Episode 2: Let's Talk about Secular Homeschooling
After a couple of years hiatus, The Podcast with Suzanne and Amy is back! Our secular homeschool podcast is shifting gears to focus specifically on homeschooling middle and high school and on how, as homeschoolers, we can work together to decolonize the curriculum. In this episode, we let you know what you can expect in future episodes. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below, or download it to take with you on the go!
The Podcast with Suzanne and Amy, brought to you by home.school.life.now
Here’s a list of everything we talked about:
TRANSCRIPT
(Note: We use an automatic transcriber for our podcasts, and sometimes it makes weird errors — we do edit the transcript, but I’m sure we miss stuff!)
Suzanne
Hello and welcome to the home.school.life.now podcast with Suzanne and Amy. I’m Suzanne.
Amy
And I’m Amy.
Suzanne
And this is episode number two of our newly relaunched podcast series, recording on Tuesday, 4th, 2023. Happy July 4th, Amy.
Amy
Happy July 4th. I feel like July 4th is so complicated.
Suzanne
Yeah, right at this very minute. And it’s not helping that in Atlanta, we have had like thunder showers and ugly rain this morning and last night.
Yeah, it does feel a little, a little fraught.
Amy
I saw a meme, I guess, last week, last weekend, where it was like, America, you’re going to act like this and still expect us to come to your birthday party.
I think that’s kind of where I am a little bit.
Suzanne
Yeah, I have been on vacation and I have not been reading news and that is — my goal is to be uninformed.
Amy
That’s fair. I mean, you know, we do — next year’s our U.S. history year, and so we’re putting together the U.S. history stuff for our curriculum and getting ready to teach U.S. history, and, I mean, I am always struck by the tremendous possibility of the ideas of the United States.
It is maybe even more heartbreaking that we rarely live up to them.
Suzanne
Yeah, yeah, I can see that. I have started to look at the history. I am fascinated by U.S. history.
I love researching it myself. I love reading it. I love teaching it. And I’ve kind of come to a point where I see it almost like my family history, right? There are people in my family who did great things. There are people who did less great things, right? Yeah, it’s tough.
It really brings you face to face with a lot of the things that have been happening lately.
Amy
I mean, I guess you can’t change anything until you see it clearly. And so I guess we can feel good that we’re seeing things more clearly.
Suzanne
I think so. I think so. Which kind of brings us a little bit to our topic for the day.
We are going to be talking about secular, progressive homeschooling. I considered myself a secular, progressive homeschooler. With our school, we talk about being a secular, progressive school.
So what does that mean and why is it important to us? And just in case, you know, I always like to start — I tell my kids, my kids and my students, you know, always to define your terms before you start the conversation, right? So secular is not religious, right?
When people would ask me, when my kids were younger, like, you know, what kind of homeschooler are you? And I would quickly say, I’m a secular homeschooler, which means that I did not choose to homeschool for religious reasons. That’s kind of what it meant to me. Even though I did have a church that I belonged to at the time.
And also the fact that religion wasn’t part of what I consider the academic side of our homeschool. How about you?
How are you secular?
Amy
Well, secular definitely means for me not religious. And so, I mean, for me, when I look for secular homeschool resources, or secular homeschool community, I’m looking for resources and community that aren’t proselytizing, that aren’t trying to convert me to anything or convince me that any kind of particular belief system or way of life is the right one.
And also, and I can’t believe that this is even a thing, but also who are relying on academic and the best scientific and historical information and not kind of a worldview that discounts the best scientific and historical information.
Suzanne
Well, I mean, it’s secular as opposed to Christian, right? Christian-focused because that is what is dominating homeschooling even now in the country.
And so it does not mean that there are not secular Christian homeschoolers or Christian secular. I’m not sure how to say that.
But like in my secular homeschooling group, we had people who were Christians. My family is not Christian, but yeah, it just means that that’s not the focus. That’s not the expectation. It’s not the expectation that everybody’s going to have the same belief system.
Amy
And I think that’s a really good distinction that you’re making because we talk about religious homeschooling versus secular homeschooling, but it really is Christian homeschooling versus secular homeschooling.
