In recent months (especially since people found out I’m expecting another baby), I’ve been asked a particular question by several different people. It seems possible that others have wondered the same thing, too, so I thought I’d post the answer here. The answer is, “No.”

Hee.

Okay, seriously, the question. A couple of friends have asked whether, given the amount of time required by Wonderboy’s various medical issues and Early Intervention, we are going to have to think about putting the girls in school. How can we go on juggling PT, OT, speech/hearing therapy, bunches of doctor appointments and keep writing books and keep homeschooling the girls?

It’s a fair question, coming from friends who love us dearly but don’t live nearby. If you hang out with us in person a lot, then you probably already see why “Heavens no!” is the answer to the question. It’s a question that springs from the perfectly understandable assumption that homeschooling takes a lot of time. Which is to say, it’s an assumption born of educational experiences which involve establishing long, set periods of time each day for the study of seven to ten different subjects. If you’re supposing that we must sit the girls down at the table every day and teach math, teach writing, teach history, teach science, etc etc etc—at three different grade levels—then I can absolutely see why such an arrangement would seem difficult under our current circumstances.

But homeschooling doesn’t have to be anything like that. It can be; I have many homeschooling friends who do make use of traditional school methods and schedules at home. But for us (and for many thousands of other families), homeschooling is something entirely different from school. It isn’t a section of our day devoted to learning by traditional methods (or more accurately, teaching by traditional methods)—it’s a lifestyle, it’s a way of learning as you live and living as you learn. It’s discussing Shostakovich over breakfast and solving complicated math problems in your head for fun on the way to the grocery store. It’s snuggling up with your 4-year-old several times a day, a few minutes here and there, to listen to her read a Bob Book. It’s being 8 years old and falling so in love with Liberty’s Kids on PBS that you spend six whole months writing letters to your mother in the character of a Revolutionary War-era British girl living in Philadelphia, fully expecting your mother to keep up her side of the correspondence. It’s reading a book of Greek myths until it quite literally falls apart, and deciding (at the determined age of six) that you need to learn to read Ancient Greek. It means giving your mother no peace (determined 6-year-old that you are) until she manages to track down a child’s Greek primer for you.

It means that when you discover your little brother is hard of hearing and—talk about surprises!—spent the first ten months of his life unable to hear much of the chatter going on around him, you immediately dive into the study of sign language. Your mother ditches the family German lessons because the little brother kind of needs to learn English first. Sign language becomes a family passion. By the time you’re ten, you have completed a college-level ASL intro course online and are hungry for more.

Learning permeates the day, every day. There are no summer breaks because there is nothing to break FROM—who ever stops learning? It would be like taking a vacation from eating.

Neighbors often say to me, “I could never homeschool because it takes so much time.” I joke that I couldn’t send my kids to school because that takes so much time. You have to get everybody up at the crack of dawn and rush around getting dressed and packing lunches and stuffing backpacks. You have school clothes and play clothes, twice the laundry. You have to figure out when to fit in doctor and dentist appointments. You have to schedule time for parent/teacher conferences, school fundraisers, checking reading logs, helping with homework, volunteering in the classroom, and on and on. And if you have several kids, you have to juggle those things for all of them. I know this is true because I have lots and lots of friends with kids in school, and these are the challenges they discuss. Being an involved, committed school parent takes a great investment of time.

The school kids around here probably spend more time on homework than my kids do on table work in the course of a day. When you’re learning one on one, it can happen more quickly. There isn’t any reason to have extra work for practice at home, because you already are home and your parents know whether you understand a concept or not. If you’re having trouble multiplying fractions, your mom can suggest you triple a cookie recipe. It’s amazing how quickly you master a skill when you get to eat it afterward.

We have loads of reasons for homeschooling, definite and serious and passionate reasons. But if I were to set all of them aside and address the question purely as a practical, time-management matter, I’d say we’d be nuts to give up the freedom and flexibility this lifestyle affords us. The appointment-juggling would become more complicated if I had school and bus schedules constraining us. Plus I’d be sending Wonderboy’s greatest therapeutic aides (and the joys of his life) away for the bulk of the day. His sisters are deeply, eagerly involved in his various therapies. His first speech/hearing therapist considered Jane her right-hand man in Wonderboy’s sessions. He has made huge strides recently, and I am convinced this is due in large part to the delightful motivation and modeling he receives all day long from his sisters.

Like I said, I get where the question is coming from. If homeschooling required six hours of concentrated instruction time five days a week, we’d be in trouble. But a lifestyle of learning is a whole different kettle of fish. Wonderboy has brought an awful lot of learning to this house. We learn because of him, for him, from him. I affectionately refer to him as our Unit Study on the Brain. Rose calls him her Favorite Thing in the Whole World Which I Love Even More than Horses and Dolphins and Both my Hermit Crabs Put Together.

So. If you’ve wondered whether this will all get too complicated at some point and we’ll have to lay our ideologies aside and put the kids in school just as a matter of survival—now you know. We have an immensely good thing going here. But I really appreciate the concern, honestly, and I’d rather people did ask the question. It gives me an excuse to gush about how much fun I have all day long with my fabulous children.

