Secular Homeschooling with Blair & Amy

Why do books get banned, and why should we read them when they do? Get ready to update your secular homeschool reading list.

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Hello and welcome to Secular Homeschooling with Blair and Amy. Brought to you by SEA Homeschoolers and home.school.life. I’m Amy. 

Blair: And I’m Blair. 

Amy: And we are here today to talk to you about, one of my personal favorite things, which is banned books. Let’s talk about banned books and why we should read all the banned books.

Blair: I wonder if people thought you were gonna say the patriarchy . 

Amy: In all fairness, there’s a big correlation between books getting banned and the patriarchy’s interest in what books get banned. 

Blair: Although it’s not dads for liberty. It’s moms for liberty. I’m just gonna be super judgy here, everyone. It reminds me of the moral majority that was always a minority, not a majority.

Amy: The issue, of course, with groups like Moms4Liberty is that they’re not actually for other people’s liberty, therefore controlling the narrative, therefore building the things that they want within the structure and kicking the things that they personally don’t want out. 

Blair: I am way more cynical about it. I think that they bring in money, they pocket that money. First person that alerted me that the Moms4Liberty person wasn’t very ethical was Sean, my 24-year-old. So that group, really not a Moms4Liberty fan, that sort of age group.

Amy: That makes sense, because it’s their liberty that’s getting curtailed the most aggressively. These are the people who want to read those books, who are the right age to read them, and who are having them taken out of their lives. Classroom libraries who have great experiences with those books in their classroom libraries and then now they see them getting pulled out of classroom libraries.

I think that’s really, maybe I should start complaining, Blair, about the white capitalist patriarchy and just get it all in there. No, Blair, teases me, I have really strong feelings about, like, how the patriarchy is subtly behind, the white patriarchy specifically, is subtly behind all the problems of modern civilization. 

Blair: So Amy’s going to start with a personal story. And then I did a little research about something and I’ll explain to you after Amy shares her personal story. 

Amy: My first experience with censorship was when I was growing up, and I want to say before I start that my relationship with my parents is a complicated one, but one of the things that I’ve always really appreciated about my mom is that she would buy me whatever books I wanted — I don’t know if you guys got the Scholastic book order form in school We got the Scholastic book order form, and my mom would let me get every single book — I don’t even know how she spent that much money on books for me, but she would let me buy every single book so I want to say I really appreciated that she was willing to let me read any book I wanted to. But here’s where the censorship comes in.

My mom, who was a very conservative Christian, Republican person with all of that implied in the 80s, would read all of the books before I read them. And she would go through with a black magic marker and black out any words or scenes that she thought were problematic. 

So I could read any Judy Blume book I wanted to, for example. But all the swear words would get blacked out. Any references to anything remotely sexy would get blacked out. She did leave the period stuff in, which I thought was cool. but I want to tell this story because I actually think that my mom is an example of what I would call reasonable censorship.

She did not try to stop me from reading the books that I wanted to read. She just went through and picked out the things that she thought would be terrible for me, and blacked them out. And it wasn’t like she was handing me a book that was, like, mostly blacked out. She, as an individual, individually decided what she thought was appropriate for her kid to read.

She did not send the blacked-out books to my school library and say, No one should be able to read these sections of these books. She did not call the school and say, These books should not be on the shelf of the library because they have these things in them. She made a choice for her individual child.

It was a weird choice. And I make fun of it a lot. But The point is, I think this kind of censorship, parents deciding what’s appropriate for their children, is totally fine. Parents deciding what’s appropriate for other people and their families is really shady and gross. Do you agree, Blair?

Blair: I do agree. Tell us, Amy, did you ever, try to figure out what the words were under the blacked out marker?

Amy: Okay, I really hope — I don’t think that my mom ever listens to my podcast, and just so you know if you hold the book up like a certain way to the light you can totally see what the words are So I knew it was like a weird little compromise that we made.

Blair: I inhaled books. I think I’ve told the story in the podcast already that I come from four generations, including my son, that we know of, people who taught themselves to read between two and a half and three. And we started inhaling books the minute we could read them.

My parents just gave me anything I wanted to read. Unlike Amy’s parents, my parents were not conservative and they were pretty liberal. I come by my liberal democratic roots honestly, in that regard — not that my whole family, I’ve got a lot of people in my family that aren’t as liberal as I am, but growing up, I had a liberal ability to read whatever I wanted.

I can remember a big conversation at dinner one night, a dinner party, and one of the people who had started his own school in New York. I grew up in Long Island.

And the kids could read anything they wanted, they just had to read. And so what they found was that a lot of kids that didn’t like to read, if you would let them read comic books, would become the top readers in their class and that their vocabulary improved dramatically because the thing about comic books and if you haven’t looked at a comic book in a long time, there’s some pretty advanced vocabulary in comic books and so my parents fell into the feeling that I could read anything I wanted to read and I read Years above my grade level. And so I often would just read the same thing. My parents were reading once I got to be in about middle school, probably about sixth grade. 

So actually this episode was suggested by Kat, because she said, hey, it’s Banned Book Month in September, your September 1st episode should be about banned books. And as we were planning and talking about this episode, I thought, it’s the weirdest thing. Nationally, I see the conversation about banned books in California, we’re not really talking about this. So I researched to find out why that was and on September 25th, 2023, our governor banned the banning of books.

He signed a bill into law to curb book bans. And the intention is to combat discrimination in schools. where books are, Pulled out of schools on the basis of the race or sexual orientation of characters or topics in the books. This is part of Newsom’s focus on educational freedom. Which he defines as the right for students to access a comprehensive and inclusive education that reflects the diverse experiences and perspectives of all Californians. This concept emphasizes the importance of protecting students rights to learn about various viewpoints and histories.

Newsome has stressed that educational freedom includes the ability to engage with materials that foster understanding, empathy, and an accurate reflection of the world and society. He believes educational freedom protects the rights of families to be involved in the educational decisions affecting their children.

I think that’s really interesting because the Moms for Liberty cohort say that they’re protecting families and yet it’s families who have had to fight back. Families that want a more inclusive perspective and they don’t want certain books pulled. Now I went searching to see if any other states had a law like California.

And actually, Illinois beat California by about three months to enacting a law that’s similar to the one in California. The governor of Illinois signed a law that withholds state funding from any library that bans books for partisan or doctrinal use. This law is designed to combat the growing trend of book bans, ensuring that educational and library materials reflect diverse perspectives and experiences without being subjected to ideological censorship.

The thing about these laws that Newsom and Pritzker are putting into play, protect librarians. And teachers. And so it’s really important that we remember how important it is that there are laws protecting these individuals. Can you imagine as a librarian getting death threats and hate mail? But there are librarians who say that has happened to them. It’s just insanity that people are doing that. I’m telling you, if somebody’s got that much hate in that situation, counseling is needed.

I agree. 

Amy: I think that there is so much misplaced anger that comes out against people who aren’t like you in the world today. And I think, can we just address the sort of, what I think of is the central irony of book banning in the United States, which is that most of the people who are banning books are banning them because they don’t reflect some version of Christian values.

But the Ur text of Christianity, the Christian Bible, the Old and New Testament, as a book, would be banned under basically every single thing that is mentioned as a reason to ban a book. The Bible would not be allowed to be on any shelves. And so I feel like that irony suggests that there is more at work than just these are things that I don’t want my child exposed to.

I really do think it’s these are people existing that I don’t want my child exposed to. 

Blair: To me, the irony there is even bigger, and it’s that these people who are espousing Christian values could not tell you the root word of Christianity, could not tell you what the person who is the root word of Christianity honestly stood for.

Anyway, don’t want to get too religious here. I wonder if there are any spiritual doctrinal text that wouldn’t be banned, maybe Buddhist.

Amy: At least some Buddhist philosophy would get banned, right? Because it talks about multiple manifestations of God. So that would be, like, religiously inappropriate in schools that want to ban things that aren’t Christian. Yeah. I was trying to think of a better way to say that. But yeah, aren’t Christian is really the answer. I’d be concerned about banning books that aren’t about being gay, say, right?

Books that are just about a family that happens to have two dads, or a kid who happens to like to wear dresses and play baseball. Banning books like that where the story is not oh, here is my great revelation. Here is like my coming of age experience in this. It’s like saying that these people existing is somehow immoral, and like it does not seem like a very big step from banning a book about a trans five-year-old to banning trans people.

Blair: I would agree with you, and I think that might be part of the reason. I think part of it’s just money in their pockets. They can raise money off of the issue. I don’t know. maybe I’m being way too cynical.

Everyone feel free to disagree. Yeah, Amy, Let’s bring some history into this, and then let’s go to talk about books that people can incorporate, what people should do to celebrate banned book month. Can we relate book banning to book burning, which is another type of censorship — is the burning of books just a really outrageous amplification of book banning? And we take real issue with the Nazis burning books. Is it the same thing as banning books that’s happening now? 

Amy: Honestly, I’d rather somebody take a book that they hate and burn it in their backyard than try to get that same book taken off the shelves at the library.

Censoring literature has a long and storied history in Western civilization. From almost the very beginning of the time that people were writing things down, People were arguing that those things should be banned. If you look at, for instance, Athenian history, right? If you go back to classical Greece and Athens, you can see dozens and dozens of arguments recorded where people are like, this book shouldn’t be allowed to be read by children.

That is why Socrates, the famous philosopher Socrates, one of the crimes that he was accused of was corrupting the youth because he was giving them information that their parents didn’t think was appropriate for them. And this was even before the right-wing Christian religion was around. So Western history is full of people trying to control information and access to information.

We talk a lot about the medieval period. And how most of the learning was kept within monasteries and was limited by the church. So that people, it was on a need to know basis. And new information was rejected if it didn’t match up to these kind of religious ideas. But that didn’t stop then. In the 18th century when people started to, like, the novel got invented, right?

And people were like, children should not be allowed to read novels because it will rot their brains. They will absolutely rot their brains. So they will not be able to be intelligent human beings. They will learn all the wrong values from novels.

So I think it’s interesting that it is more common in Western civilization to see people trying to ban books than to read. I guess as long as people have been trying to defend it, there have been people who have been fighting against it, but it has happened in every period of Western history.

It’s very different in the East, I think. 

Blair: In the East or the Southeast? 

Amy: Like Asia, the Middle East. They have their own stuff, but in a different way. 

Blair: PEN America, the Freedom to Write, which is a wonderful resource for anyone who wants more information about books that are being banned. Here are the eleven books that are the most banned in the first half of the 2022 23 school year. The first one is GenderQueer: A Memoir. 

Amy: It’s a really lovely book. 

Blair: Tell us who should read that book and why everyone should read it. Amy? 

Amy: I definitely think that this is a book that older middle schoolers and high schoolers should read. Because I think it addresses really frankly and thoughtfully what does it mean to not be gender conforming? What does it mean to make decisions about how you want to be?

The person that you are every day, what are the ramifications of it? What are the possibilities of it? There’s a little bit sexual in there. So if that’s something that you’re like, you haven’t covered that with your kid yet and you want to save it for a little later, that would totally make sense.

But there’s nothing in there that I wouldn’t let a late middle schooler or high schooler read. 

Blair: Okay. Flamer. Have you ever heard of that? 

Amy: I don’t know that one. 

Blair: Flamer is, I don’t know. We’re gonna have to look up Flamer spelled exactly like it sounds like it is. Okay, you look up Flamer. I will go to two that I have read.

One is A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas, which people love that book! Come on! The problem with her books is people think there’s too much sex in them. I guess that’s it. It’s this whole thing where there’s this purity culture.

Amy: People who talk about too much sex in books should have to explain what enough sex is. Like what’s the sufficient amount of sex? If they can explain that I’m willing to listen to them say that it’s too much.

Blair: That amount of sex was in something for boys, would they still have an issue with it I would like to know and then the other book The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.

I am so offended any time I see that Toni Morrison’s books are banned, really because it’s so racist. Her goal is to, is the way she portrays what it was like to be an enslaved person and the fallout and the after effects. And, yeah, you know what? That’s uncomfortable as heck. 

That’s uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable, and it’s a story everyone should have to be forced to face some of that discomfort. 

Amy: I think it is a hard book to read. And when I read it in my high school lit class we had — I grew up in a really small town and there were like three Black students in the entire school. And one Black student in my AP Lit class when we read that, and I think that having classroom full of white, privileged kids who didn’t realize that they were privileged talking about this book with one Black student must have been really hard on that student in ways that I didn’t recognize.

One thing that I tried to do as someone who teaches is to not create situations where people who’ve been historically marginalized have to be the spokesperson for their community with a reading assignment. I think that as a teacher, you might choose not to teach that book in a mostly white class to be respectful towards students who don’t want to have their experiences tokenized or who don’t want to have to be the spokesperson for all the people like them. 

Blair: I could see that. I had my son read Beloved and coupled that with Between the World and Me. That’s not just a really important story to read, but Ta Nehisi Coates is absolutely, like Tony Morris, is absolutely one of the most talented writers I think that I’ve ever read. Simile and metaphor. I had to read the book three times because the first time I got so caught up in the magic of just Coates’ writing, I had to read it again before I could teach it. And then my son and I would make notes. So I did this thing where, I would read it and make notes through it.

And then he was required to make notes. So all of our books we used in middle school and high school lit have writing all in them. So I would really talk about some of the powerful messages that was coming from the books. I think that’s actually a really great way for you to teach it in your homeschooling. And the reason I say that is because you’ve got a lot more experience and you’ve got a perspective that’s generally more nuanced. So he had to respond, but then he had to write things that he noticed as well, so that then I would read through and read those. And it’s a really powerful way to teach literature in a homeschool situation.

Amy: I love collaborative annotation. I think there is almost nothing as effective for reading complex texts. And, it’s also like. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this, but when you have a teenager or a partner, sometimes it is easier to talk about things, big, important things when you’re driving, because you don’t have to look at each other, and I think annotating a book is the same way, It takes away some of the vulnerability of speaking out loud and lets you get your ideas straight and put them down so that you’re able to be more open and be a little braver about making connections and extending what you’re thinking.

And I love that about annotation. 

Blair: And Coates, if you don’t know the story, they banned his book . And so he showed up and said that he didn’t think that Between the World and Me should be banned. That’s pretty powerful. 

Amy: It looks like Flamer is about a gay kid who gets bullied at Boy Scout summer camp in the 90s. Again, like this is an experience that a lot of people have and reading about it builds empathy and understanding. And I don’t understand how empathy and understanding are things that we wouldn’t want our children to have. 

Blair: Part of the reason that’s important to teach is because kids, people who don’t bully, who don’t have a problem, but who aren’t a part of that community, so it’s never happened to them. a lot of times you’ll see oh, that doesn’t really happen, that’s not really happening. When it is, but because it’s not someone’s reality, something they’ve seen happen. They don’t recognize the importance of paying attention, to the possibility of it happening. And. That is upsetting. 

