Episode 1: (New) Adventures in Homeschooling
After a couple of years hiatus, The Podcast with Suzanne and Amy is back! Our secular homeschool podcast is shifting gears to focus specifically on homeschooling middle and high school and on how, as homeschoolers, we can work together to decolonize the curriculum. In this episode, we let you know what you can expect in future episodes. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below, or download it to take with you on the go!
The Podcast with Suzanne and Amy, brought to you by home.school.life.now
Here’s a list of everything we talked about:
TRANSCRIPT
(Note: We use an automatic transcriber for our podcasts, and sometimes it makes weird errors — we do edit the transcript, but I’m sure we miss stuff!)
Suzanne
Hello and welcome to the home.school.life.now podcast with Suzanne and Amy. I’m Suzanne.
Amy
And I’m Amy.
Suzanne
And this is episode number one of our newly relaunched podcast series recording on Sunday, April 2, 2023. So welcome.
Amy
Yay.
Suzanne
Yay. Amy, what are we doing? Why do we have a podcast aside from the fact that I messaged you one day and was like, hey, you know, we should have a podcast.
Amy
Well, we did. We did have what I would say was a pretty great podcast for a few years there.
We are both big homeschool nerds. I think that there is nothing that we like better than talking about secular homeschooling.
In fact, I think that’s one of the reasons that we bonded is because we can obsessively talk about secular homeschooling and about books.
And so a podcast seemed like a really awesome way to talk about this and then talk about it so that we can have bigger conversations with more people than just the two of us.
Suzanne
Yes, yes, that’s exactly right. So we’ve had a lot of fun with the podcast. We may — it’s possible that we may not have updated quite as regularly as we would have liked.
So what makes us, what do we mean by a relaunch? What does this mean, what are we doing here with relaunching our podcast?
Amy
Well, so in all fairness to us, a lot of things kind of converged to happen to make the previous incarnation of our podcast — I don’t know, I want to say slow down significantly.
One thing is that the kids that we were homeschooling started to grow up, and it started to feel weird to talk about their homeschool experiences like it was our story. It seemed like it was their rare story to tell. And so it was hard to figure out how to balance those things as our kid got into later middle and high school.
Another reason is that we started a school and it turned out that people wanted to go to it, which — we were not expecting this, right?
Suzanne
It’s shocking development.
Amy
And so it turns out that if you’re going to run a school and people are actually going to go to it, they take a lot of time and energy to run that.
And so we kind of had to figure out how to incorporate that. Also, I don’t know how to say this, except for, suddenly the world was on fire — because we started our podcast, right, in 2015, I think?
Suzanne
That sounds right.
Amy
And so the year after we started our podcast, there was a traumatic presidential election, and all of a sudden, everything that we had kind of understood about the world felt like it was quicksand.
I mean, I feel like I’m being melodramatic, but genuinely, it’s like the world was on fire.
Suzanne
Yeah.
Amy
And so it was hard to talk about secular homeschooling science when it felt like everything was urgent and terrible and we were all just kind of trying to get through it.
Suzanne
Yeah, like what are we doing doing a podcast? We should all be running around with the fire hoses.
Amy
And so as we kind of kind of found our equilibrium with that — which I guess we’re all still kind of finding together — it turned out that when we came back to our podcast, we’d kind of said all the things that — we said a lot, right?
We said a lot of things and it turned out that that was, we kind of said everything that we wanted to say about homeschooling elementary and early middle school. I think. Do you think that’s fair?
Suzanne
I think that’s fair. Yeah. We said a lot. I talk a lot. You may have noticed this.
Amy
And so instead of trying to pick up where we left off, you know, four years ago, we thought, hey, let’s kind of start fresh. Let’s start a new podcast about where we are — wait for it — now. home.school.life.now. Yes.
Suzanne
Yes.
Amy
Because where we are now looks a little bit different, I think.
Suzanne
I think that’s really true. And I think since running the school, we now have a lot broader experiences with working with homeschooled middle schoolers and high schoolers.
And so we have a lot to say, right? We have a lot of new experiences that we’re having all the time.
I want to say a little bit about what you just mentioned. So we used to say the podcast brought to you by Amy’s home/school/life magazine, and folks may know us from the magazine, or they may know us from the Instagram account. And you may have noticed that it is now home.school.life.now. And in fact, our school is home/school/life academy.
So what happened?
Amy
Well, I took some business classes, Suzanne, and apparently you shouldn’t hide all the things that you’re doing in different places. You should put them all together under one big umbrella so that people can find them easily.