Our family is Jewish in a very relaxed kind of way. But I don’t run into a lot of situations where I’m like, oh, well, this is a Jewish curriculum and it’s trying to do these things, or this is a Muslim curriculum, or this is a Buddhist curriculum.
It’s really curriculum that’s Christian versus curriculum that’s secular.
Suzanne
Right, right. as like I said, I said, I said, this before I’ll say it again. know, that doesn’t mean that Christians are welcome in the secular world, or that they don’t exist in the secular world. It’s just not the focus.
So then we get the the progressive part, which I think, over the years — I mean, speaking for myself personally, I describe myself as a liberal, I describe myself as progressive. You know, sometimes my children say I’m not using the right terms anymore. But for me, means that I am on what would be considered the opposite of conservative, right? The left, the group of people who are trying to fight oppression, or in some cases, even just, you know, as a middle-aged white cis woman in America, you know, learning about oppression and learning about privilege.
And what can we do to make the world more fair and equal and just for everyone?
Amy
Yeah. No, no, I love that. For me being progressive is much the same. It’s very much about kind of being against othering in all its forms and being willing to kind of constantly check myself and reevaluate my understanding and being open to being wrong — to make progress as a society and as an individual.
Suzanne
Yeah, and it also means things like if you walk in our school, you’ll see signs on the wall for Black Lives Matter and, you know, and —
Amy
Immigrants Welcome.
Suzanne
And, yeah, also, but on the back of my car, you will also, we will also see these things.
Amy
The Rezelvan is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Its loveliness only increases, it will never pass into nothing.
Suzanne
Thank you. Thank you. We did have problems with the brakes, but it’s going to be fine.
You know, and I had written down to talk about, you know, why is secular, progressive homeschooling important? But really for me, it’s not so much that it’s important, it’s who I am, right?
I mean, I am not a Christian homeschooler. I’m a secular homeschooler. I am not a conservative homeschooler, again, conservative Christian homeschooling kind of dominates in a lot of places, both in certain areas of the country and also dominates in things like curriculum, sales, often, or even what you can do online or with hybrid schools is this very Christian and very conservative in terms of social values.
Amy
Which I honestly didn’t realize when I started homeschooling — did you realize that? Because because I have never been a conservative Christian kind of parent.
And I did not realize how dominant conservative Christian voices were in the world, the homeschool world, when we started homeschooling.
I went to my very first homeschool conference. It’s about — we’re in Georgia and there’s a conference every year at the Cobb Galleria, a homeschool conference. And there was a conference session about “spare the rod and spoil the child” and there were conference sessions with “Adam and Eve” in the title.
And I was, I was genuinely surprised.
Suzanne
I think so. I think I was — well, okay, so when I started first considering it, I’ve told this story before — I do what I always do, which is I went to the library and checked out every book I could find.
But I learned early on that I had to look to to see whether it was Christian materials or secular materials because I did — I think I was aware that Christian homeschoolers were kind of the dominant, or I should say, conservative Christian homeschoolers were the dominant force.
And occasionally I got a book that started with you know well has a whole I’m a homeschooling mom, you know, we start every day with a prayer and an understanding that we do this to the glory of God, which is just not who I am.
But I was lucky. I was lucky because I think that the fact that there was still a stack of books for me to check out. I benefited from kind of the first wave of secular homeschooling materials, right?
I benefited also by the fact of being in Metro Atlanta, where there were a handful of secular groups, maybe not always progressive, but secular groups that were open to everybody that didn’t require a statement of faith.
And I think once I learned the search terms, I was kind of able to ignore it. Like, I was able to not have to get into that work. But I did have to learn the search terms. I had to learn the vocabulary.
Amy
Yeah, I think that’s it.
It’s sort of an unpleasant surprise to go and be looking for, I don’t know, a way to help your reluctant reader, and the first piece of advice is to stop and humble yourself and pray. And maybe that is genuinely helpful for some people.
If that is, like, helpful for you, that’s awesome. That is not really great advice for the general person in that situation.
