or wanted to go to the computer lab so we could spend our free time messaging each other on the internet. I retained a slight disdain for many of my classmates, jealous of their basketball abilities or familiarity with the oeuvre of Glee. Maybe some of this is inherent to my personality or the circumstances; I won’t ever know if school would have been more straightforward for me, socially, if I hadn’t had those wonderful yet isolated years learning with only my siblings for classmates. 

What I do know has stayed with me from those years of homeschooling is that learning things doesn’t just happen in classrooms(/bedrooms/living rooms). You can learn something in the blood lab of a small hospital, in the smoothed pathways of an ancient fort, with hands sticky with drying flecks of home-made paper, while observing the dreaded social ritual of picking sports teams for PE as an 11-year-old acclimatising to being surrounded by peers, from the contents of a plastic bag shipped all the way from New Zealand – and if you’re lucky, you’ll get the chance to try it all. 

New episodes of Home Education will be released on The Spinoff every Tuesday. Made with the support of NZ On Air.

Keep going!
HMH_FeatureImage-2.png

SocietyOctober 10, 2024

Help Me Hera: I’m so apologetic I’m annoying everyone around me

HMH_FeatureImage-2.png

Being too apologetic might make me sound insincere, but I genuinely am sorry about everything. Help!

Want Hera’s help? Email your problem to helpme@thespinoff.co.nz

Dear Hera,

Inspired by Chatty Cathy’s recent letter to you, I suddenly realised that “oh, maybe I can ask for Hera’s advice, instead of just wishing an angel could descend from the heavens, bop me on the head, and cure me of my problems.” 

I have a similar problem to Cathy, but a little to the left. Instead of being overly talkative to the point of annoying everybody, I am overly *apologetic*, to the point of annoying everybody – even myself! Being too apologetic might make me sound like an insincere person, but the problem is that I genuinely *am* sorry about everything. I feel like I’m rude when I email people, or take them up on offers freely provided, or eat food shared with me, or or or (envision a seal here if you must)…

I’m keenly aware that I’m socially awkward. I behave really well when I am in a “role”, but suck at talking to people in more casual settings, and often struggle to stop a conversation from dying. When I do manage to speak, I’m invariably apologising for *something*, and now I’m worried that I’m cheesing everybody off!

Help me please, Hera!

Nervous Nellie

A line of fluorescent green card suit symbols – hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades

Want Hera’s help? Email your problem to helpme@thespinoff.co.nz

Dear NN,

I will admit up front I’m an apology apologist. As a longtime fan of the grovelling cultures (Minnesota, Canada, Japan) I believe a little performative humility is the social glue that holds the fabric of our society together. 

I may be in the minority here. There was a time in recent memory where you couldn’t open a Sunday magazine without encountering an article with a title like “Sorry Not Sorry: Why Women Should Reclaim Their Power and Stop Apologising.” The radical feminist theory underpinning this seemed to be that men don’t apologise nearly as much as women do, and if men do something it must be good. 

Maybe this advice makes sense in the boardroom. But most of the time, saying “sorry, but I ordered the Halibut,” isn’t damning linguistic evidence of a female inferiority complex, but a harmless conversational lubricant we use to show others we’re not assholes. 

Being a chronic over-apologiser is a different problem.

It seems clear from your letter that you suffer from some pretty intense social anxiety, and worry your presence is a burden to others. First of all, this sucks and I hate this for you. Feeling like you have to constantly apologise for the fact of your existence is no way to live. Cutting down on your apologies isn’t going to solve the big issue here, and my main recommendation is to work on consciously building up your self-esteem because you seem like a lovely person who is unnecessarily haunted by the idea that you’re not good enough for others. 

However, I think your interpretation of why people find over-apologising awkward is a little off. You don’t want others to think you’re insincere. But I’m willing to bet your sincerity is precisely the issue. 

An apology is usually a call and response. One person apologises and the other person replies “no worries.” I wonder if over-apologising is your way of unintentionally seeking reassurance from others that you’re not bothering them and they don’t secretly hate you? The problem with constantly seeking reassurance is that it quickly becomes exhausting to be around. When you batter people with apologies, you’re unintentionally showing them you secretly fear they’re judging you harshly, which isn’t a great way to build trust and camaraderie. Nervousness is contagious, and by constantly calling attention to your own discomfort in social settings, you end up creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

So what can be done? 

It can be hard to kick a conversational habit cold turkey. But as a first step, you could try replacing the word “sorry” with “thanks.” 

I hate to admit it, but this ubiquitous “customer service lifehack” seems to work. Telling a line of angry customers “Thank you so much for your patience” is a million times more effective than saying “Sorry for the long wait.” Most nervous apologies can be easily reimagined as expressions of gratitude, and they work a lot better because people like being thanked a lot more than they like being apologised to.

a line of dice with blue dots

I’m not saying it works in every context. “Thank you for being so understanding that I ran over your dog” is not an acceptable employment of the foundational principles. But let’s take a better example. You say you feel rude when people share food with you. But apologising to someone who has offered you a plate of dinner is a lot unintentionally ruder than learning how to give a warm and sincere thank you. An apology makes the situation all about you and your discomfort. A thank you makes it all about their kindness. 

I know this is not an easy habit to break. For some people, it can be a million times harder to accept the love and generosity of others than it is to accept their blame and criticism. But it’s an important thing to learn to do because it will set you free. 

‘Love The Spinoff? Its future depends on your support. Become a member today.’
Madeleine Chapman
— Editor

It took me a long time to realize that accepting help from others is a wise and righteous thing to do because people genuinely love to help. At the risk of sounding like Dale Carnegie, one of those annoying business “hacks” which I believe in my heart to be true (simply because I know it would work on me) is that a good way to get someone on your side is to ask them for a favour. As far as I can tell, the secret psychological reason this works boils down to the fact that most people like other people, and are flattered and proud when given an opportunity to help them.

Yes, you should stop apologising so much. But not because you’re a bad person who is secretly irritating everyone you come into contact with. It should be part of a wider quest to learn to trust that, for the most part, people wish you well and have your best interests at heart. Even if you don’t really believe it, this is one of those situations in which I would strongly recommend the “fake it till you make it” approach. Learning to feel safe in the company of others isn’t as easy as changing your vocabulary. But changing your vocabulary might be a step in the right direction. 

But wait there's more!