Amy: A logical fallacy, too. Because I haven’t experienced this, it must not be true. 

Blair: It tells the converging narratives of five troubled teen protagonists. It’s noted for its gritty realism. That’s people who appreciate the book. But there’s sexual activity and drug use in it. 

Amy: It’s baffling to me that there seems to be a subset of people who think that if kids never read about sex, it will magically keep them from thinking about sex until they’re, I don’t know, married or responsible enough. To deal with it. I think the more kids can read about sex, the better; the more you can talk to your kids about sex, the better. 

Blair: I think sex just needs to stop being taboo. You and I grew up in, at a time when it was taboo. And I’m going to tell you, honestly, I wish that it hadn’t been treated as taboo. I frankly think you’re less likely to do some experimenting that in hindsight you’re like, Oh gosh, I wish I had not done that. Or you’re like, maybe if I’d have been able to talk to somebody about that, I wouldn’t have tried it, I’ve always been like way out there with all my kids. There’s no boundaries as far as that goes. Cause I want them to have somebody who is trustworthy to talk to about. but my son, when he wanted to know about sex came to me so we were on a walk.

He said, I’ve got something I want to ask you, mom. I’m like, what? And he goes it’s about sex. I’m like, you can ask me about anything. He said, so I’m wondering what pole dancing is, mom. Pole dancing led to a couple other things. And then I said, so while we’re having this conversation, let’s get a few things out on the table because obviously you’re starting to be curious. And I just want to let you know that people don’t always just have sex when they want to have babies. Most of the time when people have sex, they have sex because it feels good so I told them, I’m like, when the time comes where you’re doing that make sure that you can’t get somebody pregnant unless you’re trying. TMI, mom, TMI. I cannot believe you went there.

But yeah, I was that mom, that embarrassing parents. So if my son wanted to read a book like Tricks. I’m for a family where there’s addiction. I would have been much more worried about that. But we also, had many conversations with my child about that, because I believe the narrative that psychologists have been pushing for years, which is talk to your children about things you don’t want them to do.

Amy: Yeah, don’t just ignore it. Yeah. I think it’s interesting. But because one thing that I would say I think is important is to make sure that — you want to read this graphic novel about a queer kid who gets bullied at camp. You should read it. It’s a great book. Make sure though that you’re not just reading. trauma porn. You want to make sure that all your books about queer people are not books about terrible things happening to them You want to be sure that every book that you read about Black people is not about slavery or terrible things happening to Black people You want to be sure that every book that you read about people who are stuck in bad financial situations are not about people who are stuck in bad financial situations, and it’s terrible.

You want to make sure that as you’re reading books, you’re balancing them. This isn’t banning books. This is just making sure that you are not categorizing people into a category of, oh, being gay is terrible. Oh being Puerto Rican is terrible. 

Blair: Okay, book number four, The Handmaid’s Tale, the graphic novel. I don’t know anything about this. Do you, Amy?

Amy: Oh yeah. So I read The Handmaid’s Tale when I was 17.—

Blair: The graphic novel is the one that’s been banned. 

Amy: — and it changed my life. I think that it inspired what I studied in college. It inspired the way that I lived my life. So I loved this book. And when the graphic novel came out, I couldn’t wait to read it. I was so excited. And I think the graphic novel does an absolutely amazing job with the text.

I think almost everyone knows what The Handmaid’s Tale is about. It’s about a futuristic society where the United States has become a Christian theocracy and women have no rights. Basically no rights. And handmaids are women who, just like the handmaids in the Old Testament, are, like, the concubines, of powerful men.

And their job is just to have children. That’s what they’re there for. To have children. With all the, mechanics that implies. I can see why people wouldn’t want you to read this book, because banning books is a big part of what happens in the novel. It’s part of the way that society ends up in this terrible place that people have to escape from.

Blair: Okay, so I’m going to admit, ooh, it’s my day for sharing secrets. I own The Handmaid’s Tale, not the graphic novel version. I’ve read two chapters of it and I went, no. I know the story, and here’s part of the reason, I was like, I just don’t buy this. It just makes people nervous. And then, especially for some of you it’s baby steps, but sometimes it’s got to feel like you’re moving closer to it.

Amy: The cool thing about that book is that Margaret Atwood’s imaginary theocracy only contains things that happened historically. It only contains things that actually happened in the Western world. They didn’t all happen at once, the way that they do in the book, but that’s why it’s so scary, I think.

Blair: I gotta say, What it is about being stronger and having a penis that makes you superior, I’ve never understood. 

Amy: You will know this because you’re a scientist, isn’t there like a whole school of thought that in fact the XY combo is the result of a broken X chromosome? It’s like an incomplete X? 

Blair: I don’t know. And here’s why I would have to look at that. Two sexes didn’t evolve with humans. the evolution of sex is absolutely fascinating. I haven’t read any good science treaties on it. I’ve read a couple of science themed books, but I call them more pop sci. 

Crank is the fifth now, these aren’t the most banned books These are the most banned books in the first half of 2022-2023. 

Amy: What’s really interesting about this, like the books that people are choosing to ban is, for a long time, books about the civil rights movement, or queer experiences, would get banned because they had explicit sex, or they were very upsetting, or there were deaths.

And so people said, okay, and they started just writing books where gay people existed. It was like just as a fantasy novel, but there’s a gay person, it’s a, science fiction novel, but here’s a Black person and people started banning those too, which really does suggest that it’s not the sensitive subject matter that people want their kids to stay away from.

It’s the actual existence of people who aren’t like them. 

Blair: So the 11 most banned books, that we’re talking about. 10 of the 11 authors and illustrators are women or non binary individuals. Four of the books are written by authors of color and four by LGBTQ plus individuals, identities historically underrepresented in publishing and in school libraries.

So Crank. That’s the next one on the list and it is banned for drugs and It’s the memoir of the author’s daughter battled with addiction of crystal meth. I guess it depends on where you land on that. What about Sold? Do you know the book Sold, Amy?

Amy: Is it also a graphic novel?

Blair: Sold is a book about a young Nepalese girl who struggles to survive after being sold into sexual slavery. 

Amy: I could see that there are stages of my kid’s life where I would have been like, I’m not sure that’s a book that I want you to read right now. I’m sure that there’s a lot of difficult stuff in that book, but again saying I think my child needs to be a little older before they read this and banning books are two totally different things.

Blair: Also, I feel like it is something that kids need to know about. Then the book Push, which contains sexual content and emotional abuse. But it largely focuses supposedly on people being erased. Oh, and there’s profanity in it. Oh, I see. Wait, the protagonist uses profanity frequently. And supporters of the book say it puts a human face on victims of incest and child sexual abuse. Again, like Sold, I could see that being really tough stuff.

Now, we’ve already talked about A Court of Mist and Fury and The Bluest Eyes. Then there’s This Book is Gay.

Amy: Oh, that’s a great book. Our sixth through eighth graders read that book and loved it. 

Blair: Tell us what it was about and tell us who might like it, Amy?

Amy: Oh gosh. So it is really a book about the experience of being LGBTQ and so I think everyone would like it and read it. I would maybe even do it as a read aloud with elementary students. Why was it banned?

Blair: Because this book is gay? 

Amy: Sure, yeah. So yeah, it’s very gay. I highly recommend it. 

Blair: A poetry book called Milk and Honey has been banned. 

Amy: Oh, that’s funny. 

Blair: It mentions sexual assault and violence. 

Amy: My high schoolers love Kupi Kaur, yeah. But they love her poetry. They are all over it. And I say anything that makes kids excited about poetry is a Why would you want to get rid of that? 

Blair: Okay. The states with the most book banning? Texas, Florida, then Missouri. oh, wait a minute, South Carolina. The five big ones are Texas. Utah, Missouri, South Carolina, and Florida. 

Amy: I feel like first of all, the great thing about banning books is what Kurt Vonnegut said, that the best way to get somebody to read a book is to ban it. I think people banned several Kurt Vonnegut books over the years, including Slaughterhouse Five, which I would argue is a masterpiece.

 so one great thing about book banning is that it definitely points kids towards books that they might want to read. So that’s useful. The other thing is that it is really easy to incorporate banned books into your homeschool because they’re really just books. With the exception of a couple of books on the most banned list, I would have read all of these books with my kid in middle school and had no problem with it.

Probably I wouldn’t have read about crystal meth with my sixth grader. Probably I wouldn’t have read about sexual slavery with my sixth grader, but I totally would have read these books out loud as just part of our homeschool reading list.

think that one of the best thing that you can do is show support for these books.

Number one, by checking them out at your library, show the librarians that there’s a market for these books, that people want them, that they’re interested in them. If your library doesn’t have them, ask your librarian to order them. This is a really normal thing. Librarians get this all the time. They have forms that you could fill out. They might even have, like computer stuff. So you can totally request books that aren’t at your library.

Donate books to your homeschool group or co-op. I know there are a lot of banned picture books that are so much fun. I buy them for my students. Sometimes we read them out loud at lunch, where we do a little picture book read aloud at lunch. And high schoolers love that. They really love it. More than little kids even. So donate them to your co-ops, to your homeschool groups.

Go to your local bookstore. Ask if the author can come in and sign them. Ask if they have signed author copies. Make sure that they order the book. Do that sneaky thing that authors do when they’re at a bookstore.and find the books that are banned and turn them out. So that they’re flaunting themselves on the shelf. They’re really easy for people to see.

Basically just normalize it. Give them as presents. For kids birthday parties, for holidays, just get banned books out there all the time and let people know that these are books that have value to you and your family, which is the best way to make sure that they stay on shelves or that they get on shelves at all.

Blair: My advice is to read big, meaty, meaningful books that cover topics that give your child broad perspective of what’s going on in the world, and that means including topics that can be controversial and can be uncomfortable. It’s okay to be uncomfortable sometimes. And when you’re educating children around some of these societal issues and history social studies issues if you’re not uncomfortable you’re not tackling some of the realities that will make your child more thoughtful about what the lives of others might be like and might look like. I think it’s so important. That would be my number one advice, and I would read them with your child.

Make sure that you have discussions about this. If something is uncomfortable, if you have a particularly sensitive child, Skip some of those topics. Charlotte’s Web is, and Where the Wild Things Are have been banned. You don’t have to get too crazy to include banned books.

I think it’s important to acknowledge that some books are banned. You, homeschool, so you get to read whatever you want. Homeschooling’s like the California, Illinois, of the educational, the academic community.

But then, my other tip, I can sum up in one word, vote. 

Amy: [00:39:00] Yes. Also I think that it’s worth considering ways that you may encourage censorship in your homeschool without thinking about it. I know that as a homeschooler, sometimes we feel like we want to make sure that we’re being academically rigorous, and one way that can play out is I see a lot of homeschoolers talk about twaddle. And by twaddle, they mean books that are just fun to read, that don’t have like literary merit, per se.

And I say, let your kids read what they want and do not be judgy about it. If your kid wants to check out the same book every week because they love that book and they just want to read about frogs or magic gardens over and over again, really, why would you stop them? Why would you want to limit their choices as long as they’re reading other stuff too?

If they’re reading a book that you don’t think they’ll like or that you don’t think was very good does it really matter? I think we can subtly encourage censorship that makes it easier for our kids to accept book banning and not because we’re bad parents or because we like support censorship in any way, but just like with our attitude, I think that there are ways that we can communicate to our kids that some books have value and other books don’t.

And literary merit is an important topic and one that you want to talk about with your kids But mostly kids should read things that they’re excited to read because they want to read them. 

Blair: There’s some cognitive science of learning that supports allowing kids to reread things. One of the things that happens when kids start to reread things is even if they’re not thinking about it, they’re paying more attention to how the text is structured, different phrases that are used. One way that reading extends to writing is the phrasing of certain words that go together. Once we see one word and the first couple letters of another word, we have an idea of what’s going to follow. And so that can be really important. Your child get some metacognitive [00:41:00] benefit. 

Yeah. So that, is that a wrap? 

Amy: It’s a wrap. I wouldn’t be surprised if we ended up doing another episode sometime about banned books, because there really is a lot to talk about around it. And I feel like it is in the homeschool world. It’s almost like your to be read list, right? You see a book is banned and you’re like, oh, I want to put that on the school reading list. 

Blair: I don’t pay that much attention. Part of that is because I’ve got a college student now who’s reading, just had me buy, oh, the book that is about the Civil War, that’s fun when your child starts to read it as an adult, young adult, and looking at what choices they make — he likes non fiction I cannot remember the name of the book. it’s been on The New York Times bestsellers — there’s people listening to this who know exactly what the book is because it is It’s about the aftermath, oh, Demons of Unrest. 

Amy: History books are fascinating. The Devil in the White City? About the Chicago World Fair?

Blair: Yes, and then the book I can’t remember the other book , now I can look up Eric Larson. Read these yourself if you like this area. Devil in the City of Angels and, The Splendid and the Vile. 

Amy: So that is a wrap for this episode of Secular Homeschooling with Blair and Amy brought to you by SEA Homeschoolers and home.school.life. So fun to chat with you today about banned books and our obsession with reading them, and we will look forward to seeing you soon. 

Let's talk about making back-to-school season special in our homeschools — plus tips for easing back into busy fall routines and things you can do right now to make your whole year better.

We use an automatic transcription app for our podcast, which makes it possible for us to include transcripts for our podcast episodes — but it does sometimes make weird errors! We do edit it, but I’m sure we miss things sometimes.

[00:00:00] Amy: Hello, and welcome to Secular Homeschooling with Blair and Amy. Brought to you by SEA Homeschoolers and home.school.life. I'm Amy. 

[00:00:11] Blair: And I'm Blair. 

[00:00:13] Amy: And we are here today on this muggy, hot summer day to talk about what we're all looking forward to, which is getting back to school? 

[00:00:23] Blair: I think most homeschoolers think of it as not-back-to-school. Yeah, it is hot. It's not muggy where I live in Southern California, but hot. Yes, it is. So.

I always think it's interesting the whole back to school, not back to school, because most homeschoolers who've been doing it for a while, they're more year round than back to school. We always did so many things during the school year, that there were these stragglers going into the summer.

What about you? 

[00:00:58] Amy: We’re year-round homeschoolers. I may have told you this story before, but when I started homeschooling, my daughter was in second grade — I couldn't figure out when to stop. Like, what was the right stopping point? And so we just kept going. And then it was the new — she was in third grade, and then we just kept going and kept going. So we definitely are still here around the school years, but just because I could never figure out where to stop.

I will say that we do a lot of stuff during the traditional school year, like a lot of our classes and a lot of our co ops and a lot of our activities are during the kind of September to May period. So summer is slower for us because our to-do list outside of home gets smaller, but we are year round homeschoolers. I do think, though, that it is fun to mark the beginning of a new grade. Even though my kids never know what grade they're in, a new learning year. I think it's fun to start fresh and obviously a big part of that is school supplies, because school supplies are the best.

