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
Curriculum Series: Classical Conversations
Unlock the secrets of homeschooling success as we explore innovative curriculum options with a spotlight on Classical Conversations. Journey with a homeschooling family that masterfully integrates this program into their lives, balancing community days with personalized lessons. Discover the transformative power of the Math Map program that brings children of various ages together in a shared learning experience and witness the confidence boost that public speaking from a young age can provide.
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Welcome to the Homeschool How-To Find my Curriculum, a series where we talk all about curriculum. I've been interviewing homeschooling families for over a year now on my main podcast, the Homeschool How-To, but I really wanted to zero in on curriculum. There's so much out there. How do I know what would work best for me and my child? How do I know what works for one child would work for the other? I might like the curriculum I'm using now, but how do I know there's not a better one out there, especially if I don't know all the curriculums? And what about supplemental curriculum? Should I be using that too? This series is to help you decide just that. I'm going to interview parents who are using all the curriculums so that you can decide the absolute best way to unfold your homeschooling journey. The absolute best way to unfold your homeschooling journey Is there curriculum that your wife does with them, or are you guys more unschoolers?
Speaker 2:We do classical conversations and so they're gone. Basically, you know, half a day for the younger ones or almost a full day for the older ones with that.
Speaker 1:Is that every day or just once a week?
Speaker 2:Once a week, one day a week, and then the other days of the week we are getting it started in the nine o'clock realm after chores are done. Everybody's done their chores, they've eaten stuff like that Somewhere on the 8.30, nine o'clock realm, and everything that can be done together they do together at that point, interestingly enough, from the 13-year-old, I think the 13-year-old, maybe the 12-year-old for sure, down to the six-year-old are all doing math together and this is the first year it's been so integrated like that. It's called the Math Map and it's very, very, very different than anything we've seen before. But you're learning math like you would learn a language and you're starting out with a small grammar and so forth.
Speaker 2:I have a friend who is a computer scientist and physicist working on reprogramming. Actually, I guess what they're doing is they're rewriting all the existing programming to work in quantum computing, because now instead of zeros and ones it's zeros, ones, twos and zeros and ones, or zero and one or zero one. It's a weird thing. Anyway, it kind of, you know, exponentiates the dimensions it's in and everything that exists has to be done again. He looked at this program. He sat there and looked at it for 20 minutes and said almost nothing, he's just going through it and finally, cause he, you know he's, he's one of these brainy guys. You can just sit there and say nothing for that long and then he, he finally kind of sits up from, he goes I love this. So that's kind of cool.
Speaker 2:We're doing the math map and they're doing that together, which is great. There's other things that they can do together as well. Uh, they just kind of continue on and but then they kind of get to the stuff where they can't do together. There's the reading lesson for the individual kids and so forth. Like, that other kid needs to write a research paper, needs to study for this, needs to make a poster for presentation. They do presentations every single week from day one, four or five years old this is something you're putting on your children, or is this the classical?
Speaker 2:no, this is part is part of classical conversations. Okay, so, and it's, it's not. I can tell you it's not hugely intimidating, other than the fact that you are standing up in front of the four or five, six kids in your class and you're. You're doing it once a week and it can be. You know, this is my Hot Wheels 1969 Camaro that my dad got me and I like it because it's orange with white racing stripes and I think it's awesome.
Speaker 2:Are there any questions? Yes, Where'd you get it? I don't know, my dad gave it to me. Is it a real car too? Yeah, is it your favorite? No, actually the 67 Mustang is, but I didn't bring it today because my mom said I could only bring one car because I'm always losing stuff and she gets mad when I leave stuff in the car like my socks and my shoes that I do all the time. Yeah, like, that's what it looks like. And by the time they are in high school, when ordinarily someone would maybe be having to, I think maybe in middle school, you know, somebody might have be be required to do some kind of an oral presentation. They're totally used to it, even if they're a natural introvert. No big deal.
