Episode 3: What Does Decolonizing the Curriculum Look Like for Secular Homeschoolers?

In this episode we’re talking about decolonizing the secular homeschool curriculum — and why it’s a project that we expect to be working on for the rest of our lives.

Here are links to all the stuff we recommended in this episode:

• the 1619 Project

• Stamped

• An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

• Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

• Deep Thought history classes

• Pointless: An English Teacher's Guide to Meaningful Grading

• The Sentence

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: [00:00:00] 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 three of our newly relaunched podcast series recording on Tuesday, no, Thursday, July 20th. 2023. What year is it? Do you know what year it is? 

Amy: I was just so impressed that you got so many of those dates and times right.

I'm just, wow. You knew what podcast number it was. I feel like we should all pause and give you an award for summer homeschooling. 

Suzanne: I know, for real. It is kind of bad in the summer. I was trying to do, talk about tuition with parents the other day and I was like, math? I can't math during the summer.

What do you? What do you mean? I know it's all round numbers and everything, but, but welcome. We're excited to have you listening to today's topic. We're probably going to jump right in because it turns out we have a lot to say. Our topic for this podcast is decolonizing the curriculum, [00:01:00] which means building a new homeschool canon.

So I guess the first question to talk about is what does decolonizing the curriculum mean? 

Amy: Yeah. 

Suzanne: Go ahead. 

Amy: Oh, no, I was going to say, well, because when you talked about decolonizing the curriculum, I think that's the first question that people have. What do you mean? 

Suzanne: Absolutely. The first question my brother had, who teaches, who teaches history high school history.

And to me, it means, you know, the way I was taught history growing up, I was taught specifically United States history, but really world history. I was taught only about White male Europeans, specifically white male European colonizers, if we're talking about U. S. history. And I really didn't learn much, if anything, about anyone else.

And anyone else is a huge group. That's all women, pretty much. That's all of the people who are living, for example, in the Americas, before the [00:02:00] Europeans came, all the Native Americans. It's about Black people. And not only was I kind of only taught the facts and stories of these, you know, the white male Europeans, I was also taught to adopt their perspective on what had happened and what was happening.

You know, that their perspective was the United States as a land of freedom and opportunity. And we know, if you look at even the tiniest bit, that the story of the United States is not a story of freedom and opportunity for most of the people living here for most of its existence. 

Amy: Well, yes. And on those rare occasions where somebody who isn't a white colonizer gets highlighted in history, it's through that same lens, right?

These are women or people of stories of non colonizers are always stories about people overcoming challenges, kind of proving that it isn't just. [00:03:00] white men who can do it as long as people really want to do it. They can — look there's this example, kind of ignoring all the systemic stuff that makes that impossible for most people, 

Suzanne: Right?

And how that systemic stuff has created the world that we live in today, right? The world that, that — very much we are dealing with right now, the story of the ways which the United States was not free and where it was not a place of opportunity. So for me, when I'm talking about decolonizing the curriculum, it means learning about the everyone else, right?

Learning their stories, learning what happened with them, what they did, and treating that with the same weight and importance as the white male European colonizers. And, and then also looking at their point of view, seeing this point of view of freedom and opportunity is one that was specific to this very small group of people.

What was the point of view of everyone else who was [00:04:00] living through those times? How did they experience the world? 

Amy: Yeah, and I think, I think one, one side of this and one criticism that kind of people have about this is that if you tell history this way, it can make cis white European men look kind of bad.

The point of decolonizing the curriculum, and I just, I feel like this is like an important point to make, is not to just bash white men. I mean, I feel like they can take it after centuries of being valorized. Like, I don't think it's going to hurt their feelings, you know, to be snubbed a little bit by a class of high school students.

But, but even if it does, the point is not to bash white men. The point is to like include them in the story with everybody else. And in that story, they don't always look great. 

Suzanne: Right, [00:05:00] right. They are, they are, as human beings tend to be, complicated, flawed people who did some screwed up things along the way, right?

And so I'm not, you know, when I'm teaching, I'll be teaching middle school U. S. history next year, and I'm going to talk about Thomas Jefferson. I'm going to talk about George Washington, absolutely. And I'm going to talk about some of the interesting and admirable things that they did. But when I talk about Jefferson, I'm also going to talk about Sally Hemings.

When I talk about Washington, I'm going to talk about his experience as, as a, as an enslaver, as a person who, who thought that he could own other people, right? And yeah, that, that does give you a different feeling when you look at, for example, the Washington Monument. But that's the whole story.

That's the actual story. 

Amy: Yeah. 

And it's important to tell. That's, I mean, that is, that's what we want to tell is the whole story. 

Suzanne: And I think that's really important to us. We, we, [00:06:00] we like facts. We like information. We like stories. We like knowing the whole picture. But I think, I would say for me, it's also personal that decolonizing the curriculum is a very personal, it feels important in a personal way.

Not just because I am a woman. I also have white privilege, but, you know, as a woman, I'm, I'm very aware of how much of my history has been left out of the books. But also, this is still, the curriculum that kids are learning in traditional school in, you know, the 2020s is not very much different from what I learned in the 1970s and 80s.

Amy's heard me tell the story many times of one of my kids. When she went to traditional public school she, you know, she was in the upper level literature classes, AP courses, kind of all the way through, but in her literature courses. Every single piece of work that was assigned that the [00:07:00] entire class had to read, every single one, except for maybe a poem here or there, was written by a white man.

And mostly it was written by a British white man. You know, so that it wasn't until her senior year that there were assigned works that everyone had to read that were not white males. And I was, you know, first of all, I didn't notice it. When my oldest son went through the, went through the curriculum, but my daughter sure noticed it and we talked about a lot when she, and that's not very long ago.

That's just a couple years ago. And I was really shocked by that. I was really shocked by that lack of very basic diversity. 

Amy: Well, I think that that is a really important piece of this, right? Because, because we are both shocked by it. And we don't notice it, like both of those things are simultaneously true for a lot of people because we've kind of, [00:08:00] we've grown up in a world of colonized history of colonized literature, even of colonized science.

Suzanne: Yes, absolutely. 

Amy: It was really sort of, sort of surprising, and I mean, I mean, I, I, I'm also telling this story that I always tell, which is about reading Little House on the Prairie with my children, which I was so excited to read with them because I loved it so much when I was a kid, and I thought, here is a fantastic story about westward expansion, which is even a colonist name, westward expansion.

Anyway, Little House on the Prairie is one of those, reading Little House on the Prairie with my kids sort of introduced me to the breadth and depth of my own ignorance about non colonized history. It kind of lit a fire under me to look more closely at the ways that I was looking at history, at literature, at everything, because I was genuinely, I mean, horrified is maybe a tiny bit of an [00:09:00] overstatement, but only a tiny bit.

I was horrified that these books that I had loved were really, really racist in ways that I had never noticed. 

Suzanne: Yeah, yeah, well, and all the ways that we were taught to view the world you know, is, means that, that I grew up with, my perspective was a white supremacist, patriarchal perspective, right?

I mean, so, so doing this work, doing this work of decolonizing the curriculum for me is a lot about changing my own perspective. You know, if you grew up with the same kind of history, the same kind of curriculum that I did. You know, how do you make those changes? How do you have those realizations? And then educate yourself.

And, you know, okay, you know what it's going to be for me. The answer for me is that I went to the library and got a giant stack of books. But the great news is, is that there is a giant stack of books to be gotten these days, right? There is a lot of work that is being done. [00:10:00] That is is fascinating, and so well written, and so engaging.

I, you know, I hope everyone has heard of the 1619 Project. If you haven't done yourself the favor of checking that out and looking at it, it's amazing. There are books like Stamped by Ibram X. Kendi, which is a history of... The idea of racism in the United States and there's, and there's even a young adults version.There's a YA version of STAMPED.

There's a series I don't know, Amy, if you've run across these, all these different people's history of the United States, so like indigenous people's history, right? There's amazing stuff that's out there, and if you start doing some Google searches for book lists, you're going to find so many great recommendations, but I do want to say, and I know Amy's heard me complain about this, it can be an infuriating process, because I love history.

I [00:11:00] love reading about all the dad books, like, you know, whenever they're doing like dad book lists and they're all like these giant biographies of founding fathers or World War II. I read all those, right? 

Amy: She really does. I'm just saying she absolutely does and she will tell you about them for hours.