Suzanne
Well, we were talking earlier in a different conversation about finding curriculum that doesn’t like you. I would have that experience sometimes when checking out curriculum.
And of course, I think it’s still true to a large extent that you don’t always get a chance to look at the curriculum before you’re buying it. And every so often, I would misstep or I would sometimes you have to judge, like, how Christian is this?
Is it just a little Christian? And I can kind of skip those parts or are there, you know, with every single single grammar exercise based on a quote from the Bible, which is something I saw.
Amy
I feel like that is the homeschool game show that we all need: How Christian is it?
Suzanne
And I did occasionally, I would buy curriculum that I was reading, and I was like, oh, this curriculum doesn’t like me. I am not Christian. And this curriculum doesn’t want me around. These, the people who wrote this wouldn’t want me in their group or want their children to play with my children because it was so very much from that very closed world.
Amy
I think that’s such a good way to describe it, too — curriculum that doesn’t like you. Because we — I mean, we are in such a privileged position as cis white women, right? Cis white middle class women in like a reasonably large Southern city. We are pretty fortunate. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be a person of color, to be a Muslim person, to be — I mean, so many people would come to a lot of these curriculums, and just generally — the curriculum doesn’t like them, it doesn’t want them there.
Suzanne
And the fact is the idea of homeschooling is not inherently Christian. It’s not inherently conservative. In fact, the movement started with the hippies. We go back to the hippies and fighting the power, right?
Yeah. So it is, I think, not a big step from seeing this curriculum doesn’t like me to feeling like there is not a place for me in the homeschool world.
And I think that might be highlighted even more today as we have so many more young people who are identifying LGBT and feeling like, you know, is homeschool a place where I’m safe and welcome and celebrated?
And I think that’s one reason that it’s important to us is to be very clear about that. We were reminded of that recently. We were talking about unpleasant surprises. We went to a conference recently.
Amy
Oh, gosh.
Suzanne
I know. know. I shouldn’t bring it up. It was painful. It sounded really cool. Tell us. I don’t remember what the title was. Amy, do you remember what the title was?
Amy
It was the Annual National Hybrid Schools Conference.
I mean, it was billed — I would say very neutrally, right? Hybrid schools. I picture — you know, certainly, like, conservative Christian schools might be a part of that, but a lot of the hybrid schools I know are very progressive and are very interested in kind of deconstructing educational systems in progressive ways.
So there was nothing, there was no clue. This was not a conservative Christian hybrid schools conference. It was not billed like that.
Suzanne
And it was run and funded by the business school at Kennesaw State University, which is a public state school here in Georgia. It wasn’t funded by a Christian conservative homeschool group or by churches or by anything like that. It was a state university that was sponsoring this.
And I think — I know I was excited. I like going to conferences because it makes me feel like a grown-up who knows what they’re doing. It reminds me of my olden days going to conferences as a software developer. I get to wear a name tag and a lanyard, I love it. But I thought it would be really cool. We are kind of, this sounds silly to say, we’re trying to take this business that we’ve been running for six or seven years, a little bit more seriously as a business, right?
So I was excited to learn things both on the business side of how do you run a microschool? How do you run a hybrid school?
Amy
And, it feels like there’s so many good questions to be asking around this, right? How do you make what you do affordable and accessible to people in your community? How do you support parents and students kind of learning together, right?
How do you set up systems that make it possible for parents to support their kids learning? How do you manage all the back end stuff of running a school, efficiently?
There’s so many great things to talk about when it comes to running a hybrid school. I thought we were going to talk about those things.
Suzanne
Yeah, and on the curriculum side too, you know, what are the logistics of how much work is it reasonable to expect for kids to do independently at different grade levels?
How do you help the parents with that? It’s — so we were excited. I think we were very excited.
Amy
We woke up early and everything.
Suzanne
We carpooled down there. We were all — I got my goodie bag. I collected my t-shirts. And then I think what we got was not what we were expecting.
And I think that became clear to me, started to become clear in the first keynote speakers, the first round of keynote speakers.
I was a little alarmed when somebody got on stage and said, I’m from Arizona and you all want to be Arizona. And here’s how you can be. And that’s not something I think of necessarily first when I think of Arizona.
