Episode 3: What Does Decolonizing the Curriculum Look Like for Secular Homeschoolers?
In this episode we’re talking about decolonizing the secular homeschool curriculum — and why it’s a project that we expect to be working on for the rest of our lives.
Here are links to all the stuff we recommended in this episode:
TRANSCRIPT
(Note: We use an automatic transcriber for our podcasts, and sometimes it makes weird errors — we do edit the transcript, but I’m sure we miss stuff!)
Suzanne: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to the home.school.life.now podcast with Suzanne and Amy. I'm Suzanne.
Amy: And I'm Amy,
Suzanne: And this is episode number three of our newly relaunched podcast series recording on Tuesday, no, Thursday, July 20th. 2023. What year is it? Do you know what year it is?
Amy: I was just so impressed that you got so many of those dates and times right.
I'm just, wow. You knew what podcast number it was. I feel like we should all pause and give you an award for summer homeschooling.
Suzanne: I know, for real. It is kind of bad in the summer. I was trying to do, talk about tuition with parents the other day and I was like, math? I can't math during the summer.
What do you? What do you mean? I know it's all round numbers and everything, but, but welcome. We're excited to have you listening to today's topic. We're probably going to jump right in because it turns out we have a lot to say. Our topic for this podcast is decolonizing the curriculum, [00:01:00] which means building a new homeschool canon.
So I guess the first question to talk about is what does decolonizing the curriculum mean?
Amy: Yeah.
Suzanne: Go ahead.
Amy: Oh, no, I was going to say, well, because when you talked about decolonizing the curriculum, I think that's the first question that people have. What do you mean?
Suzanne: Absolutely. The first question my brother had, who teaches, who teaches history high school history.
And to me, it means, you know, the way I was taught history growing up, I was taught specifically United States history, but really world history. I was taught only about White male Europeans, specifically white male European colonizers, if we're talking about U. S. history. And I really didn't learn much, if anything, about anyone else.
And anyone else is a huge group. That's all women, pretty much. That's all of the people who are living, for example, in the Americas, before the [00:02:00] Europeans came, all the Native Americans. It's about Black people. And not only was I kind of only taught the facts and stories of these, you know, the white male Europeans, I was also taught to adopt their perspective on what had happened and what was happening.
You know, that their perspective was the United States as a land of freedom and opportunity. And we know, if you look at even the tiniest bit, that the story of the United States is not a story of freedom and opportunity for most of the people living here for most of its existence.
Amy: Well, yes. And on those rare occasions where somebody who isn't a white colonizer gets highlighted in history, it's through that same lens, right?
These are women or people of stories of non colonizers are always stories about people overcoming challenges, kind of proving that it isn't just. [00:03:00] white men who can do it as long as people really want to do it. They can — look there's this example, kind of ignoring all the systemic stuff that makes that impossible for most people,
Suzanne: Right?
And how that systemic stuff has created the world that we live in today, right? The world that, that — very much we are dealing with right now, the story of the ways which the United States was not free and where it was not a place of opportunity. So for me, when I'm talking about decolonizing the curriculum, it means learning about the everyone else, right?
Learning their stories, learning what happened with them, what they did, and treating that with the same weight and importance as the white male European colonizers. And, and then also looking at their point of view, seeing this point of view of freedom and opportunity is one that was specific to this very small group of people.
What was the point of view of everyone else who was [00:04:00] living through those times? How did they experience the world?
Amy: Yeah, and I think, I think one, one side of this and one criticism that kind of people have about this is that if you tell history this way, it can make cis white European men look kind of bad.
The point of decolonizing the curriculum, and I just, I feel like this is like an important point to make, is not to just bash white men. I mean, I feel like they can take it after centuries of being valorized. Like, I don't think it's going to hurt their feelings, you know, to be snubbed a little bit by a class of high school students.
But, but even if it does, the point is not to bash white men. The point is to like include them in the story with everybody else. And in that story, they don't always look great.
Suzanne: Right, [00:05:00] right. They are, they are, as human beings tend to be, complicated, flawed people who did some screwed up things along the way, right?
And so I'm not, you know, when I'm teaching, I'll be teaching middle school U. S. history next year, and I'm going to talk about Thomas Jefferson. I'm going to talk about George Washington, absolutely. And I'm going to talk about some of the interesting and admirable things that they did. But when I talk about Jefferson, I'm also going to talk about Sally Hemings.
When I talk about Washington, I'm going to talk about his experience as, as a, as an enslaver, as a person who, who thought that he could own other people, right? And yeah, that, that does give you a different feeling when you look at, for example, the Washington Monument. But that's the whole story.
That's the actual story.
Amy: Yeah.
And it's important to tell. That's, I mean, that is, that's what we want to tell is the whole story.