Who knew?
Suzanne
Can I just point out that I knew? that I in fact did tell you this?
Amy
Okay, this is actually true. Suzanne, as always, is right about everything. If Suzanne makes a book recommendation to you and you don’t read the book, you will regret it. And then when you read the book later and you’re like, this was the best book, Suzanne will be like, ahem, and cross her arms at you.
So it turns out that Suzanne was totally right about this. Also, I think the world has changed when we started home/school/life back in, gosh, Suzanne, 2014. Can you believe that 10 years ago, almost, when we started home/school/life? People still read magazines.
I mean, I still read magazines.
Now I stack magazines in my bathroom, which is very different from reading them.
Suzanne
Yes.
Amy
And it felt like there are, in 2023, there are better ways to reach people who are homeschooling. There are better ways to connect with people than just a magazine.
So we still have a version of the magazine, it’s kind of a slimmed down version of the magazine. You can also find us on Instagram. You can also find us here on our podcast. You can find us at home/school/life academy, where we’re doing in-person classes, here in Atlanta, online classes around the United States and Canada, and where we sell curriculum so that you can steal our best ideas to use in your own homeschool.
So yeah, I think that we have just… kind of kind of grown into the space that we want to be in.
And that space turns out to be what we think of as the homeschooling sweet spot, the most fun part of homeschooling, which for us turns out to be middle school and high school, which I think is great because there aren’t as many resources for that.
Suzanne
That’s true. There is a million and one thing about there for homeschooling elementary, but once you get into the middle and high school world, it does kind of feel a little bit like you’re breaking new ground — even though that’s not true.
There are a lot of us out there, and there’s a lot of great resources. And we’re actually really — you know, I was teasing Amy, but we are super excited about home.school.life.now and bringing this together and kind of looking forward as how we can continue to bring it into the future and support people.
So this is a really exciting time for us and we are really excited about our relaunch podcast and we have a whole bunch of future projects. that we want to talk about.
Tell us some of the projects, Amy.
Amy
Well, so the big thing that I think we want to talk about in the podcast is homeschooling middle and high school — our experiences with our own kids, but also our broader experiences here at the Academy. Turns out, if you homeschool a bunch of middle and high school students, you get a really good sample size.
And so you can kind of make bigger statements about things that might be useful to more people. So that’s exciting for us because I feel like in the world of homeschooling high school, homeschooling high school in a way that is academic and student-led and fun, it’s really hard to find resources for that. And so I hope that we can share some of the things that we’ve discovered and become a resource for that for people.
Suzanne
Absolutely, absolutely. And it’s nice to know sometimes, like, is this just an us thing? or is this everyone thing? or what does the next step look like? And how is that changing and evolving. I think we’re at a place right now in education across the board where people are looking and should be looking at how do we change things to make them better?
Amy
And so part of that, I think one of the other things that I’m really interested in talking about and I know you are too Suzanne, is writing a new secular homeschool canon.
Right? Let’s reinvent the book list.
Suzanne
This could not be more exciting, I could not be more exciting, I get to tell people what books to read. That is basically my definition of a good time.
Amy
I think we’ve just got so many better books now. I mean, I know, I talk about this all the time, but I always tell the story about how I loved Little House on the Prairie when I was a kid and then I read it with my own children, and they were legitimately sort of terrified by how racist it was which, I just, I never noticed. Right? In my entire childhood, I did not notice — or I guess I didn’t care if I did notice — how racist Little House on the Prairie is.
We don’t have to read racist books, right? They’re not the only options. The canon is biased toward white European men, and I think we can be a really instrumental part of changing that for our kids, because our kids want us to change that, right? They are not looking at the books that we loved as children the same way that we are. They don’t have any of that nostalgia around them. They just see the bad stuff.
Suzanne
Well, and especially when she get into the middle and high school years, I mean, my kid, number two, went to a public high school. And I remember her coming home and being so frustrated. And talk about telling stories before — I know I’ve told this one before, that she did not read an assigned book — like everybody in the class has to read this book — she did not read a book by a woman until, I think, her senior year.
And there were books you could choose. Maybe some women would be on that list, and maybe she read some poetry and some short stories. But I think she went through three years of high school without there being a book that the entire class had to read — and she was an advanced literature classes, including AP classes — that was written by a woman.
And more than that, they were written by English men. It wasn’t even American writers. And that’s how far behind, I think, the canon is, especially in the upper grades, when it comes to reflecting the world that we live in now.
