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The Homeschool How To
I don't claim to know anything about homeschooling, so I set out on a journey to ask the people who do! Join me as I chat with homeschoolers to discuss; "why are people homeschooling," "what are all the ways people are using to homeschool today," and ultimately, "should I homeschool my kids?"
The Homeschool How To
#92: This is Not a School: Insights from Homeschooling Dad & Author, John Dale
Discover the transformative journey of John Dale, a dedicated homeschooling father with an extraordinary background that spans various schools in the U.S. and Guantanamo Bay. John provides invaluable insights into how his personal experiences and skepticism of federal institutions motivated him and his wife to homeschool their three daughters. This episode promises a deep dive into the intricate layers of homeschooling, from the importance of creating strong family bonds to the challenges of maintaining a nutritious and flexible education system at home.
We take a critical look at the inefficiencies and corruption within government systems, particularly in New York, and how these issues bleed into public education services, such as school lunch programs. Our conversation with John uncovers how these factors influence the decision to homeschool and how adapting curriculums to current political climates can foster a better understanding of civic education. It's an eye-opening discussion that highlights the intersection of education and politics, urging for a more malleable approach to teaching real-world issues.
We question whether the traditional schooling system is becoming obsolete and consider how homeschooling can thrive in this evolving landscape. John shares his unique approach to homeschooling, emphasizing personalized learning and ethical education, while preparing his children for real-world challenges. This episode culminates in a celebration of the homeschooling community, acknowledging their resilience and adaptability, especially as more families turn to this educational path in an ever-changing world.
Buy: This is Not a School
Emails can be sent to KatelynMD@gmail.com for questions and comments.
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Welcome to this week's episode of the Homeschool How-To. I'm Cheryl and I invite you to join me on my quest to find out why are people homeschooling, how do you do it, how does it differ from region to region, and should I homeschool my kids? Stick with me as I interview homeschooling families across the country to unfold the answers to each of these questions week by week. Welcome, and with us today I have John Dale. John, thank you so much for joining me on the Homeschool how To.
Speaker 2:It is my pleasure.
Speaker 1:Now you are a homeschooling dad, huh.
Speaker 2:Correct.
Speaker 1:Can I ask how many kids do you have?
Speaker 2:We have three children. Our oldest is 20 years old now, going to college and doing really well. Our middle kid is 17 years old and our youngest is nine, and they're all homeschooled from the get-go and they're all girls.
Speaker 1:So you've been doing this for 20 years and that's kind of before the whole. Like COVID boom, I know that really woke up a lot of parents to seeing what's actually going on in the school system on top of all the stuff going on politically right now and for funding purposes, which is why another reason people want to pull their kids. But what was your reason, your and your wife's reason, to start homeschooling 20 years ago?
Speaker 2:Well, I come from a family that has inherent distrust in federal institutions and I think that really that was the kernel of an idea that grew in my consciousness over time from a very young age that we should go in with eyes wide open when it comes to federal programs, especially one as big and unwieldy.
Speaker 2:as the Department of Education here in the United States I attended I think it was nine different elementary schools. Growing up we moved around a lot, including a couple of years in the K-12 school in Guantanamo Bay for the second and third grade.
Speaker 2:And so I got to see sampling of all of these different sort of these different cultures from Guantanamo Bay, south Dakota, montana, washington State, california, arizona, and so I got to just when you're young, going through that, you see the different dialects, you see the different cultures, you see the different approaches and I think it gave me an inherent understanding of what was happening in the schools and a perspective that a lot of people just don't have.
Speaker 2:Make a lemonade out of lemons kind of a situation, because ideally you want to be in the same structure growing up, whether that's homeschool or otherwise, I think. But so that, I think, was really the kind of the genesis of my desire to want to homeschool. We were in Tucson, arizona, I was getting a master's degree from the University of Arizona at the time and we found out that we're going to have a baby, and so I started thinking from the get-go, extrapolating out what you know 20, 30, 40 years from now what kind of a relationship do I want to have with my children and how do I get there? How do I get to that place where there's just this strong bond and an impenetrable trust that I have with my family? And the answer to that was to be present, not just be the wage earner, but to literally have lots of time with my family of the best hours of my day In the morning, normally when you would be giving your time to a corporation or an institution, a non-family farm type arrangement.