Suzanne: And I think that's really important to us. We, we, [00:06:00] we like facts. We like information. We like stories. We like knowing the whole picture. But I think, I would say for me, it's also personal that decolonizing the curriculum is a very personal, it feels important in a personal way.
Not just because I am a woman. I also have white privilege, but, you know, as a woman, I'm, I'm very aware of how much of my history has been left out of the books. But also, this is still, the curriculum that kids are learning in traditional school in, you know, the 2020s is not very much different from what I learned in the 1970s and 80s.
Amy's heard me tell the story many times of one of my kids. When she went to traditional public school she, you know, she was in the upper level literature classes, AP courses, kind of all the way through, but in her literature courses. Every single piece of work that was assigned that the [00:07:00] entire class had to read, every single one, except for maybe a poem here or there, was written by a white man.
And mostly it was written by a British white man. You know, so that it wasn't until her senior year that there were assigned works that everyone had to read that were not white males. And I was, you know, first of all, I didn't notice it. When my oldest son went through the, went through the curriculum, but my daughter sure noticed it and we talked about a lot when she, and that's not very long ago.
That's just a couple years ago. And I was really shocked by that. I was really shocked by that lack of very basic diversity.
Amy: Well, I think that that is a really important piece of this, right? Because, because we are both shocked by it. And we don't notice it, like both of those things are simultaneously true for a lot of people because we've kind of, [00:08:00] we've grown up in a world of colonized history of colonized literature, even of colonized science.
Suzanne: Yes, absolutely.
Amy: It was really sort of, sort of surprising, and I mean, I mean, I, I, I'm also telling this story that I always tell, which is about reading Little House on the Prairie with my children, which I was so excited to read with them because I loved it so much when I was a kid, and I thought, here is a fantastic story about westward expansion, which is even a colonist name, westward expansion.
Anyway, Little House on the Prairie is one of those, reading Little House on the Prairie with my kids sort of introduced me to the breadth and depth of my own ignorance about non colonized history. It kind of lit a fire under me to look more closely at the ways that I was looking at history, at literature, at everything, because I was genuinely, I mean, horrified is maybe a tiny bit of an [00:09:00] overstatement, but only a tiny bit.
I was horrified that these books that I had loved were really, really racist in ways that I had never noticed.
Suzanne: Yeah, yeah, well, and all the ways that we were taught to view the world you know, is, means that, that I grew up with, my perspective was a white supremacist, patriarchal perspective, right?
I mean, so, so doing this work, doing this work of decolonizing the curriculum for me is a lot about changing my own perspective. You know, if you grew up with the same kind of history, the same kind of curriculum that I did. You know, how do you make those changes? How do you have those realizations? And then educate yourself.
And, you know, okay, you know what it's going to be for me. The answer for me is that I went to the library and got a giant stack of books. But the great news is, is that there is a giant stack of books to be gotten these days, right? There is a lot of work that is being done. [00:10:00] That is is fascinating, and so well written, and so engaging.
I, you know, I hope everyone has heard of the 1619 Project. If you haven't done yourself the favor of checking that out and looking at it, it's amazing. There are books like Stamped by Ibram X. Kendi, which is a history of... The idea of racism in the United States and there's, and there's even a young adults version.There's a YA version of STAMPED.
There's a series I don't know, Amy, if you've run across these, all these different people's history of the United States, so like indigenous people's history, right? There's amazing stuff that's out there, and if you start doing some Google searches for book lists, you're going to find so many great recommendations, but I do want to say, and I know Amy's heard me complain about this, it can be an infuriating process, because I love history.
I [00:11:00] love reading about all the dad books, like, you know, whenever they're doing like dad book lists and they're all like these giant biographies of founding fathers or World War II. I read all those, right?
Amy: She really does. I'm just saying she absolutely does and she will tell you about them for hours.
Suzanne: There's good stuff in there. So I am used to a world where there are dozens of George Washington biographies, right? If I want to read about George Washington, I can read the book that came out last year. Or I can read the book that came out two years ago. Or I can read the two hundred words. Version, or I could read the 800 word version, or I could read the one by the guy who loves George Washington, or I could read the one by the guy who hates George Washington, or I could just wait six months, because there's probably going to be a new one coming out, but when I went looking for the big comprehensive biographies of historical figures. The first example I think of are like first wave feminists, right? So the [00:12:00] suffragists in the United States. I went looking for the biographies of people like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and these kind of people and there was like maybe one. And it wasn't very long.
And it was from 25 years ago, right? These, these kind of big comprehensive biographies based on recent scholarship just doesn't exist. For a lot of the people who haven't been showing up in the curriculum and that's enormously frustrating But it really brings to light this idea that no these people were all left out to begin with.