Amy
I was a little concerned when the second speaker who followed that speaker kept referring to the good Christian families that they served.
Suzanne
And in fact, I believe that speaker from a school in Metro Atlanta, as we were — okay, we were bad at this conference. I think we can, I mean, we just have to admit it, Amy, we were bad.
Amy
We were terrible students. And we did not set a good example of how students should be.
Suzanne
We were passing notes to each other — I mean, via text, but we were passing votes to each other. And commenting on the speakers and the speaker who runs a school for good Christian families runs it for only good Christian families, right?
They, their school has a statement of faith that explicitly defines marriage between one man and one woman. And that was a really weird whiplash moment — to one of the other speakers who I think, when doing the introductions, had talked about how young people have always been at risk for dying by suicide and how that has gotten worse in some ways and how one of the best things, you know, the best ways to help young people and to reduce this risk is to make sure they have a connection to a trusted adult and how in hybrid schools and microschools, we have those opportunities to build those connections with our small, you know, because we have smaller bodies of students and — you know, he didn’t say anything about LGBT students, but I as parent to LGBT kids, you know, I’m very aware of the statistics.
Amy
I mean, as a human being in the world who cares about people, you can’t not know those statistics.
Suzanne
Right. And so the one of the keynote speakers they invited to speak has a school that not only explicitly excludes that group entirely, but makes it clear that they don’t think that they’re okay. It was a little, I think we were both a little boggled.
Amy
So, Suzanne and I, I will say, I think it’s fair to describe us as big nerds. Right? Like, you know, I, I have almost never walked out of a class because if I don’t enjoy a session or a class, like I still feel like I can learn from it.
Right? Suzanne and I went and I said, was it okay if we went to the session on classical homeschooling because I really like a lot of things about the classical homeschool model.
I think we need to decolonize the classical homeschool model, but there are a lot of things that I really like about it.
The Well Trained Mind was, I mean, it was kind of like my ur text when we started homeschooling.
Suzanne
That was my Bible, not to be weird about it.
Amy
And we’ve always looking for ways to bring elements of classical learning to the Academy and to our own kind of homeschool ideas.
And we sat down and we were so excited. And the first thing that this speaker said is that there are more important things than facts. And we’re like, yes, yes, we’re here for this.
Suzanne
Students are the number one important thing.
Amy
And the guy is like, like salvation and glorifying God. And literally, like we just stood up and left because that wasn’t what we were there for, right?
That isn’t what we needed to learn. I am not interested in salvation and glorifying God. I think we could figure that out for ourselves.
Suzanne
I want to be really clear about the level of baseline assumption that was there, right?
It wasn’t that this speaker came up and said, well, you all know, I come from a Christian school. And so these are some of the priorities e have there, and I know they’re not going to relate to everybody in this room, and I’m sure that you have your own priorities — something like that, right?
He wasn’t talking about it in that context. There was a default underlying assumption there and in every single thing that we heard while we were there that the audience, that all of us in this hybrid microschools community, were Christian, were conservative.
I think there were some people of color there, but it was awfully white. And then when we got to the lunchtime keynote speaker, that we are all about destroying public education and that we hold as a fundamental political belief that government should not be involved in education.
And I am here to tell you that I do not hold that belief even a little bit. So that was what was really shocking to me.
Not that — of course, there’s going to be people there who are — I bet that speaker could have told me a lot about how they manage curriculum and how they manage independent work that would have been really useful.
But that wasn’t the conversation, the conversation was, well, everybody here clearly is on the same page. And I found that assumption, I think, the most offensive of all.
Amy
I will say, when we went to this conference, I still mask in public indoor spaces, just out of an abundance of caution. And I was — we had a bunch of rainbow mask left over from our big rainbow prom at the Academy. So I was wearing my big rainbow mask. And I did — we did have several people kind of come up to us and say, like secret code, like I like your mask.
So we were not the only people there who felt excluded, and unwanted and who the conference was not designed for.
Suzanne
That conference hated us, Amy.
Amy
The conference really did hate us.
