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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
#98: How Teaching Refugee Students Inspired This Teacher to Home Educate Her Children
Mary, a former ENL teacher with profound stories and insights, joins us on a captivating exploration into the world of homeschooling and alternative lifestyles. With a background rich in experiences with refugee students, particularly from the Karen ethnic group of Burma, Mary's perspective is both unique and enlightening. Her journey into homeschooling was significantly influenced by the stark contrasts she observed between the freedom-filled lives of the Karen community in Thai refugee camps and the rigid structure of American schools. Inspired by these observations and Sebastian Junger's book "Tribe," Mary embarked on a mission to create a more fulfilling educational path for her family, sparking a wider conversation on the systemic issues in traditional education and the potential of homeschooling as a solution.
Navigating the homeschool journey isn't without its hurdles, especially when custody agreements and modern family dynamics come into play. During our discussion, we address the challenges that arise when parents consider homeschooling amidst a separation. Mary shares her personal journey and the support she received, highlighting the broader dissatisfaction with societal norms and the search for alternatives to conventional schooling.
In the quest for authentic living, many families are choosing to step away from societal expectations. We dive into bold lifestyle choices, such as off-grid living and unschooling, and the creation of supportive communities or "tribes" that prioritize family values over societal demands. The conversation extends to the influence of modern family dynamics, the impact of technology on familial bonds, and the liberating process of breaking free from traditional norms. Through engaging stories and personal reflections, this episode offers inspiration and insights for anyone considering a more self-directed, family-centered life.
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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 Mary. We are both in New York, so we decided to do this in person. I haven't done this before, so bear with us on the technical difficulties.
Speaker 2:Mary, thank you for being here. Well, thank you for having me. I am so excited to talk about my favorite topic, which is homeschooling.
Speaker 1:All right, this is cool, because I actually don't know your story. I'm going to have you move a little closer to this mic so that people can hear you. So yeah, all this to say too, I only have one microphone, so we're sharing. So I don't have a job, and if any microphone companies want to send me a microphone, I'll test it out and review your product for all to hear. All right, so, mary, you were a teacher, I was. How ever did you get to leave your profession to homeschool? Like what could you have seen?
Speaker 2:Great question, Cheryl. Yeah, so I got to homeschooling through the belly of the beast. I guess you could say I was an ENL teacher.
Speaker 1:What's that English as?
Speaker 2:a second language Okay, english as a new language. So I taught mostly refugees and some immigrants for 13 years and I loved my job for most of the time that I taught. But gradually I started to see just that what we accept as normal is not normal and one of the population of students that I saw that really shifted my mindset was the Karen students. Karen students are, or Karen people are, an ethnic group of Burma or Myanmar and they have been in Thai refugee camps for quite some time. Most of my students had grown up spent their whole lives in Thai refugee camps for quite some time. Most of my students had grown up spent their whole lives in these refugee camps.
Speaker 1:So so are the refugee camps here in America or in their country.
Speaker 2:No. So, uh, my students, the Karen students I'm talking about, their parents or grandparents had lived in ethnically um Karen. They grew up, their parents were from Myanmar or Burma but because their families had to leave because of their ethnicity, they my students had grown up and born in Thai Thailand refugee camps. Wow, yeah, um. And so most people would think like, oh, wow, these kids won the lottery, they got to come to America. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying America isn't great. Um, there are a lot of things we have here that and there's a lot of things we don't have here that other people are running away from in other countries.
Speaker 2:These Karen students, I saw them writing and talking about their homeland with such longing and I started to see that they got to spend their days hunting and fishing and playing soccer. And now I'm looking at them in my class or in the other classrooms and they're six, seven, eight hours at a desk listening to a language they don't understand and then going home with loads of homework that they don't understand, just to get up in the morning and do it all again. And this isn't just, obviously, the ENL students, this is all of majority of students going through public ed in America. I remember actually seeing a cartoon on one of the teacher's desks and it was so ironic. It was African kids and they had a soccer ball or something and they had the bubble said hey, have you heard of these American students? These poor kids they have to. They make them sit at desks all day long. We should start a fund for them.
Speaker 1:Yes, I think I've seen that one. It didn't stick with me like it did you, but that makes so much sense, right, so okay. So these kids grew up in refugee camps, but they were still out hunting and doing that sort of stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I remember of course this is all secondhand stories but, um, I do know that sometimes they would have to. I think it was illegal actually to leave the refugee camps and so sometimes you know they were doing it illegally. But I just the general gist I was getting of their writing was just they were freer than the kids that I saw in the American kids in the schools, and not just that population, just on the whole, my students, the ENL students, the refugees they just seemed more balanced, more happier. You know they had been through some of the worst things in life. They had experienced war and death of family members and things I won't even mention, but no one seemed depressed. And the irony of that to see, just like the rampant depression in in the American population, I just started seeing that something was wrong.
Speaker 1:How far into your career did you start to think maybe this isn't the best way um, good question, I so.
Speaker 2:I taught for about 13 years. Six of it was in an elementary school and I really didn't question when I was there. And then I spent six years in a high school in inner city and it was probably halfway through. So three years into that, so about nine years into teaching, and I read, there's a few things that started to open my eyes. Like I just mentioned, the students, but I read Sebastian Junger's book Tribe.
Speaker 1:Have you ever Somebody just mentioned that to me I want to say was it you. Maybe I don't think so In the last week. Okay, I talk about it to everyone. So, but I don't think it was me, I don't think it was you, I think it was somebody on the podcast, okay.