Amy: Well, and I think people who are left out of traditional academia are doing a lot of this work and a lot of them are doing it online And so if you find people doing research on early 20th century feminism, or you find people doing research on Harriet [00:13:00] Tubman and Sojourner Truth and you think it's good research, even if it's not perfect, even if it's not in a shiny format that you would expect to see from a traditional publisher, like support them, give them resources to keep doing the good work that they're doing, Because I think in many ways, this is a golden age of this kind of research, but it's only going to get out there and easily accessible to all of us if when we see somebody doing it, we're like, yes, let me help you keep doing this.
Suzanne: Absolutely.
And there is stuff coming up. There's a, the major new biography of, well, not new, I guess it's maybe five years old now of Frederick Douglass, right. By David Blight. That, that was a big deal, right? So we do see kind of some of those.
Like I said, the traditional history, traditional biographies, but we also really need to be open to the alternative sources, right? And to recognize that history is not, if we're studying history, is not necessarily going to look the same [00:14:00] way. That we're used to or that I'm not gonna maybe not gonna find those big biographies And if I want to teach that material if I want to learn it for myself and teach it then I need to be looking in unexpected places and I need to be okay with it looking a bit different.
Amy: Well, and I think that this is, this is a big, important piece of decolonizing the curriculum.
And I just want to say, like, I feel like we should say you know, Suzanne and I are not sitting here as like experts in decolonizing the curriculum. We're not like, here is how you decolonize the curriculum. We are the experts on this. Take our advice, go out and do what we say. We are just two people who care tremendously about doing it and who are trying really hard to do it and have found some things that work for us.
So if they work for you too, that is amazing and awesome. And if you have things that work for you, we would also love to know about them because decolonizing the curriculum, decolonizing is not a noun, right? [00:15:00] It's not something that's done and finished and people can hand you in a neat package. It is work that we are all doing.
Every single day where we are learning through embarrassment and failure and realization things that we miss. I just, I just think it's important to say, like, we are not at all experts in decolonizing the curriculum, but we would love to be.
Suzanne: Yeah, we, we have, we are not coming to you having, having decolonized our curriculum, right?
It is always in process, and I'm always trying to do better, you know, next year than I did last year. And yeah, embarrassment and frustration and, is, is part of that process. I also wanted to say, you know, I talk about books. I talk about checking out. There's a lot of great stuff being done on YouTube.
There's a lot of great stuff being podcasts. Podcasts are a great way. I talk about the 1619 Project a lot. There's a 1619 Project podcast if you prefer to listen than to [00:16:00] read a giant book. Or there's I think a Hulu television streaming program version talking about a lot of the same things.
So, so yeah, there is so much available if you look around.
Amy: I want to say, I think too, I, I think that if we're really going to decolonize the curriculum if we're really committed to doing that, then we also have to decolonize the way that we've been taught to do history, because we've been taught to do history by valorizing primary sources, specifically written primary sources, newspapers, letters, diaries, And the truth is that those have kind of belonged to white colonizing people.
So if we want to study history of not white colonizing people, I think we have to be open to other kinds of historic record keeping. It might be objects, it might be artifacts, it [00:17:00] might be oral histories, it might be cultural knowledge passed down. But you're never going to find a letter that Harriet Tubman wrote somebody.
Harriet Tubman didn't know how to write. You can find 600 letters that George Washington wrote. One guy. And so I think that like a big piece of decolonizing is recognizing that decolonized history is not going to be, it's not always going to look the way that we were taught that history should look.
And that's okay. That's important. That's, that's part of decolonizing.
Suzanne: And I think too, it means in some cases, familiarizing yourself with the facts and the information that we have, and then being open to ways in which it can be reimagined or discussed. I'm thinking specifically, so I'm working on my curriculum for this upcoming fall, and, you know, a lot of people a lot of historians have traditionally kind of traced the ideas that became the United States of America. A lot of people like to trace it back [00:18:00] to the Mayflower Compact, right? And we can read the Mayflower Compact in class. That is a primary source document. We can look at it and talk about it. Again, going back to the 1619 Project one of the ideas in there is that what if we looked at the year 1619 when the first black Africans were brought to Jamestown and were sold as property to white colonists, what if we looked at that as the founding, you know, of the ideas that would become America? Not, not to, not, you know, this is terrible, look how terrible this is, but to acknowledge the whole story, right? To have a fuller picture. And so, we can't read, I can't read a letter, you know, I don't have any primary source document to give my students to read, but there are some poems that have been written about those people who arrived in 1619, right? So we're going to read the Mayflower Compact, and we're [00:19:00] going to read a poem, and we're going to talk about two different views of the founding of the United States, right?