Suzanne
The conference hated us. Okay, so during the lunchtime — spoiler, we didn’t make it to the afternoon sessions. I was poking at the lunchtime speaker, we could go on and on, but let’s say he was also super racist.
Amy
The salad was very good.
Suzanne
The lunch was very good. I have no complaints about the lunch. And I was kind of like, Amy, we have to walk out. Via text, right? And Amy’s like, we cannot walk out. The person is still speaking. And I’m like, I’m not going to be able to sit here quietly much longer.
So once he did finish speaking, we did walk out. Fortunately, because, Amy, you were about to start asking questions.
Amy
Yeah. Okay, but in all fairness to me. In all fairness to me. The entire middle part of his talk was basically this kind white savior narrative about how he went into these small towns in India and saved the children from bad education by starting private schools for them.
Suzanne
Bad government schools, government-funded education, because that’s the key.
Amy
So just in all fairness to us.
Suzanne
It was bad.
Amy
So we did leave, we left after his talk — we decided it was good manners, and I do think it’s important to have good manners, even though we were terrible, and we probably were distracting. We were just sitting there texting each other. So maybe it would have been more polite to leave sooner.
But when we left and we stepped outside, we kind of unpacked our feelings. It turned out that the video recorder, who was recording the questions that the speaker was answering was like right there.
Suzanne
Yeah, somebody came out and told us that we had to stop talking and move further away.
So we might think be immortalized on the conference report, although my husband who runs sound as a hobby for various things, including nerdy science fiction conventions, said, really, if they’re not just recording directly from the microphones, that’s on them.
We bear no guilt if their IT and sound and everything skills are not up to par. That is not us.
So yeah, I think that was, gosh, it was infuriating. It was super disappointing because we had, we’ve been looking forward to spending a fun, nerdy day together doing nerdy school stuff.
And it was also really, really disheartening because honestly, I was surprised. You know, talking about the surprise of realizing how much the homeschool world is dominated by Christian conservative homeschoolers. I did not think that this new world of hybrid schools or microschools would be dominated by that same group in the same way.
Perhaps that was naive of me. But I really thought that it had opened up, homeschooling and this world of microschools, hybrid schools, had opened up to a bigger community.
And I didn’t see that, I didn’t see that even beginning to be represented at this conference. And there were people from, know, not just Georgia, there were people from all around.
And that was a really disheartening moment. Like haven’t we come further than this?
Amy
Well, I think that we, too, we’ve been so lucky in recent years because we started our little hybrid school.
And it is, I mean, it is such a warm, inclusive community. People who find us are 100% secular progressive homeschoolers, lik,e they walk in the door and they’re like, oh yes. And so it feels like there is a huge community of this, right? And this is the community that we get to be a part of every day. We’re so lucky.
The conference made me realize, Suzanne, how lucky we are.
Suzanne
Well, yeah, and I think the ultimate result as we came out and as we were ranting to each other of the drive home.
I think the ultimate result was, I think for me, inspirational in the way that what we do is important, right?
If there are genuine — I don’t think there’s genuinely this view of us. I think that this conference was dominated by one set of voices. And that we don’t even know what percentage that was, right? Was it just the people that the organizer chose to speak?
Because he did choose to, you know, like the people from his children’s school. He chose them as speakers, right?
Amy
The Catholic Christian School that his children attended.
Suzanne
Exactly. Was it reflecting the organizers, organizers biases? Or was it really that, you know, with our little rainbow masks that we were the 1% there, you know.
But either way, it’s clear that what we’re doing is necessary and important. And I found that to be reinvigorating, right? That we need to lean into who we are.
We need to maybe — I mean, like I said, we have never been vague about how we feel. You talk about people coming in the door and seeing our signs and being like, this is awesome.
And then we also have people who walk in the door and see Black Lives Matter and the giant trans flag on the wall. And — for whatever reason, I’ve never had anybody who was actually got up and turned around and left.
Amy
But we wouldn’t be offended if they did because that is why we have that there.
Suzanne
But you can tell when kind of mentally they have walked in the door and they see, and they their demeanor changes and they realize that this isn’t the place for them, right?