Amy
Yeah. No, I think so, too. Is it Maya Angelou who said when you know better, do better? Well, we know better. And so I think together we can do better.
Suzanne
Yeah, that is something that is going to be a ton of fun and useful for us.
Still, you know, this is a process of discovery that we are going through right now as we continually try to bring the best curriculum to our school, which is really exciting.
Amy
Well, you did — in the spring, you did the coolest banned books project, which I shared a little bit of it on Instagram, but that’s a great way to do it.
I mean, we don’t have to know exactly which books are going to be the new canon to get out there and read a lot of new stuff. It’s only by reading a lot of new stuff that we figure out together what that new canon should look like.
Suzanne
Yes, yes. So that is a project we are really excited about working on. Another project that we have that is in the works is going to be our online high school curriculum that is going to be available through the Academy, through home/school/life academy, that we are trying to make as available as widely as we can.
And so that is something we’re going to be launching in the fall. Amy, do you want to say a little bit more about it?
Amy
Yeah. Well, I mean, so this is a big leap for us because as you may know, if you have tried to buy our curriculum in the past, we sell a very limited number of copies of it every year.
Because it’s really important to me, and to Suzanne, I think, that what we give people is great and that we’re able to do a good job supporting them.
And so a few years ago, when COVID started, we launched an online version of the high school, mostly for our in-person students who had to stay home because we were all kind of socially distancing and nobody was really sure what to do.
The high school went really well. We were able to expand it into a full online high school for the Academy.
But one of the things that we learned doing that is that a lot of the stuff that we do in our online high school from the curriculum actually translates really well to online learning. And so we’ve been experimenting over the past couple years, kind of finding ways to put classes online for students so they can take them at their own pace, so that they can kind of set their own goals, so they can work at their own schedule.
And I think we have a really, really good setup in place. I’m really proud of it and really excited about it.
And I — you know, I love the classes that we teach at the Academy high school. I don’t think we do a perfect job of decolonizing the curriculum, but I think we’re doing a pretty darn good job. So I’m excited to kind of get to share a little bit more of what we’re doing with even more students.
It’s exciting and also a little terrifying.
Suzanne
Yeah, yeah, that’s kind of been the entire thing, I think, for the past for the past while. Yeah, no, and I think some things that you really said, we really want to lean into the side of homeschooling that works particularly well online, which is at the student’s pace, right? Not based on an outside schedule. And that, we have found, I think, is really important when you’re talking about online learning and different from in-person learning. There are significant differences between the two. And I think one thing that’s great about that online curriculum is it means we can lean into supporting the kind of homeschool family lifestyle, right?
I mean that’s one reason we have the name home.school.life.now is because homeschooling is not just an educational or academic practice, it is a family lifestyle.
That’s in fact my answer when people would ask why are you homeschooling? and where I kind of landed was because we like the lifestyle, right?
We like to be able to set our own calendar. We like that things are done on the students’ time rather than on an academic calendar that someone at some point has decided what should be learned at what age and that someone was probably not a teacher.
So yeah, I think that that’s something that we definitely want to continue as part of this new relaunched podcast is talking about family lifestyle.
What does it mean to be engaged to this educational practice? What does it mean big picture, and what does it mean for our individual families?
Amy
Yes, and also I think, I mean, we can’t talk about education in the world today without talking about what does education even mean now? What is the point of education now? What can we do to support learners not just academically but in all the pieces of their lives?
And also, I think, in a really important way, what brings joy to our homeschools? Right? Like what makes us happy?
So you will definitely hear us talking about television shows that we love and books that we love and games that we like to play because I think all of those things are a really important part of homeschooling, right?
They’re a really important part of what homeschooling means to us. There are things we get to do together because we’re homeschoolers.
Suzanne
Absolutely. And I think building — you know, it’s always important, but it has been something that’s become even more and more important. Building community is both, you know, the family and then the wider community — how can we connect, and how can we focus on the goals at the end of it, which is not to produce a kid on the assembly line that goes out at age 18, that is, you know, ready to go to this set of colleges or something.
But, well, you’ve talked about slow homeschooling or slow schooling, and I really love that we’re going to get a chance to talk more about that and what that means for us right now with the decisions we’re making.
Amy
And also now, I think that now is an important part of home.school.life.now because if the past years have taught us anything, it’s that we all have to be ready to be wrong, to change our minds, to shift gears when something isn’t working. I think more than ever we need to give ourselves freedom to kind of start over, to go back to the beginning, to take a new path, to be brave, to learn something that we didn’t know before about ourselves or the world or learning.