Speaker 2:That's the time that I figured I wanted to give my children and I wanted them to reciprocate that and give me their best time too, and so I had this nagging vision in my mind about how I wanted to conduct my parenthood responsibilities, and it took some convincing of my wife, to be quite honest, to head down this road, and she was always a good conservative backstop for this project, which is the most important project that anyone can do. It's the most important project parenthood and it's probably the least respected and the most trampled on historically, because children, when they're born, are considered assets of the state, and so I mean you might conclude that I wanted my children to be my assets, and I suppose you can conclude that it wasn't a strictly monetary, fiduciary responsibility that I was honing in on, but much, much more than that, and that only reinforces my belief that we made the right decision, because there's much more than just people as assets, I think, in the human experience, if you want to maximize the return on our investment.
Speaker 2:I think, in the human experience if you want to maximize the return on our investment. I think there are a lot of intangibles to it, but that's basically the context behind when this project got started about 20 years ago and there's just so much to it and I've been fortunate to have a good memory and that was part of my upbringing was the nutrition, and I think that the seed of consciousness and the ability to learn and grow and be a productive member of our society really starts at the nutritional element from a very young age, and so, thinking about all of the garbage that I was served in public school.
Speaker 2:It just led me to believe that if we could get the nutrition right, that it would be very difficult to perform worse than the lower 50% of an average American classroom. And so those were the founding kind of visions and philosophies of our homeschool.
Speaker 2:What might have tipped the scales for Jess, my wife, is that when you leave your child alone to an institution, subject to an institution, for eight hours, six hours at a time, there are a lot of unpredictable influences that vector into that situation and there's no way to tell how your kid's going to turn out, regardless of how diligent you might be from the hours of 5 pm to 9 pm and on the weekends and holidays. So those are kind of the three sort of main driving principles and aspects of our circumstances that caused me to be just a ruthless, merciless advocate to homeschool.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Yeah, that makes me think of three different things. A couple of weeks ago I was at a uh local like fall festival, um, promoting my children's book, let's talk emergencies and a guy came up to me that was talking about, uh, you know, oh, he goes. You know Trump. When he was in office he tried to. He took all this money away from the Department of Education. And I'm looking at him like, yeah, yeah, right, he should. Administration doesn't need that money. The government agency doesn't need that money. Are you trying to convince me to vote otherwise or something? So, yeah, I just kind of looked at him dumbfoundedly, especially coming from 16 years of working in the government myself.
Speaker 1:I can truly attest to what you had said about you grew up with a strong distrust in government agencies or entities, organizations. And, yeah, I've seen it. I've worked in four different state agencies in New York. I've seen corruption in every single one of them. State agencies in New York. I've seen corruption in every single one of them. My husband works for a private company but that contracts with many state agencies, including schools, jails, hospitals, but all state funded, and the corruption there is unreal. The waste, the amount of waste, the waste, the amount of waste, fraud is like the one thing, like there's probably little like fraud, like oh, somebody got you know their broken leg paid for and they didn't really deserve that, OK, but the amount of fraud, waste and abuse is so huge and it's our tax dollars but they do a good job of not letting us see those numbers. And the third thing that you were talking about. Lastly, let's see you were. I had three fingers raised to bring up the three points that you were making the school lunches.
Speaker 1:Yes, that just because I'm, since I've had to register my son now with the school, which I don't even know if I legally had to, but that's, in New York, what they made us do. I get these emails now about what's going on, and it's this email I got recently. That was, hey, good news. Now we offer free breakfast and free lunch to every child in the school, and we're not even in like a poor town, we're not in inner city or anything like where I grew up. This you know. But because they don't want to discriminate against the children whose families cannot afford, you know, breakfast and lunch, I guess they're just offering it to everybody. So think about that.
Speaker 1:If you're the parent, like myself, I try to. I spend extra money on getting organic foods or, like you know, chicken and beef and you know, pork from the local farms, and I want to feed my kids that stuff and I send them to school where they can then throw that in the garbage and get free pancakes, free peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on white bread, free pizza, free nachos. It's like it makes me so angry right there.