[00:02:05] Blair: Oh I know, that was one of the things that I really miss, school, clothes shopping, and supplies, and much to my husband's consternation. We still usually did do some clothing shopping.

You know what, it used to be much more, at least based on what I see and see, it used to be much more common for people to not really want to use grades, but I think that, and it's not just been since COVID, I think it's been over the last 10 years, people are much more likely to talk about what grade their child's in, even if they're homeschooled. Is that something that you've noticed, Amy? 

[00:02:47] Amy: I think so, and I honestly think that it's because even though grades aren't super important as homeschoolers, it is the question that people ask kids all the time.

Every time you meet somebody, at the checkout at the grocery store or at the doctor's office, they say, what grade are you in? And so I do think that we've agreed that this is the social norm, is that you don't describe your child by how old they are, but by what grade they're in.

So I think more homeschoolers are doing that because we have more homeschoolers who are just regular moms. Secular homeschoolers are just regular moms making an educational choice for their kids. You don't want to have to get into a big philosophical discussion with a nice lady. 

[00:03:30] Blair: And it used to be much more loose about the grades and the ages you put on materials.

I know because when I wrote climate change, one of the reviewers got back to me and said, you don't have an age range on this. then I went looking at my other books that I had out. And when they first came out, they didn't have an age or grade range. And then they did.

And it is because people want to know that. I think sometimes it's because they want to have the flexibility of going back into traditional school, but also, as more homeschooled kids go to college. I think it just naturally lends itself to having your child's grade in mind because, if you've got someone who's in fifth grade, you're thinking, how many more years until they go to college?

[00:04:27] Amy: And it's an awesome milestone, I think, for kids. I think it's fun to start fifth grade or third grade or sixth grade. Get your shiny new notebook, some shiny new books, some new shoes, since they outgrow their shoes every five minutes. And just enjoy that, it can be a really nice moment to celebrate. Plus, you did it! You got through another year! Yay, you! 

[00:04:51] Blair: I really like that you use the word celebrate because when we, especially those of us who are in the sort of support business for homeschoolers, we don't focus enough on the celebration aspect because most of the people that come to us not because they're celebrating, but because they're struggling in some way.

And I really — We had struggles and we had hard times, and there were times when my child did not wish that I had not homeschooled him, but that has changed as he's gotten older and really become more familiar with, through his friend group, what it looks like to be in traditional school. 

To we, the things that I, so it, there's a lot more celebrative aspects. And so I think it's good to start and end with the celebration. 

[00:05:52] Amy: I totally agree. I think it's one of the most fun things. And it's nice for you. Take that moment, take a picture, label it. First day of third grade, first day of second grade, you're not going to regret that, right?

You're going to be really glad in years to come when you have that to look back at. I think these moments, these memories are really important. And we're so lucky as homeschoolers that we get a lot of moments like that. It almost feels like we don't need those big moments because we have a million little ones.

But I think those big moments are nice too. 

[00:06:25] Blair: So one of the things that, so my son went to kindergarten, traditional school. And I saw a recipe for making a school bus cake. Now, something I don't think I've talked about at all, is that I came really close to going to chef school instead of getting a degree in chemistry.

They go together. Oh, chemists, most chemists are really good cooks. Because they do, they go together. And I, in my family growing up was always known as like one, there's some really good cooks in my family. I'm right in there with them. so I would make these totally elaborate cake using candy and cut in special shapes and like a school bus.

And so after doing that in kindergarten, I thought, What am I going to do for first grade? And I would choose, so we did single subject science and single subject history, and usually I would do science. I would choose some, something thematic, so for first grade when we were doing biology, I think we were doing ancients in history. I made a mummy. 

[00:07:41] Amy: Amazing. 

[00:07:42] Blair: It was this pyramid cake and you opened the lid, you took the top off and there was a cake mummy inside. 

[00:07:50] Amy: Oh my gosh, that is amazing. You took pictures? 

[00:07:54] Blair: Oh, there, if you could see my office, it's really clean except for one corner has two computers sitting on top of each other.

And yeah, it's on, and then I've got another computer in a shed. Somewhere probably on a computer. The problem is I started homeschooling so long ago, there wasn't even an online to put it into. Yes. Pictures did happen, but they're probably on rolls somewhere. I've gotten those snapshots somewhere.

But I encourage you highly, and if you want to make cool shapes, Licorice is your friend. 

[00:08:27] Amy: Really, that's a good idea. I love that. 

[00:08:32] Blair: Licorice and the tape. We used fruit roll ups, but now people, I think my grandkids, if I were to do that for them, would rather have me make sour strands or something.

Yeah, okay. 

[00:08:45] Amy: I think I love that we always have a pancake start the first day of school. We always make pancakes together. And so I think having little family rituals and traditions like that — pancakes are not as fancy as cake cakes, but they're a fun way to start the year.

[00:09:01] Blair: Ooh, you could make pancakes in shapes, like you could make a three for third grade or bunny shaped. Okay, in case you're wondering, I do make pancakes shaped like that, and I like to make for the youngers. I like to make sandwiches that I cut out in numbers and letters as they're learning their alphabet.

And so it's not unusual to get a come over to my house just as you're learning how to spell your name and find that you have a sandwich. 

[00:09:35] Amy: When my daughter was in school during the couple of years that she was in school, I would pack her lunch every day. And I would try to Martha Stewart it.

I would cut her sandwiches into flowers and butterflies. And one day, she came home, and she just looked at me, and she said, Mama. Can I just have rectangles, please?

My adorable sandwiches are not even appreciated but that is what I gave her — rectangles. 

[00:10:02] Blair: Oh, I overdo it on that. But yep, not that my son has never told me not to do that. So I've been lucky. Now, of course, I don't really do it. But I am a foodie and I focus a lot on foods in case anyone's — I'm vegan. Yeah, eating out is a production. So we usually just stay home and I keep thinking, If I had the time, I'd be writing these amazing cookbooks, but not gonna happen. So let's get back to not back to school instead of Blair's cooking fetish.

[00:10:32] Amy: One of the things that I think is really challenging with back to school is that even if you don't take the summer off, definitely life slows down. And a lot of us are like ramping up when we return to fall and our co op starts and our drama classes start or whatever. So I'm going to say that one thing that I think is really important is to build yourself up to this, right?

If you had a kid in traditional school, you would spend the two weeks before school started trying to get your kid back on a normal sleep schedule, right? You'd push them to go to bed a little earlier and wake up a little earlier so that you'd be ready when school rolled around, and I think the same thing works really well with homeschooling. I have found that I don't try to start all our new stuff one week — I start a few weeks before I officially want to start by making sure that we're doing our family read alouds every day. And then, after a little while I add in math. So we're doing a little bit of math every day, and then I add in a little bit of something else so that by the time I officially start back this school, we already have our rhythm back, like our regular learning rhythm back, and it's much easier, gentler, and less stressful on all of us if we make it a process and not just a beginning boom.

[00:12:00] Blair: So the build up does something else as well. The build up also gets kids ready.

One of the things you hear from parents is that wait my I'm getting all sorts of pushback as we start academics again well that, a transition that Amy's talking about will help with that. But the other thing that helps with it is just to start preparing your child have a calendar — Oh 15 days until we start back to school. Now I did — this doesn't really relate to back to school, but I did want to interject, if your child struggles with a subject, don't take the summer off. And in this doesn't just apply to kids who are homeschooled — one of my — I have a granddaughter that kind of struggles with math, and I had a grandson who started school during Covid and really struggled with reading and is about to go into 3rd grade, so it's really important and I got wind of it at the end of 1st grade. So by the time he was done with 2nd grade, he was above grade level. But we did not let him take the summer off from reading because we didn't want to see any slide. Not everyone in his class who had the same experience as him. He struggled to learn to read, and so we all have been very thoughtful, and my granddaughter that math is an issue with, we've been really thoughtful about making sure that she's been doing math this summer Not a lot not, so much that, I mean they all complain the other day, on the 4th of July, we were having a conversation about how much we did it because we loved them, not because we wanted to torture them.

[00:13:54] Amy: Yeah, I think that you're right, and I think one of the really great things about homeschooling, That your routine, your family's homeschool routine, should actually be a very every day, every season kind of routine. I think that is part of the great thing about homeschooling is you don't have to get up at six o'clock and start doing math.

Get ready, wait by the school bus. You don't have to be like outta the house by seven. You can start your classes. As my kids get older, our classes roll back and back, and now we rarely start anything before 10am, and that is fine with me. Because we have the freedom to do that.

[00:14:37] Blair: Celebrate. Have a celebration. Make a crazy cake send it in, Amy or I will put it on Instagram. 

[00:14:45] Amy: Oh, it's actually your crazy back to school cake. 

[00:14:49] Blair: Not back to school cakes. The maybe I will be inspired to do something for my grandkids this year, and if I am I will absolutely share pictures.

So this let's talk about how you can set yourself up for success. That's the other thing that I think It will, a lot of people are really excited, but also a little nervous. Or what's even worse is when you're super excited and then three weeks in, you start to get nervous. Cause it's so —

[00:15:24] Amy: Nervous-cited that's from My Little Pony.

[00:15:28] Blair: Nervous-cited. Okay. It can really help for you to be organized. Now I know a lot of you are thinking but I talk all the time about organization and you're not super organized. but it really can help if you're organized and you do a little planning about what it's going to look like at the start.

It just makes it so much easier because your kids aren't the only ones who go from, 10 to 50 miles an hour or overnight, you do too. And so if have everything organized for the first month, or at least couple of weeks and you have a plan for what it's going to look like — that's meant to be broken, of course cause that's, it's easy to plan and then your kids get involved. What do you think? What advice, I think those two tips at least to really beginning are so important for success. 

[00:16:27] Amy: I think one of the things that we don't do often enough as homeschoolers is to when we start each new season of homeschooling, you might do it at the beginning of every new school year. You might do it like semester-y. But ask yourself, when this season is finished, what will make me feel like it has been a successful term of learning?

What is a successful term of learning going to look like for you? Does it mean that you're going to finish this particular curriculum? Does it mean that you're going to work with your child to build this particular skill? Is it a schedule thing? Are you going to do math three days a week? No matter what. Are you going to make nature walks part of your routine? What is really important for you to accomplish in this season of learning? And then don't lose sight of that, right? Because if you articulate it to yourself, it's more likely that you're going to accomplish it.

If you don't take time to articulate it to yourself and check in with yourself about it over the semester, you really don't have anything that you're working toward. I think having a few things that you're working toward is one of the ways that homeschooling can feel a lot more successful.

Nobody else is out there saying, okay, here are the metrics that you have to hit — you have to set your own metrics, and in order to feel like you're hitting metrics, you have to actually set them. You're the boss of that. You have to set the metric. So I definitely think so. 

[00:17:53] Blair: I love that you brought that in but I wanted a couple of the things that you listed.

I would encourage people not to use, do not use, we are going to finish this curriculum this year, my child is going to master these 10 skills. 

[00:18:11] Amy: Never, With 10 skills!

[00:18:13] Blair: But what I would really encourage you to do instead is come up with a system that you are going to use to track progress.

Because that is how all of us should be measuring success That's a traditional school mindset, that you have to get through a certain amount or that certain things have to be done. Fet some sort of practice work, sample something, figure out where your child is at the beginning, and then don't wait all the way to the end to grab a sample, because it can be really important for your child's learning for you to check in and use a diagnostic, not consistent testing, but a diagnostic to see if more learning needs to be done, more teaching needs to be done around certain things. But it also is how you can track your child's progress.

And I see people really stressed out all the time in the homeschool community and they, a lot of times when you talk to them, more one on one, you learn that they haven't really been tracking. And so they're looking at yesterday. Yesterday is not a good measure of whether your child has learned. Something a month ago, two months ago, the beginning of the school year. That's how you figure it out. If your child is learning. Yeah, I actually didn't think we'd talk about this, but I think it's important that over the summer when parents get this lull that maybe they rethink What could help them? So that they're not as worried or burnt out. Do some free work. Think about if you homeschooled last year or your child was in traditional school, think about what the stressors were, why you're homeschooling. Think about what the stressors were when you homeschooled last year and really think about what you can do so that you can be less stress and less burnout.

[00:20:24] Amy: Yeah, I love that. I want to say too, just like to chime in, talking about the difference between diagnostics and testing. I think you hear anything that sounds like testing, and we get riled up about it because we really dislike the emphasis on testing that schools have, and I think for me it helps to think about testing as it's a Pyrex measuring cup that you have in your cabinet, right?

It is a cup, there are lines on it, and when you pour water in it, you want to see how close to the lines your water gets. That's what testing is like, it's seeing how your kid measures up to these standards.

But diagnostics are like a measuring tape. You're pulling it out to see how tall your child is. You're pulling it out to see how much they've grown. You're not measuring it against anything but your own kid. And so for me that is helpful because I think diagnostics are really helpful because you're measuring your particular kid's progress. There's not all this whole context of how's everybody else doing and where do you fit into that.

Sorry I feel strongly that diagnostics are really helpful and that testing is problematic. 

[00:21:29] Blair: And this is, you and I've been having this conversation because just in case you're wondering, the curriculum Amy and I are working in has diagnostics. And so I came up with this idea, I wrote this whole thing, and then I freaked out because I was like, are people going to think this is all this testing?

Actually, if burnout is something, find somebody you can talk to. Find somebody who brings your level of am I getting this right? Down. So burnout should be thought of before you're burnt out. You want to add anything to that, Amy? 

[00:22:01] Amy: Yes. Think of your curriculum the way that Coco Chanel thought of her wardrobe. Always get rid of one thing before you start. Take one thing off. Because I promise you that the most stressful thing for homeschoolers is overloading. There's so many cool resources, so many cool possibilities. You can do everything and it makes you want to do everything. But don't. Don't. Take something off.

Take at least one thing off your plate before you start. I promise you will not regret it. In fact, I, myself, have gotten into the habit of cutting what I want to do in half. And then cutting it in half again for my classes that I teach with my high schoolers, because I know that's what I can get to and do a really great job with and have them do a really good job and come away from it feeling like we've been productive and awesome.

And not have the complete, I don't know, do you guys have this, the February collapse where you just want to curl up in a ball under your bed and cry and wait for it to be May? Why isn't it May yet? So I think cutting something from your to do list is ALWAYS a good idea to minimize burnout.

It's hard, but do it anyway. 

[00:23:16] Blair: I just need to admit to everyone that I did not do a good job of that. There was always more things that I could bring in — the problem with that is you can get your kids burn out. But the other thing that can happen is that as kids are learning, it can be a little scattered when you do that.

I read so much. I'm always like inhaling books. it's a problem. I keep telling my family, at least it's just books, but I do buy a lot of books. I was always stuffing more resources and more information. And where were you when I really needed you, Amy?

This is important advice. If you're like me and you have a problem with always bringing in more and more, now with the internet, that's. Way easier to do. 

[00:24:06] Amy: There are just so many great things. There really are. And the only reason that I know this is a good idea is because I've not done it for many years.