Speaker 1:Public speaking biggest fear in the world. Not a problem, I love that. That's great. Wow. So does Classical Conversations cover every subject, or are there extras that you and your wife put in?
Speaker 2:We don't put anything extra, that doesn't mean that they necessarily provide everything. So the Classical classical conversations curriculum until recently did not include math. Most people were doing Saxon, but it didn't include it. You brought your own math and then on the community days you were actually bringing your own math to the table. So, like, this is what I did in math this week.
Speaker 2:So the kids end up especially by the time they're in their final years, they're bringing the lesson, they're teaching the lesson and what's really cool is there, you know, because by the time you're a high school senior, like probably not everybody's at the same point in math, unless you just ended up with a weird group of people. And so you've got somebody that struggles in math and you got somebody that's killing it and they're doing you know calculus right. So this week Bob is giving his math. He's got the math this week and so he's presenting on this basic algebra that he did. And Jimmy, uh, the next week who does calculus? He's presenting on the calculus and he has to teach Bob how to do calculus, how to do the calculus. He just did all of the skills involved in teaching Bob how to do calculus, how to do the calculus. He just did, All of the skills involved in teaching someone else to do math, especially more advanced math, amazing, huge, great preparation for anything you're going to do.
Speaker 2:And I think this is a good point to make, because you get so much pushback, particularly from dads, about homeschooling or anything like classical and liberal artsy kind of stuff that that's not practical, that's not. How's that going to help them get a job? Well, guess what? Just like in the command economy and the command education system, nothing they're learning is going to help them get a job. They need to learn how to learn. That's the only thing that's going to help them long-term, Because most of the jobs that are going to exist by the time my eight-year-old I don't have an eight-year-old my seven-year-old or my nine-year-old are going to hit the job market don't exist right now. Correct, yeah, they're going to be learning it fresh. They're going to be the first ones that ever did the job.
Speaker 1:That's so true and that's, yeah, a huge thing about homeschooling and guiding your kids is learn how to learn how to ask questions. And you know, I'll catch myself. Sometimes my son will ask a question. I'll be like, oh, I don't know. And then I'm like, wait, no, you have to take the time to sit there and, even if I don't know, say, great question, let's research it later. Or, you know, let's take five minutes now to look it up and really getting them into reinforcing that asking questions is awesome and even, as you were talking about with the giving presentations, just getting the kids used to asking a question after it.
Speaker 1:You know we're so used to someone saying any questions and nobody will raise their hand. And I remember being in school thinking, gee, I have a question, but I don't want to look stupid, so I'm just not going to say anything. And it's, you know, not. Until I got older and was like, well, hey, if I have the question, most people probably do too, so why don't I just say it? Who cares if I look stupid? I just say it. Who cares if I look stupid? But that's huge too. So it's not just a benefit for the presenter but for the kids asking their questions afterwards too. I love that Right.
Speaker 2:But apart from the math, like classical conversations and classical education in general, it typically is going to rely more on primary source texts than it is on like textbooks. So we don't have a lot of textbooks. But also you're really trying to. The end of the education is building a whole person and worship, like that's it. It's not just to make you a cog on a wheel, it's to make you a free thinking citizen, actually someone capable of self-rule. That's what liberal arts is actually. We think liberal arts like that's some kind of bad lefty thing. It's not. It's the liberating arts, it's the arts of free people, and so that's the direction you're coming at it from.
Speaker 2:And the literature that you read is just wonderful. They do memorize a lot in the early years and some people don't like that. They think they don't like that about it. It is kind of a party trick for the adults. If you can get your kids, you know, get your seven-year-old to come up and say hey, name all the presidents, and they can do it, you know, or whatever. The case is the big timeline song, but but really what you're doing with the time.