Speaker 2:And you're right, the nutrition is the basis of it all, because that's just how they're going to function for the rest of the day I've got to commend you for putting in so much time in New York, a very contentious city and state throughout the history of our country and a truly beautiful place in a lot of ways, because that friction and tension tends to ferret out the truth about a lot of things. So it's a love-hate thing, isn't it? New York is an amazing, amazing historic place for America the truth about a lot of things. So it's a love-hate thing, isn't it? New York is an amazing, amazing historic place for America and it means a lot to us. It means a lot to Americans and it's very hurtful.
Speaker 2:Even as someone who's only been through New York I didn't spend a significant amount of time there, but I find that I have a reverence for New York and I'm very disappointed in seeing what de Blasio and others have done through the policies that I presume are being fed to them by their extortionists. Together and present through that whole era was incredible because we got an amazing civics lesson, a contemporary civics lesson, from 2015 until present, even although we did apathy and attrition kind of set in in 2022. And so we haven't been quite as involved on national, on the national politics, but still very involved locally. That's great.
Speaker 2:But to just see all the things and the tactics that were done going through that presidency and the reactions to a key platform strategy of Make America Great, to see all of the backlash and the pushback against the concept of Make America Great. It wasn't like the Patriot Act. He literally wanted to make America great again and so we had just a frontline civics lesson, watching live feeds and analysis, and it was a huge part of our homeschool that preoccupied our time, which, if I was starting out, I would want to know this. Another big core principle that emerged in the success of our homeschool was to kind of go with the flow, was to look at what's happening around you and look for the problems to solve and make those real world problems part of our curriculum.
Speaker 2:And that was hugely successful, because every time we did that, I think our retention was just was off the charts. And also with the nutrition and their memory, they now have an ingrained memory about whether or not we truly have a representative democracy in our country right now, which I think is a question that's up in the air as long as we have uncertainty at the ballot box. What do we have? And it gave us a chance to study different systems of government, from communism to totalitarianism and fascism, and free market based capitalism and anarchism, and to study these concepts not necessarily put all those into practice, mind you, but contrast them so that they can make an informed decision, as they're being encroached upon by this runaway system right now. And also, I'd like to say that you know, I don't want to off-put people who work in government.
Speaker 2:I think government is necessary and can be very effective to enhancing the human experience, and people like yourself, I think, get disparaged and there are a lot of people with their heads down and that are just trying to keep afloat in this crazy world and they have government jobs and they're very tremendous people.
Speaker 2:They're very good people that are in the asset column and they have a first line of sight into the inner workings of government. So I want to be careful not to disparage all of the people in government. When I say government, I refer to the system, its policies, the touch points, and then eventually there are human actors that act within the government as well with conscience, and those are the people I tend to put faith in, not necessarily the system that we have right now, and that was one of the primary lessons that came out of the Trump presidency for me.
Speaker 1:And I think that exact sentiment can be used for the education system. You know, when I make certain comments on the podcast or on my Instagram page, I'll get a little backlash that teachers are wonderful people and, yeah, I'm sure a lot are. I know some that are great people. But when you're stuck in a system that's not letting you do what the children need from you or even be creative, it just all has to be. This is the test. This, this is where the funding comes from. Your kids have to do well on the test. That's how we will measure. That's how we get paid comes from. Your kids have to do well on the test. That's how we will measure. That's how we get paid.
Speaker 1:And then and you can't even teach it the way that you want, once taught it and that the kids enjoyed because we have to all streamline it same for you know bobby in new york city, and the same for billy joe and you know wyoming. They have to have everything the same and it doesn't work that way, because my kid, even though he has a best friend, they have different interests, different learning styles. One can learn to read faster, and it's enjoyable, and the other one might like building things outside and it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with that. They'll both learn to build and read when it comes. But the school system and the funding and all of the testing just makes it so that teachers can't even do what they dreamed of doing as they were going through the schooling to become a teacher.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it can get pretty depressing when you're, when you're out there as a messenger trying to improve the system and identify the faults in that system. It can, it can get, you can, kind of black pill right and demotivate and demoralize folks.