And I, I get seriously burned out. I just would like. Spin and spin and add and add and add and like I just I was tired by December. And I feel like then you're rushing through things to get to the next thing. You're like, oh we gotta finish math so we can do this awesome history. Oh, we gotta finish this history so we can do our science experiment.

And that's okay. Part of the great thing about homeschooling is that you can really slow down and learn. And so if all you do on Tuesday is this really awesome science experiment and you do it from beginning to end and you talk about it and you think about it and you reproduce it. To me, that is much more valuable than checking off an entire page of, quick lessons. For my kids, that was better. And for me, that was better learning and it wasn't learning that burned us out. It was learning that excited us. 

[00:25:06] Blair: Oh, that sounds really good. So find that. Yeah. Where were you when I needed you like 10 years ago?

[00:25:14] Amy: Okay. I doing exactly what you were doing. it's very easy to look back and say, I should have done this, I think. 

[00:25:21] Blair: Oh, yeah. 

[00:25:22] Amy: You can take Blair’s and my advice because we have already made all the mistakes and burned ourselves out a lot. 

[00:25:29] Blair: So burnout should be thought of before you're burned out.

So if you see yourself doing that, cut back a little and realize that the dumping of so many different resources and information. Be thoughtful about cognitive overload. Now this is starting to sound more like a talk that we should be giving in the middle of October, not a, back to school talk.

So let's talk about one of the most fun things I think to do you're going to start school again is something that I always like to think of as a hook. And I would hook in a lot of different things. Like we always had a book that was a hook, but I like to do fun things.

Now we lived up in Eastern Sierra. for most of my son's life. And we had so much fun. We would do these big camping trips or hiking if possible. I would pair what we did with something from science or history, even language arts. I really love to do that. Do you?

Come up with the hook, Amy. 

[00:26:48] Amy: Yes. So I am a very humanities person and my teaching, and I always have one kind of text, by which I mean like a movie or a poem or a book, not just, doesn't just have to be a printed thing., It could also be a piece of art. So when we do U S history, we start with the American Gothic painting. When we do European history, we start with Rilke's Ninth Elegy. When we do Japanese history, we start with the wave.

So it's just this idea, this one object that we can keep coming back to and looking at and comparing and building on. And it is, I think it is really great. I think of that as a hook.

I think that's such a good idea. Also, Blair's idea about implementing your hook — do the fun camping trip to look at the rocks that you're studying. Write that on your calendar right now at the beginning of your school year. Say, okay, October is a great month for camping, so I'm going to make sure that I put that we're going to study, I don't know whether rocks in California are like, Blair, but like gypsum. We're going to study gypsum in October, and we're going to go camping to this place that has a lot of it. I don't know, Blair. 

[00:27:55] Blair: A random rock to choose.

[00:27:56] Amy: I don't even know why. 

[00:28:00] Blair: I happen to have some right here. Look at how nicely it's separated. 

[00:28:05] Amy: Blair is such a rock nerd, you don't even know.

But go ahead and write it on your calendar now, because what's going to happen is you're going to get busy, and life is going to get exciting and tumultuous, and you're going to get to the end of the year, and you're going to be like, oh crap, I really wanted to go camping to look at gypsum. Or, oh, crap. I really wanted to read this book over the winter break because it was such a great segue between the two things that we're doing. 

[00:28:30] Blair: I really wanted to go see the pandas that are now in San Diego.

[00:28:34] Amy: Yes — the Sheep to Shawl Festival and we missed it for the third year in a row.

So go right now, take your home school calendar and write down all of those things in it. All those things that like you love, that you want to do at a specific time, and you will thank me for it later. Because you will get busy and you will forget. This is the most organized, the most focused that you're going to be all year.

So take advantage of that and fill out your calendar right now. 

[00:29:05] Blair: Okay, now part of that I'm going to say stuff happens. I'll tell all of you listeners. Amy just put a podcast up and I got on today and said wow you put the one that we didn't edit So I thought it was a little messy stuff happens or leaving it up by the way We'll let you figure out if you see if you could figure out which one we didn't do an edit on.

Just know Blair sometimes gets halfway through a sentence and decides she wants to word it differently. It's a writer's thing. But stuff happens. And so what Amy's talking about on that calendar, do not let that get to you. Do the stuff. That's the magic.

Or, make a commitment for not back to school this year that the stuff that you're not going to say, Oh, we only did three days of math this week, we've got to do five so we can't go see pandas, or we can't spend the whole day making a video.

Back to, not back to school. Okay, whatever. Don't — it's too early in the year for that. Don't let the cool, fun stuff get left in the way. And it took me, so my son was on a ski team and it took me a year. Luckily, it only took a year for me to recognize that when extra practices happened or it was a, you would think that with snow, that would mean nobody skied, but that would be like everybody that's So everybody would want to be out skiing.

And his school friends would often, their school would close and go skiing. So those things, when you have planned, don't —that's where just do a little math in the summer, do a little whatever, but do not let the cool fun stuff get shelved.

So those things you write on your calendar, they're going to multiply, there's going to be more cool opportunities. Do those. And your child will look back, at least this is my experience, and I hope Amy's daughter has said the same thing. Amy's child that's at college, I think it's your daughter, your child will tell you that They were so lucky to be homeschooled because you made time for those cool things that just make you excited for, that you're even alive.

[00:31:41] Amy: They're definitely the things that kids remember and the things that you remember. And in a way, I think they are the things that make you feel like — quotes — “a good homeschool mom.” These are the things that you can only do because you're homeschooling ,that build the relationship that you wanna have with your kids.

And writing it in the calendar is not a blood oath, right? Like sometimes things come up and they keep you from doing the thing that you wanna do, and that's okay too. Like it snows and you wanna go play in the snow. So you're not gonna go celebrate Hobbit Day at the downtown second breakfast party.

But if you don't write it in the calendar, you definitely won't do it. You'll definitely forget about some of those things. So writing it down encourages you to remember them, the memories that you want to make with your kid, which is. Blair says, the magic of homeschooling. You get to have magic!

So don't miss it! Don't miss it to do extra math. 

[00:32:41] Blair: I just thought of, we could start a movement of not back to school at least once a month. The whole school year. It could be, it's our not back to school day in October or not back to school day in, you could actually put on the calendar, you'd be even looser and put cup, not back to school day so it doesn't have to be rock collecting, it can be whatever you want.

And if it's not, if everybody's totally stressed and it's been really long, it can be like teacher and service days. Which in my family, everyone's teacher and service day. Why? They have enough holidays. And I'm like, you have no idea how hard it is to teach. And even if they're not planning, even if what they're doing is sitting binge watching some series Bridgerton, my husband came in and he's, you didn't watch all eight episodes tonight?

[00:33:38] Amy: I watched the first season. It was very entertaining. 

[00:33:44] Blair: I have now watched, I don't watch much tv and so sometimes I, because I read, but I did, when I have nights where nobody's home, and it's just me and the dogs, and I don't feel like reading, I'll watch that.

So now it's done. Till the next time.

[00:34:07] Amy: In addition to the calendar, one other thing that I like to do as we're starting a new school year that I think is genius? That I came up with when the kids were little, is I started a terrible day box. It's a plastic bin in my front hall closet.

And I started it out because people would always give my kids presents over the holidays. They'd get jigsaw puzzles and craft kits and art supplies and new board games. And they would also get stuff that they were really excited about. So this stuff was like, they would just get put to the side.

So I took it and I put it in this big box. And then whenever we were having a really bad day, I would pull out a surprise from the box, and it would make our bad day better. Now we might have a bad day because it was just like a bad day, but also sometimes, how you planned like a really fun field trip and it rains. Or you get a flat tire, and so you can't go, or your air conditioning goes out where you've had a fun thing that you were gonna get to do, and then you don't get to do it, the Terrible Day box is also good for that.

But I find having this little stockpile of random fun stuff that you can just reach in and pull something out has been great for our homeschool. I cannot make my in-laws stop giving my children presents. So I have stuff. You could do the same thing with like a jar with fun ideas on it. Make a hopscotch thing in the backyard or draw with sidewalk chalk or pretend that you’re horses for the day or whatever your kids are into.

[00:35:41] Blair: You're not going to get grandparents to stop giving stuff. It's, we're, it's a requirement. I was stricter with myself now, but when the first ones came, the first two, oh, I could not. Okay, so we encourage you to celebrate. Throughout the year. Why are you homeschooling?

And I like homeschoolers to really pay attention to why you are doing this and make sure that you make the time to keep doing things that support the reason that you started homeschooling I think it's important to — whether it's a bad day box, which wasn't what I thought you were going to say I thought she was going to say when everybody's losing their temper with each other, which I don't lose my temper very much and neither does my son.

And so when we both lose our temper, there's no playing a board game together and we don't yell at each other. You'd have to be around me. I'm like, really hard to rile. I would just end school. I'd say, you know what? Wow okay, learning is not happening and neither is teaching right now. Let's take a break. And if everybody can stop thinking about how irritated they are with each other, we can come back to it. That isn't a bad idea. It isn't bad to know how you're going to handle that. Think about the burnout before you get burnt out. And, If you need to take a day, Amy and I are giving you permission right now to do that.

[00:37:27] Amy: If you need permission. I will write you a doctor's note. 

[00:37:31] Blair: Yeah, just, one of the things I consistently see homeschoolers do is that they don't give themselves the grace that they need in doing this job that they are so want to get right or they wouldn't be doing it. 

I've really not met a homeschooler that didn't really become invested in what they were doing. And sometimes we all have bad days, whether you do what I do or whether you pull out the box, like Amy, or whatever you do. So Amy told me something that she does and It's on our list of things you want to make sure and discuss.

Amy is going to tell you about her pep talk letter. 

[00:38:26] Amy: So I'm an anxious person. And my reaction to things going wrong is always to think that it's all my fault and I've ruined everything. I catastrophize when something doesn't go perfectly. I'm getting better at it, but I still really struggle.

And one of the things that I have done, in fact, since the very first full year that we homeschooled, because when we pulled my daughter out of school in second grade, we thought we'll try this until we figure out what to do next. So it was a stopgap and then the following year when we were like, okay, no, we're gonna keep doing this, I was like, oh god, i'm gonna ruin my daughter's life she was like what eight and I'm like she's never gonna get into college — which is probably not the — so I wrote myself a note like: dear Amy, and I wrote all the reasons that we were homeschooling, all the reasons that I thought that it was a good choice for our family, all the things that I really loved about it. I took time to write down, specific great memories, great moments. And then I folded it up in real folded note style, which is how you can tell I'm a real Gen X er because I can fold the note so that it makes its own envelope.

Yeah. So I wrote that and I put it in my dresser drawer and when I had those days where it happened because, oh my gosh, I had those days, I still have them, where I felt like I was doing everything wrong and I'd made a terrible mistake and I was going to ruin my daughter's life, I would pull out that letter and I would read it.

And so now every year at the beginning of every new year, I write myself a letter, a little pep talk. It's Hey, you're doing this for a reason and you're good at it. Like good things have happened because of it. Your kid is doing great. And here's all this evidence to support that. And so have your bad day, but know that it's a bad day. It's not a bad decision. You can do this. Love, Amy.

And I find it is really helpful because nobody knows what I need to hear more than I do when I'm stressed and worried. And so when you're feeling really good about homeschooling, you have those moments where you're like, you know what, this is the greatest thing ever and I'm so glad that we're doing this. And my kid is like making this awesome progress, stop and write yourself a little note and tell yourself that. And then when you're having a day that is not great, you can open it and it is really shockingly helpful. It sounds silly. It's probably like some weird self help thing that people do.

But it has been a real gift to me over the years. 

[00:40:52] Blair: And be specific about it too, what you did, the same thing we would tell you about evaluations. Don't just say, did a great job, be really specific about what happened and then save those. I wish I'd have done that because wouldn't it be great to have, not just for me, but to share with my son.

[00:41:14] Amy: It would. Yeah, I think it's actually awesome and I'm really glad I have all those letters to look back at now that my youngest is getting ready to finish, it's really lovely to be able to look back at it. What a great experience it's been.

Give yourself opportunities to recognize what a great experience it is and what a gift the time is. Some days — I once asked my parents if I was gifted and my parents were like we wouldn't have paid for you, so there are definitely days where it's like, the gift is you wouldn't have paid for it, but it really is, a really special thing to get to homeschool — and yeah, you’ve got to remind yourself of that sometimes, because it doesn't always feel that way.

[00:41:52] Blair: There are hard days which is another reason to celebrate, to remember to insert. Now I'm totally hooked on the monthly celebrations, if not back to school. 

[00:42:05] Amy: No, I love that idea. We should do it at SEA. we should have a day in SEA, where it's just like that monthly celebration day.

[00:42:11] Blair: What did you do? Just that yeah. Oh my goodness, my to-do pile. You would think that I wasn't busier in the homeschool community than I've ever been, but I am. 

[00:42:26] Amy: It's like now that you're not actually homeschooling, you have time to do homeschool stuff. 

[00:42:31] Blair: Oh, goodness. So much.

And I think I need to remember to celebrate the not back to school part of it. The not back to school part isn't negative to school either, but I do think that you should think about what it is about homeschooling that is, for you that's superior 

[00:42:57] Amy: And I think there are a lot of things that homeschoolers miss out on not being part of the school community.

It's just the way that it is, right? You don't usually have field day or field trips on a bus. I know the most homeschoolery thing ever. We did a poll a few years ago, and it was like getting to ride a school bus. Thinking that getting to ride a school bus was the most exciting thing in the world.

[00:43:21] Blair: Your students, your students were missing? 

[00:43:25] Amy: We actually did like a whole survey in home.school.life, in the magazine, and we had like thousands of people respond. They voted — there were things like wearing your pajamas all day and mummifying a chicken. So we have this whole list of things, but thinking that riding the school bus was exciting was the number one thing that said homeschoolers, that was the most homeschooler-y thing ever.

So there are things that homeschoolers don't get to do that other kids do. There are like these annual celebrations that school kids are being a part of, and back to school is a big one. You see it everywhere. There are TV episodes about it and aisles and stores dedicated to it. And everyone talking about it. Are you excited to go back to school? When do you go back to school? And so I think like honoring the way, it's celebrating that you've made a different decision is really fun. And it's not being against school or traditional school. It's just celebrating what you're doing, which I think is fair.

[00:44:22] Blair: I don't know that my grandkids are excited about going back to school. I think their parents are looking forward to it though. 

[00:44:32] Amy: That is the other thing about home schooling that I think we don't talk about enough is that like having a family routine Is such a saver. I mean because in school, you have a school routine, right? You have a home routine to get you ready for school Then you're in school and then you have a home from school routine and then you have weekends.

But homeschooling is fun really,

[00:45:07] Blair: Okay, so Amy and I would love it if you shared your traditions, especially if you think someone else can benefit from it. 