I just looked out the window and saw Beanie blithely pedaling her two-wheeler around the cul de sac. Since she didn’t know HOW to ride a two-wheeler fifteen minutes ago, you can imagine I found this a rather astonishing sight. Scott’s brilliant method has worked its magic again. He wrote a piece about this on his own blog a couple of weeks ago, the day he took Beanie’s pedals OFF her bike (step one of His Brilliant Method), which piece I shall now repost here in order to share his brilliance with as many people as possible. He would perhaps argue that the really brilliant person is whoever invented this particular method of teaching a kid to ride a bike, but I will counter with the assertion that it takes an inspired mind to think of Googling “teach your kid to ride a bike.” Which is what he did, which is how he discovered the Brilliant Method, which is what led to Bean’s amazingly speed achievement today. I therefore present:

So some of you may remember that a while back I said that The Rose had actually forgotten how to ride her bike over the winter, thus disproving the old adage. She hopped on it this spring, went two feet, wobbled, almost fell off and decided she no longer knew how to ride a bike.

She spent all spring and summer sadly watching her big sister do amazing feats on two wheels but wouldn’t give it another go herself, even though her two best friends also spent those seasons riding like madwomen.

And then one day, a few weeks back, out of the blue, she asked if she could ride her bike. I said sure, of course. So I brought it out, helped her on with her helmet and she climbed on. She was shaky for the first few seconds and then it was like she hadn’t stopped for eleven months. Off she went, getting better by the minute—an amazing thing to witness. And for the next week she rode every chance she got, from early in the morning to late in the evening, until she was far better than she’d been last year.

Kids are weird.

The Bean didn’t want to be left out, so I brought out her bike as well. I’d taken the pedals off and lowered the seat so she could learn to ride the way Max and The Rose had. Our neighbors had noticed this, and The Rose’s sudden amazing prowess, and asked what the deal was. Max filled them in in incredible detail.

Intrigued, they took the training wheels and pedals off their seven-year-old’s bike and lowered her seat as well. And within a few days she was riding like a pro.

Our neighbors have since thanked us about a half-dozen times, as have a few other friends we’ve passed this Learning to Ride a Bike tip on to. In the interest of furthering joy for mankind, and in case any of youse has a kid who wants to learn how to ride a bike, I therefore present what I firmly believe is The Easiest Way to Learn How to Ride a Bike.

First of all, as mentioned, you take off not just the training wheels—vile things which only serve to ingrain bad habits which later have to be unlearned—but also the pedals themselves, and lower the seat way down; the seat should be low enough that when sitting her feet are flat on the ground, with her knees bent, as though sitting in a chair.

Okay. Now she just rides around. And that’s how she learns how to ride the bike in a matter of days, all by herself.

See, normally, when you’re learning how to ride a bike, you’re trying to learn how to steer, pedal, brake and balance all at the same time. They’re all vital, obviously, but the hardest and most important of these, of course, is learning to balance. By taking away the pedaling and braking part, you’re able to focus on just the balancing and steering. And, really, the steering’s pretty basic, especially if you don’t have to worry about the pedaling and braking part.

It’s best to do this on a basically flat area with maybe just the tiniest hint of a slope—but just a tiny one. The kid will initially sort of duckwalk the bike around, taking little babysteps. Soon—generally sooner than you can believe—she’ll realize that’s a little bit boring and that by taking bigger and longer strides, she can glide a little bit further each time. From there it’s just a little while longer before she’s got both feet off the ground at the same time, balancing perfectly.

Theoretically you could do this by just lowering the seat and not removing the pedals, but the kid’ll keep banging her legs into the pedals as she walks, so it’s way more comfortable to take ‘em off. And you want to make this as easy for the kid as possible, because that way she does all the work. Which isn’t only good for you—not that I ever discount an excuse for laziness—but because it works better.

And there you go. After maybe a few days or a few weeks, depending upon the kid (our neighbor’s kid asked for them back after about two hours; they put her off for a few days but finally gave in and, yeah, she was ready for ‘em), the kid’ll be begging to take it to the next stage, at which point you put the pedals back on. It’ll take a few minutes for her to get used to the pedaling and braking thing but not too long. Not too long at all. You’ll be amazed. After a week of practice—or, as always, maybe less—you’ll want to raise her seat back up to where it should normally be.

I spent hours and hours trying to teach Max how to ride a bike the standard way and after about a dozen hours she was convinced she was one of those rare humans who was simply fated to never ride a bicycle. Then we tried this technique. I’d guess I had to invest a total of an hour, including time spent removing and replacing the pedals, before she was completely proficient. Same thing went for The Rose (both times combined).

And the joy it’s brought…I mean, just riding a bike’s pretty groovy thang in and of itself. But mastering this vital childhood step all by yourself? The Rose glowed for weeks. She felt like she’d kicked Godzilla’s ass. And that, my friends, is beyond cool.