And so you, you have to be a little bit creative, right? While acknowledging that that's not... A poem is not a historical source, but if we're thinking about perspectives, if we're thinking about ways to tell the story, there's so many different ways you can do that.
Amy: I mean, there's always somebody when you read a, any document ever whose story isn't being told.
Suzanne: Yeah. So even going through the document and saying, or the book or whatever you're reading and saying, Hey, who isn't here, you know, or who, who is here, but their voice is never being heard. That can, these are all ways. I think we've kind of morphed into like, what, how do we teach, right? If we are working on decolonizing our own perspective, then how do we teach our kids as homeschool parents?
And for me, it's, it's again, it's going back to that. [00:20:00] Let's get as many points of view as possible in there. Let's get all the points of view that I didn't even realize were out there in there. It means not giving up Thomas Jefferson, but also teaching Sally Hemings.
Amy: And kind of also this, that my Little House on the Prairie problem, which is, I didn't realize that it was problematic.
And so when I started reading it with my kids, there are ways to respond to that, right? Because we are not going to be able to screen every single thing that we read. We're not going to know every single, like, potential issue with colonized history and what we do. And so, so having a plan also to kind of react to it in the moment, I think, is really important.
Suzanne: Yeah, to have that conversation to, to, well, maybe it'll be flustered anyway, I'm flustered all the time.
Amy: Well, but to be willing to be uncomfortable, right? To have the uncomfortable conversation in the moment.
Suzanne: And to bring in your critical thinking skills, right? Okay, so we'll run across this thing that we've found.
Well, who is saying it, [00:21:00] right? Who are they in relation to what is being talked about? What is their perspective? What are, you know, what are they trying to accomplish by saying this? Who is not being heard of, right? These are all big, important, critical thinking skills that we bring to bear on hopefully everything we do in education, right?
So these are the kinds of questions that you can have when you run into something, like reading, if you're reading Little House. And I also think for me, being aware and trying to very deliberately change the language that I am using, which I will acknowledge is, can be tough. A very, very basic change that that academia has been trying to make recently is you don't talk about slaves, you talk about enslaved people.
And I've been working on that and I, I get it about 90 percent of the time. Which is a heck of a lot better than I did the first year I tried that, right? [00:22:00] And it goes so far beyond that, right? What if instead of plantations, we talked about forced labor camps? Which is true, it's an accurate depiction of what was happening there.
Amy: Nobody wants to get married on a forced labor camp.
Suzanne: Yeah, we are, come to our wedding on the forced labor camp, right? Yeah, these, these words are important and they shape our point of view and it can, I will say that from my perspective, I don't know what your perspective has been, Amy, but, but using the word sometimes can feel a little artificial or heavy handed.
You know, for example, it was really hard for me to talk about kind of white, you know, the white supremacism in America. That that was just kind of a basic part of our culture. It wasn't just the KKK and their, their sheets, right? Those terms were so loaded, but the more, I mean, I used enslaved people because it's more accurate and it gives a more accurate. idea of who we're talking about. Forced labor [00:23:00] camps is more accurate and gives more information than plantations does, right? So, so these words are being used because they're, they're better descriptions. So it's worth, it's worth taking those jumps even if it feels weird, or if it takes a while to get comfortable.
Amy: And even smaller changes like talking about Stonewall as an uprising instead of a riot, like, just the little connotations of words like pack such a punch and uprising is a good thing and uprising is where people stand up against something that's wrong and fight back and a riot is where people break televisions.
Suzanne: Right, right. I think that, yeah, I think that's very true. And we, these are the words we've used because these are the words we've been taught, right? And, so it takes an active, you know, an active choice to, to make these changes. And also we were talking about earlier too, we don't [00:24:00] just want to talk about oppression and suffering.
We don't just want to talk about the people who've been left out of these stories in terms of their oppression, in terms of overcoming suffering, all that kind of stuff. Because that leads to this very narrow view.
Amy: Well, we're still centering colonialism when we do that.
Suzanne: It's still, yeah, because how do they overcome colonialism?
Or isn't it sad that they didn't overcome colonialism or whatever it is, right? We have to be sure that we are treating all people as people with experiences of joy and success and You know, everything that comes along with existing as a person.
Amy: I remember, and gosh, Suzanne, I think this has been like, we are so old.
I think this was like 10 years ago, but I remember you telling me about this book you were reading about the lives of enslaved people. In the southern United States and how there was this conception that enslaved people were lazy [00:25:00] and that they didn't work hard. And you said, but this book is proposing that this, this activity was a form of resistance, right?
It blew my mind. It changed the way that I looked at everything in, in history. I mean, it really like, It was revelatory for me in this amazing way. And I think there are so many discoveries like that, where you just haven't looked at something that way and where people's stories are not just about like them in the context of colonialism.