[00:45:16] Amy: Yes, for sure. I think that there are all these cool things, but I always hear people talk about it and I'm like, why didn't I think of that?

Every time Blair says something, I'm like, I never thought of that! Such a good idea! So we can all share those things with each other and give other people great ideas. Please leave good ideas in the comments or share them on the SEA Facebook page. Maybe we can start a post there about it when we put this podcast up.

[00:45:40] Blair: We'll do that. That's a great idea. Are you reading anything? 

[00:45:43] Amy: I am. Oh, I've been on the holds, I just got literally today. I'm so excited. I just got the new book. James, have you read this, which is a new version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved man who helps Huckleberry Finn on his journey. It is supposed to be fantastic and amazing. I'm so excited to read it because I love The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as an early example of an anti racist novel, but as an early example of an anti racist novel, it's still a bit racist. So I love the idea of having a Huckleberry Finn adjacent text to read that I can actually feel good about reading with students.

So fingers crossed. I'm very excited about it. What about you? What are you reading? 

[00:46:33] Blair: I am reading a couple of things. I'm actually biding my time not reading anything big because the fourth book in T. J. Klune's book in the Werewolf series comes out, and the fifth or sixth book in Deborah Harkness's Discovery of Witches series comes out.

And so I am — I have read all the books leading up to the end of those. And so I'm just, everything I pick up is just I'm reading magazines and a lot of articles and stuff right now. Actually, if you really want to know what I spent time reading this week, it was Project 2025 when I don't even, I don't even want to go into it, but yeah, that's depressing, scary. Depressing isn't the right word. It's petrifying. If you like living in a democracy, 

[00:47:27] Amy: That's like terrifying and heartbreaking and emotionally devastating , 

[00:47:32] Blair: I think we need to figure out a way to turn Trump as the root word into some horrible, it's really an authoritarian regime that is rich, mostly white.

[00:47:48] Amy: not even rich people. 

[00:47:50] Blair: That's not who's supporting it the people that, the Federalist Society, you don't think those are all a bunch of rich, mostly white guys? And mostly guys, 

[00:48:04] Blair: Vote it's a matter of voting against your best interests. Anyway, we're working. This is it should not be too political because yeah, that's so i'm waiting for — maybe we'll do an episode about it just to talk about it in a more thoughtful way, like how do we talk to our homeschool kids about this?

Very concerning and strange document. 

You know what, I think we'll talk about it in the context of when we talk about the Truth Matters and On Tyranny. I think it's a perfect and that is coming up, us doing that. 

[00:48:38] Amy: But our next episode is actually going to be about one of the most fun things, banned books.

Love me some banned books. 

[00:48:46] Blair: I live in a state where we banned the banning of books. We'll be talking about what it looks like. California gets bad press. But I'm sitting on the inside and it doesn't look nearly as bad. 

[00:49:01] Amy: I live in a state where a teacher got fired for reading a not banned book that was in the school library out loud to her class because they decided it was offensive.

So yeah, opposite. 

[00:49:15] Blair: So yeah, all that news, people leaving California, I hate to break it to you, they're moving to your state cause it's redder.  

Yeah, let's not end on a negative note. Congratulations at the beginning of another year. Amy and I are here to support you.

If you ever are thinking, I wish Amy and Blair would talk about — whatever. Reach out to us and let us know. Who knows, it might be what we talk about on one of our episodes, because as you can tell, we're pretty freewheeling. 

[00:49:48] Amy: No, we really love it. Any ideas you have, we are super excited about. Happy not back to school.

Hope this is your best homeschool year yet. 

[00:49:59] Blair: Every year should be your absolute best. You can't have one second back that you live in some ways, live in the moment. 

[00:50:08] Amy: Yeah, absolutely. Homeschooling is the best. I don't know. It gives you such a great relationship with your kids. I'm so thankful that I got to spend all those minutes with them, all those magic minutes. I would not trade that for anything. 

[00:50:22] Blair: It has made my life richer, so much richer to have that connection and time with my child.

[00:50:33] Amy: We're so lucky. Happy homeschooling. See you soon. 

[00:50:36] Blair: Bye everyone

Women’s history is human history, and feminism is something we should be talking about in our homeschools.

Transcript:

We use an automatic transcription app for our podcast, which makes it possible for us to include transcripts for our podcast episodes — but it does sometimes make weird errors! We do edit it, but I’m sure we miss things sometimes.

[00:00:01] Amy: Hello, and welcome to Secular Homeschooling with Blair and Amy, brought to you by SEA Homeschoolers and home.school.life. Today is Sunday, May 19th, and Blair and I are talking about something that popped up in a conversation and that we've been texting back and forth about for the last week, like a homeschool case study over here, with women's rights, feminism in the 21st century.

Okay. so before we get started, I would like to say, and I think I speak for Blair when I say this, that when we talk about feminism, we're going to define terms, and we're going to talk about different ways that we talk about feminism, but all feminism that we are talking about is trans inclusive feminism, no trans exclusionary feminists over here. Just to get that out there. 

[00:00:57] Blair: Yeah, a lot of what Amy and I, decide to talk about comes out of these conversations that the two of us had. And I thought, I went and pulled this out a couple days after we decided to do this episode, which I'll tell you what made me start texting Amy. The, kicker for the, actually it was Kansas City Chiefs, Harrison Butker came on.

I thought it was very interesting. The headline says, “Man who kicks balls wants women to stay in the kitchen,” which I thought was really interesting because there's multiple ways you can kick balls.

So I thought that was interesting. Now listen to this. Imagine for a moment that you are a young woman who has spent more than $100,000 on your university degree. After four years of hard work, it's your graduation, and Harrison Butker, a kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs, is the commencement speaker. During his speech, the NFL star, who has made millions by kicking a ball, kindly informs you that your hard-earned degree was a waste of time and that your true role in life is supporting your husband.

Imagine what that would be like.

He doesn't just take issue, by the way, with women. he—IVF, surrogacy, euthanasia. He's got some pretty strong opinions about that. Pride Month happens to be a deadly sin, the entire month; he said some pretty anti Semitic things. And no, women have been subject to the most diabolical lies.

And while some women in the audience may go on to have successful careers, the majority should be most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.

Now, I just want to say that it's a good thing not all men think that way. When I read Harrison Butker's, speech and what the Guardian had to say about it, I gave some thought to both of my husbands. I have been married twice and, I didn't really put it together that both of my husbands had actually been raised by their mothers. My first husband, his father abandoned his mother and three children. Luckily, she had a degree and was able to get a job to support all four of them.

And my current husband, who I've been married to a long time, his mother was widowed when my husband was 10 years old. Good thing she had the skills needed and the education to get a job because she supported the two of them. It's really not just sexist when men say this. It's also really ableist.

there are women who, to be able to support themselves. it's this ridiculous notion—first of all, that all men are worth staying married to. But also that women might not be in a situation where they need to support themselves. It is so offensive, isn't it?

[00:04:16] Amy: No, it absolutely is, It's so problematic because I think that a happy marriage and a family can be amazing. I am thankful every day for my partner, my husband, who I adore and my children, who I do consider to be one of the greatest parts of my entire life. But I am so thankful that both of those things are choices that I got to make for myself.

They were not choices that anybody else made for me. And, I adore my husband. I think he is the best. But if he were abusive, if he were to die, I would still be okay because I am a whole and independent person besides that.

That is a part of my life. That is not my whole life. I think, I think homeschool moms, I think we, we really feel it as our kids get into high school, where if you've spent your whole life basing your life around other people and other people's needs and fulfilling other people's needs. There comes a time where people don't need that from you anymore. And so what are you going to do? You don't even know what your own needs are if you haven't been paying attention to them for all of these years. 

[00:05:34] Blair: I'm sorry to interrupt you. so first of all, I want to say that I find it very interesting that you said paint.

[00:05:41] Amy: it's the Gauguin joke, right? Because he ran off to Tahiti painted beautiful women. 

[00:05:49] Blair: Okay. I thought that was very interesting, that you would go there. so we've got an issue where, we are bringing, we're putting the cart before the horse. And what we're saying is, hey, this, sexism, this misogynistic, viewpoint, it's pretty pervasive and it's even pervasive in places where we feel women have rights, that there is some equality.

So the way this came up is Amy and I, as we told you in the last episode, Amy and I are working on writing a curriculum and we're starting with the evolution of humans, and I started to think, we've been doing a lot of reading about the going from hunter-gatherer societies to farming societies, and I really started to think about this patriarchal system that began to evolve and we, the history seems pretty clear that not all but most civilizations existed as a patriarchy. Now I've, there are some of you telling me, Blair, you are wrong. in order to get to where we are today in the United States, this is what's really interesting. This is what sparked the conversation between Amy and I. The patriarchy had to give up some power.

Women didn't get their rights just because of women. Women got their rights because some men supported women getting their rights. 

[00:07:26] Amy: We see this surge in rights for women around the world.

The late 1800s the early 1900s when various U. S. states, one at a time, and then the United States as a whole, and European countries, start giving women rights. And they do this, and I don't think it's a coincidence, but they do this at the same time that literacy rates are rising, and women are agitating for voting rights specifically.

Because all of a sudden, if you give women rights, you have a whole new constituency. So you can get them to vote for you because if you're gonna increase the voting population, then you're gonna want to sweeten the pot a little bit so that voting population wants to vote for you. 

We see this system of getting women on the sides of various politicians, various political movements, getting women to do work for those movements, and then giving women little rights in exchange. So like the right to possibly have access to your children if your husband leaves you, the right to own the stuff that you own instead of having it all belong to your husband.

These tiny little rights start to get eked out as women become part of the voting population. 

[00:08:48] Blair: Did you see that, Ben Carson is now saying that the next thing that he and his little coterie or big coterie of people, they want to do away with no fault divorce. Now I don't see that really catching on because men also, men are the big breadwinners still today in lot of marriages, and so I'm thinking they like no fault divorce.

[00:09:21] Amy: Well, people like, historically it's been incredibly difficult for women to get out of a marriage. In what? A bad marriage. A good marriage. It's been incredibly hard for women to get out of a marriage, often impossible. And while there have been periods where it's harder for men to get out of a marriage, it was almost always something that was doable.

If you had enough money and were willing to go through certain steps to do it. The Pope would annul your marriage for you if you paid him enough back in the day. Obviously not today. 

[00:09:58] Blair: I don't want to go there. Okay. 

[00:10:01] Amy: And for a lot of history, I think it's fair to point out that divorce was problematic because marriage wasn't a romantic thing. Most people would not fall in love with somebody and then use that as the basis for deciding to marry them. Marriages were economic alliances, they were political alliances, they were community alliances.

So they were very much, not necessarily about being in love with somebody as they were about building a foundational, a societal structure. so divorce didn't really come into that because love didn't come into it, so it's not like your marriage isn't working, so you get a divorce. Your marriage is doing what it's supposed to do, like that's what marriage is.

[00:10:43] Blair: A society that doesn't have equality for women often it leads to what Harrison Butkus is saying, recommending, and that is to get married and if you're lucky you marry somebody makes millions of dollars. it's how you—Because you don't have as many avenues open to you to be successful to get a job, to go to college 

[00:11:12] Amy: Yeah, it's a really limiting set of beliefs. It's a really limiting way of envisioning your future. It's very retro, but not in the cool poodle skirt way, this idea that women can have children, or they can have a career or, like superwomen can have both, but the family is the most important part.

Women who have kids are always doing the majority of the kid-related stuff, the labor of setting up doctor appointments and remembering to bring sunscreen and bug spray to the park and making sure that there's milk for people's breakfast. Just like all the various responsibilities still fall on women.

It doesn't matter whether you are a mom whose whole life is staying home with your kids or if you're a mom who's going out and working, women are still doing most of the house labor 

[00:12:08] Blair: So let's first discuss how you can teach—So the very first place that we start any academic discussion is by defining things.

And I think one of the things we should, talk about is what does equality mean? What exactly does it mean to be equal? And in this case, let's really talk, in terms of women. 

For example, are women equal in the United States? We don't make as much money. Women tend to be paid less. And If you are a woman of color, you make substantially less than a white male who is doing the exact same job.

If you are—we can't get the Equal Rights Amendment passed. Women don't fully support the Equal Rights Amendment. Do we have equality? 

[00:13:07] Amy: We don't even have basic health care rights across the United States. we don't have, autonomy, bodily autonomy the way that men do.

[00:13:14] Blair: Correct. The whole thing where Viagra is easy to get, but birth control pills aren't is pretty insane. So if you're looking in, because when you start bringing that issue in, and I think it's a valid issue to bring in, and I think it's one of the reasons it's important to teach this is, But that means that a state like California, where I live and a state like Georgia, where you live, I have more rights than you do.

Yeah. And that is interesting when you think about it. So let me just go for one minute about why I think we should be teaching this. If you were listening to the science discussion that we had a while back and one of the things that we talked about is how you need to look at adults and the adult population to see if we're doing a good job of teaching things.

And there's a lot of really sound reasons for women to have the same rights as men. Women, because we do most of the child rearing, the more equal we are, the more, reasonable it is to think that, our children will have more options, more alternatives, that we'll be able to make better choices and more complete choices for our children.

Agree Amy? Yeah. Okay. the fact that we can't get the Equal Rights Amendment passed, or that people aren't really looking at, some of the other legislation that's happening, and the Harrison Butkers of this world being given a stage, means that we don't view women's rights— where adults don't really think this is an issue And it's not just adults that live in a country that has way more rights like ours does There are countries where women have a lot less rights that also think it's okay. It's the status quo. 

[00:15:26] Amy: Yeah, I am always gonna talk about this, I know, but I will never forget When I was in 10th grade, I took this women's studies summer class and it changed my life. The first thing that we did was we read this essay, “Person Paper on Purity in Language.”

And in this essay, what he does is he switches out all gender coded words in the English language for black and white. So every word that would be specific to women. He would substitute black and every word that was specific to men, he would substitute white. And so he would say like all whites are created equal.

it was fascinating to me because I had not ever realized how deeply entrenched. patriarchal thinking was in the words that we use every single day. We can't dismantle the patriarchy with language when the language that we use enforces the patriarchy. This blew my mind and I vowed that I was never going to use the singular he. I was always going to use the singular she in my sentences. My parents were very annoyed by this because I became a very feminist kind of person. I was, like, calling out sexist language everywhere. But yeah, it is so entrenched in the way that we, even the ways that we talk about feminism, our patriarchal ways of talking, it's fascinating. 

[00:17:01] Blair: That's one of the things that I think makes the conversation right now about pronouns being very profound. I love that we, obviously not all of us, but probably all of us who are listening to both of us on this podcast and probably most of you listening, think that you should be able to choose any pronoun you want, because it's you. You get to make those decisions for you.

When I first started using she, it was I felt like I was doing something really radical. I didn't feel radical at all! 

[00:17:41] Amy: That is one of the definitions of feminism that I really love is that feminism is the radical notion that women are people.