And so I’m excited to kind of move into this new chapter of home/school/life and on our podcast together because that’s kind of how we’ve done all of our homeschool things.
Suzanne
It is true, it is true. So for today’s episode we kind of just wanted to introduce home.school.life.now to you and talk about the podcast and our goals and projects and what’s going on and where we’ve been.
And we also thought it would be a good time to kind of reintroduce ourselves personally to people who may not have listened to us before. As Amy pointed out — she’s been going through some of the older podcasts and talking about how young the kids were.
Amy
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. They were babies.
Suzanne
For context, my kid number four — I have four kids — celebrated her 18th birthday this past Friday. So yeah, a lot has been happening.
So yeah, so we wanted to introduce ourselves. So, as I said before, I’m Suzanne. In a previous life, I was a software developer and coder.
And then when I was pregnant with my first child, I had a full-on identity crisis and realized that I wanted to stay home.
So I quit my job. I had kid number one. And about three years later, I had a second identity crisis because every single person in my neighborhood playground had started sending their kids off to daycare once they turned 3, which is fine.
Right? There is nothing wrong with that, but it was like such the norm, right? The moms weren’t going back to work. It was just seemed to be the thing that everybody knew that you were supposed to do, that once the kids turned 3, they go to daycare, at least a couple of times a week.
In fact, I had a mom friend who, like me, did not send their kid to daycare at age 3, and she was told quite seriously by a family member of hers that she would, quote, “have to cut the apron string sometime.”
I’d like to emphasize, we were talking about 3-year-olds, right? And again, this isn’t about, this isn’t about daycare, this isn’t about the situations.
What it was about was that suddenly everybody was sending their kid off to school and I wasn’t, and I wasn’t for three different reasons. One was that I wasn’t ready to send the kid off to daycare. I was getting a kick out of this whole staying at home that I’d upended my entire life for.
Also I didn’t think he was ready to go. He was a later than average speaker. He didn’t talk early. He didn’t seem like he was ready to be put in that kind of environment.
And then the third reason is we couldn’t afford daycare anyway because I had that whole first identity crisis and quit my job.
And yeah, so oh gosh, this has to be, believe it or not, 2001 or so, and I don’t remember why, but Amy, you probably remember, too, that homeschooling was kind of was in the air then for some reason. Specifically secular homeschooling, meaning that people were choosing it not for religious reasons, but for academic and family lifestyle reasons.
The quote, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer quote homeschooling — it’s not just for scary religious people anymore.
Amy
Buffy’s always right.
Suzanne
Buffy is always right.
Amy
Joss Whedon not so much.
Suzanne
Keystones of the academy. And I remember hearing an NPR story about some secular homeschoolers.
And at this point, because homeschooling very much seemed to me like a weirdo oddball kind of thing to do. But I was already feeling like a weirdo oddball because I wasn’t sending my kid off to daycare. So I did what I always do in the face of an existential crisis.
I went to the library and checked out every single book I could find on the topic and brought the moment, started reading through the stack.
And about halfway through the stack, I started to think that I could maybe, maybe, actually do this. And by the time I got to the end of the stack, it turned out that that was what I wanted to do. This weird, weirdo oddball homeschool thing. So that’s what we did.
I have four kids that they were all homeschooled from the beginning through 8th grade, and mostly, most of the time. I loved it. I really loved it. I quickly collected several bookshelves full of curriculum. I loved doing school with my kids because my kids and school are two of my most favorite things on the planet, so to get to do them together was awesome And I loved the learning that I had to do to keep up with them.
I wasn’t so great, as it turns out, at kind of the homeschool co-op, park day, homeschooler life social side of things, but —
Amy
Okay, but you did have four kids. I could barely get one child out the door with both shoes. So I feel like you get a bye for that.
Suzanne
I think I still have nightmares about trying to get four sets of shoes on. They were all four in carseats at one point.
So yeah, so I wasn’t so great at that, but but I did manage to get a signed up for a homeschool Girl Scout troop.
And of course there was some crazy homeschool mom who I guess did not have enough going on in her life who had signed on to be the troop leader.
And any idea who was that? Who was that mom?
Amy
Okay —
Suzanne
That’s right.
Amy
I am just going to say if you are an introverted socially awkward homeschool mom — hi, me, too. And starting things and running things is one of the best ways to get involved in the homeschool community because then you don’t have to make small talk to people.