Speaker 2:But reading that book was an eye opener too. And he just talks about how we ancestrally are, as humans are supposed to live in tribes and he describes tribes as around 60 or less people will who share resources and live together and will die for each other. He was in the military and he talks about how PTSD we think it's because these people have been in the military or gone off to war, and you know, obviously I'm not saying that isn't part of it, but he says a bigger part of it is the coming back here and having lack of purpose, a lack of a tribe to to be with.
Speaker 1:Yes, okay. So this is the exact conversation. I just released his episode a couple days ago because he said the exact same thing. They did studies and he's the one that mentioned tribe that in the army, even though they were losing their friends, they had a purpose. Every morning when they woke up they knew they had to find their food, they had to find shelter. They had to find, you know, stay warm enough, dry enough. They had to watch their buddies back, you know, it was no man left behind and that gave them such a strong sense of purpose. And we are just handed everything because if you want food, you get. Grubhub delivers it, you know, and somebody else will deliver it right to your Amazon. They'll oh, you're thinking about food. Here it is at your door.
Speaker 1:We don't have the fear in America generally that we are going to, you know, die of war or being attacked, at least not today, in 2024. So the and the procreation, even that's gone because they take away the desire to even have kids. When you look at shows that I grew up watching sex in the city and friends, they don't glorify having children like you know, back in watching Little House on the Prairie or something does, it is very like me, me, me. This is all the stuff I have. This is the wonderful job I can have as a woman. I am so independent. It's wonderful. So society's taken away every innate thing, that when you look out the window and you see what the birds and the bees do, that's all they're doing all day Looking for food, shelter and procreation, yep, and all of that's gone from our lives.
Speaker 2:So, of course, we're going to be depressed. Yes, 100%. I agree with everything you said. I was a product of the night of. You know, I was born in the 80s, product of the Disney 90s movies that started making us think this and they're worse now. You know, I saw Elemental and it's like taking this care, this female character, like out of her, her home, in her corner store and going off and being successful, right, and, and I it's so good to be able to see both sides of it. I was so guilty of it.
Speaker 2:I taught, I taught Afghani girls and I, misguidingly, was, you know, pushing them towards a career. And I'm not saying that, you know, it's all about options. Right, that's what the whole feminist movement was supposed to be. It was supposed to be about options. And it turned into you are not successful unless you have a career. And so I run into sometimes now I run into my students. You know, I ran into one of the Afghani girls a few years ago, one of the students that I was probably like oh, you know, I ran into one of the Afghani girls a few years ago, one of the students that I was probably like oh, you know, go off, get a job.
Speaker 2:And she's like, miss, what are you doing now? And I like, I quit teaching, I stay home and I'm raising my three children and I've never been happier, and I'm baking pies in my kitchen and I'm growing my own food and it's just, yeah, full circle. I remember actually showing the students at one point you know, I was doing the thing that so many Americans do, where they watch a documentary about homesteading and they just idolize it Right and I was watching this family who was living a life very much like we're living now. But I showed it to the students like, hey, wouldn't this be cool. You could grow all this food, it wouldn't be ultra processed and you could all live together and sit around the campfire. And they were like, miss, that's what we did, like the last 16 years of our lives Like they all right.
Speaker 2:That's how they grew up, and then they came to America. Now they're working corner stores and they're like we tried to sell fruit in it. No one will buy it. So we went back to the package stuff.
Speaker 1:Oh yes, I mean, when you just think about that, these people are in refugee camps living more fulfilling lives than we're giving our children here in America. So do you think there's a design to that? Do you think it's on purpose?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's part of the revelation I started to make too. You know, I actually got a co-teacher this all I believe. God just put things little breadcrumbs along my path to figure it out. And I got a co-teacher who his kids are homeschooled and his wife was homeschooling them, and so we'd have great conversations. He's an author of a book. Actually he should come on your podcast. But I remember just saying to him wow, they just keep us so busy working these jobs and taking care of our kids that we don't have time to realize our greatness. We don't have time to realize we are powerful beings that are great for just existing, just for our beingness. But they convince us we must do, do, do, do, do. And once you start opening your eyes I mean, you've been there right. Once you start opening your eyes, you can't shut them, and then they keep opening to all these things, and then there's no going back now Okay, so I'll let you tell any.
Speaker 1:So I don't want to get like too personal or anything. But you, uh, you've got three kids. Did you always homeschool them from the beginning? And in New York we also have very strict CDC vaccine regulations. You can't go to school unless you have every single shot on the schedule. There's only five states that require that and in the last six years that's been a new law here. So have you started out mainstream and kind of pulled back?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I started more mainstream. There was always the barefoot hippie inside of me somewhere, but you know I fell for some lies. So I have. My oldest son is 11. I'm divorced from his biological father and I am now married to my husband. He's been since. I think Merrick was three is when Mike came into my life. But Merrick went to school until first grade. But that was another piece of it, right, like having a kid in school. I started to see like why am I putting him in one brick building so I can go to another brick building to teach other people's kids? And you know he had a first grade teacher that you know really, really helped put the nail in the coffin to get out of public ed.
Speaker 1:Isn't that funny. So well, and what I hear from a lot of moms in particular is that, like it's, if you are separated with a father, it is really hard to homeschool because, one, just if you're single income based, but two, you both parents have to agree to it.
Speaker 2:Like has that been a hurdle at all for you. Well, when I started having all these realizations in the classroom, I also remember saying to that same co-teacher I didn't know what the pushback would be, I didn't know if I would be able to take him out of school, and I didn't get to the point to even like starting to fight that battle, because I remember saying like I just want the world to end as it is so I can totally radically change my life. And then, yep, the whole COVID thing happened Interesting.
