Home schooling

[mallorys_camera]

The luminous and lively Maya dropped out of RLS last June at the end of her sophomore year. I’m not sure whether this was her decision or her parents – Purea had been working there for a couple of years, leading potential cast members of Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous on guided tours around the campus. One of the percs of working at RLS is that tuition is free for your offspring. But Pebble Beach is a long ways from Corralitis and I’m not just talking the commute.

Anyway, this year Maya is doing home-schooling. Didn’t want the parental units involved. Lined up mentors, agreeable adults with some credibility to offer insight into Great Literature, Differential Equations and other aspects of the self-paced learning process.

Couldn’t find someone to do the Great Literature gig so I offered up Annie. “Not without a back-up,” Annie said and that’s how I got involved.

I decided: Fuck the standardized 11th grade American Lit curriculum. Let’s do a Coming of Age unit. Here’s the reading list:

Sula
The Life of Pi
A High Wind in Jamaica
The Go-Between
The Little Friend
Atonement
Lolita
A Clockwork Orange
Jane Eyre
Goodbye Columbus
The House of Mirth
Of Human Bondage
The Magus
A Home at the Edge of the World
Sula was actually Janie’s suggestion, she teaches it at Ithaca College. I read it in three hours straight yesterday, sitting behind the counter at the store.

Extraordinary book, filled with disquieting images – a dark, closed place in the water; a flaming, dancing figure in the yard; a boarded-up window; a child’s purple and white belt. I dreamed about them all last night.

Lots more to write about but I am in a kludgey mood, laboring under a thousand mindless gotta-do’s. How the hell did Toni Morrison write a book like this as a single mother, raising two sons and working a day job polishing other people’s words? That woman is an inspiration.