Speaker 1:That's like 13 minute timeline songs. I have listened to that.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, and they know it and it's great. And my my favorite part, if I get my mic up here they know it and it's great. And my favorite part, if I get my mic up here the hundred years war and black death. So yeah, there's all that kind of good stuff in there and what they're doing, though, history is very important, right. Cs Lewis said you got to study history because you can't study the future. And yet you need something to set against the present, to remind you that basic assumptions were very different in different times. So studying history makes you not like the person who just lives in the same village their entire life and has no idea what else is out there. We can be chronologically that way. So history is huge.
Speaker 2:Doing the timeline song or whatever, it's not just about memorizing facts. When you have those facts, they draw maps. They do mapping from the time. They're little, they're just a blob. There's America, you know. They memorize that over time and they get to where they've got this timeline of history with actually quite a bit of depth behind each of them by the time they're done and they can freehand draw a map of the world and label all the countries and capitals. That's amazing.
Speaker 2:Well, I don't know, if you ever want to be a diplomat, it might come in handy. Or if you just hear on the news that such and such place went to war with such and such place and you can go. I think I know why that happened, or I have a little bit of understanding that makes you an educated voter. Or maybe you would understand that that might mess up my supply chain for the things that's being made in this little manufacturing facility I have. Whatever the case is, you need enough pegs out there so that you can triangulate the truth when somebody's throwing something at you, right?
Speaker 2:So we're in this data worship era. You can't derive principles from data. You don't always know what to do with data. You can't derive principles from data. You don't always know what to do with data. You can't research everything. You can't wait for a peer-reviewed paper to come out for every decision you make. Otherwise you would be the government. You would be way behind. So you're going to have to make judgment calls. You're going to have to make decisions based on your gut. The better educated your gut is in history and geography and everything else literature, all this stuff the better equipped you are to do that. That's what anything classical should be pushing you towards. Now there are Charlotte Mason people that hate classical conversations. We're pretty Charlotte Mason-y and we just kind of do that. In classical conversations, a lot of people will add extra stuff to it, make it harder than it needs to be. Those people burn out and quit and then bad mouth it. But don't do that. Don't add anything to it. You can give your kids most of the day to play and it will be okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I just had a post, nothing else to a homeschooler.
Speaker 1:I posted the other day on my social media that you know, the world schooler is never going to be able to give their child the life of the homesteading family and the homesteader is never going to be able to give their kid the life of a world schooler. Because you got animals, You're really not traveling often, but both lifestyles are amazing and both offer so many gifts to your children. So you have to be okay that you aren't going to provide them with every little thing that's out there. You know that's okay. We didn't get nearly half as much as that Did you world school.
Speaker 1:No, but I've just talked to some people that have and I'm like it looks like fun, doesn't it? Yes, I had one interview. Her name was Jen and I mean it was just they kind of look at where's a cheap flight Okay, Zimbabwe, we're off and they're living on a plank in the water. It's like there you go.
Speaker 2:I can't help and this is actually. I never mentioned Wendell. I haven't mentioned Wendell Berry yet, but, like my inner Wendell Berry says, there's something wrong with that, because I think I can have wanderlust without actually doing it a lot like actually succumbing to it, and so I can. I can get the world school from just reading a whole lot of good literature. Yeah, but there's something that happened for a long time prior to the modern, or at least the postmodern age, depending on how you define that. You know, if you had the money, you sit your kids on the grand tour, uh, to go see a lot of things. So they learned a lot ahead of time. My 16 year old has been studying Scottish Gaelic for years now and she's never been to Scotland. I don't think she's talked to anybody that speaks Scottish Gaelic. One day she will, so like that can come.