They're about their own individual movements and efforts and ideas and inspirations. I, That book, I didn't even read that book that you read, but it changed my life.
Suzanne: It's really powerful, right? Because I was used to growing up with a story, well, oh, look at how, look, it's so sad that the white enslavers stereotyped the people that they thought they owned by saying they were lazy and they broke a lot of tools and they [00:26:00] did all this — in the book is like so that's resistance, right? That is resistance to being enslaved. That is people, a story of people pushing back in the only way that it may have, and it wasn't even entirely safe, but like, you know, in, in ways that were as safe as they could.
And that's, first of all, I, I believe that 100% and, but it's a more interesting story. It's, it's a better story, it's a more accurate story, but yeah, that's, that's a shift of point of view.
Amy: Well, it turns out that this whole narrative of like, oh, poor enslaved people is such a lie. Yeah, enslaved people fought back all the time in so many different ways and we never talked about that when I was studying history and I feel like that never came up.
Suzanne: No, well except in fact you see that as an argument. I wouldn't say pro slavery but you know there's an argument out [00:27:00] there that it wasn't.
Amy: I think of it as the anti anti slavery argument, right?
They're not pro slavery.
Suzanne: They're not pro slavery.
But this idea like well if they really didn't like it they would have done something about it and it's like but they did.
Amy: Turns out they did a lot.
Suzanne: All the time. They never stopped. Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's infuriating.
Amy: Well, this is part of teaching our kids, right?
Because, because, like, we learn this stuff. And so, showing them what our own growth looks like, showing them how we... Change the way that we talk, you know, saying to your kids, like, well, you know what, I used to refer to enslaved people as slaves, but it turns out that that is really not the best way to describe them.
So I'm going to change my language and do better. Kids really respond well to like their parents coming to them and saying, oh, you know what? I was wrong. I mean, I don't know about your kids. My kids love that.
Suzanne: They love [00:28:00] that. Everybody loves that. All the students love that. Like, nope, I was wrong.
I screwed up. This is what I'm going to do differently. Well, I was going to say, doing all this makes reading the news a lot more interesting, because I don't know if you've seen it out there, but there are a lot, there is so much pushback to teaching this kind of history, right?
Amy: Oh my gosh.
Suzanne: To and teaching, and teaching different perspectives, more perspectives than the... white, male, European, colonizer story of freedom and opportunity. I was thinking in more than one state, I think it's Florida, and I don't remember the other state now, you can talk about things like the Tulsa Massacre, but only if you don't mention race. Which is —
Amy: Wait! No, wait!
Suzanne: No, it's absurd on the face of it.
It's absurd on the face of it. It's It's like talking about the suffragists without acknowledging that they didn't have the right to [00:29:00] vote. So nothing makes sense, right? And then I just saw I just saw this morning --Amy, you're going to need to hold on to something --that in Florida the new curriculum that has been approved for the state the new history
Amy: Oh, no Suzanne, is it bad?
Suzanne: It's bad-- Requires that middle schoolers are taught that during slavery enslaved people learned valuable skills that they could then use on their own behalf, right, as presumably later in life. I don't know. I don't know. But that's in the official history. That was not there, because it's not true. Again, I was just reading some history the other day, and it was talking about how in many states, the slave codes included laws that they were not allowed to farm for themselves. That was one of the things they were not allowed to. They weren't allowed to grow their own food. But no, but they're learning valuable skills along the way.
So. So this is kind of ridiculous over the top pushback, both in big ways and small ways. Those are kind of some big ways, but I think [00:30:00] there's, you know, does your book talk about, does your textbook, who are the individuals who are named in your textbook? Are they all white males? That might be a concern, right?
Amy: And this is, I mean, in all fairness to everybody, This is the history that we this is the way we grew up learning history. So, like, if you went to a traditional school for middle school and high school, this narrative of white colonial exceptionalism is the one that you learned, like, If you haven't checked yourself, that's what you believe.
Suzanne: No, and I, I don't want myself for myself, you know, I've always been a fan of well, George Washington, I've been a fan of, and, and I read a ton of history, I like reading about these guys I find them interesting, and so to kind of grapple with the fact that, no, he enslaved people, and there's just, there's, you know, that's just a [00:31:00] fact, right?
To kind of grapple with some of the unsavory parts of that is I get weirdly defensive about it sometimes, right? Like, I get weirdly defensive, you know, Abraham Lincoln did not agree, did not believe in black equality and I get weirdly defensive about these people that I have looked up to for so long as part of my life and as part of my cultural history, of us kind of looking at their whole story and so I know there's some emotions around, around all of this
Amy: I think if any historical figure is treated as a hero — I mean, we have to go into that knowing that that people aren't heroes, right? That people are way more complicated than that. And we can love Abraham Lincoln and all the things that he accomplished, while still acknowledging that he wasn't a perfect person. Like, it doesn't, it doesn't make him [00:32:00] not someone that you can respect and have a good opinion of.