Suzanne: There's good stuff in there. So I am used to a world where there are dozens of George Washington biographies, right? If I want to read about George Washington, I can read the book that came out last year. Or I can read the book that came out two years ago. Or I can read the two hundred words. Version, or I could read the 800 word version, or I could read the one by the guy who loves George Washington, or I could read the one by the guy who hates George Washington, or I could just wait six months, because there's probably going to be a new one coming out, but when I went looking for the big comprehensive biographies of historical figures. The first example I think of are like first wave feminists, right? So the [00:12:00] suffragists in the United States. I went looking for the biographies of people like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and these kind of people and there was like maybe one. And it wasn't very long.

And it was from 25 years ago, right? These, these kind of big comprehensive biographies based on recent scholarship just doesn't exist. For a lot of the people who haven't been showing up in the curriculum and that's enormously frustrating But it really brings to light this idea that no these people were all left out to begin with. 

Amy: Well, and I think people who are left out of traditional academia are doing a lot of this work and a lot of them are doing it online And so if you find people doing research on early 20th century feminism, or you find people doing research on Harriet [00:13:00] Tubman and Sojourner Truth and you think it's good research, even if it's not perfect, even if it's not in a shiny format that you would expect to see from a traditional publisher, like support them, give them resources to keep doing the good work that they're doing, Because I think in many ways, this is a golden age of this kind of research, but it's only going to get out there and easily accessible to all of us if when we see somebody doing it, we're like, yes, let me help you keep doing this. 

Suzanne: Absolutely. 

And there is stuff coming up. There's a, the major new biography of, well, not new, I guess it's maybe five years old now of Frederick Douglass, right. By David Blight. That, that was a big deal, right? So we do see kind of some of those.

Like I said, the traditional history, traditional biographies, but we also really need to be open to the alternative sources, right? And to recognize that history is not, if we're studying history, is not necessarily going to look the same [00:14:00] way. That we're used to or that I'm not gonna maybe not gonna find those big biographies And if I want to teach that material if I want to learn it for myself and teach it then I need to be looking in unexpected places and I need to be okay with it looking a bit different. 

Amy: Well, and I think that this is, this is a big, important piece of decolonizing the curriculum.

And I just want to say, like, I feel like we should say you know, Suzanne and I are not sitting here as like experts in decolonizing the curriculum. We're not like, here is how you decolonize the curriculum. We are the experts on this. Take our advice, go out and do what we say. We are just two people who care tremendously about doing it and who are trying really hard to do it and have found some things that work for us.

So if they work for you too, that is amazing and awesome. And if you have things that work for you, we would also love to know about them because decolonizing the curriculum, decolonizing is not a noun, right? [00:15:00] It's not something that's done and finished and people can hand you in a neat package. It is work that we are all doing.

Every single day where we are learning through embarrassment and failure and realization things that we miss. I just, I just think it's important to say, like, we are not at all experts in decolonizing the curriculum, but we would love to be. 

Suzanne: Yeah, we, we have, we are not coming to you having, having decolonized our curriculum, right?

It is always in process, and I'm always trying to do better, you know, next year than I did last year. And yeah, embarrassment and frustration and, is, is part of that process. I also wanted to say, you know, I talk about books. I talk about checking out. There's a lot of great stuff being done on YouTube.

There's a lot of great stuff being podcasts. Podcasts are a great way. I talk about the 1619 Project a lot. There's a 1619 Project podcast if you prefer to listen than to [00:16:00] read a giant book. Or there's I think a Hulu television streaming program version talking about a lot of the same things.

So, so yeah, there is so much available if you look around. 

Amy: I want to say, I think too, I, I think that if we're really going to decolonize the curriculum if we're really committed to doing that, then we also have to decolonize the way that we've been taught to do history, because we've been taught to do history by valorizing primary sources, specifically written primary sources, newspapers, letters, diaries, And the truth is that those have kind of belonged to white colonizing people.

So if we want to study history of not white colonizing people, I think we have to be open to other kinds of historic record keeping. It might be objects, it might be artifacts, it [00:17:00] might be oral histories, it might be cultural knowledge passed down. But you're never going to find a letter that Harriet Tubman wrote somebody.

Harriet Tubman didn't know how to write. You can find 600 letters that George Washington wrote. One guy. And so I think that like a big piece of decolonizing is recognizing that decolonized history is not going to be, it's not always going to look the way that we were taught that history should look.

And that's okay. That's important. That's, that's part of decolonizing. 

Suzanne: And I think too, it means in some cases, familiarizing yourself with the facts and the information that we have, and then being open to ways in which it can be reimagined or discussed. I'm thinking specifically, so I'm working on my curriculum for this upcoming fall, and, you know, a lot of people a lot of historians have traditionally kind of traced the ideas that became the United States of America. A lot of people like to trace it back [00:18:00] to the Mayflower Compact, right? And we can read the Mayflower Compact in class. That is a primary source document. We can look at it and talk about it. Again, going back to the 1619 Project one of the ideas in there is that what if we looked at the year 1619 when the first black Africans were brought to Jamestown and were sold as property to white colonists, what if we looked at that as the founding, you know, of the ideas that would become America? Not, not to, not, you know, this is terrible, look how terrible this is, but to acknowledge the whole story, right? To have a fuller picture. And so, we can't read, I can't read a letter, you know, I don't have any primary source document to give my students to read, but there are some poems that have been written about those people who arrived in 1619, right? So we're going to read the Mayflower Compact, and we're [00:19:00] going to read a poem, and we're going to talk about two different views of the founding of the United States, right?

And so you, you have to be a little bit creative, right? While acknowledging that that's not... A poem is not a historical source, but if we're thinking about perspectives, if we're thinking about ways to tell the story, there's so many different ways you can do that. 

Amy: I mean, there's always somebody when you read a, any document ever whose story isn't being told.

Suzanne: Yeah. So even going through the document and saying, or the book or whatever you're reading and saying, Hey, who isn't here, you know, or who, who is here, but their voice is never being heard. That can, these are all ways. I think we've kind of morphed into like, what, how do we teach, right? If we are working on decolonizing our own perspective, then how do we teach our kids as homeschool parents?

And for me, it's, it's again, it's going back to that. [00:20:00] Let's get as many points of view as possible in there. Let's get all the points of view that I didn't even realize were out there in there. It means not giving up Thomas Jefferson, but also teaching Sally Hemings. 

Amy: And kind of also this, that my Little House on the Prairie problem, which is, I didn't realize that it was problematic.

And so when I started reading it with my kids, there are ways to respond to that, right? Because we are not going to be able to screen every single thing that we read. We're not going to know every single, like, potential issue with colonized history and what we do. And so, so having a plan also to kind of react to it in the moment, I think, is really important.

Suzanne: Yeah, to have that conversation to, to, well, maybe it'll be flustered anyway, I'm flustered all the time. 

Amy: Well, but to be willing to be uncomfortable, right? To have the uncomfortable conversation in the moment. 

Suzanne: And to bring in your critical thinking skills, right? Okay, so we'll run across this thing that we've found.

Well, who is saying it, [00:21:00] right? Who are they in relation to what is being talked about? What is their perspective? What are, you know, what are they trying to accomplish by saying this? Who is not being heard of, right? These are all big, important, critical thinking skills that we bring to bear on hopefully everything we do in education, right?

So these are the kinds of questions that you can have when you run into something, like reading, if you're reading Little House. And I also think for me, being aware and trying to very deliberately change the language that I am using, which I will acknowledge is, can be tough. A very, very basic change that that academia has been trying to make recently is you don't talk about slaves, you talk about enslaved people.

And I've been working on that and I, I get it about 90 percent of the time. Which is a heck of a lot better than I did the first year I tried that, right? [00:22:00] And it goes so far beyond that, right? What if instead of plantations, we talked about forced labor camps? Which is true, it's an accurate depiction of what was happening there.

Amy: Nobody wants to get married on a forced labor camp. 

Suzanne: Yeah, we are, come to our wedding on the forced labor camp, right? Yeah, these, these words are important and they shape our point of view and it can, I will say that from my perspective, I don't know what your perspective has been, Amy, but, but using the word sometimes can feel a little artificial or heavy handed.

You know, for example, it was really hard for me to talk about kind of white, you know, the white supremacism in America. That that was just kind of a basic part of our culture. It wasn't just the KKK and their, their sheets, right? Those terms were so loaded, but the more, I mean, I used enslaved people because it's more accurate and it gives a more accurate. idea of who we're talking about. Forced labor [00:23:00] camps is more accurate and gives more information than plantations does, right? So, so these words are being used because they're, they're better descriptions. So it's worth, it's worth taking those jumps even if it feels weird, or if it takes a while to get comfortable.

Amy: And even smaller changes like talking about Stonewall as an uprising instead of a riot, like, just the little connotations of words like pack such a punch and uprising is a good thing and uprising is where people stand up against something that's wrong and fight back and a riot is where people break televisions.