I feel like you don’t understand — and I feel like you should understand by now, Suzanne — how terrible I am at making small talk.
The thought of walking up to a group of women at a homeschool Girl Scout troop and trying to talk to them was terrifying. It was so much easier to lead a troop than to try to think of a way to say hi, my name is Amy to a bunch of strangers.
Yeah, how introvert moms survive homeschooling is you run things. You start magazines about homeschooling so that when you have a panic attack at 3 o’clock in the morning, you can call experts to interview them for an article that you’re writing, right?
You start schools so that when your kid wants to take AP U.S. History, you have a place for them to take it.
I think it’s true. You way underestimate what homeschool introverts will do.
Suzanne
Well, how did you become a homeschool introvert? How did you even get that homeschool adjective in there?
Amy
Well, you know, it’s crazy because I definitely did not ever think of homeschooling as something that I would do.
My kids are farther apart than yours. They’re seven years apart. So one of them is not, like, much older, but a significant age difference from the other.
My daughter is my oldest child, and we lived in a good school district and I worked full time. And so there was — I did not think about homeschooling as something that we would do, but my daughter was really miserable in school, and, like, increasingly miserable.
I was listening to some of our earlier podcasts, but I still feel terrible listening to them because when my daughter was in 2nd grade, she was getting in trouble every single day.
Suzanne
I’m just going to break in and say, I know Amy’s daughter — you couldn’t, I mean, my mind is can still boggled by the idea that this child could get in trouble in any circumstance.
Amy
She was getting in trouble for sitting on her knees when she was writing, and she was getting in trouble for humming while she took a test, and she was getting in trouble for doodling on her worksheets when she had finished them.
I mean, I feel so bad. I didn’t know, right? You don’t know what you know, what you don’t know, until you realize that you don’t know it.
Like, I didn’t realize that this was terrible, right? I thought that she needed to learn just to sit with her feet on the floor. And I thought that she needed to stop — I know, I know, but I… That she needed to —
Suzanne
Of course.
Amy
Stop doodling. And, but it just, it started to feel like it was ridiculous. And what I thought was this kid who loved learning, who was so sweet and smart and curious, was starting to hate school.
She was dreading going to school. She hated it. She was hating school.
Suzanne
And elementary. This was elementary school.
So I can say, Amy — you know, Amy and I, we started at school. So it’s maybe not a shock that we both love at school.
I love school. I was so good at school. All my teachers loved me. And that’s the experience I wanted for my kids.
Amy
Yeah. It was, it was hard, it’s still heartbreaking. Looking back at it, it’s still heartbreaking. But I am glad, you know, it was — she started 2nd grade in, I guess, the end of August.
And in October, we pulled her out. So I’m glad that I didn’t let it go on super, super long.
And we had no idea, Suzanne, what we were going to do. We had no idea. I thought, like, we would look at some private schools, maybe. We would see if there was a private school that was better. But for the meantime, I had probably heard that same NPR piece that you were talking about, a couple of years earlier. And I was like, well, we could just homeschool for a little while. Right. We could just homeschool until we figure out what to do next. By next semester, we’ll have a good plan.
Well, she is now a homeschool graduate. She’s in college. She homeschooled all the way through.
And her younger sibling, who is now 15, also looks to homeschool all the way through. But it was never — well, I guess with my youngest, it is more of a plan where like, okay, well, you’re probably — but with my daughter, every single year it was like, well, we’ll just keep doing it because it seems like it’s working.
I never knew what I was doing. I never felt like, oh, yes, we are homeschoolers, right? I never had that sense of like, I had figured it out.
And in fact, I like to tell the story of how when we started homeschooling, we became year-round homeschoolers because I couldn’t figure out when to stop, right?
I couldn’t figure out how to end the year, so we just kept going and going. It turns out it worked well for us and our schedule, but, like, really no idea what I was doing.
And so I started the magazine because I had worked in magazines for most of my career, and there were no secular homeschool magazines, so I was excited to kind of have one.
I wanted one, so I thought, well, I will make it since there isn’t one. And then I started leading this Girl Scout troop, which is where I met so many lovely, awesome people, including Suzanne.
I still remember — we were on a campout, right? Weren’t we camping? And Suzanne and I sat on the floor in the arts and crafts cabin and had this really long conversation about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And I thought, Suzanne is gonna be my best homeschool friend. And she is, she is my best homeschool friend.