[00:17:50] Blair: Now, I think that the feminist movement gets in its own way, and it does it by insisting that there be mono definitions for things, 

[00:18:00] Amy: Yes, but this is true of every kind of movement, right? It is that people who are extremist within the movement become the people that everyone fights when they're talking about the movement, even though they're not really representative of most of it. 

[00:18:19] Blair: Okay. That makes a lot of sense. so I'm going to go all the way back. What does equality mean? So first of all, men gave up some of their power to make women more equal.

And. That is radical. It's radical. We've got to give some of those men that were with women making this happen, some chops and I'm not saying it only could have happened because of men. It took a lot of women fighting really hard, but it couldn't have happened without men because they were in power.

And that's one of the most fascinating things about this Is we've entitled this episode the patriarchy gives up some power women get rights because You've got to realize that they do have to give up some power 

[00:19:10] Amy: And I think that when we talk about this, it's really important to talk about white feminism and how white feminism is not representative of all feminism because I think that one of the things that the white patriarchy has done it's brilliant—It's terrible, but it's brilliant—is they've been able to convince marginalized groups, women, people of color, LGBTQ plus people, disabled people, all kinds of people, that they have to fight. And so we see ugly things in white feminism, like after the Civil War, where white women feminists argued that they should be able to vote and said some really racist things about Black men being able to vote.

Meanwhile, nobody's paying any attention to Black women who are marching at the same marches, at the back of the line. So I think it's really important to remember that. The patriarchy is also set up to divide women into smaller groups, and you notice that's exactly what happens in the southern United States.

When women get the vote, they really start pushing the Jim Crow laws that take voting rights effectively away from Black people. 

[00:20:32] Blair: And that's, that to me is really, frightening. Back to the who raises the children situation, because when you have cohorts of people who are disenfranchised from, having the same economic benefits that those of us who are white have had the advantages because That then makes it harder for their children throughout their whole life and their children's children and it, many years ago, I was in, Washington, D.C. This was before it was even that crazy. I think, I don't remember who was the president then. It might have been Reagan. And, someone was standing there with a sign that, was a, pro life. And the person came up to me, it's a white woman, came up to me to talk about it. She was the only protester there.

And she walked up to me as if we would agree with each other. And I said, are you pro welfare, pro WIC, pro aid to dependent children, pro Head Start? And she said, no. I said, then you and I don't have anything to talk about. 

[00:21:53] Amy: Yeah. There, there's this whole weird like pro fetus thing. They don't even want it when it's a baby, like just when it's a fetus, 

[00:22:02] Blair: Can you imagine being raped or, having your child die, the fetus die and not be able to, terminate? Yeah. 

[00:22:15] Amy: I don't always talk about this, my daughter, when I was 20 weeks pregnant, they found, that she had aortic stenosis and Turner syndrome, and there were a lot of risks associated with that.

I'm so glad that she's alive and my daughter and she has done great, but I was really thankful as a 28, living in New York, in graduate school, not making a lot of money. And I was really thankful that all of my healthcare professionals really laid out for me what all of my options were.

I picked the one that felt most right for me, and I'm glad I did. But I was really thankful to know that I had options. Having options helped me immensely. 

[00:22:58] Blair: And that's really what it's about. And frankly, that's what ProChoice is about. ProChoice is about, okay, here are the options.

Pick the one that works for you.  

[00:23:08] Amy: I think is the problem is that you shouldn't be trying to pick for other people 

[00:23:13] Blair: No, it's this entire ableism. Somebody like Harrison Butker. I thought they, I wanted to start with the Guardian’s article or just their the way they interpret it and because I thought they did a really good job.

[00:23:26] Amy: Patriarchal thinking really is about telling women what they can do with their hands. Their money, their income, their bodies, their free time, their families, and I just don't think that we see that with any other group of people.

I think we do not see it as much with any other group of people as we do with women where the patriarchy feels like it's entitled to all of these things that should belong to women and should be women's decisions to make. 

[00:23:57] Blair: One of the interesting things that happened as you and I began to talk about it is the historical context.

And I'd love to have you explain that. we're going to go back to hunter gatherers and I would, if you look at the hunter gatherer tribes today, don't think you can have the same definitions that we do in a more modern way.

I don't know if I have the perspective to know if those societies are particularly sexist, so I won't make any comments about it. but I'm thinking that in hunter gatherer societies, and maybe you know the history of this, Amy, that it was much more egalitarian. 

[00:24:42] Amy: Yeah it seems that there were divisions of labor, and that some of those divisions might have been gender based, but that most people in communities had equal say over what happened in the community, or at least, proportionate say over what happened in the community and we know that this isn't just about like men and women, right? We know that, there's a really beautiful story in David Graeber's book The Dawn of Everything, where he visits a site where a very clearly disabled person, who would have—it would have been impossible for this person to walk without assistance—was buried really lovingly in late middle age on a mountain pass, where it was very clearly, like, his people were traveling that way and he passed away while that was happening and they buried him with honor and love and respect.

And that is often not what we think of, right? We do not think about, we think, oh primitive people would, if a baby was born disabled, they would just let it die. But it turns out that often, that wasn't the case. It turns out that people were very inclusive in a way that we could read as more inclusive than we are now.

And yeah, it seems like a lot of these early societies were, as you say, much more egalitarian, and that unfortunately, with record keeping, what we end up with is a lot of records of societies that veered more towards a patriarchy. 

[00:26:19] Blair: Yes. So one of these, I think I've already talked about it, but I've volunteered a few times at the Lakota Sioux Reservation on Pine Ridge.

And you get, have a lot of opportunities to talk to people and they have speakers come in. One of the speakers was talking about when the first colonists, encountered the Lakota Sioux and it was, matriarchal, but the colonists were offended that they kept wanting them to talk to the grandmothers and they refused to have any interaction except with at first, the males just spoke for the grandmothers, but eventually through the adoption of some of the, ways of the white colonists, that society moved to more of a, patriarchal one. 

[00:27:20] Amy: So this is the thing that I think is so interesting is that at a certain point, people decided to start keeping records. And this point seems to correlate to a shift to patriarchy in a lot of what will end up being modern civilization. And the reason seems to be because, why do you want to write things down?

The earliest written records that we have are basically receipts. Sales, people calculating how much stuff they own and have sold and records of property that people own, right? so capitalism comes into this, right? This idea that like people own stuff and who owns what and how much of it do they own?

And so you may say how does this connect to the patriarchy? I'll tell you, I think it's really interesting. So I own a bunch of stuff, right? I'm a rich man. I'm a very rich man. And I'm going to die as all mortals must. And so who do I want my wealth and all my property and all my awesome stuff to go to, I want it to go to my beloved offspring.

But there is a problem because a woman can always be sure whose child she's giving birth to. It's her child, right? She knows that the child she's giving birth to is her child. But a man can't ever be 100 percent sure that the child a woman is giving birth to is his child. And so we start to see all these attempts to control women, to control the line of inheritance, so that property continues to belong to this man's genetic heritage.

Which I think is really fascinating the way that capitalism and the patriarchy come together and become way of controlling women that gets more and more extreme, right? Women eventually become like a kind of property, more than individual people. 

[00:29:16] Blair: You end up with the strength dynamics that allows that to happen.

[00:29:20] Amy: Yes. And women's lives are definitely set up in a way where, we joke about like the horror movie, but girls in horror movies, right? Why are they running around in high heels and a little dress through the woods, in the dark, but women are set up to do that historically. They, women's clothes are designed to confine them and to make it hard for them to move freely.

The work that they do keeps them indoors so they can't get out and build strength, They're not going to get away from the house often enough to be familiar with the area that they live in the same way that men are. So it's really fascinating. 

[00:29:57] Blair: And so your take on it is that the patriarchy gives up some of the power Because they began to see it as a way to pass certain legislation. 

[00:30:12] Amy: I feel like when the patriarchy as a group, not, I'm not talking about individual awesome men here because there are individual awesome men, but when the patriarchy as a group gives up some power, it's because doing so, enables them to hold on to the big power, right?

You let a woman on the Supreme Court, but most of the justices are still men and most of the people in power are still men. You give women the right to vote, but you know that for a lot of women, that's not going to mean that they're able to vote independently. Lots of women we know, especially in the early years of voting, would vote exactly what their husbands told them to.

[00:30:54] Blair: Do you think that still happens today? 

[00:30:57] Amy: Our Butker guy would hope so. I think.

[00:31:01] Blair: What's the argument against equality for women? What was it historically and what might it be today, Amy? 

[00:31:09] Amy: They are unable to think reasonably. They are led by their emotions. Also, there's a really good chance that if they fulfill their biological duty and pop out a baby, they will die because childbirth is incredibly dangerous. 

[00:31:24] Blair: percent mortality. 

[00:31:26] Amy: Yeah, so why would you bother,educating women or trying to help them learn anything if their whole mission in life is just to have a baby and that's all they need to do?

[00:31:35] Blair: Okay, Aristotle valued the vital force, I'm thinking is sperm. 

[00:31:39] Amy: And women are like flower pot that holds his vital force. So it's really sad if your flower pot breaks, but you can get a new one. 

[00:31:50] Blair: Okay, so that is Aristotle. 

[00:31:53] Amy: And of course, in the Western Christian mythology, women are essentially the cause of humanity's fall from closeness with God, right?

Yes. It's women's fault. And so that's why women have periods, because we deserve to suffer every month for ruining things for men who just, in their love for us, followed along with our misguided ideas. 

[00:32:18] Blair: But the whole patriarchal society, although that supported it, had been around a long time before that.

In, European culture as Christianity spread, the women who had held power began to see that stripped from them. Actually, what about witches? Is that a way of stripping power from women? I know things I've read seem to support that. 

[00:32:55] Amy: For sure, I think for sure, because witchcraft, if you were a woman who could read, if you were a woman who ever used any kind of herbal remedy, which, In a world without drugstores women who couldn't use herbal remedies were probably not gonna last very long. Their families were not gonna survive very long. yeah, it's very much about controlling women, controlling their access to information, controlling how they use their knowledge. Women were targeted for witchcraft if they were single. if they were really wealthy, independently wealthy, or if they were really poor, if they, were pregnant and not married, like basically anything that men didn't want women to do could be considered proof that you were a witch.

And so that towards the end of the European witch trials, it gets to where like women who are bad housekeepers could be witches, 

[00:33:56] Blair: This, orchestrated, legislated violence toward women that makes them fearful enough to continue with this imbalance of power, this dynamic where there's an imbalance of power.

Is that kind of what you're saying, Amy? 

[00:34:18] Amy: I think so. Because women, I think that, safe legal abortion is one of the best things that could have happened to women because women have historically been so biologically vulnerable. You could be sexually assaulted by any man and if you ended up pregnant, you have no control over that, right?

Maybe you would have to marry this man, maybe you would have to go live in squalor, maybe you would die giving birth, but you could really be physically controlled.  

[00:34:50] Blair: Maybe you could be sent to, what was it that was, that, remember the, have you seen some of those documentaries of the women in Ireland you would be sent to?

[00:34:59] Amy: Magdalene homes! 

[00:35:01] Blair: Oh, get you imagine your father raping you and then sending you to Magdalene home where, for those of you who aren't familiar with that, these are run by the Catholic church and they are basically jails, although they don't call them that women are sent to, their babies are taken from them, given up for adoption and then the, Women often never get out of there.

And what they do is they work in like laundries and they're just enslaved. 

[00:35:35] Amy: And I think that this is a great place to talk about how women of color—Particularly, I'm thinking about the, United States and I'm thinking about the institution of slavery here and how women's bodies were used as weapons in this war, right?

How they changed the laws so that the status of a child was the same as the status of its mother, not its father. So if you sexually assaulted, one of your enslaved labor force, you could impregnate her over and over again and get more enslaved labor from it. 

[00:36:09] Blair: I think it was in my early 20s when I read the historical account. It was very clear, I know it's totally, naive of me not to realize this before, but that women were sexually assaulted and men were sexually assaulted. If you were enslaved, you could be sexually assaulted. And I guess it wasn't even really considered legally sexual assault.

But I hadn't realized it until then, 

[00:36:36] Amy: No, it's horrific. It's horrific the way that, because women are biologically vulnerable in this particular way. so I think that because of this biological vulnerability, historically women have, sometimes passive resistance is just that, is just waiting.

Right, is trying to do what you can in the little specter of space that you are given because the alternative, in Mesopotamia, if a husband wanted to divorce his wife, he could just come up to her and be like, we're divorced now and she would have to leave his house, but a woman couldn't do that to a husband according to Hammurabi's code. And if a man thought that his wife was having an affair, he could kill her. And that was fine. That was a hundred percent fine in, medieval England. If a man wanted to marry a woman and her father wouldn't let him marry her, he could capture her and sexually assault her and get her pregnant and the father would let him marry her.

That's where the honeymoon comes from. That's actually the origin of the honeymoon. 

[00:37:44] Blair: So why, what does this have to do with homeschooling? You might be wondering. And we discussed a little bit about having this conversation because while it is intellectually interesting, at least to Amy and I, what is the purpose of it if you're a homeschooling, parent?

And I think that one of the reasons to have conversations like this is that big discussions get people thinking, get them making connections, researching, engaging their brain, This is the sort of conversation, think about having a conversation with your children of any age, probably middle school, high school, certainly.

What does equality really mean? Do women have it? Extend that to, different groups, LGBTQ plus community, the, people of color. Indigenous people, especially those who are still living on reservations. That's particularly interesting because they're it's fairly complicated. The legislative situations, you've got a reservation that's in a state, but it's federal land. And they are not bound by all the same laws. It's, it's, what do you do? What is, what does that mean as far as, the rights of different groups and how do we ignore those rights? How do we continually strip people of rights? We think of ourselves as more modern, but we just lost the right to choose in the United States and a lot of states and other states like mine, it's now a part of our constitution.

What does it mean? 

[00:39:40] Amy: And if you're, this is the answer to the question when you're looking at a bulk of US presidents and you're like, why has there never been a woman president? This kind of patriarchal structure is the answer. Why has there never been an openly LGBTQ plus president? 

[00:39:55] Blair: You know what, let's talk about that for a minute, because I actually think she's like a really good case in point, whether you like Kamala Harris or not. I want you to think about, we have a person of color who is a woman who is the vice president of the United States. And I find it really interesting and in a horrific sort of way, the way she is talked about.

Yeah. 

[00:40:31] Amy: You would never, no one would ever talk about a male vice president the way that people talk about Harris, even the way that we refer to her by her first name so often. And I do it too, cause I feel like we're friends or at least friendly. but yeah, like you would never ever no one's going to call Donald Trump, Donnie. 

[00:40:53] Blair: I think of other Dan Quayle, I didn't call Dan, I called him Dan Quayle, he misspelled potato and it was all downhill from there for him.

[00:41:02] Amy: In the earlier idyllic days of my youth, Dan Quayle represented everything that was wrong with American politics with like privilege and intelligence and, and wow, I miss those days.