So it’s — so while it hasn’t been a secret and while we have tried to be very clear, it felt like it’s even more important to lean into that, to acknowledge unfortunately the ways that it makes us different, the ways that it can make us more inclusive and welcoming.
And we want people to know we want people to know that that’s who we are and that this work is important and especially in Georgia, especially in Georgia in 2023.
Amy
Yeah, and I know that this makes me sound like I come from an enormous place of privilege because I do, but it’s it’s a little bit scary to put ourselves — I mean, I feel like it’s so important, and we’re doing it. We’re doing it.
But it is a little bit scary to do it because there’s a lot of what, like, anger? Do you think anger is the right word? Vitriol?
Suzanne
Well, there’s a lot. I mean, there have been situations with other small schools in different areas of the country that focused or catered to, for example, LGBT kids, that have been kind of discovered by a conservative pundit, right? Or a politician, who then points to them as, you know, everything that’s wrong in the world. And funnels a lot of abuse their way.
You know, there are people with a lot of time on their hands. And that is not, you know, that is not a crazy thing, that is not a bizarre thing to be concerned about from our perspective.
Amy
But on the other side, we have the parents who call us up and say, we hear that you’re the school for trans kids. We hear that you’re the, you’re the place where trans kids can go. And I mean, that is who, that is who we are.
That is, that is who we want to be and that is what we want to do. And so.
Suzanne
We have to say this is who we are. We don’t want anyone who would be, who would benefit from coming here, not be able to come here simply because they didn’t know we existed.
Or we weren’t, we weren’t — you know, I look for it now. don’t know if you’ve had this experience too, but working with transgender students and having transgender children or my own, I am really aware — we’re doing college visits now. I am really aware of which schools use preferred names and which schools only have an option for legal names.
I am really aware of what kind of bathrooms are available. I am really aware of things like in their — do they have a clip in their, know, the colleges, they have like a slideshow, right? Here all the great things about our school, here are all the fun clips. Is there a rainbow flag somewhere in there?
It turns out that these small things are what we look to, to say, you know, is this safe? Is this some place where all kids can be celebrated?
And, you know, what could we be doing more in our online presence to have all of those clues in there?
It that terrible? I don’t know if that’s terrible. We can also just say it right out, that we celebrate, you know, LGBT students, but it’s important to have all of it.
Amy
Signifiers are important. I think that they are a really important piece of it because, I mean, people who are not the, what, the straight, cis, white majority, can’t always trust the words.
I mean, I think the signifiers often carry more weight that we are an inclusive environment that values diversity. I mean, the same organization that doesn’t welcome non-Christian marriages has a statement about diversity and inclusion on their website.
Suzanne
Yes.
Amy
Which, I think, they don’t seem to me. At least not the way that you would want them to mean it.
Suzanne
Right. It’s a very different kind of definition. So, yeah. So, I think that was something, we know, we’re looking for something valuable to come out of this experience.
And I think for me, I think for both of us, that was something valuable, right? Kind of this, okay, you know, we are ready. We want to lean even further into this. This is a valuable and necessary thing.
We actually made a big decision that day. We had been considering one of the biggest changes that we have made since we started the school, which is moving into a larger office facility.
And we were kind of on the fence about it, I think — because, you know, it costs more money, but also would be really nice to have it.
It’d be really nice to have two bathrooms. Two bathrooms would be awesome.
Amy
Suzanne says that I can start a college if we have two bathrooms.
Suzanne
That’s not — You know, if we want to get to logic, that’s not what I said. What I said was we cannot start a college with only one bathroom.
And, oh, gosh, it’s been too long since I looked at converse, whatever. Whatever of that is not true. So, yeah.
But I think we came out of that conference going, yep, we’re going for the bigger classroom. Yeah, it feels right, it feels important.
Amy
It did. I mean, I think it really — I don’t want to say like it gave us like like the kick that we needed, but but I think it in a way it did.
It kind of made us say, you know, what we do matters. And it matters to us, of course, but it matters to other people. It’s something that makes life better for other people for the, you know, the community of homeschoolers who doesn’t feel seen by the conservative Christian — I don’t even know if it’s a majority, but it’s a really vocal chunk.