Speaker 2:And then, of course, if you have neighbors that are like-minded and when you live in the country this is the interesting part about living in the country we're always closer to our neighbors when we live in the right. Let me back that up. We've always been. We have been closer to our neighbors living in the country and because of the military and other things. We've lived three different places in the country than we ever were in the city or in the suburbs, because you start to rely on each other for different things. And we've never had to cancel a vacation because we couldn't get somebody to take care of the animals. We've got sort of the primary people, the backup people, the backup to them, the backup to them, because every and when we, when we, do it for them too. So there's that community and that interconnectedness, that that exists in the rural life. That can't happen, you know, in the city.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but it tends not to. Because when things pop up, you know, what I had thought of was kind of during our election that we just had how in for the Democratic side, why it boggled me that nobody had a bigger stink about the presidential candidate running on the Democratic side, biden stepping back and then placing the vice president as the runner, and I'm like this isn't right, this isn't the democratic process. But nobody, really nobody, put up a stink about it, nobody bat an eyelash. If anything, that party said the other one was of the dictatorship, but it's like, but nobody knows, because nobody knows the context of how the process is supposed to work and that is so of our I mean by the summer of 2024, the most popular decision, if they did take a vote, the most popular, which they mean.
Speaker 2:They do have a process, they have electors that, because obviously if somebody dies, they have to do the same thing. But it didn't take a lot of time for them to just go yeah, this is what we're doing and nobody's going to just nobody bucked it. They all put their, they all put their votes in that direction. But the most popular thing they could have done in the summer of 2024 was to get rid of Joe Biden, because wouldn't nobody want him except, I guess, his wife and son. I mean that was bad.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's. But you wonder how many things are out there that are happening that we aren't even aware of, because, one, we're not paying attention and two, we didn't learn the proper process in the first place. And then you and then you kind of look at that and say, oh, is that what kind of our school system was set up for, so that we didn't know when they blundered?
Speaker 2:I wonder you know, if, hopefully, we well and we're not being ornery or something but you know, our kids, the generation that we're raising, are going to be better educated in the founding documents and a lot of ancient literature and a lot of stuff that we just totally missed out on, and frankly, it was the left that did that. Now they complain about it, but you know, in classical conversations in particular, because that's what I'm familiar with and I've I've taught the challenge for a class for for high school seniors. I mean, they are coming with a breadth of knowledge that just has hardly existed, especially not at that at that age level. Yeah, maybe if you went through college and you did a true liberal arts education at that point and you studied history and politics and stuff, then then maybe, but that's a small minority of the people that are going to college.
Speaker 1:But these kids are these kids?
Speaker 2:are all getting that. I mean it's, it's wild. So I wonder, you know, in 20, 30 years, 40 years they're just going to be head and shoulders above us, like stuff that was like huh to us.
Speaker 1:They're like yeah duh, so true, um, and I do. I'd love to take, you know, a microphone and a camera on the streets of, you know, albany, new York, Troy, new York, and and just ask kids like, how long do you? You know young adults, how long do you think America has been in existence? Just see what they say. Because, as you're talking about the timeline song, when you really look at the timeline and America's so tiny, this you know, so recent in time, but they kids just think it's infallible, like oh yeah, it'll be here forever and it's always been and always will be and it's so, not true? And when you look at the fall of Rome and kind of really like, look at this whole map and timeline, I mean it's so important. I love that concept of the timeline song and putting it in song so that you do have you can replay it in your head and sing it and you know catches on quicker with song, so that's so cool. Anything else about classical conversations? Well, well, I have you.
Speaker 2:My, my oldest, when she was five, I guess, was five, I guess the place we live is also out in the country. It was our first country place in North Carolina, near Fort Bragg, and we had to take our trash to a central trash station. Nobody came and picked it up there, and so we're in the little Ford Ranger pickup truck and we're going there and I had NPR on and this must've been around 2010 or 11, something like that, probably 11. And they said but with Americans entering a period of isolationism, popular isolationism or something like that, blah, blah, blah. Something about Afghanistan, probably, and my daughter looks up at me and goes daddy, is that like the isolation of Japan, kind of? I had to explain.