It's just, there's, there's more to the picture.
Suzanne: There's more to the picture. And I, I think I have been trying to look at all of this ridiculous pushback as in some ways good news Showing that progress has been made, right? If everybody, you know, I talked about progress not being made in my daughter's literature class But if, if history was being taught the same way it was in the 60s, 70s, 80s Then we wouldn't be having these issues come up, right?
This is a reaction against the progress, the changes, the, the opening up of the story, the, the telling more people's stories. And this, this, it turns out is a change that is deeply threatening to those who have adopted kind of the white supremacist patriarchal point of view. And that's probably good.
But so yeah, so pushback is a sign of progress. It's also [00:33:00] infuriating and disheartening. But I think, ultimately, if we can keep moving forward, the entire, all of this history is part of our cultural inheritance in the United States, right? So we don't have to view this as we're trash talking old white guys and, and diminishing our history.
We are expanding the idea of who we celebrate and what accomplishments we celebrate. And there is a lot to celebrate in our history. My life is enriched by knowing more about Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. Two names that, from my regular education, I could have told, I could have said, Oh, I recognize those names.
But I would not have been able to say what they did or who they were. I just had a vague idea of them as Black Americans who had done something during that bad time of slavery that we fixed.
Amy: Well, and that's it, right? Because it opens the door for us to have [00:34:00] heroes who aren't just white men. I mean, nobody's gonna be perfect.
We're never gonna find like some superhero, magical, marvelous person, right, who does every single thing, right? All the time. Because spoiler, sorry to spoil this for you, people aren't like that. people make mistakes, but expanding the stories that we tell about who is the United States, what is the history of the United States, we also get to adopt all kinds of heroes who aren't white men and they're awesome people who it's exciting and I mean, it's kind of kind of wonderful to have new heroes, people to look up to people to emulate people to admire. Women, and people of color, and Latinx people, and Asian Americans, and I mean just this whole glorious, I mean for real, like the actual melting pot that we're always talking about that isn't real, but the actual, like, [00:35:00] combination of amazing people who make up U. S. history. Like, they, we get to have them. They get to be part of us. Like, we're, we're not just the white colonizers. We're also all the other people.
Suzanne: People who look like our students and the people we care about. People who are not cis, who are not straight. People, you know, all kinds of different people.
And that's kind of amazing. And, and I love that. And, yeah. Huh. So, I think, I think for me, this is part of the work of coming to terms with the difficult and tragic and horrible parts of our history. I don't think that our history is entirely that story, but there are definitely parts of it that we have never come to terms with, I think, as a culture, and, and made amends for, right?
We've never really figured out how to. We can't even talk about it right now.
Amy: Yeah.
Suzanne: But I think that this part of the work, even if we're doing it as [00:36:00] individuals, even if what it looks like is educating ourselves and educating our children or helping to educate our children as homeschoolers, I think this is part of that bigger, that bigger work, that bigger project, which none of us can tackle on our own and, and many of us may feel powerless about.
But it matters, and it makes a difference, I think.
Amy: It's hard work, but it's such good, rewarding work to do.
Suzanne: Mm hmm. The stories just, they're all good. They're good stories. They're all, I love a good, I love a good story. Amy, what haven't we talked about? Decolonizing the curriculum. Is there anything else we wanted to say?
Amy: I mean, I'm sure that this is a topic that we will revisit because, like I said, this is, this is a verb. It's something that we're doing all the time. And I feel like, like, we're always kind of if we're not always growing and doing it new ways, and we're not always like, running into things where we feel [00:37:00] sort of resistant and defensive and getting past that resistance and defensiveness to see what's underneath it, I mean, I feel like we're not decolonizing. So I think, I think just, this is a, this is the beginning of a conversation, not the end.
Suzanne: So if it gets easy, we're doing it wrong. Is that what you're saying?
Amy: We're probably doing it wrong, but that doesn't mean that it's not nice sometimes when it's easy.
Suzanne: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hard can be wonderful. Hard can be wonderful. Especially if it gives me excuse to read more books.
Amy: We should say, though, we should say, Suzanne, that if people love this idea of decolonizing U. S. history with high school students, they should check out our Deep Thought History classes online, because they're pretty awesome, I have to say.
Suzanne: They are, they are, what the subtitle is, what the Queer, Colorful, Feminist, Immigrant History of the United States, which, which I love that you came up with that. That is, that is a glorious and beautiful thing to do. And we've talked about, Amy and I have talked about like [00:38:00] junior high versus high school, and it's like in the middle school, in the junior high, we're trying to get a lot of those, like, like we can't skip talking about Thomas Jefferson, right?