And so when we started the school, kind of, again, on a whim, where I was like, well, I would like a place for my kid to take some AP classes, which my daughter then did not want to take any of the classes at the Academy.
But that’s fine, that’s how homeschooling works. And Suzanne was like, you should start a middle school thing. You should start some middle school classes at the Academy.
And I was like, okay, you should come and do that, Suzanne. And that’s the story.
Suzanne
No, it was, because we had very much a similar thing. Because I think everybody’s making it up as they go along, because every family is different.
And what we had always said that seemed like a really reasonable answer to us and to other people who asked is that we would homeschool for as long as it worked in our family.
And you know by the time high school was kind of looming up for kid number one, there were a lot of reasons in our family why it made sense to give our local public high school a try.
Which he did. And he would go on and graduate from that high school. And then his younger siblings kind of followed in his footsteps, right?
We went home school through 8th grade, and then they would start 9th grade at our local public. You know, I have pictures, not as many as I would like, but I was looking at some pictures of me and the four kids around the kitchen table with all our projects.
But when it got to be just me and kid number four, I realized that I wanted to keep homeschooling and that I needed to find a way to get to homeschool other people’s children since I wasn’t going to have any more children. So it was super convenient that Amy was talking about starting a school ,and I think I just wanted to, I think I was like, don’t forget about me. I’m over here. I can help out with the school. Do you need help with the school? I think I can help. So yeah, I just would not let it go.
And then we did, and then people wanted to come, and it’s been a great ride, and it’s really exciting to be at a place where we can look forward to, you know, not just, well, this is what we’re doing next this year and maybe next year if we’re still here, it’s like, no, we’re going to be here next year and we’re going to be here the year after that.
Even after all of our own children have moved on, all of those homeschooled Girl Scouts, Amy, they’re like… College, my oldest graduates college this May.
So it’s crazy.
Amy
Well, and I think that what we learned from kind of starting this hybrid homeschool is that all the things that made us feel like we were weird and had no idea what we were doing as homeschoolers, like just kind of adapting all the time to whatever our kids needed, figuring it out on the fly, reinventing things when we needed to, always questioning whether we knew what we were doing or not — It turns out that those things are features, not bugs of a homeschool education, and they kind of make us — I say us, and I mean all of us, you listening too, right? Like every single homeschool parent, that’s what makes us qualified to homeschool our kids is that we recognize that we have no idea what we’re doing. So we’re always trying new stuff.
Suzanne
Well, and I think that’s really true, and I certainly have had felt at many times in my own parenting journey that I was doing it wrong. And I have had friends who have just, you know, when something isn’t working, when you can tell something isn’t working —education isn’t working, or something when the family isn’t working, or there’s a problem — It can feel so awful because what we want to do is we want to have the solution right there in our hands, that we can hand to our children immediately so that they don’t have to live in the problem for even a moment.
And what I have realized, and I say both to myself and to parents who are kind of in that moment, is what we’re doing — and I know that we’re doing it because we’re having this conversation — is we are listening to our kids, we are paying attention, we are recognizing that there’s a problem, and we are trying something different.
And that is really all we can do. And sometimes we try something different, and the new thing works, and it’s like, Yay! And sometimes we try something different and it’s like, okay, we’re going to have to try something else different, right?
And we’re just going to have to keep going. But I think that is a huge part of parenting and realizing that that is what is our job.
Our job is not always to have the solution ready to hand over, although that would be awesome. I think our job is to listen and to pay attention and to let our kids know that we are always willing to try something else, to keep trying.
Yeah, and that’s really, really, really important.
Amy
And to let ourselves know that too, right? Because I think that’s really important, that we kind of give ourselves the space to be figuring things out all the time.
You know, like we kind of acknowledge that there’s always the possibility that the next thing we try will be the thing that we were looking for. We have to keep trying.
Suzanne
And that’s what we’ll do, we’ll keeping trying. We’ll keep trying the podcast. We’ll keep trying the school.
It does occur to me that we should maybe introduce the school a little bit, since we will probably talk about it obsessively. And not everyone may have already heard us talk about that obsessively. So the Academy, home/school/life academy, is a hybrid homeschool situation for homeschool students.
All of our students are registered as homeschoolers in the state of Georgia. And they come to us two days a week. High schoolers come on Tuesday, Thursday. Middle schoolers come Monday, Wednesday. And while they’re here, they’re in classes from 10 a.m. to 3:30. And we try to provide a full slate, a full academic slate, right, to cover all the bases.