Suzanne: Right, right. I think that, yeah, I think that's very true. And we, these are the words we've used because these are the words we've been taught, right? And, so it takes an active, you know, an active choice to, to make these changes. And also we were talking about earlier too, we don't [00:24:00] just want to talk about oppression and suffering.

We don't just want to talk about the people who've been left out of these stories in terms of their oppression, in terms of overcoming suffering, all that kind of stuff. Because that leads to this very narrow view. 

Amy: Well, we're still centering colonialism when we do that. 

Suzanne: It's still, yeah, because how do they overcome colonialism?

Or isn't it sad that they didn't overcome colonialism or whatever it is, right? We have to be sure that we are treating all people as people with experiences of joy and success and You know, everything that comes along with existing as a person. 

Amy: I remember, and gosh, Suzanne, I think this has been like, we are so old.

I think this was like 10 years ago, but I remember you telling me about this book you were reading about the lives of enslaved people. In the southern United States and how there was this conception that enslaved people were lazy [00:25:00] and that they didn't work hard. And you said, but this book is proposing that this, this activity was a form of resistance, right?

It blew my mind. It changed the way that I looked at everything in, in history. I mean, it really like, It was revelatory for me in this amazing way. And I think there are so many discoveries like that, where you just haven't looked at something that way and where people's stories are not just about like them in the context of colonialism.

They're about their own individual movements and efforts and ideas and inspirations. I, That book, I didn't even read that book that you read, but it changed my life. 

Suzanne: It's really powerful, right? Because I was used to growing up with a story, well, oh, look at how, look, it's so sad that the white enslavers stereotyped the people that they thought they owned by saying they were lazy and they broke a lot of tools and they [00:26:00] did all this — in the book is like so that's resistance, right? That is resistance to being enslaved. That is people, a story of people pushing back in the only way that it may have, and it wasn't even entirely safe, but like, you know, in, in ways that were as safe as they could.

And that's, first of all, I, I believe that 100% and, but it's a more interesting story. It's, it's a better story, it's a more accurate story, but yeah, that's, that's a shift of point of view. 

Amy: Well, it turns out that this whole narrative of like, oh, poor enslaved people is such a lie. Yeah, enslaved people fought back all the time in so many different ways and we never talked about that when I was studying history and I feel like that never came up. 

Suzanne: No, well except in fact you see that as an argument. I wouldn't say pro slavery but you know there's an argument out [00:27:00] there that it wasn't. 

Amy: I think of it as the anti anti slavery argument, right?

They're not pro slavery. 

Suzanne: They're not pro slavery. 

But this idea like well if they really didn't like it they would have done something about it and it's like but they did. 

Amy: Turns out they did a lot. 

Suzanne: All the time. They never stopped. Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's infuriating. 

Amy: Well, this is part of teaching our kids, right?

Because, because, like, we learn this stuff. And so, showing them what our own growth looks like, showing them how we... Change the way that we talk, you know, saying to your kids, like, well, you know what, I used to refer to enslaved people as slaves, but it turns out that that is really not the best way to describe them.

So I'm going to change my language and do better. Kids really respond well to like their parents coming to them and saying, oh, you know what? I was wrong. I mean, I don't know about your kids. My kids love that. 

Suzanne: They love [00:28:00] that. Everybody loves that. All the students love that. Like, nope, I was wrong.

I screwed up. This is what I'm going to do differently. Well, I was going to say, doing all this makes reading the news a lot more interesting, because I don't know if you've seen it out there, but there are a lot, there is so much pushback to teaching this kind of history, right? 

Amy: Oh my gosh. 

Suzanne: To and teaching, and teaching different perspectives, more perspectives than the... white, male, European, colonizer story of freedom and opportunity. I was thinking in more than one state, I think it's Florida, and I don't remember the other state now, you can talk about things like the Tulsa Massacre, but only if you don't mention race. Which is —

Amy: Wait! No, wait! 

Suzanne: No, it's absurd on the face of it.

It's absurd on the face of it. It's It's like talking about the suffragists without acknowledging that they didn't have the right to [00:29:00] vote. So nothing makes sense, right? And then I just saw I just saw this morning --Amy, you're going to need to hold on to something --that in Florida the new curriculum that has been approved for the state the new history 

Amy: Oh, no Suzanne, is it bad?

Suzanne: It's bad-- Requires that middle schoolers are taught that during slavery enslaved people learned valuable skills that they could then use on their own behalf, right, as presumably later in life. I don't know. I don't know. But that's in the official history. That was not there, because it's not true. Again, I was just reading some history the other day, and it was talking about how in many states, the slave codes included laws that they were not allowed to farm for themselves. That was one of the things they were not allowed to. They weren't allowed to grow their own food. But no, but they're learning valuable skills along the way.

So. So this is kind of ridiculous over the top pushback, both in big ways and small ways. Those are kind of some big ways, but I think [00:30:00] there's, you know, does your book talk about, does your textbook, who are the individuals who are named in your textbook? Are they all white males? That might be a concern, right?

Amy: And this is, I mean, in all fairness to everybody, This is the history that we this is the way we grew up learning history. So, like, if you went to a traditional school for middle school and high school, this narrative of white colonial exceptionalism is the one that you learned, like, If you haven't checked yourself, that's what you believe.

Suzanne: No, and I, I don't want myself for myself, you know, I've always been a fan of well, George Washington, I've been a fan of, and, and I read a ton of history, I like reading about these guys I find them interesting, and so to kind of grapple with the fact that, no, he enslaved people, and there's just, there's, you know, that's just a [00:31:00] fact, right?

To kind of grapple with some of the unsavory parts of that is I get weirdly defensive about it sometimes, right? Like, I get weirdly defensive, you know, Abraham Lincoln did not agree, did not believe in black equality and I get weirdly defensive about these people that I have looked up to for so long as part of my life and as part of my cultural history, of us kind of looking at their whole story and so I know there's some emotions around, around all of this 

Amy: I think if any historical figure is treated as a hero — I mean, we have to go into that knowing that that people aren't heroes, right? That people are way more complicated than that. And we can love Abraham Lincoln and all the things that he accomplished, while still acknowledging that he wasn't a perfect person. Like, it doesn't, it doesn't make him [00:32:00] not someone that you can respect and have a good opinion of.

It's just, there's, there's more to the picture. 

Suzanne: There's more to the picture. And I, I think I have been trying to look at all of this ridiculous pushback as in some ways good news Showing that progress has been made, right? If everybody, you know, I talked about progress not being made in my daughter's literature class But if, if history was being taught the same way it was in the 60s, 70s, 80s Then we wouldn't be having these issues come up, right?

This is a reaction against the progress, the changes, the, the opening up of the story, the, the telling more people's stories. And this, this, it turns out is a change that is deeply threatening to those who have adopted kind of the white supremacist patriarchal point of view. And that's probably good.

But so yeah, so pushback is a sign of progress. It's also [00:33:00] infuriating and disheartening. But I think, ultimately, if we can keep moving forward, the entire, all of this history is part of our cultural inheritance in the United States, right? So we don't have to view this as we're trash talking old white guys and, and diminishing our history.

We are expanding the idea of who we celebrate and what accomplishments we celebrate. And there is a lot to celebrate in our history. My life is enriched by knowing more about Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. Two names that, from my regular education, I could have told, I could have said, Oh, I recognize those names.

But I would not have been able to say what they did or who they were. I just had a vague idea of them as Black Americans who had done something during that bad time of slavery that we fixed. 

Amy: Well, and that's it, right? Because it opens the door for us to have [00:34:00] heroes who aren't just white men. I mean, nobody's gonna be perfect.

We're never gonna find like some superhero, magical, marvelous person, right, who does every single thing, right? All the time. Because spoiler, sorry to spoil this for you, people aren't like that. people make mistakes, but expanding the stories that we tell about who is the United States, what is the history of the United States, we also get to adopt all kinds of heroes who aren't white men and they're awesome people who it's exciting and I mean, it's kind of kind of wonderful to have new heroes, people to look up to people to emulate people to admire. Women, and people of color, and Latinx people, and Asian Americans, and I mean just this whole glorious, I mean for real, like the actual melting pot that we're always talking about that isn't real, but the actual, like, [00:35:00] combination of amazing people who make up U. S. history. Like, they, we get to have them. They get to be part of us. Like, we're, we're not just the white colonizers. We're also all the other people. 

Suzanne: People who look like our students and the people we care about. People who are not cis, who are not straight. People, you know, all kinds of different people.

And that's kind of amazing. And, and I love that. And, yeah. Huh. So, I think, I think for me, this is part of the work of coming to terms with the difficult and tragic and horrible parts of our history. I don't think that our history is entirely that story, but there are definitely parts of it that we have never come to terms with, I think, as a culture, and, and made amends for, right?