We want people to have all the knowledge all the context that they need. You know, I can perhaps give my lecture on the top 10 ways why Thomas Jefferson is the worst. But, you know, once you have that context and once, hopefully, you have the basics when you get to high school, then you can start having the really, really interesting conversations going deeper, going further.
Making more connections, which is really awesome. And, and now we're so excited that that curriculum is up and available to everyone.
Amy: I'll throw a link in the show notes, but it's learn. homeschoollifemag. com. If you want to check it out, the classes start all the time. So you can sign up anytime and you can come nerd out with us about amazing people like Charlotte Forten and Bayard Rustin.
And yes, of course, Harriet Tubman. [00:39:00]
Suzanne: Right, of course, of course, Harriet. Everything should, there should be Harriet Tubman statues in every city.
Amy: I would watch a Harriet Tubman Netflix series, like a fan fiction Netflix series. I honestly would.
Suzanne: Okay, so next time on the podcast, we wanted to talk a little bit more about giving some specific. advice, maybe giving some like specific recommendations and suggesting. So we're calling it Books to read instead of Little House on the Prairie, So some options to some of the books that that we grew up with but then upon revisiting them we find that maybe they don't reflect our values or even books like To Kill a Mockingbird, which I think is an excellent, excellent book. It's an excellent work of literature. It is perhaps not what we should be looking to as the great American novel —
Amy: For racial justice —
Suzanne: I don't think it lives up to that, to that title.
So like, what could [00:40:00] we read that would talk more about racial justice? So yeah, so that's what we're going to have on our next episode. Meanwhile, what's new online at homeschoollifemag. com, Amy?
Amy: Oh we've got all kinds of stuff happening. So the podcast, you may have noticed, we're like on episode three.
So the podcast is coming regularly. We're trying to get a new episode up every month, which is very exciting. But the really cool thing that's happening at homeschoollifemag. com right now is our Home School Life Swag, our secular homeschool swag, Suzanne and I have been making t shirts and other gear, tote bags and things to help secular homeschoolers identify each other in the wild, which we are very excited about because as secular homeschoolers who often were kind of scoping the park group to see like, is there another secular homeschooler here?
It was pretty, it's, it's pretty delightful to imagine seeing someone wearing a [00:41:00] Secular Homeschoolers Unite t shirt at Park Day or our favorite t shirt. Suzanne, do you want to tell the story of how we made up this t shirt?
Suzanne: So you guys heard us talk in our last episode about the conference that we went to, the conference that shall not be named.
As we mentioned then we were not expecting the level of, Christian, nationalist, racist dialogue that was happening.
Amy: Wow, that was a very nice way to put it.
Suzanne: We were terrible, terrible people, and instead of paying attention to what they were saying, we were scribbling ideas for school slogans in our notes, and particularly there was one point where someone was talking about the, the benefits of school choice. What he really meant was the benefits of not having public education, the benefits of getting government out entirely of education, which, which I don't agree with. But it seems to me a fairly extreme position to take, but he was talking like, yeah, school choice works out as it turns out.
There's [00:42:00] not really any schools of witchcraft or anything that jump up. So, Amy and I were immediately like, that's our school t shirt. That's our school t shirt. We are now the Big Gay School of Witchcraft and Critical Race Theory. We are, 100 percent.
Amy: So, because we're moving to a bigger space for our academy location, which is very exciting, we we decided to make some t shirts for a fundraiser.
So, if you cannot live, Without a big gay school of witchcraft and critical race theory t shirt. And honestly, how can you live without the shirt? You can go to homeschoollifemag. com slash swag. to pick one up for yourself. I'll also drop a link in the comments.
Suzanne: There are also, I should say, tote bags and water bottles.
And I have been so enjoying listening to Amy cackle with glee over the past week as she has put all this stuff online because it has been a lot of fun. Alright, when you're not podcasting, Amy, what are you reading right now?
Amy: So I'm actually reading a [00:43:00] book that is really interesting to me. It's called Pointless: An English Teacher's Guide to Meaningful Grading. And the idea is to do away with with grades. For high school students to kind of let go of grades. And then if you do get rid of grades, you get rid of points. What do you use instead? I feel like this is the direction that I've been moving for a long time.
Like I've wanted to move in this direction. I'm not sure. I'm not sure it will ever make sense to like completely let go of a transcript. So I'm not sure exactly what this is going to look like, but I'm getting a lot of really good ideas and I'm excited. Maybe when I, when I feel like I know what I'm doing a little bit more, and I have some like plans that I'm going to try, maybe we could even do a podcast episode about it because I find it really inspiring.