Speaker 1:Wow, you really do have a little powerful. I'm pretty powerful, isn't that something? Okay, I think COVID did push a lot of people into realizing that we are lied to a lot of. You know I there's a lot of homeschooling podcasts around and when I was starting to think about homeschooling I was listening to them and you know, a lot of them were more like this is how wonderful it can be. We get up, we read, we do this, and that.
Speaker 1:That didn't seem realistic to me in my life, because I'm a little scattered, I'm like not of cultured as far as like, oh, I'm so well read and you know, I know poetry and all that stuff, so I'm like I don't think it's for us, I don't think we would find a place in it and now.
Speaker 1:So I started the podcast and then I realized there are more of me out there that are not happy with what they see in the education system and kind of just like what the education system was always intended to do when you look really into the roots of it. And then you know the other systems, like the CDC and the FDA, what the foods they're serving in school curriculums that they're teaching uh, all all the way to even I don't know, just like the people that are hiring for bus drivers. It's like they can't find anybody to work anywhere. Who are you hiring for this job? You're taking my kids and then you're having shooter drills. Like what kind of trauma are we putting them through? So my question to you is yeah, was it? Was it well received from your son's father, and how did your son take it and did he kind of understand that there were more avenues like out there reasons that you were doing this?
Speaker 2:He, he cried almost every day going to school going to school, yeah, public school.
Speaker 2:So so yeah, he was thrilled to leave and you know I'm so thankful because I know a lot of people in such a divorce situations. There is such a pushback and there wasn't from Eric's dad and he, I think he has to have seen. Just, you have to see the benefit, right. You have to see, like, how much happier your child is and how much more time I mean, we're doing the primary homeschooling but his dad still gets more time with him than he would if he was in school all day, and that's the thing it's like. We've just also accepted the normal I'm using air quotes if you're listening and not watching the normal of we only see our kids from five to eight and they've got to do homework in that time and they've got to eat dinner and sports if they're in sports and and so no, to answer your question, thankfully there was not pushback and and I'm really thankful to my husband, so the whole covid thing happened.
Speaker 2:Um, I actually got pregnant that month, which another thing like I had been trying to get pregnant for two years and that you know the lie of like you can be a working mother and you can carry a pregnancy to term while you have all this stress going on, like I hear so many people talking about infertility issues, but it's you know. Just let us be women. I yeah, so I got pregnant right away and and I just was. I'm never going back. That's what I said within the first month. I'm never going back and I might be going off of the question, but we, yeah, with all the ridiculous stuff going on during COVID, we were not going to put a mask on him and make him sit six feet away from all other children. That, maternally, just I knew that didn't seem right.
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Speaker 1:So we, mike and I, made the decision decision we were going to homeschool, no matter what. How do you transition from. I'm living this life where I have a job, I assume you have a pretty good income because you need like a master's degree. You've got student loans, you probably have a mortgage or car payments and stuff and and you're pregnant now and you want to pull your kid out in homeschool and like live off the land how ever, ever, because this is like people's biggest hurdle, right. Like I, society kind of got me into all this debt on purpose so that I'm then a slave to the workforce, indentured servitude.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:How do you pull yourself out of that and actually make this life work?
Speaker 2:It might be too esoteric for some of your listeners or too woo woo, but a leap of faith is my answer. I remember when I was homeschooling still when I was first homeschooling raving about it, and people would just say, like you're so lucky you can do that, especially with everything going on. And I would just say, no, we didn't, we're not trust fund babies. And, like you said, no, we didn't, we're not trust fund babies. And, like you said, I was the primary breadwinner at the time. My husband was just starting his business. So, yeah, I quit my job. We took a leap of faith. We put our house on Airbnb. Mike had luckily bought an acre of land in the woods a couple of years before.
Speaker 2:He must've known something was going to go down. I'm going to meet this girl. She's going to want to live out here. And we got a canvas tent and we moved in with our three month old and our Merrick was maybe six at the time into in our two dogs maybe we had a couple chickens at that point um, into a tent. We lived in a tent for and is this in New York? This was in Columbia County.
Speaker 1:Yeah, in Austerlitz okay, it gets cold in New York. Oh yeah, what time of year was this.
Speaker 2:So April to probably November, we lived in the tent, okay, and then we upgraded to a shed, which we called a cabin, by putting a wood stove in it. It wasn't even insulated At that point. We were sometimes going back to the Albany house.
Speaker 2:But, so for half the year we were there full time in the tent and we were bathing our infant in the stream with us. We didn't have. Eventually we had a makeshift composting toilet outside, but initially we didn't. We had a shovel and the woods. I can't even imagine this as a newborn and a six-year-old Right. It was. It was life-changing. It was great that we can say we did it and it was freaking hard. My point is that that we just decided we were going to homeschool, no matter what. We were not going to go. We were not going to jump through all the hoops that they were making people jump through to be a part of a system we didn't want to be a part of. So if it meant living in a tent and live, I mean, we were in the shed, the shed house. In the winter also, I remember like we'd all huddle up 30 degree weather. We could get it with the wood stove. We could get it up, you know, maybe 50, whatever. Is CPS one of your listeners?
Speaker 1:Were you worried about CPS? What about your son's father?
Speaker 2:Did he know about?
Speaker 1:this arrangement.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he knew we were living off grid. I think he didn't complain Again. I'm lucky, I'm fortunate.
Speaker 1:So okay, so you're off grid. Now Is your husband going to work?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so he owns a landscaping company.
