Thanks, Mom and Dad

I grew up on a farm in the Shenandoah Valley, the youngest of four boys with 18 years from the oldest to the youngest. My father taught drama. My mother was a playwright. All of us were home-schooled because my parents thought they could do a better job than the regular public schools. And they were right. But the curriculum was utterly unstructured. Sometimes we’d do mathematics full-time for three or four days and nothing else. Then we’d hit a bump and my mom would say, “O.K., you’ve made a step forward, now let’s step into something else.” It never got boring. Maybe that’s part of why it worked.