Suzanne
It dominates. It dominates news coverage. It dominates so much. So many areas.
Amy
Yeah, I think it made us feel like like we had to be a little braver about what we do.
Suzanne
Yes.
Amy
That’s good.
Suzanne
A little braver, a little louder, a little prouder of who we are. Right. I mean, not to brag. Okay. We should also be again really clear white privilege — cis, straight. You know, women who are always learning about our privilege, always a work in progress. We always know we can do better.
We’re trying. And that is part of being progressive, right? Is always being the work in progress. In fact, we were looking at the paperwork for next year, this morning. And I was noticing that that in some of our medical forms and all that kind of stuff, it says, you know, this is my child and I can verify that he slash she, you know, has no big medical.
I was like, Maybe we need to change the pronouns.
Amy
Yeah, absolutely, because because I felt like — what a decade ago? when we first wrote up these forms — I remember going in, and we had an attorney like put together the forms for us and they were all he he he.
And I remember going in with my pen and adding she because I felt like I was so progressive and feminist doing that. But that’s not even inclusive anymore. I love that we still get to grow. I mean, that is like, I always said, I wanted to spend my whole life as a learner.
And I feel like that’s what you get to do, kind of like that’s kind of a requisite for being a progressive person, being willing to do that kind of learning and growing.
Suzanne
And as a homeschooler too, you’re always learning just like the kids. It’s always great because we get the opportunity every year when we’re doing this work to do it better than we did last year.
Amy
I mean, I think that is like, maybe the secret of homeschooling is that we’re always homeschooling ourselves as much as our kids.
Right. It’s as much about us.
Suzanne
It’s true. Amy, Amy teases me every year because I’m still reading, you know, I’m working on a history curriculum, but I’m still got a stack of library books from the curriculum that I just finished teaching. I’m done with that. I’ve done with that lecture. We move, but I get interested and then I want anyway.
Amy
Yeah, it’s hilarious because you literally just stopped reading about the ancient world.
And that was two years ago.
Suzanne
Okay. Okay. But there’s some really good stuff. Now, I’m excited this year to move into US history and to talk about Sally Hemings when we talk about Thomas Jefferson, and to talk about Ona Judge when we talk about Washington. I mean, I think that there are ways that we can change the focus.
And that’s something I think we’re going to get into next time on the podcast. We want to talk about decolonizing the curriculum. What does that mean?
Amy
What does it look like?
Suzanne
What does it look like? What does it mean to us? How do you do it? How do you do it as, again, white, straight, cis people?
Amy
And how do you do it without just making history or literature all about people’s terrible experiences? That is a big piece of it is reflecting black joy, reflecting LGBTQ+ joy, reflecting immigrant joy, like seeing the full picture of people’s lives and not just terrible things that have happened to them.
Suzanne
Yeah, there’s some lectures I give especially in US history where I feel like I need to bring chocolate to bring everybody up at the end of the class because sometimes some of the things we talk about are just tough.
But it can’t be that 100% because that 100% doesn’t reflect even the reality. It does not reflect reality.
And if we treat the curriculum as, oh, look at all these terrible things that got done to that group of people over there, then we’re not quite there yet.
We haven’t quite reached where we need to be.
Amy
So decolonizing the curriculum is like such a, it’s a really fun and exciting project to be a part of. It’s really fun to talk about too.
Suzanne
It is because I learned about all these people that I never learned about.
But before, they’re really, really cool and super awesome. So anyway, so that’s something we can look forward to the next episode of the podcast.
Amy, tell me what’s new online at homeschoollifemag.com.
Amy
Oh, so Suzanne and I have a new book out, The Ultimate Homeschool Calendar, which is kind of the resource that I wanted when we started homeschooling.
You could find, speaking of religious dominance in the homeschool market, you could find a lot of sort of resource books, big resource books for religious homeschoolers, but not so much for secular homeschoolers.