Speaker 1:Cause, that's tough.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, don't get me wrong, it was so tough and the sacrifices we made during that time to radically change our lives. Mike was working, running a business, he has a newborn and we're living off grid Plus the world is going crazy. It was a lot of stress and kudos to Mike, my husband, for keeping it together during that time. But but yeah, we just, it was just no excuses, we're not going back, okay.
Speaker 1:So did you have to Airbnb the house like for to like? Were you trying to pay off bills and stuff? Was that kind of what the gist of that was? Yeah, the idea was we can make money from Airbnb being the house like for to like, we trying to pay off bills and stuff. Was that kind of what the gist of that was?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the idea was we can make money from Airbnb, being the house and living off grid, which was honestly something we had wanted to try anyways. Yeah, and then, like I said, I really truly believe when you, when you take those leaps of faith, god just opens the doors and fast forward. You know, a few years later we we end up going back to Albany, and now we've moved into the country more and we have a lovely home on an acre and a half. We have a 60 foot hoop house we built with our kids and we have over a dozen chickens and two beehives. And we're waking up every morning with such deep purpose and you know, I'm feeding my kids and they're feeding themselves, they're growing their own food. Merrick's out there in the beehive with me. Micah's like two years old, even younger One she's picking up chickens, she's wrangling chickens, like it is. It is the thing, like I said, like so many people in America are now watching this on TV and you can do it, you really can.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I have your honey. We actually have it in the tea right now. It is delicious. You do you make things work to make life healthier for your family and your kids. We just have the chickens here. I haven't gotten into the bees and the maple syrup, but I love all of that. I started a garden a couple of years ago. Yeah, it's a process but it's a learning. But I'm enjoying learning it and it's part of our homeschooling.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, yes, I'm glad you said that that's another piece of it too. I'm sure people are listening, thinking like, yeah, I get it, my kids should have real life skills. But they're thinking I don't have those, I can't teach them, that's part. Well then, if you didn't get them from the public school or the school system that you went to, why are you sending your kids to the same system? You know, break the cycle.
Speaker 2:It's so sad to me that that generational knowledge isn't passed down in so many things that I've had to relearn. And you know I did have parents who, you know, we gardened and my mom sewed, and but you know I didn't learn as much as I wish I had. But the good thing is you get to learn it all with your kids when you're homeschooling. You get to learn how to bake those pies together. You get to learn how my you know my husband's an amazing landscape designer but he's now trying to learn carpentry and he's getting the kids in with him to do it with with them. So we're breaking the cycle of generations of people who can't take care of themselves and have to depend on the government, the system, to parent them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's a realization of mine recently too was that, wow, this is all by design? You mentioned earlier the women's movement and yeah, the more I look into it, the more it seems to me and a lot of people would agree that that was just to get women into the workforce and get a bigger tax base. You're doubling now the taxes that the government is getting, so they're happy about that. Then they're getting a hold of our kids. Earlier on they take some of that tax money and now we need it for schools, for before care, for after care. They're extending the day of school from what used to be probably a couple hours a day to now. I mean, I don't even know. I know like we watch Little House on the Prairie and they talk about having homework on it. But again, that was in. They made that show in the 80s but it's set in the late 1800s and I'm thinking I don't think they had homework back in the 1800s or even early 1900s. I think homework is relatively new. What do you think?
Speaker 2:Oh, that was like a hill I was willing to die on as a teacher. She could tell I'm passionate about things, but yeah, I just. Homework is so asinine. It's like if you can do it at home then you don't need it. If you can't do it at home, then you shouldn't be left to your own devices to have to do it or get punished the next day for not doing it. Right, assuming that parents are helping you and just. It's just another way. Parents are giving their kids to teachers for however many hours a day, and then the teachers are grabbing for even more of that time by forcing them to do homework when they should be bonding with their siblings, with their parents.
Speaker 2:Siblings used to have such great relationships. This intergenerational family strength that's another thing I saw in my EFL students. They had such strong extended family units and we don't have that anymore. But the relationship that my son and my daughter have and now I have a 10-month-old too. He's getting in there too, but they just spend all day, every day, together, and even when we're at our co-ops and they're with their friends too, they have the same friends, right. Their friends are from three years old to 15 years old and they all play together and it's absolutely beautiful. Beautiful, but we're robbing. My point was homework is stealing that yeah, yeah and and and.
Speaker 1:When you just look at how our society is set up, with, like, even just inside, jokes that happen in the classroom or, you know, with the teachers of, maybe a way that they are like you were thinking I'm pushing them towards a career, thinking that's the right thing to do, because you didn't see it in a different way. So we have teachers that are these, you know, social justice warriors, empowering our children to up and leave the nest, and you know so. Then they have this bond that isn't in the family. They have these bonds with, you know, social media TikTok, instagram, snapchat, whatever they're on nowadays and video games and all that. It's like all these avenues that are taking away the power of the family bond. It's quite incredible when you really think about how does any family stay together at all?
Speaker 2:Right, I remember again. I believed the lies. I didn't want to get married a second time. Mike didn't want to get married and we read, read, or Mike read, elizabeth Gilbert's book on marriage before we got married and I remember him saying in that that marriage is actually the opposite.
Speaker 2:We've believed it's like oh, we're being so modern by not getting married anymore and not having kids, but marriage and family is the one thing that's so strong that the government, the powers that be, cannot infiltrate it, because you know what will you die for more than your children and your family unit. So it's impenetrable.