We've never really figured out how to. We can't even talk about it right now. 

Amy: Yeah.

Suzanne: But I think that this part of the work, even if we're doing it as [00:36:00] individuals, even if what it looks like is educating ourselves and educating our children or helping to educate our children as homeschoolers, I think this is part of that bigger, that bigger work, that bigger project, which none of us can tackle on our own and, and many of us may feel powerless about.

But it matters, and it makes a difference, I think. 

Amy: It's hard work, but it's such good, rewarding work to do. 

Suzanne: Mm hmm. The stories just, they're all good. They're good stories. They're all, I love a good, I love a good story. Amy, what haven't we talked about? Decolonizing the curriculum. Is there anything else we wanted to say?

Amy: I mean, I'm sure that this is a topic that we will revisit because, like I said, this is, this is a verb. It's something that we're doing all the time. And I feel like, like, we're always kind of if we're not always growing and doing it new ways, and we're not always like, running into things where we feel [00:37:00] sort of resistant and defensive and getting past that resistance and defensiveness to see what's underneath it, I mean, I feel like we're not decolonizing. So I think, I think just, this is a, this is the beginning of a conversation, not the end. 

Suzanne: So if it gets easy, we're doing it wrong. Is that what you're saying? 

Amy: We're probably doing it wrong, but that doesn't mean that it's not nice sometimes when it's easy. 

Suzanne: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hard can be wonderful. Hard can be wonderful. Especially if it gives me excuse to read more books. 

Amy: We should say, though, we should say, Suzanne, that if people love this idea of decolonizing U. S. history with high school students, they should check out our Deep Thought History classes online, because they're pretty awesome, I have to say.

Suzanne: They are, they are, what the subtitle is, what the Queer, Colorful, Feminist, Immigrant History of the United States, which, which I love that you came up with that. That is, that is a glorious and beautiful thing to do. And we've talked about, Amy and I have talked about like [00:38:00] junior high versus high school, and it's like in the middle school, in the junior high, we're trying to get a lot of those, like, like we can't skip talking about Thomas Jefferson, right?

We want people to have all the knowledge all the context that they need. You know, I can perhaps give my lecture on the top 10 ways why Thomas Jefferson is the worst. But, you know, once you have that context and once, hopefully, you have the basics when you get to high school, then you can start having the really, really interesting conversations going deeper, going further.

Making more connections, which is really awesome. And, and now we're so excited that that curriculum is up and available to everyone. 

Amy: I'll throw a link in the show notes, but it's learn. homeschoollifemag. com. If you want to check it out, the classes start all the time. So you can sign up anytime and you can come nerd out with us about amazing people like Charlotte Forten and Bayard Rustin.

And yes, of course, Harriet Tubman. [00:39:00] 

Suzanne: Right, of course, of course, Harriet. Everything should, there should be Harriet Tubman statues in every city. 

Amy: I would watch a Harriet Tubman Netflix series, like a fan fiction Netflix series. I honestly would. 

Suzanne: Okay, so next time on the podcast, we wanted to talk a little bit more about giving some specific. advice, maybe giving some like specific recommendations and suggesting. So we're calling it Books to read instead of Little House on the Prairie, So some options to some of the books that that we grew up with but then upon revisiting them we find that maybe they don't reflect our values or even books like To Kill a Mockingbird, which I think is an excellent, excellent book. It's an excellent work of literature. It is perhaps not what we should be looking to as the great American novel —

Amy: For racial justice —

Suzanne: I don't think it lives up to that, to that title.

So like, what could [00:40:00] we read that would talk more about racial justice? So yeah, so that's what we're going to have on our next episode. Meanwhile, what's new online at homeschoollifemag. com, Amy? 

Amy: Oh we've got all kinds of stuff happening. So the podcast, you may have noticed, we're like on episode three.

So the podcast is coming regularly. We're trying to get a new episode up every month, which is very exciting. But the really cool thing that's happening at homeschoollifemag. com right now is our Home School Life Swag, our secular homeschool swag, Suzanne and I have been making t shirts and other gear, tote bags and things to help secular homeschoolers identify each other in the wild, which we are very excited about because as secular homeschoolers who often were kind of scoping the park group to see like, is there another secular homeschooler here?

It was pretty, it's, it's pretty delightful to imagine seeing someone wearing a [00:41:00] Secular Homeschoolers Unite t shirt at Park Day or our favorite t shirt. Suzanne, do you want to tell the story of how we made up this t shirt? 

Suzanne: So you guys heard us talk in our last episode about the conference that we went to, the conference that shall not be named.

 As we mentioned then we were not expecting the level of, Christian, nationalist, racist dialogue that was happening. 

Amy: Wow, that was a very nice way to put it. 

Suzanne: We were terrible, terrible people, and instead of paying attention to what they were saying, we were scribbling ideas for school slogans in our notes, and particularly there was one point where someone was talking about the, the benefits of school choice. What he really meant was the benefits of not having public education, the benefits of getting government out entirely of education, which, which I don't agree with. But it seems to me a fairly extreme position to take, but he was talking like, yeah, school choice works out as it turns out.

There's [00:42:00] not really any schools of witchcraft or anything that jump up. So, Amy and I were immediately like, that's our school t shirt. That's our school t shirt. We are now the Big Gay School of Witchcraft and Critical Race Theory. We are, 100 percent. 

Amy: So, because we're moving to a bigger space for our academy location, which is very exciting, we we decided to make some t shirts for a fundraiser.

So, if you cannot live, Without a big gay school of witchcraft and critical race theory t shirt. And honestly, how can you live without the shirt? You can go to homeschoollifemag. com slash swag. to pick one up for yourself. I'll also drop a link in the comments. 

Suzanne: There are also, I should say, tote bags and water bottles.

And I have been so enjoying listening to Amy cackle with glee over the past week as she has put all this stuff online because it has been a lot of fun. Alright, when you're not podcasting, Amy, what are you reading right now?

Amy: So I'm actually reading a [00:43:00] book that is really interesting to me. It's called Pointless: An English Teacher's Guide to Meaningful Grading. And the idea is to do away with with grades. For high school students to kind of let go of grades. And then if you do get rid of grades, you get rid of points. What do you use instead? I feel like this is the direction that I've been moving for a long time.

Like I've wanted to move in this direction. I'm not sure. I'm not sure it will ever make sense to like completely let go of a transcript. So I'm not sure exactly what this is going to look like, but I'm getting a lot of really good ideas and I'm excited. Maybe when I, when I feel like I know what I'm doing a little bit more, and I have some like plans that I'm going to try, maybe we could even do a podcast episode about it because I find it really inspiring.

Suzanne: I'm definitely putting it on my to read list. There, there has been a lot of great articles and books and stuff about the ungrading movement coming [00:44:00] out. A lot of it's coming out from college professors but also at the high school and lower levels. And it's, it's, I think it's a small movement, but I, I think it is definitely kind of hopping, right?

There are some definitely people who are really working on it hard right now. 

Amy: Well, it's tough. It's tough because you want, Because I think that, like, the point of grades has kind of shifted significantly, and now, I mean, I don't know what an A means anymore, and if I don't know what it means, then how is a student going to know what it means?

Suzanne: Well, yes, and we talk about that a lot in our school at the academy, where if we can take grades out of the equation, right, you're not, point of education is not to get the letter, the point is to learn something. Right. But then we also want to give people, we want to acknowledge what they've learned and and show that off.

It's tough. It's a tough question. 

Amy: Well, and with grade inflation in traditional schools, you [00:45:00] know, it's it like we want our students to also be competitive with students who are getting all A's in high school for just. Checking the boxes, which, which I mean, I'm not criticizing public schools at all. I'm just saying, well, I think we all know grade inflation is a big issue.

Suzanne: You know, the more I look at the students we have coming in who are opting into homeschooling and they'd never considered it before. But, you know, the traditional school wasn't working for them. The more I see that all of this stuff that is not working is stuff that is out of the control of individual teachers.

Yeah. And, in the vast, vast, vast majority of cases, out of control of even individual schools within a school system, right? That ridiculous Florida stuff I talked about earlier, that was on the state level. That has nothing to do with the teachers who are trying to do their job in the classroom and who now...

You know, as part of their job description have to do something [00:46:00] ridiculous and in fact, the pushback that we see are from teachers associations and teachers unions and these groups. So, you know, just to acknowledge that we talk about difficult things. We know this is not about the people who are doing the work.

Who are showing up with the children every day. 

