Today we’re interviewing 2005 winner Mental Multivitamin. “Mental multivitamin was established in October 2003 for readers, thinkers, and autodidacts. It is an attempt to write across the “curriculum” of this reader-thinker-autodidact (and unabashed generalist); to synthesize what I am learning about astronomy and history and ornithology and current events and literature and technology and art and, yes, about myself, my family, and the world.”

1. Please tell us about your family and your home-life.

There are five people in my family, and there’s not one of ‘em I’d swap.

Seriously, check out my reply to Question 3. I think everything anyone needs to know about our group is captured in those linked entries.

2. How and where did you grow up? What did you aspire to be when you “grew up” as a child?

I was born and raised on the Jersey Shore in a newer suburb in which “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” To the question “How did you grow up?” I’d reply, “Slowly.” To the question “Where did you grow up?” I’d say, “Well, I began growing up in earnest the day I got married, so the answer is South Jersey.” (Since beginning my own family, I’ve lived in South Jersey, Southern California, and Chicago.)

As for what I wanted to be when I grew up… well, although I toyed with the idea of becoming a teacher or an interpreter for the United Nations, I always knew I would be a writer.

And for twenty-six years, that is precisely what I have been.

3. What is an average homeschool day for you and your family?

Check out these entries: A typical day and night here, Let’s go, and Morning meditation: What I lived for. Although they’re a couple of years old, they really speak to what our days look like and what we’re all about here.

I would only add my children are now 18, 12, and 10.

4. When did you decide that homeschooling was for your family and what method did you use?

Grab a cup of coffee (or a bottle of Mountain Dew) and sit back. This is the longest of my replies.

As an admissions counselor — first for a private junior college and then for a large university, both in Philadelphia — I traveled to public and private high schools throughout New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware in the late 1980s. For the most part, I did not like much of what I saw, particularly the lack of zeal that seemed to define most students’ interest in their studies. I was particularly unsettled by the afternoon I spent at the high school from which I had graduated six years earlier.

By that time, my husband and I had already talked about having children. Where will they learn? I wondered one evening after a particularly unsatisfying day at the local high schools. I spent some time at the public library, researching alternatives to traditional schools, and came across John Holt’s Learning All the Time. While we do not subscribe to the radical unschooling approach Holt espoused, his book is all but completely responsible for making me believe that homeschooling was not only a viable but also a practical alternative to the conventional classroom model of education.

Even so, we did not homeschool at first. By the time our oldest was three, we were living and working in So. Cal. and had an excellent relationship with the staff of the child-study center at the university where I had earned my master’s degree, so our son attended the school-day program there. Then we moved to Chicago and were fortunate to find an excellent private school for Pre-K/K. It was one el stop from my office, so I walked him to school every morning, spent many lunch hours folded into a too-small chair at a too-small table, and rode home with a companion bursting with stories about trips to the museums and parks, visits from musicians, and myriad projects. A parochial school admitted our son to first grade a year early, and all continued to go well: He had been an early reader; he had a precociously large vocabulary and was socially adroit; and he was, by all accounts, a born leader.

In second grade, however, he met his match in an older teacher who prized unquestioning obedience and standardized testing. Oh, the stories I could tell!

But I won’t. I’ll skip to the end: School ended in late May, and we spent the summer between second and third grades visiting the city’s parks, museums, zoos, libraries, theaters, and more. We took long walks and short naps. We discovered that our son needed eyeglasses. How had he seen the boards during second grade? we wondered. As it turns out, he hadn’t. So the ophthalmologist ordered glasses, and I ordered a math program, and on a particularly hot day in August, I said, “Hey, dude. Let’s get to work.”

We never looked back.

He is now a senior in high school. By the time he was sixteen, he had completed all of the conventional requirements for high school graduation (apart from driver’s education) and was using texts from my undergraduate and graduate studies in English, psychology, rhetoric, and linguistics and texts from his aunt’s undergraduate studies in physics and chemistry to further his studies. We moved out of Chicago in 2004, but in the two years before we moved, he took classes through the city college system. This year, he simply enrolled as a full-time student at the local college, taking advantage of the dual enrollment program to earn college credit while “finishing” high school. He is awaiting an admissions decision from [insert institution name here]. Frankly, after completing said institution’s arduous application process, we are all awaiting an answer.

Our daughters, unlike their brother, have never been to school — and they don’t need glasses.

Let’s see. In 2001, I read Jessie Wise’s The Well-Trained Mind. As I said, I had first been motivated to homeschool by the seeming lack of zeal that I had encountered when visiting high schools. Later, our philosophy was shaped by the idea that the conventional classroom does its best to encourage academic competence, but academic excellence? Not so much. TWTM offered one blueprint for achieving academic excellence, and I have culled many ideas from the first edition of that resource, including the idea of teaching history in three four-year cycles.

That said, I use only one “program” — a math system that I have used since we began this journey. The rest of our studies I cobble together based on need (theirs), interest (theirs and mine), and books I admire and/or appreciate (e.g., White’s books on philosophy for young people, Copi’s logic text, Horner’s Rhetoric in the Classical Tradition, and Gombrich’s The Story of Art). We study year-round, and our music, Latin, and math studies give each day its basic shape.

5. What does your homeschool/work space look like? Can you show us a picture?

Check out this entry for a glimpse into our home.

6. How long have you been blogging?

I have been blogging for about 4.5 years. In fact, M-mv will celebrate its fifth anniversary in October.

7. Why did you come up with the title “Mental multivitamin”?

When I started “Mental multivitamin,” I had only one idea… to chronicle my studies; to write across the “curriculum” of this reader-thinker-autodidact (and unabashed generalist); to synthesize what I am learning about astronomy and history and ornithology and current events and literature and technology and art and, yes, about myself, my family, and the world. Okay, I had two ideas: Given the glut of “mommy blogs,” I wanted my blog to do and say something else, something not that, if you know what I mean. The title, then, was meant to convey that M-mv was a place for readers, thinkers, and autodidacts.

8. What was the first blog you read online?

I think it was One-Sixteenth.

9. What do you like to blog about the most?

Books and the reading life… and the synthesis, synchronicity, and serendipity that define my own reading-thinking-learning life.

10. What are some hobbies you enjoy?

I tend not to think of my pursuits as hobbies but rather as studies. For example, I have been studying piano with my daughters since October 2006 — we’re preparing for our second recital. And I am taking a correspondence course in bird biology through the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Thanks for joining me for Winner Wednesday! I have some more great bloggers on the roster in the coming weeks!

Blessings!