Speaker 1:It's funny that you bring that up, because a while back I was researching like marriage and it's it used to be just a man and a woman and a priest or whatever you practice. Or whatever you practice, you know, the pastor would just say you know the vows in front of your friends and family and write it in a Bible. And that was literally you're married and the state got themselves involved. Let's have them sign a document and file it with us and spend this money. And then you know Hallmark and their posse got involved with the weddings and this and that. And then it's like well, if you want a divorce, then you need the state's permission just to do that.
Speaker 1:And I was divorced too. I was married in my twenties. I didn't have any kids, though we grew up in the era where gays were fighting for the right to be married, and especially in New York that happened in the last probably decade or so that a gay couple could get married in the state. And it's so funny to me because this thing that you used to just be able to do it was a religious thing and it was to make your family so that you could make children. So it's like you guys are fighting for the right for the government to allow you to be a family when, back in the day, before the government was involved, people did it all the time you write it down in your.
Speaker 1:Bible, write it in your journal write it and declare it in front of your friends.
Speaker 1:It's just the point is you never needed the state's permission? Yeah. And for what they give us? Dangle that carrot, you get a little tax break, yeah. But it's so funny that we just fall for this, and I do believe it's a lack of education on what laws are supposed to be and how government's supposed to work. We just okay. They say I can't get married, so I guess I can't, right. Or they say I can't get divorced. It's like, well then, just don't live together anymore. I don't know, don't be together. But it is funny that we just sign up for this. Please grant me the permission.
Speaker 2:Right, but then, like you said, then it goes for fighting for the right to get married. To now, so many people don't want to get married, don't want to have kids, the same thing we just talked about when I don't know. I'm not saying that there aren't people that you know don't want to do those things, but I think, but I just am wary of when those decisions are made because of all the programming telling you that that's what you want. Right, like that's the thing that gets me. Yeah, if that's your individual decision that you made and you're really confident, you made it without a lot, of, a lot of brainwashing from the time you were listening to the world.
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh, it's everywhere and it's in kids shows, kids movies, like you were just talking about.
Speaker 2:I haven't seen that one that you mentioned mentioned, but it's in every kid's movie there's some sort of programming yeah, and I I watched peter pan, like the old peter pan, with my kids the other day, but it was. And there's the like the cartoon version, yeah, and there's there the where she's the mother, where wendy's like mothering, and there's this whole song where they're singing about being a mother and and it was beautiful, it was like they were singing lovingly to her for mothering and I was just like, wow, that's when do you hear a disney song like glorifying motherhood?
Speaker 1:you're right, but peter pan is also the one that said we're going to um, take your little boys to never, never land, and they won't come back as boys okay, did you miss that part?
Speaker 2:yeah?
Speaker 1:probably. Yeah, you take some of, you take some, you leave some. Yes, that was the one that originally told us about. You know a big like pedophile ring kind of going on.
Speaker 1:And this is what separates me from the other homeschooling podcasts. It is crazy. So your kids are various ages. You have, um, your oldest is 10, 11, 11, three, three and 10 months. Do you homeschool those various ages? Well, you know, you've got a little one, so obviously you're tending to the baby a lot. Two-year-olds are also demanding. I have one. So how are you like balancing this? And do we have to worry that much about balancing it? Or, as a teacher, do you think too much pressure is put on the reporting?
Speaker 2:Right. Yeah, that's the other piece. The other thing I hate hearing, but I like hearing it because I can answer it is oh, you're lucky, you were a teacher, you can homeschool, right. I don't even like people knowing I was a teacher, because I truly believe that everyone, or all, well-intending parents can homeschool right. Yeah, that's the thing is, we all have gifts. Intending parents can homeschool right. Yeah, that's the thing is, we all have gifts.
Speaker 2:And another lie we've fallen for is that every kid needs this shallow education in these various subjects that are decided. Right, the public education system is archaic. Right, it used to be to pass knowledge because there were only a certain number of knowledge holders and we had to go to these people to get our education. But knowledge is everywhere now. Right, like, we have an abundance of knowledge it's too much actually but so you can give your kids whatever you have, whatever you're passionate about. It could be. It could be baking, right, like you could love baking and you bake with your kids and you learn to. You know you're learning math through doing that and you're learning real life skills. You might be a mechanic and you involve your kids in working on the cars.
Speaker 2:I'm not saying you don't use curriculum. Sometimes I do use the good and the beautiful, mainly for math. And I've bought, I do, I have used the science curriculum good and the beautiful, but honestly, with Merrick, who's the only one, the other ones were purely unschooling. At this point, and even with our oldest, we are more towards unschooling than anything. Like I said, I bought the science curriculum but he has been a science kid since he came out of the womb, right like he.
Speaker 2:He was into dinosaurs from age one up until probably last year, like a hardcore, and he knew every dinosaur, every fossil, the prehistoric eras and epics, and I don't even know the words that he knows right. But that's the thing is he could go so deep in a subject and really learn it and that he's going to retain and that taught him so much and he sought that out right, like if, if he were in school and he had that passion, it would have either gotten like teased out of him or forced out of him from the teachers because he didn't have time to learn that right. And also, I don't know, I said something about not liking his first grade teacher, but she was just very negative and I remember her calling me at the end and everything was negative. And she, he doesn't know his sight words. I'm a literacy certified B through six and I said to her I don't care, I don't.
Speaker 2:He does not need to know those sight words. I know the administrators are telling you he does, he does not, he. All you need to be to learn to read is the most important thing is a rich vocabulary. But they have broken down reading so much, they've made it so contrived that they've taken out the actual love of reading, which is the most important thing. You know, in high school they're not even reading full books anymore, they're reading excerpts these days. But so Merrick was. Merrick's first grade teacher says he's below reading level. He can't, doesn't know these sight words. As soon as he left school, within a couple months he's reading above grade level and your son called him the kid that reads.