Amy: A lot of public school teachers are basically heroes who are doing everything that they can to make it work. Because, I mean, I think that this is an important, like, value statement for us at Home School Life, which is that we 100 percent support public education and Educated communities are better communities and like public education is a great thing.

I feel really lucky to be able to homeschool my kids, but I know it's not an option for everybody and I love that there's a great free alternative to that. Public schools are amazing. I'm so happy to pay my taxes for public, I've never had to pay my taxes, but the money that goes to public schools I don't resent at all.

Suzanne: [00:47:00] Yeah, no, there's so many great resources, and there's so And we don't think that homeschool is a solution for everyone. Even if everyone could, everyone shouldn't, right? This is 

Amy: Right. It is 

Suzanne: But anyway, that's a whole — Maybe that's a whole other podcast. 

What am I reading? So, I actually just finished, so, so my daughter, who, who had the bad experience in high school of never getting to read. She was like, if I have to read about one more upper class British boy. I'm gonna throw something. I think that's when they did Ah, shoot, I forget the, I forget.

But they did Lord of the Flies back to back with something. Anyway, I can't, it's gone. Brain gone. She and I have started a little mother daughter reading club. since she's about to head off to Germany. So this gives us an excuse to read the same books and, and zoom together. And we just finished our second book, which I got to pick, which is The Sentence by Louise Erdrich.

I loved it so [00:48:00] much. It's the first adult novel that I have read by Erdrich. I had. She's been on my list for a long, long time, but a lot of her topics felt very heavy. So I'd kind of never gotten around to it. And The Sentence is her most recent novel. It was nominated for a lot of awards.

And I just found it... Delightful. I just found it. I mean, it's about some very heavy things. It's set in Minneapolis during the pandemic and the George Floyd uprising. And but it's also set in a bookstore. It's set, in fact, in Louise Erdrich's own bookstore, and she is a background character in the novel.

So, throughout, it is. It is about a love of books, among all the other things that it is about. And if you want to hook me in, give me a book that has book lists inside it. 

Amy: Yeah. 

Suzanne: Yeah.

Amy: Or footnotes. Does It have footnotes? 

Suzanne: Doesn't have footnotes, but it does, at the [00:49:00] end, it's got recommended reading based on the protagonist's, the protagonist, the fictional, I should say, fictional protagonist's favorite books. And I went down and added a whole bunch of stuff to it. 

So anyway, so that was, that was a great, a great experience. And I am really enjoying our our, our little mother daughter book club. 

Amy: I love that you're doing that. I think that's amazing. So, I feel like we were trying to keep this to 40 minutes, and it's 51 minutes, but we did, I think we did really well, because we had so much to say.

Suzanne: We have opinions it turns out. 

Amy: But, I think we should wrap it, and be back soon. So, thanks so much for joining us for this episode of the podcast, this podcast with Suzanne and Amy, brought to you by Home School Life Now. We will be back soon to talk more about all the places where home, school, and life intersect.

See you then! 

Suzanne: Bye!

Episode 2: Let's Talk about Secular 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:

• The Ultimate Homeschool Calendar

• Tears of the Kingdom

• Chain Gang All Stars.

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 two of our newly relaunched podcast series, recording on Tuesday, 4th, 2023. Happy July 4th, Amy.

Amy

Happy July 4th. I feel like July 4th is so complicated.

Suzanne

Yeah, right at this very minute. And it’s not helping that in Atlanta, we have had like thunder showers and ugly rain this morning and last night.

Yeah, it does feel a little, a little fraught.

Amy

I saw a meme, I guess, last week, last weekend, where it was like, America, you’re going to act like this and still expect us to come to your birthday party.

I think that’s kind of where I am a little bit.

Suzanne

Yeah, I have been on vacation and I have not been reading news and that is — my goal is to be uninformed.

Amy

That’s fair.  I mean, you know, we do — next year’s our U.S. history year, and so we’re putting together the U.S. history stuff for our curriculum and getting ready to teach U.S. history, and, I mean, I am always struck by the tremendous possibility of the ideas of the United States.

It is maybe even more heartbreaking that we rarely live up to them.

Suzanne

Yeah, yeah, I can see that. I have started to look at the history. I am fascinated by U.S. history.

I love researching it myself. I love reading it. I love teaching it. And I’ve kind of come to a point where I see it almost like my family history, right? There are people in my family who did great things. There are people who did less great things, right? Yeah, it’s tough.

It really brings you face to face with a lot of the things that have been happening lately.

Amy

I mean, I guess you can’t change anything until you see it clearly. And so I guess we can feel good that we’re seeing things more clearly.

Suzanne

I think so. I think so. Which kind of brings us a little bit to our topic for the day.

We are going to be talking about secular, progressive homeschooling. I considered myself a secular, progressive homeschooler. With our school, we talk about being a secular, progressive school.

So what does that mean and why is it important to us? And just in case, you know, I always like to start — I tell my kids, my kids and my students, you know, always to define your terms before you start the conversation, right? So secular is not religious, right?

When people would ask me, when my kids were younger, like, you know, what kind of homeschooler are you? And I would quickly say, I’m a secular homeschooler, which means that I did not choose to homeschool for religious reasons. That’s kind of what it meant to me. Even though I did have a church that I belonged to at the time.

And also the fact that religion wasn’t part of what I consider the academic side of our homeschool. How about you?

How are you secular?

Amy

Well, secular definitely means for me not religious. And so, I mean, for me, when I look for secular homeschool resources, or secular homeschool community, I’m looking for resources and community that aren’t proselytizing, that aren’t trying to convert me to anything or convince me that any kind of particular belief system or way of life is the right one.

And also, and I can’t believe that this is even a thing, but also who are relying on academic and the best scientific and historical information and not kind of a worldview that discounts the best scientific and historical information.

Suzanne

Well, I mean, it’s secular as opposed to Christian, right? Christian-focused because that is what is dominating homeschooling even now in the country.

And so it does not mean that there are not secular Christian homeschoolers or Christian secular. I’m not sure how to say that.

But like in my secular homeschooling group, we had people who were Christians. My family is not Christian, but yeah, it just means that that’s not the focus. That’s not the expectation. It’s not the expectation that everybody’s going to have the same belief system.

Amy

And I think that’s a really good distinction that you’re making because we talk about religious homeschooling versus secular homeschooling, but it really is Christian homeschooling versus secular homeschooling.

Our family is Jewish in a very relaxed kind of way. But I don’t run into a lot of situations where I’m like, oh, well, this is a Jewish curriculum and it’s trying to do these things, or this is a Muslim curriculum, or this is a Buddhist curriculum.

It’s really curriculum that’s Christian versus curriculum that’s secular.

Suzanne

Right, right. as like I said, I said, I said, this before I’ll say it again. know, that doesn’t mean that Christians are welcome in the secular world, or that they don’t exist in the secular world. It’s just not the focus.

So then we get the the progressive part, which I think, over the years — I mean, speaking for myself personally, I describe myself as a liberal, I describe myself as progressive. You know, sometimes my children say I’m not using the right terms anymore. But for me, means that I am on what would be considered the opposite of conservative, right? The left, the group of people who are trying to fight oppression, or in some cases, even just, you know, as a middle-aged white cis woman in America, you know, learning about oppression and learning about privilege.

And what can we do to make the world more fair and equal and just for everyone?

Amy

Yeah. No, no, I love that. For me being progressive is much the same. It’s very much about kind of being against othering in all its forms and being willing to kind of constantly check myself and reevaluate my understanding and being open to being wrong — to make progress as a society and as an individual.

Suzanne

Yeah, and it also means things like if you walk in our school, you’ll see signs on the wall for Black Lives Matter and, you know, and —

Amy

Immigrants Welcome.

Suzanne

And, yeah, also, but on the back of my car, you will also, we will also see these things.

Amy

The Rezelvan is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Its loveliness only increases, it will never pass into nothing.

Suzanne

Thank you. Thank you. We did have problems with the brakes, but it’s going to be fine.

You know, and I had written down to talk about, you know, why is secular, progressive homeschooling important? But really for me, it’s not so much that it’s important, it’s who I am, right?

I mean, I am not a Christian homeschooler. I’m a secular homeschooler. I am not a conservative homeschooler, again, conservative Christian homeschooling kind of dominates in a lot of places, both in certain areas of the country and also dominates in things like curriculum, sales, often, or even what you can do online or with hybrid schools is this very Christian and very conservative in terms of social values.

Amy

Which I honestly didn’t realize when I started homeschooling — did you realize that? Because because I have never been a conservative Christian kind of parent.

And I did not realize how dominant conservative Christian voices were in the world, the homeschool world, when we started homeschooling.