And then, of course, they’re homeschoolers. So they go home. They have their independent work related to the school to do at home, but they also have time to follow whatever it is they’re interested in, whether that’s more academic classes or whether it is sports or drama or art or — volunteering.
Amy
Volunteering. We've had students do just amazing stuff over the years, where you’re just like, wow, you are so cool. I feel that way about most of our students, actually.
Suzanne
Well, and that’s that’s something that’s really, really — I think we’ve realized — that is really, really, really important to us.
The two days a week, right? The idea that homeschool gives you time to do the other important things. That education should not be the number one and only thing on your list.
Even though, of course, you know, we don’t expect our students to be able to do their full curriculum in two days a week, right? It’s two days a week with us, and then their independent work at home is the other kind of half of the equation.
But the fact is that they’re not having to work around that academic schedule five days a week. It means that you can fit in all of the stuff that you want to do. Even if that stuff is, I want to try it doesn’t different things and see what I like.
Or I want to fall down this rabbit hole and see what comes of it.
Amy
Or, oh, even if it’s I want to play video games for a year. I mean, I feel, I feel like one of the things that I have learned is that students really need space to glut themselves on things that will ultimately make them bored. Right? I think people need the space to just sleep all day sometimes because it’s only after you’ve completely sated yourself, right?
You’ve so completely wallowed in whatever it is that relaxes you that you can be bored enough to try something new and find something that you’re good at or interested in or excited by. I think a lot of times, I find that a lot of times homeschoolers think that you can kind of magically click the switch, right? You pull your kids out of school and all the sudden your kid is going to be the totally self-directed, motivated learner.
It’s like this idea that you need to hurry up and slow down.
Suzanne
Yes, yes.
Amy
But it turns out that kids need time for that and space for that. And I think that tightening up the academic model like this, giving kids — I mean our students at our in-person school end up having literally almost as much time off during the year as they have on during the year.
And they are ready to come back to school at the end of breaks, right?
Like they are texting me and Suzanne like, hey could you give us something to do?
Suzanne
We’re on our two weeks spring break right now.
We’ve had a couple of students through the years that have really wanted to do surveys and stuff and, like, force us to have a shorter spring break. The two weeks spring break was too long. They didn’t like it. Yeah, which is an amazing experience. It’s an amazing and a real privilege and a joy to teach kids.
Okay, now I don’t want to make it sound like they come in every day, joyful to learn because that is not true.
Amy
That is definitely not true.
Suzanne
However, we can see it’s there, right? That love of learning, that excitement to be back — and it fades. It comes and goes.
But I think coming from kind of, again, this norm where kids are start school at age 3, where there is kind of this treadmill of extracurricular activities and enrichment and homework, the levels of homework and testing that are required at younger and younger ages — to be able to say, you know what, it actually works okay to not opt into that, right?
It works okay to use this other model.
Amy
Well, and not just okay, because, I mean, I feel like one of the things that we have seen that has been really helpful for me — with my own personal homeschool sample size of two kids, getting the Academy homeschool sample size, it turns out that kids who graduate from high school as homeschoolers are excited to go to college or to do the next thing.
They’re not burned out. They’re not just trying to get through high school so they can get to the next thing, so they can get through that to get to the next thing. They’re genuinely excited and motivated and they’re well prepared for what they want to do next, not just academically, which of course is important, but also sort of emotionally and intellectually — they have the tools that they need to learn what they want to learn.
They have the confidence in themselves as students to be able to tackle whatever they want to do next, and and, I mean, I compare that with some of the kids that I see who are graduates, some of our friends’ kids who are graduating from traditional high schools, who are awesome smart kids, but they’re so tired. They’re so exhausted and burned out — and our graduation, it’s just, there’s so much excitement, you can feel it like sparkling in the air — We’re getting ready for graduation so I’m at the very emotional, like, these are the best people stage.
Truly, though, I feel like there’s something really special about kids who feel that they finished something really successfully and are ready and excited to move on to the next thing.
Suzanne
I think that’s something that we’re gonna probably end up talking a lot about the podcast. So on the one hand we’re here talking about like yeah you know be loose, be free, take the time you need, play video games, do whatever you need.