Speaker 1:I was just going to say that, like, my son is a couple years younger, so you know he sees them in the playgroups but it's not like they're, you know, going to gravitate right towards each other because of the age difference. But he goes, goes. Mom, the kid that reads all the time. He told me who was in the tree colin was the kid that reads all the time, ma yeah, no, he's a voracious reader.
Speaker 2:Like we'll we up, not yelled at him, but our biggest problem is getting him out of his room when he's reading. Like this morning we're like merrick, come down and like hang out with, like, come eat breakfast, but at 11 years old, to have your 11 year old boy staying in his room because he's reading the wings of fire series instead of being on social media or video games, it's like that is a good problem to have well and I just love that the teach.
Speaker 1:His first grade teacher came to you saying he is below reading level. Right, and it's like no, I know that these are the only metrics you have to like measure how well you're doing as a teacher. But yes, you're right, the like love of story has just gotten taken right out of it. And you know I struggle with that because my son is at that first grade age, you know level, where it's like I've been trying to teach him to read but then I don't want him to read, have a negative, you know, connotation around it either. So when I find that he's just getting frustrated or doesn't want to do it, I'm like all right, but taking a step back just means I read to him and he just listens to the story, you know.
Speaker 2:I mean, we have to, as parents, de-school ourselves too, and I haven't. Trust me, I have not done everything right. I have had to de-school myself and I still am like math is not his strong suit and I spent too many years thinking at third grade he's got to learn these things. And last year I was just like it doesn't matter, like we're gonna, we're gonna go back and I'm gonna wait till he's ready. Yeah, and? And if you do that, you just get you give the kid the permission to succeed at something when they are ready, instead of just forcing the love of everything out of them because they're not there yet. They'll tell you, they'll show you when they're ready.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's actually connections in the brain, like synapses connecting, saying like, yes, I can understand the concept of three times four, and it's more that you can apply it to something too, like you can understand three times four when you're talking about. You know, maybe him and his father are putting together. You know, bolt using bolts and doing an oil change.
Speaker 1:I don't know if those two things go together but, like you know, if he says, okay, I need four boxes, they all have three in them. So can you, you know, figure out how many we have total? Like that's the sort of stuff when they're like, oh, this is when it would be relevant, that it makes sense and it clicks, but like, if they're too young to understand that, to know where it applies in life, then they're gonna be too young to learn it, and then at that point you're just badgering it into their brain as memorization and they're gonna forget it as soon as the test is over. So my next question would be in New York we have one of the strictest homeschool reporting laws in the whole country, probably the world. Well, other than Germany, you can't homeschool there. But how do you, as an unschooler, report? You're gonna get me in trouble here, cheryl. No, because you're applying things. You're doing things just like I was saying. You know you're applying these bolts, yeah.
Speaker 2:I guess everything. Honestly, the reporting system to me seems pretty arbitrary. You create your IHIP, you tell them what you plan to teach, but when I was a teacher, you can write your lesson plans, you can say what you plan to teach, unless you're the teacher, unless you're doing exactly what they say and reading script by script. That was never me, you know. Even when I was in the system, I was hatching chicken eggs in my classroom and gardening with the kids and just like writing how we spoke English while we did it.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:I'm doing the same thing as a homeschooling mom. You know you can write what you plan to teach, but then every quarter you just have to, you know, give them a paragraph or tell them what you learned and what you taught in each topic. But that could be we went to a museum and we learned these things. Or I just heard from another homeschooler He'll say we didn't teach geography this year. I know Merrick's dad does do history and geography with them and they get books from the library. Science, you know, sometimes gets met in our, in our co-op. They just one of the teachers was just teaching physics, and by teacher I mean one of the parents, right? So I'd say it's pretty easy, just because I start to write it probably the day before and our lives are rich with all this learning and so it's so easy to say, oh, he learned this math this quarter and he learned this spelling and writing.
Speaker 1:And then we do have tests right Every other year once you start around the third or fourth grade, or you can substitute that with like another teacher. We do have tests right every other year once you start around the third or fourth grade, or you can substitute that with, like another teacher or certified teacher, writing an evaluation of your child.
Speaker 2:Is that correct, yeah? So, you could start third grade, but you can, I guess, forego that and really start fourth grade, which again it doesn't make sense. But we started, we did the test in fourth grade and we took the CAT test, which is what most everyone I know does and that's the CAT test from the 80s. It's the one that we took when we were in school, so it's quite different than what they're learning today and you just send the score.
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Speaker 2:And, honestly, the school system doesn't have to really justify why they can take the kids and teach them. So why do we have to do that? On the other hand, for our own kids, right, why do we have to prove that we're teaching them or helping them succeed any more than the school district is? Because, honestly, at least the school districts I was in, more than 50% are below grade level and reading and math, yeah, so they're not anyone to say anything. Right, all right, and as we close up.
Speaker 1:What else in the school system shocked you or kind of you know, made you think like this? This probably isn't how we're supposed to be living, because you were right in there. I like, for instance, yet read an email last night from one of my listeners saying I really want to homeschool. She separated from the father and she said I, he did give me the permission, so I think I can do this. I'm trying to figure out the money situation.
Speaker 1:But she goes I substitute teach right now and the disrespect that these kids have for me and I don't think it's just for me because I'm the substitute, I, they get it from everywhere and when I try to get them in trouble I don't get backing by the principals or other teachers.