I went to my very first homeschool conference. It’s about — we’re in Georgia and there’s a conference every year at the Cobb Galleria, a homeschool conference. And there was a conference session about “spare the rod and spoil the child” and there were conference sessions with “Adam and Eve” in the title.

And I was, I was genuinely surprised.

Suzanne

I think so. I think I was — well, okay, so when I started first considering it, I’ve told this story before — I do what I always do, which is I went to the library and checked out every book I could find.

But I learned early on that I had to look to to see whether it was Christian materials or secular materials because I did — I think I was aware that Christian homeschoolers were kind of the dominant, or I should say, conservative Christian homeschoolers were the dominant force.

And occasionally I got a book that started with you know well has a whole I’m a homeschooling mom, you know, we start every day with a prayer and an understanding that we do this to the glory of God, which is just not who I am.

But I was lucky. I was lucky because I think that the fact that there was still a stack of books for me to check out. I benefited from kind of the first wave of secular homeschooling materials, right?

I benefited also by the fact of being in Metro Atlanta, where there were a handful of secular groups, maybe not always progressive, but secular groups that were open to everybody that didn’t require a statement of faith.

And I think once I learned the search terms, I was kind of able to ignore it. Like, I was able to not have to get into that work. But I did have to learn the search terms. I had to learn the vocabulary.

Amy

Yeah, I think that’s it. 

It’s sort of an unpleasant surprise to go and be looking for, I don’t know, a way to help your reluctant reader, and the first piece of advice is to stop and humble yourself and pray. And maybe that is genuinely helpful for some people.

If that is, like, helpful for you, that’s awesome. That is not really great advice for the general person in that situation.

Suzanne

Well, we were talking earlier in a different conversation about finding curriculum that doesn’t like you. I would have that experience sometimes when checking out curriculum.

And of course, I think it’s still true to a large extent that you don’t always get a chance to look at the curriculum before you’re buying it. And every so often, I would misstep or I would sometimes you have to judge, like, how Christian is this?

Is it just a little Christian? And I can kind of skip those parts or are there, you know, with every single single grammar exercise based on a quote from the Bible, which is something I saw.

Amy

I feel like that is the homeschool game show that we all need: How Christian is it?

Suzanne

And I did occasionally, I would buy curriculum that I was reading, and I was like, oh, this curriculum doesn’t like me. I am not Christian. And this curriculum doesn’t want me around. These, the people who wrote this wouldn’t want me in their group or want their children to play with my children because it was so very much from that very closed world.

Amy

I think that’s such a good way to describe it, too — curriculum that doesn’t like you. Because we — I mean, we are in such a privileged position as cis white women, right? Cis white middle class women in like a reasonably large Southern city. We are pretty fortunate. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be a person of color, to be a Muslim person, to be — I mean, so many people would come to a lot of these curriculums, and just generally — the curriculum doesn’t like them, it doesn’t want them there.

Suzanne

And the fact is the idea of homeschooling is not inherently Christian. It’s not inherently conservative. In fact, the movement started with the hippies. We go back to the hippies and fighting the power, right?

Yeah. So it is, I think, not a big step from seeing this curriculum doesn’t like me to feeling like there is not a place for me in the homeschool world.

And I think that might be highlighted even more today as we have so many more young people who are identifying LGBT and feeling like, you know, is homeschool a place where I’m safe and welcome and celebrated?

And I think that’s one reason that it’s important to us is to be very clear about that. We were reminded of that recently. We were talking about unpleasant surprises. We went to a conference recently.

Amy

Oh, gosh.

Suzanne

I know. know. I shouldn’t bring it up. It was painful. It sounded really cool. Tell us. I don’t remember what the title was. Amy, do you remember what the title was?

Amy

It was the Annual National Hybrid Schools Conference.

I mean, it was billed — I would say very neutrally, right? Hybrid schools. I picture — you know, certainly, like, conservative Christian schools might be a part of that, but a lot of the hybrid schools I know are very progressive and are very interested in kind of deconstructing educational systems in progressive ways. 

So there was nothing, there was no clue. This was not a conservative Christian hybrid schools conference. It was not billed like that.

Suzanne

And it was run and funded by the business school at Kennesaw State University, which is a public state school here in Georgia. It wasn’t funded by a Christian conservative homeschool group or by churches or by anything like that. It was a state university that was sponsoring this. 

And I think — I know I was excited. I like going to conferences because it makes me feel like a grown-up who knows what they’re doing. It reminds me of my olden days going to conferences as a software developer. I get to wear a name tag and a lanyard, I love it. But I thought it would be really cool. We are kind of, this sounds silly to say, we’re trying to take this business that we’ve been running for six or seven years, a little bit more seriously as a business, right?

So I was excited to learn things both on the business side of how do you run a microschool? How do you run a hybrid school?

Amy

And, it feels like there’s so many good questions to be asking around this, right? How do you make what you do affordable and accessible to people in your community? How do you support parents and students kind of learning together, right?

How do you set up systems that make it possible for parents to support their kids learning? How do you manage all the back end stuff of running a school, efficiently?

There’s so many great things to talk about when it comes to running a hybrid school. I thought we were going to talk about those things.

Suzanne

Yeah, and on the curriculum side too, you know, what are the logistics of how much work is it reasonable to expect for kids to do independently at different grade levels?

How do you help the parents with that? It’s — so we were excited. I think we were very excited.

Amy

We woke up early and everything.

Suzanne

We carpooled down there. We were all — I got my goodie bag. I collected my t-shirts. And then I think what we got was not what we were expecting.

And I think that became clear to me, started to become clear in the first keynote speakers, the first round of keynote speakers.

I was a little alarmed when somebody got on stage and said, I’m from Arizona and you all want to be Arizona. And here’s how you can be. And that’s not something I think of necessarily first when I think of Arizona.

Amy

I was a little concerned when the second speaker who followed that speaker kept referring to the good Christian families that they served.

Suzanne

And in fact, I believe that speaker from a school in Metro Atlanta, as we were — okay, we were bad at this conference. I think we can, I mean, we just have to admit it, Amy, we were bad.

Amy

We were terrible students. And we did not set a good example of how students should be.

Suzanne

We were passing notes to each other — I mean, via text, but we were passing votes to each other. And commenting on the speakers and the speaker who runs a school for good Christian families runs it for only good Christian families, right?

They, their school has a statement of faith that explicitly defines marriage between one man and one woman. And that was a really weird whiplash moment — to one of the other speakers who I think, when doing the introductions, had talked about how young people have always been at risk for dying by suicide and how that has gotten worse in some ways and how one of the best things, you know, the best ways to help young people and to reduce this risk is to make sure they have a connection to a trusted adult and how in hybrid schools and microschools, we have those opportunities to build those connections with our small, you know, because we have smaller bodies of students and — you know, he didn’t say anything about LGBT students, but I as parent to LGBT kids, you know, I’m very aware of the statistics.

Amy

I mean, as a human being in the world who cares about people, you can’t not know those statistics.

Suzanne

Right. And so the one of the keynote speakers they invited to speak has a school that not only explicitly excludes that group entirely, but makes it clear that they don’t think that they’re okay. It was a little, I think we were both a little boggled.

Amy

So, Suzanne and I, I will say, I think it’s fair to describe us as big nerds. Right? Like, you know, I, I have almost never walked out of a class because if I don’t enjoy a session or a class, like I still feel like I can learn from it.

Right? Suzanne and I went and I said, was it okay if we went to the session on classical homeschooling because I really like a lot of things about the classical homeschool model.

I think we need to decolonize the classical homeschool model, but there are a lot of things that I really like about it.

The Well Trained Mind was, I mean, it was kind of like my ur text when we started homeschooling.

Suzanne

That was my Bible, not to be weird about it.

Amy

And we’ve always looking for ways to bring elements of classical learning to the Academy and to our own kind of homeschool ideas.

And we sat down and we were so excited. And the first thing that this speaker said is that there are more important things than facts. And we’re like, yes, yes, we’re here for this.

Suzanne

Students are the number one important thing.

Amy

And the guy is like, like salvation and glorifying God. And literally, like we just stood up and left because that wasn’t what we were there for, right?

That isn’t what we needed to learn. I am not interested in salvation and glorifying God. I think we could figure that out for ourselves.

Suzanne

I want to be really clear about the level of baseline assumption that was there, right?

It wasn’t that this speaker came up and said, well, you all know, I come from a Christian school. And so these are some of the priorities e have there, and I know they’re not going to relate to everybody in this room, and I’m sure that you have your own priorities — something like that, right?

He wasn’t talking about it in that context. There was a default underlying assumption there and in every single thing that we heard while we were there that the audience, that all of us in this hybrid microschools community, were Christian, were conservative.

