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Friday February 2, 2007

When homeroom is at home

Homeschooling makes inroads into mainstream Jewish world

by stacey palevsky
staff writer

Sara and Lena Silberman don’t ride the school bus.

They don’t bring leftover corned beef for lunch, don’t skip school on Yom Kippur and don’t need to explain to classmates why they don’t have a Christmas tree.

Their home and the world around it is their school, their mother their teacher.

Suzette Silberman of San Carlos is one of many parents in California who found that public education’s rigidity, testing and teaching methods didn’t fit her children’s needs. Sara, 12, has been homeschooled for five years. Her sister Lena, 8, has never attended school.

“I perceive that people see what we’re doing as a risky proposition,” Silberman said. “But I have a broad view of what education is.”

A small but growing number of Jewish parents are choosing to homeschool their children, an option once almost exclusively selected by conservative Christian families. Yet homeschooling still can be an unconventional and even unpopular choice for American Jews, a religious group that is often rooted more in community than doctrine, in a country where schools are considered the foundation of many communities.

Though homeschoolers are still mostly non-Jews, Jewish homeschoolers are now a more connected and growing (albeit slowly) group thanks to the Internet.

“Being a Jewish homeschooler is a little like being a pioneer,” said Lisa Gottfried of Napa.

“Being a homeschooler puts you in the minority, and being a Jewish homeschooler on top of that puts you in a teeny tiny minority,” she continued. “We’re so few and far between, but we get a lot of support via email.”

Gottfried points to Chevra, a Yahoo Group for Jewish homeschoolers started in 1998 by a Boston woman. The mothers (in most homeschooling families, the mother is the teacher) are able to share resources, advice and information not available anywhere else since the Jewish homeschooling movement is too small to be organized like its Christian counterpart.

“Chevra is a great place to go if you have any questions about anything related to Judaism, homeschooling or both,” Gottfried said. “It gives you the feeling that you’re not alone in the world. There are unique experiences and issues that come along with being Jewish and a homeschooler that I don’t think anybody else can relate to.”

Sara Silberman is thin and tall, with a round face, thick eyebrows and porcelain skin. Her hair is brown, straight and shoulder-length; Star of David earrings peak out when she tucks it behind her ears. She speaks slowly, as though picking only the ripest apples from a tree.

She and her sister Lena attend religious school on Sundays at Peninsula Temple Sholom in Burlingame. Sara is studying for her February bat mitzvah with the cantor, and also volunteers as a teacher’s assistant.

Most Jewish homeschooling families, like the Silbermans, send their children to Sunday school. The Silbermans did consider providing their daughters with both a secular and religious education, but then thought better of it.

“One of the keys to Jewish identity is being exposed to other Jews,” said David Silberman, the father. “We could have done the Hebrew, but we couldn’t give them the experience of being surrounded by other Jewish kids at Sunday school.”

Many homeschooling families try to integrate Jewish learning into seemingly secular activities and lessons.

“Because we live an authentically Jewish life, we incorporate it into everything we do,” said Helene Rock, who homeschooled her now college-aged daughter Mia.

For example, Rock integrated Rosh Hashanah into a lesson on earth science and biology when she arranged a field trip to a local beekeeper. The kids got a tour of the hives, wore a beekeeper suit and learned how bees make honey and how humans produce it.

Then, they bought honey and apples, made gift baskets and New Year cards, and delivered them to senior citizens.

“It was a science lesson, a language arts project, a math lesson at the grocery store, and it also taught her the value of tzedakah,” Rock said. “Life is our curriculum.”

The Silbermans have their daughters save a portion of their weekly allowance for a tzedakah fund. They light Shabbat candles and make challah.

Gottfried, of Napa, said Judaism is “always a running dialogue and discussion” with her children. She homeschools her 7- and 10-year-olds, and plans to do the same with her 1-year-old when she’s older.

Like Rock, she turned Rosh Hashanah into a quasi-science project when she had her children taste-test a variety of apples and record and quantify their sweetness, crunchiness and texture, followed by a discussion on the New Year.

If she’s doing a lesson on ancient Egyptian history, she’ll expand it to include what the Jews were doing at that time. Or if she’s teaching her children about medieval knights, King Richard and the Crusades, she’ll include information about what happened to the Jews during that time.

“I give [my children] a different perspective, which you usually don’t hear,” she said. Her kids also attend religious school twice a week at Congregation Beth Sholom in Napa.

Dodi Freidenberg, who homeschools her two children in San Jose, meets with an Israeli family twice a month. They play games, read books and practice Hebrew. Her children, ages 5 and 8, also meet with a tutor and attend religious school at Congregation Shir Hadash in Los Gatos.

Bringing Judaism into her everyday curriculum is a challenge, she said, since she hasn’t been able to find educational materials that are specifically Jewish, unlike the arsenal of books available for Christian homeschoolers.

“What I’d love to see, locally or nationally, would be support from the Jewish community for Jewish homeschoolers,” Friedenberg said. “Our local day school and synagogue have been helpful, but I’m not aware of any Jewish organization that is providing support specifically for homeschoolers.”

Nearly all Jewish homeschoolers started with public or day schools, and turned to homeschooling because they felt it better fit their needs.

All parents interviewed have elementary-aged children, and said they’ll consider traditional school if homeschooling ever becomes burdensome or ineffective. It’s common for homeschooled children to attend public or private high schools since the curriculum gets advanced at that point.

Most homeschooling Jews are Reform or Conservative. Recently, however, the Orthodox have become a fast-growing segment of the Jewish homeschooling community, due mostly to the expansion of Chabad in communities without a large Jewish population, day schools and yeshivas. For them, homeschooling is often seen as a better option than public schools saturated with non-Jews.