Speaker 2:I actually knew a little bit about the isolation of Japan because of her already, because of teaching her. That was the. Not that my wife is doing most of it, but I've gleaned a lot myself, and that's actually another big thing about homeschooling and what was a big thing for my wife when she first got a hold of classical conversations, which I've been I've drunk the Kool-Aid now too but that she would get to learn these things. So you're not just redeeming one generation's education, you're redeeming two, you're redeeming your own education as well. Yes, me and her have learned so much through this that we would have never known otherwise.
Speaker 1:It's so amazing. I'm big on unit studies right now, so we're doing a lot of nature studies because it's things I never learned. I was from. You know the more of a city life and never now I'm learning about owls and the trees, the mushrooms and I'm like, wow, what's an arachnid? So it's really cool and hopefully my son sees that excitement and gleans from that. Okay, maybe it is interesting. She seems really happy, awesome. Thank you so much for joining me today. Again, you bet All right, I will definitely.
Speaker 2:But apart from the math, like classical conversations and classical education in general, it typically is going to rely more on primary source texts than it is on like textbooks. So we don't have a lot of textbooks. But also you're really trying to the end of the education is building a whole person and worship, like that's it. It's not just to make you a cog on a wheel, it's to make you a free thinking citizen, actually someone capable of self-rule. That's what liberal arts is actually. We think liberal arts like that's some kind of bad lefty thing. It's not. It's the liberating arts, it's the arts of free people, and so that's the direction you're coming at it from.
Speaker 2:And the literature that you read is just wonderful. They do memorize a lot in the early years and some people don't like that. They think they don't like that about it. It is kind of a party trick for the adults. If you can get your kids, get your seven-year-old to come up and say hey, name all the presidents, and they can do it, you know, or whatever. The case is the big timeline song, but but really what you're doing with the time.
Speaker 1:That's like 13 minute timeline songs.
Speaker 2:I have listened to that yes, yes, and they know it and it's great. And my my favorite part, if I get my mic up here the hundred years war and black death. So yeah, there's all that kind of good stuff in there. And what they're doing, though, history is very important, right? Cs Lewis said you got to study history because you can't study the future. And yet you need something to set against the present, to remind you that basic assumptions are very different in different times. So studying history makes you not like the person who just lives in the same village their entire life and has no idea what else is out there. We can be chronologically that way. So history is huge.
Speaker 2:Doing the timeline song or whatever, it's not just about memorizing facts. When you have those facts, they draw maps. They do mapping from the time they're little, they're just a blob. There's America. They memorize that over time and they get to where they've got this timeline of history with actually quite a bit of depth behind each of them by the time they're done, and they can freehand draw a map of the world and label all the countries and capitals. That's amazing.
Speaker 2:Well, I don't know if you ever want to be a diplomat, it might come in handy. Or if you just hear on the news that such and such place went to war with such and such place and you can go. I think I know why that happened or I have a little bit of understanding. That makes you an educated voter. Or maybe you would understand that that might mess up my supply chain for the things that's being made in this little manufacturing facility I have. Whatever the case is, you need enough pegs out there so that you can triangulate the truth when somebody's throwing something at you, right?
Speaker 2:So we're in this data worship era. You can't derive principles from data. You don't always know what to do with data. You can't research everything. You can't wait for a peer-reviewed paper to come out for every decision you make, otherwise you would be the government, you would be way behind. So you're going to have to make judgment calls. You're going to have to make decisions based on your gut. The better educated your gut is in history and geography and everything else literature, all this stuff the better equipped you are to do that. That's what anything classical should be pushing you towards. Now there are Charlotte Mason people that hate classical conversations. We're pretty Charlotte Mason-y and we just kind of do that in classical conversations, a lot of people will add extra stuff to it, make it harder than it needs to be. Those people burn out and quit and then badmouth it. But don't do that, don't add anything to it.
Speaker 1:I hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for listening. Please consider sharing this podcast or my main podcast, the Homeschool how To with friends, family, on Instagram or in your favorite homeschool group Facebook page. The more this podcast is shared, the longer we can keep it going and the more hope we have for the future. Thank you for your love of the next generation.