Suzanne: I'm definitely putting it on my to read list. There, there has been a lot of great articles and books and stuff about the ungrading movement coming [00:44:00] out. A lot of it's coming out from college professors but also at the high school and lower levels. And it's, it's, I think it's a small movement, but I, I think it is definitely kind of hopping, right?
There are some definitely people who are really working on it hard right now.
Amy: Well, it's tough. It's tough because you want, Because I think that, like, the point of grades has kind of shifted significantly, and now, I mean, I don't know what an A means anymore, and if I don't know what it means, then how is a student going to know what it means?
Suzanne: Well, yes, and we talk about that a lot in our school at the academy, where if we can take grades out of the equation, right, you're not, point of education is not to get the letter, the point is to learn something. Right. But then we also want to give people, we want to acknowledge what they've learned and and show that off.
It's tough. It's a tough question.
Amy: Well, and with grade inflation in traditional schools, you [00:45:00] know, it's it like we want our students to also be competitive with students who are getting all A's in high school for just. Checking the boxes, which, which I mean, I'm not criticizing public schools at all. I'm just saying, well, I think we all know grade inflation is a big issue.
Suzanne: You know, the more I look at the students we have coming in who are opting into homeschooling and they'd never considered it before. But, you know, the traditional school wasn't working for them. The more I see that all of this stuff that is not working is stuff that is out of the control of individual teachers.
Yeah. And, in the vast, vast, vast majority of cases, out of control of even individual schools within a school system, right? That ridiculous Florida stuff I talked about earlier, that was on the state level. That has nothing to do with the teachers who are trying to do their job in the classroom and who now...
You know, as part of their job description have to do something [00:46:00] ridiculous and in fact, the pushback that we see are from teachers associations and teachers unions and these groups. So, you know, just to acknowledge that we talk about difficult things. We know this is not about the people who are doing the work.
Who are showing up with the children every day.
Amy: A lot of public school teachers are basically heroes who are doing everything that they can to make it work. Because, I mean, I think that this is an important, like, value statement for us at Home School Life, which is that we 100 percent support public education and Educated communities are better communities and like public education is a great thing.
I feel really lucky to be able to homeschool my kids, but I know it's not an option for everybody and I love that there's a great free alternative to that. Public schools are amazing. I'm so happy to pay my taxes for public, I've never had to pay my taxes, but the money that goes to public schools I don't resent at all.
Suzanne: [00:47:00] Yeah, no, there's so many great resources, and there's so And we don't think that homeschool is a solution for everyone. Even if everyone could, everyone shouldn't, right? This is
Amy: Right. It is
Suzanne: But anyway, that's a whole — Maybe that's a whole other podcast.
What am I reading? So, I actually just finished, so, so my daughter, who, who had the bad experience in high school of never getting to read. She was like, if I have to read about one more upper class British boy. I'm gonna throw something. I think that's when they did Ah, shoot, I forget the, I forget.
But they did Lord of the Flies back to back with something. Anyway, I can't, it's gone. Brain gone. She and I have started a little mother daughter reading club. since she's about to head off to Germany. So this gives us an excuse to read the same books and, and zoom together. And we just finished our second book, which I got to pick, which is The Sentence by Louise Erdrich.
I loved it so [00:48:00] much. It's the first adult novel that I have read by Erdrich. I had. She's been on my list for a long, long time, but a lot of her topics felt very heavy. So I'd kind of never gotten around to it. And The Sentence is her most recent novel. It was nominated for a lot of awards.
And I just found it... Delightful. I just found it. I mean, it's about some very heavy things. It's set in Minneapolis during the pandemic and the George Floyd uprising. And but it's also set in a bookstore. It's set, in fact, in Louise Erdrich's own bookstore, and she is a background character in the novel.
So, throughout, it is. It is about a love of books, among all the other things that it is about. And if you want to hook me in, give me a book that has book lists inside it.
Amy: Yeah.
Suzanne: Yeah.
Amy: Or footnotes. Does It have footnotes?
Suzanne: Doesn't have footnotes, but it does, at the [00:49:00] end, it's got recommended reading based on the protagonist's, the protagonist, the fictional, I should say, fictional protagonist's favorite books. And I went down and added a whole bunch of stuff to it.
So anyway, so that was, that was a great, a great experience. And I am really enjoying our our, our little mother daughter book club.
Amy: I love that you're doing that. I think that's amazing. So, I feel like we were trying to keep this to 40 minutes, and it's 51 minutes, but we did, I think we did really well, because we had so much to say.
Suzanne: We have opinions it turns out.
Amy: But, I think we should wrap it, and be back soon. So, thanks so much for joining us for this episode of the podcast, this podcast with Suzanne and Amy, brought to you by Home School Life Now. We will be back soon to talk more about all the places where home, school, and life intersect.
See you then!
Suzanne: Bye!