Orthodox Jews who have children with learning disabilities may also turn to homeschooling if a yeshiva doesn’t meet their kids’ special needs.

Still, the numbers are small, in part because “Jews build institutions,” Rock said. Schools are institutions, she added, and “religious Jews put great stock in education.”

Her friends “gasped in horror,” she said, when she told them she’d chosen homeschooling instead of a day school. Her rabbi tried to talk her out of it, citing talmudic law, and argued that keeping her smart daughter from school was depriving the community of her talents.

“The birthday party invitations dried up. We were socially ostracized,” Rock remembered. “People took my decision to homeschool my child as criticism of sending their children to day school.”

Other Bay Area families interviewed by j. said their decision to homeschool was not met with such derision. They agreed that their synagogue friends thought it unusual but not sacrilegious.

“It’s a challenge anytime you make a choice outside of the mainstream,” Friedenberg said. “I emphasize that children’s needs are different, parents needs are different, families’ needs are different.”

Some, however, found other synagogue members embraced their choice. Jennifer Iscol, of Sebastopol, belongs to Congregation Shomrei Torah in Santa Rosa, and homeschools her son and daughter, ages 9 and 7. They both attend Sunday school.

“It’s a very open-minded group, and it didn’t faze anybody there,” she said.

Homeschooling is likely to remain a minority among Jews and non-Jews alike because it usually requires one parent to stay at home.

“In the Bay Area, it’s expensive to live on one income instead of two,” Suzette Silberman said. “It’s not impossible, but not everyone has that option.”

Many Jewish leaders and educators said homeschooling is not their first choice for Jewish children but they respect a family’s decision.

Rabbi Michael Lezak of Congregation Rodef Sholom in San Rafael said he couldn’t advocate for or against homeschooling — he didn’t want to pass judgment on a family’s educational choices. But he imagined homeschooling brings its own challenges.

“The first place of Jewish learning is the home … but to thrive as a Jew means to be connected to community,” he said. “If you’re homeschooling, the one thing missing is a connection to community, to a larger group, be that Jewish or non. The question is how to teach kids to be connected to and responsible for a community.”

Vicky Kelman, who heads the Bureau of Jewish Education’s Family Education Project, said she’d help if a homeschooling parent called about Jewish resources. But it’s not an educational option she’d promote.

“There is no Judaism without community,” she said. “Children need to be inducted into that at the youngest of ages.”

Even homeschooling advocates will admit that it’s not for everyone.

Judy Massarano, of Berkeley, mother tried homeschooling her two sons for the 2000-01 school year. A year later, she and her boys decided they preferred conventional school.

Massarano, a fourth-grade teacher at Oakland Hebrew Day School, thought the freedom and creativity of homeschooling would allow her sons to flourish in ways not possible in the classroom.

At times, she and her sons felt inspired by having the world as their classroom. She could devote all her time to teaching instead of dealing with classroom management.

But on the flip side, they sometimes felt isolated.

“Homeschooling was very rich but there were days when we felt lonely,” she said, “or we felt we couldn’t take advantage of doing Jewish things with other Jewish children.”

While homeschooling, Massarano plugged into the Bay Area homeschooling community, which she described as a valuable resource. She supplemented their Jewish education by finding neighbors and friends who could teach her children Jewish concepts and traditions.

Homeschooling helped her think about education in a new way, and still informs her classroom teaching methods.

But Massarano missed being in a school setting, and her children missed spending their days with peers. Going back “was the best thing for all of us,” she said. Her children are currently a senior and freshman at Jewish Community High School of the Bay in San Francisco.

“I think one of the things I learned is that there is no perfect system,” she said. “Conventional and home-based education both have a lot to offer, and I think the best is found somewhere between the two.”

Jewish homeschoolers say it’s a misconception that homeschooled children are not a part of a community.

“What we’re doing is not so much homeschooling as choice-schooling,” Freidenberg said. “We’re not learning only in the isolation of our homes, but out in the world.”

Friedenberg and other homeschooling mothers often hear remarks about how their children risk being socially inept.

“Some people ask: ‘What about socialization? Being in the rough and tumble of the world?’” said Iscol, of Sebastopol. “That’s not the challenge. The challenge is protecting private family time and making downtime for family.”

Today’s homeschooling parents have lots of resources for their children. Many enroll their kids in book clubs, science labs, community choirs, outdoor education classes and swimming teams. They go to museums, shadow working professionals for a day and, when they’re old enough, take classes at nearby community colleges.

“We actually just streamlined our schedule to be home more,” Suzette Silberman said.

Homeschooling parents say their children are exposed to the world every day, but one thing they don’t encounter is the Christian culture that permeates most public schools, David Silberman said. His daughters don’t feel left out because of their Jewishness, he said, something he experienced growing up in Burlingame and San Francisco.

“By not being in school, the kids get a lesser sense of being a minority,” he said. “But perhaps that sense of being a minority strengthens the sense of Jewish identity.”

He’s not sure. What he does know is that his 12-year-old daughter Sara enjoys Sunday school and learning trope in preparation for her bat mitzvah.

And she’s not so interested in going back to school, which she attended through third grade. She prefers the teacher-student ratio of homeschooling.

“I wasn’t bad in class — I was pretty average. Not the worst person in class but not one of the stars or anything, and so the teacher never paid me any attention,” she recalled.

She tired easily from being in a group all day, and would hole herself up in her room after school to unwind. She no longer has to retreat at the end of the day.

Homeschooling “is more relaxing,” she said. “You don’t have to be afraid of looking dumb. You do a lot more non-school educational activities, and for me, it’s easier to learn in a hands-on way.

“But there’s also a lot more distractions at home. That’s one of the few bad things,” she said. “But pretty much, I prefer homeschooling to traditional school.”

Homeschoolers weigh pros, cons of full-time motherhood

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