I think there were some people of color there, but it was awfully white. And then when we got to the lunchtime keynote speaker, that we are all about destroying public education and that we hold as a fundamental political belief that government should not be involved in education.

And I am here to tell you that I do not hold that belief even a little bit. So that was what was really shocking to me.

Not that — of course, there’s going to be people there who are — I bet that speaker could have told me a lot about how they manage curriculum and how they manage independent work that would have been really useful.

But that wasn’t the conversation, the conversation was, well, everybody here clearly is on the same page. And I found that assumption, I think, the most offensive of all.

Amy

I will say, when we went to this conference, I still mask in public indoor spaces, just out of an abundance of caution. And I was — we had a bunch of rainbow mask left over from our big rainbow prom at the Academy. So I was wearing my big rainbow mask. And I did — we did have several people kind of come up to us and say, like secret code, like I like your mask.

So we were not the only people there who felt excluded, and unwanted and who the conference was not designed for.

Suzanne

That conference hated us, Amy. 

Amy

The conference really did hate us. 

Suzanne

The conference hated us. Okay, so during the lunchtime — spoiler, we didn’t make it to the afternoon sessions. I was poking at the lunchtime speaker, we could go on and on, but let’s say he was also super racist.

Amy 

The salad was very good. 

Suzanne 

The lunch was very good. I have no complaints about the lunch. And I was kind of like, Amy, we have to walk out. Via text, right? And Amy’s like, we cannot walk out. The person is still speaking. And I’m like, I’m not going to be able to sit here quietly much longer.

So once he did finish speaking, we did walk out. Fortunately, because, Amy, you were about to start asking questions.

Amy

Yeah. Okay, but in all fairness to me. In all fairness to me. The entire middle part of his talk was basically this kind white savior narrative about how he went into these small towns in India and saved the children from bad education by starting private schools for them.

Suzanne

Bad government schools, government-funded education, because that’s the key.

Amy

So just in all fairness to us.

Suzanne 

It was bad.

Amy

So we did leave, we left after his talk — we decided it was good manners, and I do think it’s important to have good manners, even though we were terrible, and we probably were distracting. We were just sitting there texting each other. So maybe it would have been more polite to leave sooner.

But when we left and we stepped outside, we kind of unpacked our feelings. It turned out that the video recorder, who was recording the questions that the speaker was answering was like right there.

Suzanne

Yeah, somebody came out and told us that we had to stop talking and move further away.

So we might think be immortalized on the conference report, although my husband who runs sound as a hobby for various things, including nerdy science fiction conventions, said, really, if they’re not just recording directly from the microphones, that’s on them.

We bear no guilt if their IT and sound and everything skills are not up to par. That is not us.

So yeah, I think that was, gosh, it was infuriating. It was super disappointing because we had, we’ve been looking forward to spending a fun, nerdy day together doing nerdy school stuff.

And it was also really, really disheartening because honestly, I was surprised. You know, talking about the surprise of realizing how much the homeschool world is dominated by Christian conservative homeschoolers. I did not think that this new world of hybrid schools or microschools would be dominated by that same group in the same way.

Perhaps that was naive of me. But I really thought that it had opened up, homeschooling and this world of microschools, hybrid schools, had opened up to a bigger community.

And I didn’t see that, I didn’t see that even beginning to be represented at this conference. And there were people from, know, not just Georgia, there were people from all around.

And that was a really disheartening moment. Like haven’t we come further than this?

Amy

Well, I think that we, too, we’ve been so lucky in recent years because we started our little hybrid school.

And it is, I mean, it is such a warm, inclusive community. People who find us are 100% secular progressive homeschoolers, lik,e they walk in the door and they’re like, oh yes. And so it feels like there is a huge community of this, right? And this is the community that we get to be a part of every day. We’re so lucky.

The conference made me realize, Suzanne, how lucky we are.

Suzanne

Well, yeah, and I think the ultimate result as we came out and as we were ranting to each other of the drive home.

I think the ultimate result was, I think for me, inspirational in the way that what we do is important, right?

If there are genuine — I don’t think there’s genuinely this view of us. I think that this conference was dominated by one set of voices. And that we don’t even know what percentage that was, right? Was it just the people that the organizer chose to speak?

Because he did choose to, you know, like the people from his children’s school. He chose them as speakers, right?

Amy

The Catholic Christian School that his children attended.

Suzanne

Exactly. Was it reflecting the organizers, organizers biases? Or was it really that, you know, with our little rainbow masks that we were the 1% there, you know. 

But either way, it’s clear that what we’re doing is necessary and important. And I found that to be reinvigorating, right? That we need to lean into who we are.

We need to maybe — I mean, like I said, we have never been vague about how we feel. You talk about people coming in the door and seeing our signs and being like, this is awesome.

And then we also have people who walk in the door and see Black Lives Matter and the giant trans flag on the wall. And — for whatever reason, I’ve never had anybody who was actually got up and turned around and left.

Amy

But we wouldn’t be offended if they did because that is why we have that there.

Suzanne

But you can tell when kind of mentally they have walked in the door and they see, and they their demeanor changes and they realize that this isn’t the place for them, right?

So it’s — so while it hasn’t been a secret and while we have tried to be very clear, it felt like it’s even more important to lean into that, to acknowledge unfortunately the ways that it makes us different, the ways that it can make us more inclusive and welcoming.

And we want people to know we want people to know that that’s who we are and that this work is important and especially in Georgia, especially in Georgia in 2023.

Amy

Yeah, and I know that this makes me sound like I come from an enormous place of privilege because I do, but it’s it’s a little bit scary to put ourselves — I mean, I feel like it’s so important, and we’re doing it. We’re doing it.

But it is a little bit scary to do it because there’s a lot of what, like, anger? Do you think anger is the right word? Vitriol?

Suzanne

Well, there’s a lot. I mean, there have been situations with other small schools in different areas of the country that focused or catered to, for example, LGBT kids, that have been kind of discovered by a conservative pundit, right? Or a politician, who then points to them as, you know, everything that’s wrong in the world. And funnels a lot of abuse their way.

You know, there are people with a lot of time on their hands. And that is not, you know, that is not a crazy thing, that is not a bizarre thing to be concerned about from our perspective.

Amy

But on the other side, we have the parents who call us up and say, we hear that you’re the school for trans kids. We hear that you’re the, you’re the place where trans kids can go. And I mean, that is who, that is who we are.

That is, that is who we want to be and that is what we want to do. And so.

Suzanne

We have to say this is who we are. We don’t want anyone who would be, who would benefit from coming here, not be able to come here simply because they didn’t know we existed.

Or we weren’t, we weren’t — you know, I look for it now. don’t know if you’ve had this experience too, but working with transgender students and having transgender children or my own, I am really aware — we’re doing college visits now. I am really aware of which schools use preferred names and which schools only have an option for legal names.

I am really aware of what kind of bathrooms are available. I am really aware of things like in their — do they have a clip in their, know, the colleges, they have like a slideshow, right? Here all the great things about our school, here are all the fun clips. Is there a rainbow flag somewhere in there?

It turns out that these small things are what we look to, to say, you know, is this safe? Is this some place where all kids can be celebrated?

And, you know, what could we be doing more in our online presence to have all of those clues in there?

It that terrible? I don’t know if that’s terrible. We can also just say it right out, that we celebrate, you know, LGBT students, but it’s important to have all of it.

Amy

Signifiers are important. I think that they are a really important piece of it because, I mean, people who are not the, what, the straight, cis, white majority, can’t always trust the words.

I mean, I think the signifiers often carry more weight that we are an inclusive environment that values diversity. I mean, the same organization that doesn’t welcome non-Christian marriages has a statement about diversity and inclusion on their website.

Suzanne

Yes.

Amy

Which, I think, they don’t seem to me. At least not the way that you would want them to mean it.

Suzanne

Right. It’s a very different kind of definition. So, yeah. So, I think that was something, we know, we’re looking for something valuable to come out of this experience.

And I think for me, I think for both of us, that was something valuable, right? Kind of this, okay, you know, we are ready. We want to lean even further into this. This is a valuable and necessary thing.

We actually made a big decision that day. We had been considering one of the biggest changes that we have made since we started the school, which is moving into a larger office facility.

And we were kind of on the fence about it, I think — because, you know, it costs more money, but also would be really nice to have it.

It’d be really nice to have two bathrooms. Two bathrooms would be awesome.

Amy

Suzanne says that I can start a college if we have two bathrooms.

Suzanne

That’s not — You know, if we want to get to logic, that’s not what I said. What I said was we cannot start a college with only one bathroom.

And, oh, gosh, it’s been too long since I looked at converse, whatever. Whatever of that is not true. So, yeah.