Speaker 1:You know other. She said her, her child that's in school now was just talking so nonchalantly about an active shooter drill or they had to like hide and put the desk up to the door and and as the child was saying that to her mom, that that they mother said she was so nonchalant as she was talking about this Like it was like oh, we had grilled cheese for lunch and then we had an active shooter drill, and she was that irked me. So any of these bringing up things that you remember or other things, and we can even get into the foods, because now most schools in New York York at least have free breakfast and lunch for every child it's not just the low income, it's everybody, because they don't want to discriminate. But with that they're getting more tax dollars, and if we spend all this money giving our children organic food, that we're sending them off with.
Speaker 1:They can throw that out and just go eat the grilled cheese with the white bread and the enriched flour and you know, red dye 40, gatorade and high fructose corn syrup. So what shocked you?
Speaker 2:the most. Yeah, I have a few things I wrote down. I don't know how much time we have. The last one that came to mind was I talked about the book Tribe earlier, right, and how at the time, being a teacher in the school system, I realized I didn't have a tribe really. You know, I had friends, you work and you work with people and you get along well enough and you have your kids that are forced to hang out with only the 20 to 30 kids who are the exact same age as them, and then because the parents all got frisky.
Speaker 1:that same 12 month period, all the kids should get along and learn the exact same thing, the exact same way, and we should all be okay with that.
Speaker 2:Right, and no, you're not. You don't all get along like you end up. One of the best gifts of starting homeschooling was you no longer have to go to the parties with the parents of all the other kids in the class, right that? Yeah, you like some of them, but they're not your tribe. Right Like you're forced to hang out with these people that you have nothing in common with. And now fast forward to homeschooling. We, I really do think we have a tribe, right? I, we have, and you get to curate. You get to curate your kids' friends, which also means you get to curate your friends. When I go to our different activities throughout the week. I'm friends with all the parents, my husband's friends with the parents. My daughter is friends with them, my son both my sons right, like we have our tribe. If we're building our greenhouse, we call up our friends. They come help us put the greenhouse up. You know you need honey, can sell you some honey.
Speaker 1:If I need a rabbit, our other friends can get us a rabbit.
Speaker 2:You know some rabbit meat Like we. Actually, I could just give social media posts. We are a tribe, you know, like our kids get along and we get along and it's, and it's great, there's. There's no, nothing.
Speaker 2:One of the most important things you can do for your kids is choose their friends, their friends. Their friends are going to drive who they become. And another thing we've accepted is that our kids will go through these years and no longer, you know, want to hang out with their parents and they'll move across country. Everyone in my family, in my my generation of family, moved across country and I wonder if maybe we had all been a tribe together growing up, like you know, like our kids are now. Maybe they'll want to stay close to home, right Like they, because they won't see us as we're all our. All the parents are similar and and all the kids have similar interests. So they're not getting the kids saying like, oh, let's play video games all day or let's go watch this R-rated movie and you can't because your parents don't Like. We have more similar values, so they don't need to, they don't need to push back as much.
Speaker 2:I think, yeah, I remember talking to another parent who this is getting to. Another thing I saw in school. I remember talking to a parent and I told her about homeschooling and her kid was a senior. So she said it was too late but she would have loved to homeschool. And she said you could convince a lot of people to homeschool if you, for the simple reason of keeping them away from cell phones.
Speaker 2:Honestly, I mean, I'm sure there's homeschoolers out there that use cell phones and there can be, I'm sure, good ways or good boundaries around it, but I can't think of any of my kids, friends and Merrick's 11. I can't think of any of his friends who have their own cell phone or even use a cell phone. When we're all hanging out, that's a good point, and so I get to like I get to live in this world. That is is really beautiful. And then I go to.
Speaker 2:I remember going to Great Escape. It's like an amusement park near us and and just seeing preteens in front of us and the whole time they're hanging out, they're just staring at their cell phones. The only way and I'm telling this like people don't know this that are listening Right, but it's, it's unusual to me. We don't. We don't live in that world. We don't live in the the head in the screen cell phone world, and I'm beyond grateful that I got to keep my kids out of that and to tie it back to school, like if your kids aren't in school yet they I this woman that I talked to said they're almost forced to use the cell phones, like even if your kid doesn't want to, they get notifications about soccer on it and they're they're almost forced to use the cell phones.
Speaker 2:And I remember talking to another parent who was complaining about how busy he was because all his three kids are in three different schools and he has to put air quotes. I don't like the language. Have to, you choose to but he has to follow all these different social media posts and all these emails that he gets from these teachers and it's just another way they're controlling our time that's so true we're we're guilty of.
Speaker 1:Like the TV, my two year old. I wish I never introduced it because it's like I never had that issue with my six year old, with Colin, he was just never. It was there, it was and he didn't like. But she'll wake up and like demand Cocomelon. I'm like, oh my God, what have I created? And it really it's a drug, just as alcohol or you know any other, you know prescription med would be. It's like their brain made those connections and then they almost get anxiety without it.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, the cell phone thing, I definitely, uh, will not be getting into that because, you're right, it's when they're in class. Yeah, because my kids are young, I never really thought about it, but yeah, they're seeing like, oh, billy has one, johnny has one, susie has one, they're all talking to each other. Well, now I'm left out and nobody wants to be the parent with the left out kid, you know. So you, okay, let's get it. Or, you know, do we not have enough money, you know. So, yeah, I I haven't had to think about the cell phone stuff yet Cause my kids are young, but that's super interesting. Um, something to keep on the radar because yeah, the.
Speaker 1:TV.