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Speaker 2:But I mean buck up. This is the first step to making things better, and the fact that we're recognizing these problems is not demoralizing to me it's. I get hope when I see people looking at these problems, because I have faith in the ability of the people in this country, whether it's coal miners or computer scientists or political activists and leaders, or on and on and on and on. There are just so many amazing things that our people are capable of, and that leads me to the idea of this kind of a new economy that's emerging, based on a new technological industrialization of our means of production in this country. And so for hundreds of years, the philosophy behind schooling has been parents have to work. They're the engine of our economy. They bring the food, they build the houses. Through their efforts, the streets get paved and municipal systems get installed and maintained, but the question that is not being posed enough right now is are we reaching a point in our capabilities that parents and families can stay together in atomicity? Can we abandon that model of the parents have to go to work? Therefore, we require specialized teachers in the classroom and administrators, and facilities and bus systems. Think about the cost of the bus system coast to coast. It's enormous and it's a logistical cost of managing all of that. The accountants for the education system probably make a billion dollars a year combined. I don't know, I'd like to see that breakdown. But it's a huge monolithic system that is unable to adapt to these emerging technologies that I'm watching as a technologist. Other countries poach, they're taking these technologies and they're installing them and here we are still being forced and encouraged to mold ourselves and our children to this archaic system. That at one point was the reason for our success and we can acknowledge that.
Speaker 2:But I think it's also time for good people of conscience to talk seriously about how to adapt our systems to keep the atomic family together, because it was the atomic family working on the American family farm, in my view, that was the reason for our success and our rapid ascent to world prominence.
Speaker 2:And it was the atomic family and the accountability to one another from those bonds that form that aren't purchased.
Speaker 2:When you raise a child and you're there and you work and struggle together, it creates the type of bond that money cannot purchase that the state tries to replicate. In my opinion, the state tries to replicate that bond through conditioning, operant conditioning in the schools, so that the children become more loyal to the state than they are to the parents. The relationship between the children and the state, that bond, doesn't come close to the strength of a bond of an atomic family where the parents would literally die to protect their children. And there are teachers out there who have that mentality, but they're too rare and it just doesn't compare to the biochemical processes that I think are occurring in that atomic family when mom and dad nurture the children intellectually and spiritually and physically and nutritionally and carefully and methodically. And it's an art, it's an underappreciated art and you don't get compensated for being a homeschool teacher, and so it really is a statement of values for our country that has a misalignment.
Speaker 2:So we have all this stuff coming out now, like the manufacturing singularity, artificial intelligence we now have space lasers and SpaceX and SolarCity and Tesla, which I'm actually not for electric vehicles right now, and I have a lengthy article I've written about that. That doesn't mean I'm against electricity, right. That doesn't mean I'm against electricity, right. Whatever creates a healthy working and learning environment for our atomic families to spend time together but still be productive. That's what I'm in favor of, because that atomic family that is humanity, that's us. That's why we're here.
Speaker 2:If you know, it's a simple statement of purpose. We're here for each other, for this human experience that we can share, for such a fleeting moment in the grand timeline of this universe, and it is so special and that's what causes me honestly and I hope I don't offend anyone, but that's why I'm pro-life, that's why I revere and value life so much, and it's caused me to think deeply about when does a person become a person, and science has informed the debate that it happens at conception, and so you know, if that's not a little baby human, what is it? And I don't think that any religious doctrine or indoctrination is required in order to support that argument in any arena, and that perspective is something that we taught a lot in our homeschool is how precious this experience is for everyone. For this conversation to be occurring, I assume you're still in the New York area- yeah.
Speaker 2:Is that right? So for this conversation to be occurring in person is exceptionally rare, but for it to be occurring over the internet, like we're doing, it, is miraculous. Let's all take a moment to appreciate this and then take a moment to try to restructure it. Maybe we can somehow help the people who are that addicted to money and power. We do it for heroin addicts. I think that we should maybe be looking at interventions for people who are not allowing atomic families to grow and develop together, because they're hurting our humanitarian value, our shared combined value. They're hurting it immeasurably. So what do we do with these folks? I'm not sure, but I think the new economy and the way we can structure our families innovatively around these opportunities. This is everything, in my opinion.
Speaker 1:Now I know you talked about with homeschooling your girls. You did a lot of the stuff that was sort of current events going on and really making that relatable to what's going on in life, and I think that's awesome. That is a fantastic idea. How else did you? What was kind of your daily rhythm of homeschooling? Did you have a big part of it? Did your wife have a big part? At what age did the girls maybe kind of work more independently? And even as far as like curriculums, did you switch around a lot? Did you stick with one thing or not use it at all? And I'll let you kind of work that into. I know you said that your oldest is in college. Was college always the goal?