[00:41:16] Blair: I know, but, so people will talk about Kamala Harris and they'll say, and by the way, she was in, she's a politician in California. I loved Kamala Harris and I have not stopped. loving Kamala Harris, but the, I think people miss her accomplishments, who she is, how thoughtful she is, how absolutely brilliant she must be to have gotten where she is.

There's a lot to love about Kamala Harris. What people talk about with Kamala Harris. is she's strident. She's allowed in some ways, abrasive. It's she went to a country and she wasn't effective. And yet, if you really questioned someone about why she wasn't effective, they can't tell you why, there's just this sort of mystique because we have about her that she wasn't effective.

And I think one of the things that we have to be careful about, because the people that hate her the most are the white Christian nationalists, and they are really good at shifting the conversation just enough to an area where they get some agreement, but you know what I think they don't like about her, she's not white and she's not easily controlled by the white male patriarchy.

[00:42:56] Amy: And we have such a double and triple standard for women and what's acceptable for women to do. Women aren't just getting judged on the content of what they say. They're getting judged on how they say it, and how they look while they're saying it, and what they wear while they're saying it, and whether they move their hands while they're saying it, or hold their hands still, or sit down, or stand up, or cross their legs, or don't.

And it is really hard, like I can't imagine having that spotlight on me, where I'm trying to negotiate political action with another country and people are making comments about my shoes. 

[00:43:39] Blair: Or, do you wonder if she just wishes she could put on a pair of leggings and a Okie sweatshirt and stick it out and not look perfect. Rumpled, disheveled. Now we like presidents that look pretty neat too. Although, we did elect—So we can't care that much about it, but I encourage, and so here's why this might be important, so I encourage you to think about this.

If you're wondering why Amy and I blew an episode and trust me, we have a list of episodes, we bumped to talk about this. Why can't we elect a woman in the United States as a president? I want you to think about during this election season, pay attention to the way the, white nationalist party talks about Kamala Harris, how she is spoken about, what is this concern?

Ooh, Biden's going to die and then we'll get Harris and she's going to be really bad. Why? She's actually, fairly moderate Democrat. Yeah she's from California. She's, she is not on an extreme on, she's not an extreme liberal. 

But anybody in the middle, anybody who's a centrist who doesn't like her, I don't think it's because of her policies. 

[00:45:21] Amy: No, it's definitely because she's a woman of color. And we talk about feminism and we talk about racism, and women of color absolutely are buffeted on both fronts in ways I think that we don't even yet understand as a society all of the ways that women of color are impacted by the intersection of racism and sexism in our country.

I think we talk about it and we still have no idea the effects of that, the implications of it. 

You never have to think about that if you're a man. And I think that there must be a million things like that for women of color that, we just miss. 

[00:46:03] Blair: I was, I have science degrees and physical chemistry degree for my master's and as someone in chemistry, a woman in chemistry, I benefited enormously from affirmative action, like a lot of white women.

I benefited from affirmative action and the group of women that benefited the most from affirmative action, when they did studies of why it was white women who benefited more than any other group, what they realized was that the people that were selecting these candidates, there's this big bucket of people that you could bring on and they would meet different criteria for affirmative action, what the studies show were that white women benefited the most because these were somebody's sister. Some of these, they reminded them of people that they were familiar with. White men were making the decisions because that was who was in power primarily at these colleges and they were choosing people that looked like their family members.

And so where we're talking about the patriarchy, That's what it means when patriarchy is making some of these decisions, because I actually think that women, no, I could be wrong, disagree with me, feel free to disagree with me if you do, but I think women are more sensitive to issues of all colors are more sensitive to issues affecting marginalized groups, because we know what it means to be marginalized. 

[00:47:47] Amy: And I think that this is why we have to talk about this in our homeschool because none of it occurs in a vacuum. Sexism doesn't occur in a vacuum. Racism doesn't occur in a vacuum. Homophobia, xenophobia, none of this occurs in a vacuum. It all impacts and intersects each other in these really complicated ways.

And if we're not talking about it, we're missing it, right? Our kids are missing it. We're not teaching our kids to be the kind of people—to try to look at the world and see the way that it is, because you have to see things the way that they are if you want to make things better. this is my personal goal for my homeschool, and it may or may not be your goal, but I feel like if you're listening to this podcast, it is partly your goal, that I want to raise kids to make the world a better place.

I want my kids to contribute to making the world better, not making the world worse. And I feel like talking about this stuff is a big part of that for our homeschool. 

[00:48:42] Blair: I thought we were a lot closer to this than, I know you think it was two steps forward and right now we're one step back cause you said it before, but I'm not quite as optimistic about us being that much further along with egalitarianism.

I just am not. when you see, what can be taught in schools being legislated in a way that fits into the white Christian, Nationalist philosophy, which is extremely patriarchal. My guess is Harrison Butkus. I think we know who he's voting for. It's not Kamala Harris.

I really think that, we, have to be having these conversations. And once again, it's where secular homeschoolers can save the world because we are having conversations with our children. We're educating our children around issues that are incredibly important. If this one is important for 50 percent of Or population.

I think it's really important. It's interesting, in kind of a reverse sexism, my husband and I, we have, six grandchildren. And Sean doesn't have any children, but my stepkids kids, we have three granddaughters and three grandsons, and we have sat down with the father, one person has three girls and one son, and we sat him down and said, Have you been putting aside money so the girls can go to college? Have you been putting aside money so your girls have every single option that, that they want? And because my husband and I both feel it's really important that you make sure that women, we don't want our granddaughters to ever be in a situation where they feel they have to get married to have what they want to go everywhere they want.

We, we disagree with Harrison, because we think that is no way to be raising your daughters. Oops. That is so judgy. I can't believe I said it. We'll see about Satan. 

[00:50:59] Amy: I think that's because if we want an egalitarian society, if we want equality, then we have to mean everybody. That is the definition of the term.

And so anyone who says, Oh, this group of people should have a different set of rights or expectations. Then that's not what you want. You don't actually want an equal and egalitarian society. That is what I want. And that's what Blair wants. And I bet that's what you listening to this podcast want.

The talking about feminism with our kids is one way that we can do it. Is there anything else that we wanted to add? 

[00:51:39] Blair: Oh, no, we could. No, I definitely is a topic we could talk about all day. That is and I told you so much. I'm sorry. Oh, my goodness. No, don't be sorry. I do think it's important to understand that when you frame this and it's one of the reasons that it's important for us to be educating not just our daughters about this, but all of our children about this.

So much. It is, or not just our sons, because it, there has to be an agreement. There is an imbalance of power, even in a country like ours, even in my state, there's an imbalance of power. And we don't just need to rethink the way we whether we are equal or not, we need to rethink the way we talk about and look at women.

There, there's just, I can think of so many ways, it just the way we think about women who might be promiscuous, but we think of boys or men differently or, just this. whole notion that women shouldn't be able to have the same body autonomy as men. The way we talk about women, if we don't think they're attractive, then we don't talk about men the same way.

It's just and I think that through a discussion of what it means to be equal, I think that's really important. Even if it gets uncomfortable sometimes as our kids begin to assert that they want certain rights or that they want to, certain, ways of being able to discuss different things.

I think that's important. And in a culture that has as much toxic masculinity as we do, what is the guy that got arrested in Romania, and he's got this huge following, and Andrew something, Andrew Tate. In a world where that sort of horrible individual, in a world where anybody could get elected that has said that, I'm not even going to say it because it's not a word that I use, that they could use their fame to grab certain, the genitals of women.

Eww. No, it's horrible. What, two of our Supreme Court justices have been accused of? One of rape, the other of sexual assault.

[00:54:10] Amy: It's—this is why we want the bear. This is why if we're stuck, we would rather have a bear. 

[00:54:16] Blair: Okay. I'm hoping that my great first ancestress. Wouldn't have rather had a bear. I'm hoping. alright everyone. That is it. Did you see anything, watch anything, do anything? Oh, I watched a very funny movie I wanted to see for a long time, finally talked my, somebody into watching it with me, my spouse watched it with me. Wicked Little Letters. If you haven't seen it, and that actually has some, that thematic elements of this one sort of, She's promiscuous, so it had to be her is the theme, but it was pretty funny. Have you seen it?

[00:55:02] Amy: No, I haven't. I'll check it out. 

[00:55:04] Blair: Jim and I like Britflix a lot, and it was this just, I think it might have started out as a littler movie, but it caught on, and I loved it. 

[00:55:16] Amy: And that's—I'm always looking for good movies, especially to watch, for summer movies with my high schoolers.

[00:55:24] Blair: I think this would be great, and it, I think you could use it as a touch point for, to talk about feminism.

But that's not really the whole point of it and it's based on a true story. Jim looked it up, and it Oh, really? It starts and it says This is more, the events portrayed here are more true than you would believe.

Okay. All right, everyone, I hope you are having, this isn't going to be out until the I hope you're having a marvelously fantastic And if you ever would like to hear Amy and I, if you think there's a good talk topic, send it our way. Yes, 

[00:56:04] Amy: Email us at podcast at homeschool life now.com or you can email Blair directly at Blair at seahomeschoolers. com, and stay tuned because we have, we've hinted at a couple of things, but we have some big, exciting projects that are coming up in the next few months. Some of them are big SEA projects. Some of them are big Amy and Blair projects.

Some of them are cool individual things that we're working on, but we're exciting to share. We're excited. to share, some new homeschool surprises, y'all. So thanks for listening to Secular Homeschooling with Blair and Amy brought to you by SEA Homeschoolers and home.school.life We'll see you next time.

How do you homeschool writing? Just like we homeschool everything else, by giving our kids the tools and scaffolding they need to do it well.

Transcript:

We use an automatic transcription app for our podcast, which makes it possible for us to include transcripts for our podcast episodes — but it does sometimes make weird errors! We do edit it, but I’m sure we miss things sometimes.

Amy: Hello, and welcome to Secular Homeschooling with Blair and Amy, brought to you by SEA Homeschoolers and home.school.life I'm, Amy…

Blair: and i'm Blair.

Amy: And today we are talking to you about a topic that is near and dear to our hearts: How to support your homeschooler in becoming a successful strong confident writer. 

[00:00:27] Blair: Oh, this is a hard one you and I’ve been thinking about this for for as long as we've been homeschooling—this was something that I was, I spent a lot of time thinking about, and now we are working on a curriculum that has writing infused all throughout it.

I'm excited to be talking about this today. This is something I know a lot of homeschoolers really struggle with. 

[00:00:51] Amy: Yeah, I think that is true. I think, and I think it's because writing instruction works best when it's at least a little bit explicit. I hear a lot of people in homeschool groups saying that kids are going to learn to write naturally by reading a lot and by writing fun stuff that they like—just turn them loose.

I know that was the curriculum that my mom's first grade students used when she was teaching public school first grade. I'm going to say I think that does work fine for a very small handful of students. I think most of us need a little more support.

I get a lot of students in high school who have done this kind of writing, this kind of interest based, free form writing, and they come to high school, and they're just really not prepared to write the kind of stuff that they need to write.

And so of course that's crushing for their confidence and it's hard for them in their classes. And there are a lot of really easy ways that you can implement writing across all the subjects. So that when your kid gets to high school and college and the rest of their lives, they know what they're doing when someone asks them to write a paragraph or a proposal or a paper.

[00:02:07] Blair: I've been, so for a long time, I've been wanting to incorporate writing instruction into my science courses that I write. And that led me down the rabbit hole of The Writing Revolution, the Hochman method. It was, it's really eye opening when you begin to look at a completely different method.

It is the most common sense approach to teaching writing I've ever seen—ever been exposed to, and it's revolutionary on the one hand, because it is really dramatic. It looks really dramatically different. And on the other hand, you can't believe that everyone isn't using it. And it is that writing should be taught starting at the sentence level and the instruction should be incremental and intentional.

And now that is not the only method that you can use. But if you have a child who is struggling, or if you're struggling to figure out how to teach writing, I highly encourage that you look at the Hochman method, because it's also an easier method to teach, because it's, so what it is it's a method that focuses on the the skills of writing, in a way, not the mechanics of writing, but the actual skills of writing in a way that is very more, it's much more narrow.

So you don't work on all the skills all at once, which is the method that most people use, where it's just get them writing. The problem with just get them writing is it doesn't teach this more sophisticated skills.

The other thing that—according to the classes I took at the Hochman Method, this, these programs where you have kids copy other people's writing, that hasn't been shown to—I know for some kids that works, but studies in traditional school classrooms have shown that most kids don't learn to write by copying the writing of other people.

[00:04:27] Amy: Yeah, I think that reading widely definitely supports better writing. It gives you more words to use, more ideas to use. But all by itself, I don't think that for most kids it provides the kind of structure that they need.

So we thought that we would wander through a an idea of what writing might look like across 12 years of homeschooling. How do you start strong? How do you finish strong? What do you do in that messy middle? 

[00:04:58] Blair: I just want to interject something that one of the things that I found really interesting is when you focus on writing as skills-based. Studies have shown that increases the acquisition of content knowledge, but it's also—studies have also shown that it makes kids better readers.

So if you are struggling with a child who is working to transition from learning to read to reading to learn, focusing narrowly on the skills, on writing skills, makes them better able to comprehend what they're reading. And the reason for that is that we don't write like we speak.

And so when your children are reading the writing of others, the sentence structures, they don't make sense to them in a language sense, because, when you think about how you speak, It's not the same language structure. And so you're asking kids to interpret meaning in ways that they're not used to acquiring information.

if you, when you hear that, you're like, wow, yeah—I was, I thought it was pretty eyeopening. Totally. 

[00:06:26] Amy: And I think an important thing to remember with these early years of writing. is that handwriting does not equal writing. Punctuation does not equal writing. A lot of things that we think of as writing don't necessarily equal writing.

What you want to get kids to do is think like writers. And sometimes that can mean scaffolding the pieces of writing that are more challenging. 

[00:06:54] Blair: So let's start where you were talking about with the elementary level and the scaffolding approach. So if you were to start to write down every single thing you need to do to write, the number of skills can be overwhelming.

And you really have to think about cognitive load. And on top of that, when we tell kids just to write, Hey, just write. We aren't just overloading them potentially with the mechanical side of things. There's the whole idea creation. That has to happen and getting those ideas from your brain down your arm onto the page, just stymies a lot of kids, or they've got these huge ideas and they start to tell you this big story.

And it comes out as, I was happy. I went to the park. All these little choppy little sentences because it's complicated to get those big ideas out because it's the writing. They realize, how do I spell this? Oh, how do I make this character? Where do periods go? And one of the things with scaffolding is as you're teaching kids to make the transition from writing to Like writers write as opposed to how they speak, you can do that orally, you can take that in dictation. You can write that for them on a whiteboard so that they can see their words going up on a page, but you remove them from having to get the handwriting aspect. And you can use sentence prompts. There's no reason you can't use sentence prompts to help students.