So I put together from back issues of home/school/life and I wrote some new stuff — 366 ideas for your homeschool based around the calendar. Some of them are for goofy holidays, like Appreciate a Dragon day or Penguin Awareness Day. Did you know Penguin Awareness Day is a thing?
Suzanne
I did not know.
Amy
There are art projects, like these Faith Ringold-inspired story quilts. There are science experiments, like make bubbles with carbon dioxide — not carbon dioxide, that would be bad.
Make dry ice bubbles for Halloween or make glow-in-the-dark bath bombs, and there are unit studies, like the history of cuneiform or the French Revolution or Sacco and Vanzetti.
So it’s a whole hodgepodge of stuff. It’s a pretty book. You can flip through it and find something to do every single day.
You can flip through it and think about things that you might possibly like to do one day.
Suzanne
I was going to say when Amy was talking about this, this is the kind of thing I love. I would never do the things.
You get the old Parents magazine or Family Fun or something. I just found it really inspirational. This is what I want to do when I’m parenting is flip through, and maybe I do a handful of things.
And you never know, out of that handful, maybe Penguin Awareness Day becomes a cherished family holiday that has its own rituals, and so you never know if it’s going to be a big hit in your family and might be a permanent addition to what your life looks like.
Amy
Well, I hope it’s a fun resource for people. It is definitely something that I would have loved when we started homeschooling.
Suzanne
It’s so pretty. You said it was pretty.
Amy
I do care a lot about how things look.
Suzanne
All right, well then before we go, one last thing, Amy, I have to ask this question because if we don’t talk about books, we feel sad.
What are you reading now?
Amy
So I am reading a lot of stuff about U.S. history for next year, but Suzanne, I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but most of my reading time is currently being taken up by the new Zelda game. Tears of the Kingdom. Which I’m playing with my kids so it’s quality time.
Suzanne
Oh, sure, sure, sure. Wait: Quote: Playing with your kids.
Amy
Okay, so I lay on the bed and watch them play because I can’t actually like fight a bokoblin or anything but I’m very good at, like, figuring out how to solve the puzzles even if I can’t use the controllers.
So I participate.
Suzanne
It’s a joint effort. It’s a joint effort. Well, that sounds awesome.
Amy
It’s really nice because they want to hang out with me. It’s actually, I mean — it’s like a very like open world kind of beautiful game. So it’s very entertaining. It’s a lovely way to spend the summer day.
What about you? What are you reading? You were just on vacation. You abandoned me for a week.
Suzanne
I know. I know. went on vacation to where our family meets up. My extended family meets up in North Carolina, and they play a lot of board games.
It was — I bring two bags of library books, plus hundreds of books on my Kindle, and just tell them to go away and not bother me and read the whole time. And it’s lovely.
So I got through a lot of books that week. But what I’m reading right now is actually an amazing book that I’m going to recommend to everybody.
It’s called Chain Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. The premise is grim. The premise is that in a near future, prisoners are given the opportunity to sign up for a sports league that basically is gladiator fighting to the death. And it is hugely popular. This is, I said, in the near future. And really, what the book is about is prison abolition.
The book talks not only — the book has an has an opinion. The book talks not only about this fictional world, but also talks about statistics and what’s going on today.
And that makes it sound like a very dry read, you know that the book is lecturing to you, but it is not.
It is a very engaging, sometimes upsetting read that I I have just been zipping through and I haven’t quite finished it yet. That’s on my project for this afternoon. But I can, I really recommended it. That sounds like something you’re interested in.
Maybe, but if you’re not super interested in it, it really is both an entertaining read and one that has a lot of thought behind it.
So that’s Chain Gang All Stars.
Amy
I have that on my library holds list, and now I’m even more excited to read it.
Suzanne
Yeah, I hope you. Like it really is. I know I say I make it sound like a lecture. It really isn’t. It’s very entertaining.
Amy
I mean, I love a lecture.
Suzanne
That’s true. We are nerds.
Amy
So we’re trying to keep these podcasts under an hour. And so I think we have to call it for this episode of The Podcast with Suzanne and Amy brought to you by home.school.life.now.
But we will see you back soon for more conversation about the places where home school and life intersect.