Speaker 2:So kind of a day in the life of our homeschool is. I don't want to say it's unschool, because that was a little too freeform and we knew that we had to get basic skills Installed before you know we could get to some of the higher-order things that we wanted to accomplish. Let me write down one of your other questions I just remembered.
Speaker 1:Well.
Speaker 2:It really kind of depends. So in the winter here our pe is more snow related, so we'll do, you know, hiking in the snow and we've taken up cross-country skiing a few years ago and so, like, we watch the weather very closely and our approach is really dynamic, and if the weather is a certain way, well, we tend to plan our activities a different way than if the weather is a certain way well, we tend to plan our activities a different way than if the weather's not that way.
Speaker 1:And, and I'm really glad to hear that you've written a book.
Speaker 2:We of course have this book about our experience called this is not a school, and I do get into a lot of the detail about you know what is the secret of our homeschool and our success? And we have had tremendous success, fantastic, so well, my job as our administrator is to constantly assess how our girls are doing, constantly, because that's kind of one of my core skills is observation, and so I talk with them and I ask them questions and then gauge the responses very carefully and if I find a deficiency then I say, hey, jess, there's this area where we really need to address this area, and because we don't have to commute to school, we don't have to go through any bureaucratic red tape to adjust our curriculum. We were able to attack those deficiencies and make extreme progress in a very short period of time compared with what you would see in a public school, very tailored, you know. I noticed that our youngest wasn't developing her art skills as quickly as I felt comfortable with, kind of instinctively, and it wasn't even an objective measure. So we would have her do some intensive activities around art and expressing herself visually with, you know, different mediums.
Speaker 2:I'm not sure when it occurred, but it definitely happened that our kids started taking responsibility for their own learning. I think it was probably right around nine or 10. And I drove and so and another job as an administrator was to drive home strategic messaging You're responsible for your learning, you're gonna be a lifelong learner. People who stopped learning start dying. Those kinds of messages, I think, caused our children to have a different perspective and there's a certain freedom in our approach that allowed them to pursue things like. Casey wanted to learn piano, so she learned piano. Casey felt like she didn't know enough about math so she, cover to cover, went through and did every exercise in the old Saxon algebra book, the algebra one book from when I was in high school.
Speaker 2:Was college always the goal? No, not necessarily being capable of, you know, filling needs within our market system legally efficaciously, with conscience and ethics and morality legally efficaciously, with conscience and ethics and morality that was the goal. It just so happened that I think in our small town here, where we have a university, they were watching us very closely and it's an old teacher's college, black Hill State University, so they're very focused on education. They've turned out a lot of teachers here and so you know they on one hand, they have a motivation to protect their cash flows from the federal government, the teachers unions and the teachers and the education colleges. On the other hand, I think that they know they're struggling. They see other countries really maximizing our model and making it work for their kids, for rote learning, better than we can, and I think they're truly looking for opportunities and those opportunities don't come from the mainstream. Those opportunities come from the fringes, from the outliers, from the people who are thinking differently from the mainstream, and that certainly is me and that's us now and that's our whole family. Now is we're looking for those opportunities with conscience, and that's key.
Speaker 2:You've got to have some sort of moral curriculum. We're really heavy on ethics in our in our curriculum, which is consists largely of the walk talk, and I go into that in detail here. So our school was conducted more outside than inside, more through dialogue than through activities in front of books and curriculums. I always I felt like once I saw how the curriculums worked, I thought this is a great tool to apply when it's really really needed in certain areas where we see deficiencies. And then the rest I want to talk about how to apply what they learn to the real world, and that's what we did on just hundreds of hours of walk talks, and that was a bit of a risk. I didn't know if it would work, but I think it really worked.
Speaker 2:But college was not always the goal and because of and here's a tip if you have a homeschooler about to start college and you're a little bit worried, what we did was we had Caitlin, our oldest, take one course, one for her, a difficult course.
Speaker 2:It was the math course.