On the other hand, academics are really important to me, and, you know, also as a homeschool parent, I was like, well, how do I make sure that my kid is on the right track to graduate high school, let’s say, eventually and get in, let’s say, to college, and how does that match up, how does that kind of relaxed, there-is-no-rush, there-are-no-deadlines, match up with our traditional — you know, but we expect kids to be graduating high school around page 18ish, and most kids are going to want to go on to some kind of college education, right? How do you make those two pieces match up, how do you make those two pieces match up to the college education? And at this point we have a lot of experience with that, both with our own kids and with kids at the school, and it is not a contradiction. It may feel contradictory but it’s not. And so I’m really excited to talk more about that and to talk more about how you can find a path that works for your family and your kids.
Amy
Yeah, and I think that because we have the experience of a really diverse group of students, like students coming from all kinds of backgrounds with all kinds of abilities and interests, we can kind of say here here are things that really work for most kids, which which is exciting because it feels like there’s not nobody’s really doing a lot of research on secular academic homeschooling.
There aren’t a lot of resources that you can consult about this, and so it’s kind of exciting to be kind of building our own database of a secular homeschool information.
Suzanne
Yes, yeah, and it’s working. I mean, it’s really nice to see the end result. We’re getting to the point with our own family that we can kind of see the end result of this homeschool choice and homeschool journey, this leap of faith that we took early on.
And it is just a real privilege and a joy to see it both with our kids and with the kids that we work with at the school, who are awesome and successful.
Amy
They really are. And of course on some podcasts, I’m sure we will be complaining because there’s always stuff to complain about.
Suzanne
Oh, we always complain. We always complain. That’s how we keep going — we complain all the time. Is there anything else we should be saying about relaunching our podcast or introducing ourselves or do you think we covered it?
Amy
I think, true to form, we have no idea what we’re doing. And we may shift gears as we move forward, but I think we’re really excited to be back to the podcast, to be kind of looking at this new chapter of home/school/life, to kind of be talking about more specifically middle and high school homeschooling.
I think I’m really excited about it, and I haven’t felt so excited about talking about homeschooling in a little while. It’s been a hard few years.
Suzanne
It’s been a hard few years. But we actually really enjoy the podcasting part of it. We love hearing from people and one of the things we most love is being able to recommend things, usually often books to folks who we, so we end the podcast with a recommendation. But I think right now — we talked about this.
Amy
We have a joint recommendation. Yeah.
Suzanne
Ted Lasso is back, folks.
Amy
Ted Lasso is sort of everything good in the world. Is too much to say that?
Suzanne
I mean, yeah, you got to add in a little bit of, you know, the pirate show —
Amy
Some Abbott Elementary.
Suzanne
Some Abbott Elementary, but yeah, I know, it’s good. I needed some Ted Lasso this month.
Amy
It is one of the shows where my entire family will take our dinner in the living room and sit on the couch together and watch — instead of eating in the dining room, like civilized people, we will eat on the couch and watch Ted Lasso because we just, like, we all love it.
And we’ll go back and rewatch the episode from the beginning as soon as we finish it. It’s that kind of show for us.
Suzanne
So if you haven’t given it a try, give it a try. See what you think. It’s a weird, it’s a weird concept. I think a lot of people have heard it for a while now, but I remember telling Amy to watch it, and I told her, I was like, you’re going to hear me describe the show and you’re going to think this is totally not 100% not for me, but I’m telling you it is. But now it’s a little bit more in the consciousness.
We love it. Go watch it. It’s the last season. Let’s all pull the things close to us that bring us joy.
Amy
Well, and this is what I say. Suzanne is always right about these things. You can wait to watch the show that Suzanne recommends, but then you’ll just be late to the party. It’s true.
So yes, go watch Ted Lasso if you haven’t already. It does have a lot of swearing, but it’s British swearing, which I feel is fine.
Suzanne
It doesn’t count. It doesn’t count if it’s said in a British accent. We might be a little traumatized. It might come back up on the podcast again. I’m waiting to hear how they handle some of the redemption arcs.
Amy
I’m hoping to see good stuff this final season. So yeah, no, no, I feel like there’s a lot of good stuff that could happen. So fingers crossed that we that we leave in a happy place. Ted Lasso has not let us down so far.
Suzanne
Yes.
Amy
And I guess there’ll be more to talk about in future episodes. But I guess for this episode, we can call that a wrap, for episode one of the new home.school.life.now podcast, brought to you by home/school/life and the home/school/life academy. And find us on Instagram at home.school.life.now.
And please, if you enjoyed this episode, leave us a comment, ask us a question, let us know. We love nothing more than to hear from you. So we’ll see you again soon.
Suzanne
Bye.