Speaker 2:They all got to go, you can break it. Micah was, we were guilty, micah, honestly, she, she. The tent life was a little tough. We had Starlink and we would pull the computer out sometimes. So I think it even happened then. But we just probably around Kenley's age, we were just like no more, only at night, and like you just have to detox them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Well, and then it's detoxing myself too, because it is such an easy babysitter for. Okay, I'm going to work on the podcast right now, and even if I get up at five in the morning, it's like why are you up at 6.15? I just got my coffee, and you know. Then I go back to sleep and yeah, it's like, all right, well, I was planning to work on this now, so you watch that and that, and then you know you get interrupted 15 times, so anything you were planning on doing still doesn't get done. It's just all these little things that when you're in the system, you don't realize that it's even an issue, but when you try to like pull yourself out, it really is like unsticking each limb, like from what you eat to how you spend your time. Are you outside enough and are you grounding and are you? Do you have chemicals in all your laundry detergents? And you know, are you?
Speaker 2:I can't believe where my life is now compared to where it was like when I was getting ready to come talk to you, just like I actually got sick to my stomach, remembering what life was like when I was doing a little journaling and I wasn't unhappy then. That's the thing is like if, if you had talked to me 10 years ago, I wouldn't have known where I, but knowing where I could be, knowing what life could be like, what it could be like for my kids, and that's the thing too is start making the decision to homeschool. It didn't just change schooling for us. I really believe it transformed everything for our family.
Speaker 2:Like because we chose to homeschool, we we just, you know, I chose to stay home. It really helped me just ground myself and learn how to just be and not do. We just, you know I chose to stay home. It really helped me just ground myself and learn how to just be and not do. We just really wanted to eat organically. We moved into the country. It's like dominoes, right, you topple one and they all fall in this beautiful mosaic pattern.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it all starts with I watched a documentary and you've got root canals getting ripped out of your mouth and you're yeah, you got the pig. You're ready to slaughter in the back. It's. It is crazy. I never thought I'd leave my state job. I mean, you left a pension too, right that's the other thing you know, like.
Speaker 2:So I hear so many people say, like the benefits or the pension, like honestly, I don't even know. I mean, there's still a pension somewhere for me, right, like I worked for 13 years. I have no idea what I just it was for me. It was such a I am leaving nothing. There's no carrot that's shiny enough to steal my life, in the life of my children.
Speaker 1:Steal that one for a post. No, that's so true, that carrot that is dangled. We don't realize that. Well, if the dollar collapses, it's not going to be there when you retire anyway, or if you know, we switch over and we're now all on the yen.
Speaker 1:Well, they ain't going to care about our New York pension, or, god forbid, you die of cancer and or a hit by car, or, you know, a random hurricane that wants to come in, you know, 300 miles from the coast. Yeah, something could happen at any time. So that was a big realization for me is why am I going to spend my time sitting in a cubicle? I did it for 16 years. I'm going to spend, you know, up to 14 more years while my kids are young to sit in this cubicle so that, when they're ready to leave the house, I can retire and sit home by myself. Why would I do that? It's just crazy.
Speaker 1:And I think, like you mentioned before, we're so busy and we get into this because teachers are, you know, well-meaning social justice warriors that are. Get out there and work, or, you know, go to college at least everybody's promoting college. Then you get out of college and you have two $300,000 of debt, so then you have to work, then you might get married. Well, now they have the same amount of debt and now you're like trying to afford a house. So now you've got the house and both you know, student loan debts and probably two car loans and insurances and taxes, and so it's like this snowball effect that they almost make it impossible for anyone to stay home.
Speaker 2:So everyone's a computer engineer or whatever it is. Whatever they're pushing right now, like it's going to be so flooded, yeah. So learn a skill, learn a trade.
Speaker 1:Right, yes, you're so right, closing up anything else you had written down that you want to make sure you talk about.
Speaker 2:No, I did, I did and we can put this in or not. But one other quote that really was impactful for me during my realization that I needed to leave education. There's a movie, my Dinner with Andre. I think it's a 1980s movie and it's just a conversation at dinner. But in that there's a quote that says they built their own prisons. So they exist in a state of schizophrenia. They're both guards and prisoners and, as a result, they no longer have the capacity to leave the prison they've made or even to see it as a prison. And I realized I was a prisoner and I was a guard and I was guarding these children, keeping them into a classroom that I didn't want to stay in, and my principal was my guard, but she was also a prisoner of her bosses that were telling her to stay inside the building. And it's yeah, I just I couldn't do it anymore.
Speaker 1:And as a beekeeper, have you seen the bee movie? Yes, okay, cause isn't that so symbolic of that? Because this whole time they don't realize all the work they're doing. The humans are taking their hard work. And then so, once they rose up and fought back, at the end they realized it was kind of like Shawshank Redemption, that they got the freedom, and they were like, oh, we don't have any purpose anymore.
Speaker 1:They like wanted the humans to steal their stuff just so that they had purpose, and it's like you're your own prisoners and you don't even realize that you know they didn't go find like their freedom, like I think that was kind of a warped comparison, but it is funny, you know and because we both went to public and I think you did too we didn't find anything wrong with the fact that they're all boy bees doing the work and all of the girls be do the work in reality.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I didn't even right. I didn't know Right until I started homeschooling my son we were doing nature studies that although all the female ones do the work, the men just impregnate. Yeah, queen, right. And then so I didn't even realize that the movie had all males, yeah, doing the work. Oh my god. Yes, that's our public education. I now I rely on you know, children's books and title twins books, to educate me, and it's done more than any college degree so far. Well, mary, thank you so much for joining me today.
Speaker 2:I I'll talk about homeschooling, home birthing, all home things anytime. That'll be the next podcast.
Speaker 1:Thank you, mary. 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. Thank you.