Speaker 2:She struggles in math a little more than Casey and I think that our youngest is looking like she's gonna be really good at math too, but it was just she struggles with it.
Speaker 2:So we had her take college algebra right out of the gate and that was her only course and she focused on it and not only learned the college algebra, but she also learned how to pass a college course and what was involved in that. So once she was able to prove that she could do that, it was wide open. She can take as many or as few college courses as she wants now and we have confidence that she'll do really well and bring honor to our family and our methods and also our cohort of people who are homeschooling. I have a tremendous sense of responsibility I feel a lot of. Sometimes it gets kind of stressful to be successful with this, not just for myself, but because people are going to point to our model and say any failure we have, it's going to be magnified and they're going to say see, see, you should have sent them to the public school, but any success that we have is going to be marginalized and squelched and tamped down it seems like.
Speaker 1:Do your kids know what to do in an emergency? Do they know how to call 911 from a locked cell phone? Well, if you've been listening to my podcast for any length of time, you know that I have been working for the last year on a book that talks about exactly this. I was going through homeschooling curriculum with my son and realized that, although they would brush over certain things that my son would need to know in an emergency, nothing really delved into it, and definitely not on a repetitive basis. I started reaching out to teachers and asking them what schools do to prepare kids for emergencies and, other than skimming the surface, they said that they really feel that this information is the parent's responsibility to teach. But do parents know that? It's not like there's a handbook where we talk about who is responsible for what?
Speaker 1:So I set out on a journey to write a book about exactly this, and it is finally published. My illustrator, cheryl Krauthamel, is a retired NYPD officer, so she was the perfect fit for this book. We have hidden a 9, a-1 and a 1 in each illustration, so that you and your kids can have fun searching for these numbers. While solidifying for your kids what these numbers look like. I've put the steps for how to reach 9-1-1 on various cell phones, even if they're locked, and what that call will go like and what information they will be looking for.
Speaker 1:My book will help your child practice their first and last name, mom and dad's first and last names, their address, what to do if there is a fire. It goes over stranger danger, internet, water and gun safety, and I have paired an activity book to go right along with it. To solidify these concepts, give yourself peace of mind and give your kids the confidence to handle the unexpected. By grabbing your copy of let's Talk Emergencies today, you can head on over to the link in my show's description or thehomeschoolhowtocom, and if you do purchase the copy, please, please, please, leave me a review on Amazon. The more reviews I have, the more the algorithm will push this book out there, so I would really appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening and for all of your support of the show.
Speaker 2:So I feel a great sense of responsibility to not only be successful, but to also have a big megaphone and try to touch base with people like yourself who can help us get the word out that this is actually a more efficacious method.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it makes me think of a post that I had written on Facebook or Instagram about what I had learned over a year of interviewing homeschooling families, and one of them was that, you know, our our need to want our kids to be on par has more to do with our insecurities as a parent and educator. And how easy would it be to send them to public school so that when they fail, you can say, well, it was the school's fault. But as a parent who loves your child homeschooling, you're not going to let them fail. You know, if there is something that they are not good at, well, do they have to know that anyway? Is that something they need for the real world or the career they want to go in? If not, maybe you don't have to go forward with that, or maybe you can find a different way to make it relatable and fun for them to learn, or a way for them to understand.
Speaker 1:There's just, you know, it is easy to throw, and society has made us think, you know, we are not capable of being the teachers to throw in. Society has made us think, you know, we are not capable of being the teachers, even though we went to the same place to be educated. That, they're telling us, made us not smart enough to educate our own kids. So it's like, if you didn't make me smart enough to educate them, why should I send them there? But that's so true. And and did you when she when your oldest did her one course of math in college? Was she still technically in high school, or had she graduated the homeschooling of high school and just took one class as a college student?
Speaker 2:Well, so sorry I was. I want to. Yeah, I'm going to answer that question and remind me of the question in just a moment, because you hit on something that was very, very important and I don't want to just pass over that and I love your question. By the way, I don't mean to be rude, no, no no.