But I think we came out of that conference going, yep, we’re going for the bigger classroom. Yeah, it feels right, it feels important.

Amy

It did. I mean, I think it really — I don’t want to say like it gave us like like the kick that we needed, but but I think it in a way it did.

It kind of made us say, you know, what we do matters. And it matters to us, of course, but it matters to other people. It’s something that makes life better for other people for the, you know, the community of homeschoolers who doesn’t feel seen by the conservative Christian — I don’t even know if it’s a majority, but it’s a really vocal chunk.

Suzanne

It dominates. It dominates news coverage. It dominates so much. So many areas.

Amy

Yeah, I think it made us feel like like we had to be a little braver about what we do.

Suzanne

Yes.

Amy

That’s good.

Suzanne

A little braver, a little louder, a little prouder of who we are. Right. I mean, not to brag. Okay. We should also be again really clear white privilege — cis, straight. You know, women who are always learning about our privilege, always a work in progress. We always know we can do better.

We’re trying. And that is part of being progressive, right? Is always being the work in progress. In fact, we were looking at the paperwork for next year, this morning. And I was noticing that that in some of our medical forms and all that kind of stuff, it says, you know, this is my child and I can verify that he slash she, you know, has no big medical.

I was like, Maybe we need to change the pronouns.

Amy

Yeah, absolutely, because because I felt like — what a decade ago? when we first wrote up these forms — I remember going in, and we had an attorney like put together the forms for us and they were all he he he.

And I remember going in with my pen and adding she because I felt like I was so progressive and feminist doing that. But that’s not even inclusive anymore. I love that we still get to grow. I mean, that is like, I always said, I wanted to spend my whole life as a learner.

And I feel like that’s what you get to do, kind of like that’s kind of a requisite for being a progressive person, being willing to do that kind of learning and growing.

Suzanne

And as a homeschooler too, you’re always learning just like the kids. It’s always great because we get the opportunity every year when we’re doing this work to do it better than we did last year.

Amy

I mean, I think that is like, maybe the secret of homeschooling is that we’re always homeschooling ourselves as much as our kids.

Right. It’s as much about us.

Suzanne

It’s true. Amy, Amy teases me every year because I’m still reading, you know, I’m working on a history curriculum, but I’m still got a stack of library books from the curriculum that I just finished teaching. I’m done with that. I’ve done with that lecture. We move, but I get interested and then I want anyway.

Amy

Yeah, it’s hilarious because you literally just stopped reading about the ancient world.

And that was two years ago.

Suzanne

Okay. Okay. But there’s some really good stuff. Now, I’m excited this year to move into US history and to talk about Sally Hemings when we talk about Thomas Jefferson, and to talk about Ona Judge when we talk about Washington. I mean, I think that there are ways that we can change the focus.

And that’s something I think we’re going to get into next time on the podcast. We want to talk about decolonizing the curriculum. What does that mean?

Amy

What does it look like?

Suzanne

What does it look like? What does it mean to us? How do you do it? How do you do it as, again, white, straight, cis people?

Amy

And how do you do it without just making history or literature all about people’s terrible experiences? That is a big piece of it is reflecting black joy, reflecting LGBTQ+ joy, reflecting immigrant joy, like seeing the full picture of people’s lives and not just terrible things that have happened to them.

Suzanne

Yeah, there’s some lectures I give especially in US history where I feel like I need to bring chocolate to bring everybody up at the end of the class because sometimes some of the things we talk about are just tough.

But it can’t be that 100% because that 100% doesn’t reflect even the reality. It does not reflect reality.

And if we treat the curriculum as, oh, look at all these terrible things that got done to that group of people over there, then we’re not quite there yet.

We haven’t quite reached where we need to be.

Amy

So decolonizing the curriculum is like such a, it’s a really fun and exciting project to be a part of. It’s really fun to talk about too.

Suzanne

It is because I learned about all these people that I never learned about.

But before, they’re really, really cool and super awesome. So anyway, so that’s something we can look forward to the next episode of the podcast.

Amy, tell me what’s new online at homeschoollifemag.com.

Amy

Oh, so Suzanne and I have a new book out, The Ultimate Homeschool Calendar, which is kind of the resource that I wanted when we started homeschooling.

You could find, speaking of religious dominance in the homeschool market, you could find a lot of sort of resource books, big resource books for religious homeschoolers, but not so much for secular homeschoolers.

So I put together from back issues of home/school/life and I wrote some new stuff — 366 ideas for your homeschool based around the calendar. Some of them are for goofy holidays, like Appreciate a Dragon day or Penguin Awareness Day. Did you know Penguin Awareness Day is a thing?

Suzanne

I did not know.

Amy

There are art projects, like these Faith Ringold-inspired story quilts. There are science experiments, like make bubbles with carbon dioxide — not carbon dioxide, that would be bad.

Make dry ice bubbles for Halloween or make glow-in-the-dark bath bombs, and there are unit studies, like the history of cuneiform or the French Revolution or Sacco and Vanzetti.

So it’s a whole hodgepodge of stuff. It’s a pretty book. You can flip through it and find something to do every single day.

You can flip through it and think about things that you might possibly like to do one day.

Suzanne

I was going to say when Amy was talking about this, this is the kind of thing I love. I would never do the things.

You get the old Parents magazine or Family Fun or something. I just found it really inspirational. This is what I want to do when I’m parenting is flip through, and maybe I do a handful of things.

And you never know, out of that handful, maybe Penguin Awareness Day becomes a cherished family holiday that has its own rituals, and so you never know if it’s going to be a big hit in your family and might be a permanent addition to what your life looks like.

Amy

Well, I hope it’s a fun resource for people. It is definitely something that I would have loved when we started homeschooling.

So, you can check it out.

Suzanne

It’s so pretty. You said it was pretty.

Amy

I do care a lot about how things look. 

Suzanne 

All right, well then before we go, one last thing, Amy, I have to ask this question because if we don’t talk about books, we feel sad.

What are you reading now?

Amy

So I am reading a lot of stuff about U.S. history for next year, but Suzanne, I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but most of my reading time is currently being taken up by the new Zelda game. Tears of the Kingdom. Which I’m playing with my kids so it’s quality time.

Suzanne

Oh, sure, sure, sure. Wait: Quote: Playing with your kids.

Amy

Okay, so I lay on the bed and watch them play because I can’t actually like fight a bokoblin or anything but I’m very good at, like, figuring out how to solve the puzzles even if I can’t use the controllers.

So I participate.

Suzanne

It’s a joint effort. It’s a joint effort. Well, that sounds awesome.

Amy

It’s really nice because they want to hang out with me. It’s actually, I mean — it’s like a very like open world kind of beautiful game. So it’s very entertaining. It’s a lovely way to spend the summer day.

What about you? What are you reading? You were just on vacation. You abandoned me for a week.

Suzanne

I know. I know. went on vacation to where our family meets up. My extended family meets up in North Carolina, and they play a lot of board games.

It was — I bring two bags of library books, plus hundreds of books on my Kindle, and just tell them to go away and not bother me and read the whole time. And it’s lovely.

So I got through a lot of books that week. But what I’m reading right now is actually an amazing book that I’m going to recommend to everybody.

It’s called Chain Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. The premise is grim. The premise is that in a near future, prisoners are given the opportunity to sign up for a sports league that basically is gladiator fighting to the death. And it is hugely popular. This is, I said, in the near future. And really, what the book is about is prison abolition.

The book talks not only — the book has an has an opinion. The book talks not only about this fictional world, but also talks about statistics and what’s going on today.

And that makes it sound like a very dry read, you know that the book is lecturing to you, but it is not.

It is a very engaging, sometimes upsetting read that I I have just been zipping through and I haven’t quite finished it yet. That’s on my project for this afternoon. But I can, I really recommended it. That sounds like something you’re interested in.

Maybe, but if you’re not super interested in it, it really is both an entertaining read and one that has a lot of thought behind it.

So that’s Chain Gang All Stars.

Amy

I have that on my library holds list, and now I’m even more excited to read it.

Suzanne

Yeah, I hope you. Like it really is. I know I say I make it sound like a lecture. It really isn’t. It’s very entertaining.

Amy

I mean, I love a lecture.

Suzanne

That’s true. We are nerds.

Amy

So we’re trying to keep these podcasts under an hour. And so I think we have to call it for this episode of The Podcast with Suzanne and Amy brought to you by home.school.life.now.

But we will see you back soon for more conversation about the places where home school and life intersect.

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

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Here’s a list of everything we talked about:

• HSL podcast archives

• home/school/life academy

• home/school/life online classes

• Ted Lasso

• the pirate show

• Abbott Elementary

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.