Speaker 2:So sugar and fructose and fluoride and lack of iodine in our diet, has you said, parents have been dumbed down, basically, so they're not capable of really teaching the kids. Um, well, I I think that that's a key and central point, and let's go ahead and diffuse that a little bit because, to be honest, I didn't. I'm not a genius teacher, neither is my wife. We know, we don't know what the hell we're doing, or we didn't when we started. All we knew is that we loved our children, and if we could get the diet right which you don't have to have a 140 IQ to get the diet right then you're going to be successful. But you again. There are other struggles. We write about a lot of them in the book. Okay, so now give me that question, just a revised version of that question, cause as she took that college level course.
Speaker 1:Was that her? Was she still a high schooler, because a lot of homeschoolers are able to take college courses in that? And then, and I'm going to add on to, how prepared was she for college level courses, or even going to college after that first class she took? Did she feel she was adequately educated in order, to quote unquote fit in with the rest of her peers in college, or was she far beyond which I'm guessing?
Speaker 2:so these two questions, the last two questions, really demonstrate your competency in this field. So here's what. So I mentioned that Black Hills State University, what probably was keeping a very close eye on us, likely using systems that were not entirely legal, I'm thinking, because it was such a high stakes endeavor and as we were, you know, communicating out in the community. It's only 10,000 people who live here in Spearfish and I have a lot of family and connections, so, you know, this word of mouth kind of spread very quickly. I thought they I think they saw it as a potential disaster. Oh my gosh, he's brought his children up here from Arizona. He's running from something. I think that was one of the assumptions when, in reality, I was, I was, I was running from the border crisis in Tucson. I didn't want my children anywhere near that in case that melee broke out and I just there were a lot of assumptions and so so they tapped into the network and I think that they kept tabs on us and then they watched the development of our children over time.
Speaker 2:So Caitlin's path to college was well, I wanted to have her take the GED exam to answer the same question you just asked me. So she took the GED exam and passed, so she got her high school diploma. So we had that basic level of objective proof that any of the naysayers to our method can just shut up, because she got her GED and she was 17. So but the GED is not that difficult of an exam really. Any high schooler should be able to pass the GED that grits their diploma. That's the theory.
Speaker 1:And in fact, if you get a high school diploma.
Speaker 2:The theory is that you should excel in the GED and it should be easy. So I challenge high schoolers to go take that test to see where you stand. So that's, that was one of the things that we did with Caitlin. And then I just hand wrote her a diploma and gave it to her and I said congratulations, and now you can embark on the next stage of learning. Nothing changed in our home school. We had perfect continuity through that whole process. There was no big ceremony that was needed to indulge her in her own intellectual grandiosity. There was also virtually no disruption in our homeschool during the whole COVID thing zero. Our operations were completely unaffected by that whole fiasco Amazing.
Speaker 2:So what happened was my wife was more sort of concerned with the college experience and wanting Caitlin to have something normal, because we're really on the fringes and we're really pretty far out with what we do in our homeschool.
Speaker 2:And as you'll see in the book, I get into some of those more controversial aspects of what we did. So they just we signed her up to take some pre-college stuff I forget what the name escapes me. When you're in high school, you can take some college preparatory courses in high school. So we signed her up for some of those as a way to kind of see if she would be a good fit for Black Hills State and they said, oh my gosh, you can't do this because she has her diploma. So I think that they looked at our specific situation, the mitigating factor of the COVID pandemic and so many people going to homeschool, especially in South Dakota. They wanted to do a little bit of research and forward thinking about how they could admit some of these students into the university system in South Dakota. They wanted to do a little bit of research and forward thinking about how they could admit some of these students into the university system because it's really it's an income question of the income that they have to answer there.
Speaker 2:And I think that the some of the most capable performers in college are going to be coming from the home schools, because it clearly demonstrates that their families were smart enough to pay attention and decipher what was happening during that whole thing. We'll be nice, shall we? So they admitted her and she went in and took her first college course and really just kind of some of the tasks and some of the objectives for us changed. What we wanted to go after changed, but our family operations stayed virtually identical and what I found was that you know, caitlin would go and she went to every minute of every class and got there 15 minutes early because that's what she wanted to do. I didn't have to set any alarm clocks or roust her out of bed or anything. She was just she was ready to go and participate in that experience. So she was very motivated. She did every assignment like a week early. Anytime it first came out she would do the assignment and she did really well on the test and she got, I think, a high A, like a 96% in the course.
Speaker 2:So there was our second bit of absolute objective validation of our methods and we were, we did math in our home school and one example was when the local economic development corporation gave a simple interest loan to a local company and so we weaved in some moral philosophy and finance and algebra together in a lesson to study this issue of why did this company get a simple interest loan, whereas if you go get a loan you're gonna get a compound interest loan.
Speaker 2:So we got to study compound interest, we got to study the algebra involved in that, we got to look at the moral issue of why did they make this decision for these people, but not for these people At any rate. So that that was an example of a project that we had done before, and now this, this class, this algebra class, was just another project, like kind of like that, except a more extensive project and higher stakes. And what I found was that when Caitlin would struggle with something, we had two built-in tutors, because Casey's just kind of gets math well, because we started algebra on our walk talks earlier than with Caitlin and no paper, no whiteboard, just talking algebra.
Speaker 2:So she just has a mind for math and I think that's one of the reasons and so she was too hard, so our younger daughter was tutoring our older daughter in a college algebra course.
Speaker 2:And then my wife, of course, loves math. I love math too. My wife is better at math than I am. I'm better at functional calculus than computer programming, but I think she could be better than me if she just wanted to. So we have this team of people who are streamlined in our communication with one another and helping one of our own to get the highest mark possible in her college algebra course. So it's just a win for our model, it's a win for our family, it was a win for Black Hills State because it was kind of a risk for them to admit her. If she had bombed out then you know they would. There would be just ugly conclusions all around. But we all stepped up and we all performed and that's how. That's Caitlin's story of getting into university. And now we're going to have Casey, I think, follow the exact same track because there's precedent and she'll do the exact same thing and I'm I'm kind of curious to see if she'll be able to improve on that math score in the college algebra course and and I also said.
Speaker 2:You know, go to all the clubs, make friends, make connections, build a network of people. Take your time. I don't want you to get in there and spend three and a half years and graduate and then move off, shuffle off to some, you know, just stuffy cubicle farm. Make college that experience and take your time and get to know everybody there, from the janitor to the president, while you're there. I don't see any harm in that so that's sort of that's the general approach that we took for for college.
Speaker 1:We have kind of a special circumstance here small town, small university I'm gonna put the link to your book in the show's description, but if you can one more time, just give me the name of the book and where people can find it.
Speaker 2:The name of the book is this Is Not a School by John Dale, and my wife has a architectural rendering of an old school house on the cover. She was a registered architect's a was a registered architect in Arizona. She has a Bachelor of Architecture. And then right underneath that, it says this is a drawing of a school and if you look for this is Not a School by John Dale. You can find it on Amazon and we also have an audio version. If you're interested, please just reach out. And if you don't have the money to get the book but you're homeschooling and you need this information now, just reach out to please. I want to help you because if you're stronger than our country is in, our communities are stronger. So, um, yeah, what was there? Another question also?
Speaker 1:So then I'll put your email in the show's description as well. So if anybody does want to reach out to you that way, but also I will link the book with what to the Amazon. That's the best way for people to grab that I'll do that as well, john. I have to wrap up, but thank you so much. This conversation has been amazing. I hope people check out your book. I can't wait to. I'll probably need that audio version because you know how it is when you got two young kids you open a book and then you just fall asleep. So I like listening to audio as I can, you know, do the dishes and the dishes and or be in the car rides going to and fro. I can't wait. It sounds like such a plethora of great information and new ideas for homeschooling parents that are especially just starting out. Anything you want to say to close up?
Speaker 2:well, this has been a lovely interview and I really appreciate you taking the time to help us get the word out about our book. I want parents to know that these beautiful gifts that they have are worth the time, effort and risk to do all that you can so that they can live fulfilling and meaningful lives of their own, while contributing to their communities at the same time.
Speaker 2:So I just I can't thank you enough and I'll follow up with a link to the audio book and if you have any follow-up questions for me, please feel free to reach out anytime. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Thank you so much. Thank you for tuning into this week's episode of the Homeschool How-To. If you've enjoyed what you heard and you'd like to contribute to the show, please consider leaving a small tip using the link in my show's description. Or, if you'd rather, please use the link in the description to share this podcast with a friend or on your favorite homeschool group Facebook page. Any effort to help us keep the podcast going is greatly appreciated. Thank you for tuning in and for your love of the next generation.