For example, I'm going to assume most of you have heard of the Pigeon. Why don't you drive the bus? You can say. The pigeon wanted to drive the bus, but, and then kids fill in the rest of that sentence. Now, this is straight Hochman method that I'm talking about here, and that's not the only method for kids, but I would encourage you, if writing is something that your elementary level students struggling with, that you think about how you can make writing instruction more incremental, more intentional, and more focused on the structure of how people write interesting and informative sentences.

[00:09:34] Amy: Yeah, I think, do not underestimate the power of taking dictation for young writers. Just taking that whole holding the pencil, making the pencil make letters, off the table and encouraging them to just think about what they want to say and how they want to say it and how they want it to sound, and you write it down and you can say, Oh, it sounds this sentence is a question, so let's put a question mark at the end or, oh it feels like this is actually two sentences. Let's break it up. Let's put a period here and make it two sentences. And you're doing that from a perspective of actually helping them improve something that they are writing.

You're just doing the physical writing part, which I think is awesome. 

[00:10:19] Blair: You also take the spelling aspect off. Another thing you can do is, oh, you have two ideas, I think we can make this one sentence. You're introducing the conjunctions. The other thing that studies have shown is that grammar is best taught in context.

What Amy was just talking about with the question mark—pick a limited number of grammar skills like, uppercase at the beginning of a sentence and a period and a question mark. That is—my son loved to diagram sentences more than any other thing in school and but that has not been shown to make kids better at grammar.

[00:11:09] Amy: I would argue that diagramming sentences is like doing crossword puzzles or logic puzzles. It's really fun, but, and it's good for people with a certain kind of brain. But but yeah, it doesn't actually help you always learn things the way that you think it will. 

[00:11:26] Blair: That's, yes, I could see that little Sudoku with grammar. So the best way to teach grammar is to limit what you're teaching. And then have kids work on those skills as they're working on their writing. 

[00:11:41] Amy: And I will say I get—every year I teach high school classes at the little hybrid school that I run. And every year I get high school students who don't know to capitalize proper nouns or the first word in a sentence.

And I have to spend a lot of time kind of supporting them through that, right? But if I'm supporting them through that in high school, that means that we are not getting to lots of other more complex grammar things. Because this is a very basic grammar thing that most people should come to high school knowing.

And if you follow a looser format, you gotta make sure that you're going in after it and making sure that your kid understands the conventions of grammatical writing. They are important. It seems silly, but but they do matter. And people will take you less seriously if you're starting all your sentences with lowercase letters and your sentences have no punctuation.

[00:12:38] Blair: Or if it sounds really slangy, as if they just basically picked up their phone and it was typed to text—which I must say gonna a lot every time I send a text to you. It says gonna. I'm like Why doesn't this say going to? I'm learning,.

You did bring up something that I do think we need to touch on is feedback.

I really encourage you if your child it I gave a talk about feedback. One of the things that I said in a talk that really resonated with people was, do not give your child a one star review. Feedback. Think of feedbacks like a Yelp review. One to five stars. Nobody should be giving their own child a one star review, even if you're really frustrated with them.

And do not overwhelm your child with the number of things they're working on. If you have a child, for example, who I don't care what grade they're in. I don't even care if they're in college because I've had college students at UCSD who, some of them, struggled with basic writing. Oh, I'm going into science. I don't really need to write. Yes, you really do if you want to be taken seriously.

But if you've got a child who doesn't know how to punctuate a proper noun and they don't know how to use periods and then there's a whole bunch of other things they don't know how to do grammatically, just choose those two skills and then work your way through it. Do commas later.

If you have a child who is struggling with basic sentence structure, stop with the multi paragraph essays. It isn't a multi paragraph essay with a whole bunch of badly written sentences or sentences that don't show the grade level that you want them.

Just think about a very limited number of things you want your child working on. And then scaffold them to mastery. It doesn't matter how old your child is. It doesn't matter what grade they're in. That's the level they're at. And it can be, I think it's frustrating for older students, when they're struggling with writing, because those are students with big ideas. So are the younger students, but these are students who really want to get their big ideas out. And so I think it's important that we help them be able to do that in writing. What do you—don't you, Amy? 

[00:15:25] Amy: Yes I think it's really important to remember that your job as someone who's supporting a young writer is not to be their copy editor.

It is not your job to go in and fix every mistake that they've made. Pick one or two things, like Blair says, and work on those until they get good at them. And then pick one or two new things. And keep doing that and it will, you'll build those skills. But you'll actually build them. 

[00:15:52] Blair: And don't fix them for them.

No. Say, Ooh, what goes at the, this looks like the end of a sentence. What should go there? This looks like a complete sentence, looks like you've got three complete ideas here. 

[00:16:09] Amy: A lot of people are really tempted to copy edit their kids work. I too have been tempted to do that. So I'm not judging. But it really doesn't help them if you go through and fix all their mistakes.

For one thing, it's very disheartening to get back a paper covered in green circles and lines and cross outs and underlines and for another thing if you're doing it for them, there's no incentive for them to figure out how to do it every time —they know that you're just going to go through and mark it all up for them.

So they never spend the time learning how to do it, when if you said instead. Oh, hey, so one thing I noticed is that like your sentences are not starting with capital letters I wonder why that is—sentences should always start with a capital letter, right? So this should look like yeah this and then you just go back through it together it's much more accessible. 

[00:17:02] Blair: And if you have a child who has any sort of learning challenge with writing, help with that, help them facilitate, especially if it's anything that affects the mechanical side of things, just take some of that off writing. It is such a big such a big job. I heard something recently that really resonated with me and I can't remember—but it was that in order to learn something, you have to forget it a little. And feedback, this was in a discussion that I was listening to about feedback. And it was that feedback should be given in at 24 to 48 hours after the assignment is completed. If it's given on a Friday, Monday's fine.

And then you should, if you're going to let someone correct based on the feedback, which I encourage you to do, 150%, totally do not give feedback unless you're going to let somebody do something with the feedback. You want to have a very short turnaround because you don't want them to have forgotten too much.

[00:18:23] Amy: Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. Actually, I think that's a really good strategy.

[00:18:27] Blair: I’ll have to dig up the actual saying. It was better than—you didn't need to use as many words as I did to explain it. 

[00:18:37] Amy: So another part of good writing that I think that we often overlook as homeschool parents is that academic writing, unlike creative writing—or maybe like creative writing in some way, like that could be a whole argument—but academic writing requires you to have evidence to support your ideas.

And so I feel like learning how to find and paraphrase or quote evidence for your ideas is an incredibly important piece of writing that sometimes gets overlooked. 

[00:19:17] Blair: I really like this and I think that critical thinking, I love that. I think that critical thinking is really easy to incorporate into writing instruction, especially when you're having the discussion about the sort of evidence and information.

I've taught Ssnce leaving college, I have taught middle and high school level science and elementary level, and even at the elementary level, I talk to kids about where they're getting their information from and how they're using that information. I think that's a really important discussion. You must tell everybody how you would teach this to your high school students, Amy, because actually, let's give them some how to tips.

[00:20:04] Amy: So one thing that I love that works for middle school and high school is to divide a regular plain old sheet of paper into six blocks, three lines down, one line across, write your idea, whatever it is that you're thinking on the center line, and then fill each block with one piece of evidence from the text.

So say that your big idea is that, I don't know, Hamlet has commitment issues, right? That's your big idea. That's what you want to talk about around Hamlet. So you would go through and you would say, okay look. Here is one piece of evidence that Hamlet has commitment issues. He wants to go back to school, but he can't make up his mind to go back to school and leave his mother.

Here's another example of how Hamlet has commitment issues. His dad has asked him to get revenge, he thinks he needs to get revenge, but he can't make up his mind to actually do it. His relationship with Ophelia, all this stuff with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. But you fill it up, you fill up the sheet of paper, you're not actually doing a ton of writing.

You're just jotting down ideas, which is different from focused writing. But focusing on finding the evidence and filling up this page with evidence really helps you build your argument.

Another thing that I love, and this is more of a high school thing, is I really like students to do narrative bibliographies.

A traditional bibliography is an alphabetical list of all the sources that you used for a particular project. It’s put into a specific format, right? A narrative bibliography is a little bit different. A narrative bibliography Is the story of how you did research, and I think that this is so helpful for kids.

A narrative bibliography isn't alphabetical, it starts with the first resource that you consulted. And if that was the encyclopedia, or that was a biography of the person that you found at the library, or if that was a research article that you read, wherever you started, whatever kicked off your exploration.

That's the first piece of your narrative bibliography and you explain how you used it and where you went from there, right? I read this biography of Harriet Tubman. Turns out it wasn't such a great biography but it's the only full adult biography of Harriet Tubman out there. But it referenced this meeting that she went to in Seneca Falls. And so my next step is I'm gonna go try to find out what I can about that meeting.

And so you do that the whole way through. You go through step by step the research that you're doing, the things that you're finding. Some of the things won't work and you'll say, Oh, yeah, I consulted this resource and it was really crappy. But you're not actually writing a research paper. You're just building that skill to collect evidence to write a research paper so that later when you do go and write a research paper. You already know all the things that you're doing. You know how to get all the evidence that you need. You've done it.

So you can focus on the writing part of it instead of the research part of it. 

[00:23:13] Blair: Okay. That sounds —so do you have your students eventually write research papers as well? They do eventually write research papers, but they but they start out, you scaffold them with the skills for how to do research.

I never really thought about that because that's the other thing. We just—so we dump kids into writing and say, just write. The most complex, it's really interesting to think about the way we teach math and don't teach writing the same way. It makes no sense. So you would also take issue with the way people just let kids loose with research.

And so you're actually teaching them how research works. That's profound, actually, before getting to I've never—that's the first person I've ever heard approaching it that way. 

[00:24:12] Amy: I feel like it makes a big difference. I feel like I, a lot of kids, when I was in school, and I bet when you were in school, Blair, we had a library day at school.

And we had a research librarian and she would talk to us about how to research topics and show us how to use the microfiche machine—remember the microfiche machine?—and the card catalog. But I feel like with so much stuff online today and so much technologically accessible stuff, we forget that kids need to learn how to use all of that. That they need, like the little research skills, to be able to do it, and I think that is an important part of good writing because I feel like if you're just going on historyisfun-dot-com and collecting a list of facts, you're not really getting good evidence to support your history paper.

You're not really getting good evidence to support your history thinking. But it's okay that you don't know that because no one has showed you.

[00:25:14] Blair: So let's go back to, we were going to talk about middle school, we were going to talk about high school. I think we really talked about, there's a lot we could say about elementary school, a lot. We could say elementary school because we're writing a first grade curriculum right now, but we won't spend two hours talking to you about elementary school—reach out to us if you really have questions. I think in middle and high school, I think that one of the things and I like to do this in elementary school, but I think it's really important to start doing in middle school and high school is to broaden what it means to do a writing project.

For example I, my son was the first person that came to me and said, Instead of writing a paper, can I—this, when he was in 9th or 10th grade—he said, can I, every other paper, can I YouTube a video? And I. said, absolutely, he had really interesting videos, like one about fracking, one about, so they were all non fiction.

They were all—the script was expository. it was fascinating to me, and it really got me thinking—it's actually about the same time I started to see that he was doing that.—it got me really thinking about the innovative ways that we should incorporate writing. Yeah, one of the projects that I had my middle school, high school chemistry class work on was a poster activity, and I was really—I gave kids very explicit instructions for labeling for some of the texts that they would need to describe, pictures, how they would want to organize, and I didn't tell them, wasn't like, Pink by numbers, but I did give instructions because I think one of it's really important in this day and age when so many things are visual that we teach kids how to use their writing to incorporate into visual presentations 

[00:27:35] Amy: Yeah, I think presentations, especially like you say in this world where so much learning takes place online, aew super important I think in a big picture way.

It helps me to think about with writing and everything else—I think there are like three stages, elementary, middle, and high school. And in elementary school—I like to think about Legos, right? So in elementary school, you're looking at all the cool Legos there are. There are different colored Legos. There are different shaped Legos. You look at how you can put one or two of them together. You sort them, get to know the Legos.

And then in middle school, you're using those Legos to build things from instructions that someone else has given you. You're building that Millennium Falcon. You're building all of these various things from instructions.

And then in high school, you have a big bucket of Legos and you are figuring out your own things that you want to build from them.

And so in middle school, I think that a lot of scaffolding is really beneficial. I think focusing on the bricks of creating good writing is so important. Help kids understand what bricks they need to build an essay that argues something. Help them figure out what bricks they need to build an essay that explains something. Ask them what bricks they need to find and to create an essay that describes something. Help them figure out the kind of bricks that they need to do all of these different things.

And help them build it like that. Because then when they get to high school and they have their own ideas that they want to express, they have a whole toolkit that they can use to do it. 

[00:29:19] Blair: So I just want to so the bricks are the intentional lessons. So for example, I, one of the mistakes that I see that is made often when teaching middle school students is that there's an explanation of what an argumentative paper looks like, but the very intentional incremental instructions of this is what should go here.

[00:29:53] Amy: Yeah, like a sandwich, right? Like you need this statement, you need this spread, you need this evidence. And you need this statement. 

[00:30:02] Blair: And these are some of the transitions that you might use. These are some of the word choices. These are some of the conjunctions that you might want to use just to really and I know people worry that then it won't seem original, that then it will seem more formulaic.

I think that the concern that kids will write something that feels formulaic, it gets away from the point that a lot of times when someone is first practicing what they're learning, it looks very formulaic. And it is very formulaic. What's the problem with that? What is it? Perfect practice makes perfect performance.

And in this case, you're getting someone to practice. Before they write the original screenplay. Yes! Or whatever.

[00:30:58] Amy: It builds so much confidence. Because kids see that they can do it. 

[00:31:02] Blair: Then it becomes automatic. What parts go where? And once that becomes automatic, once that's the form—the formula of, for good writing, some of those are learned.

And whether you realize it or not, there, there really are a lot of formulas that go into writing. One of the things in The Writing Revolution they talk all the time about is appositives as a way to add information in a condensed way. And it's really interesting to me as someone who writes science curriculum, because I use appositives all the time.

When I introduce a term, for example, if I'm going to use species and let's say I defined the word in chapter two and it's chapter five and I'm using it and I'm not sure if kids will still remember what the definition is. I use an appositive. And a lot of kids who, if your child has never been taught how to write an appositive, number one, they're not using them in their own writing. And it's a really common writing convention.

But number two, they often don't understand what that little phrase is after the word species. They don't understand what the author just did was to redefine species for them. And it's eye opening, and so teaching those writing conventions and then asking children to do them—we don't worry about it in any other subject besides writing that it's going to make our kids writing seem kind of formulaic.

We don't worry about it in math. In fact, we teach kids in math, copy this method, copy this procedure, you'll get the right answer. We don't think to ourselves, Oh, my child is never going to go get a math degree from college. They're never going to be able to do something creative with math. Because they learned it in this formulaic way.

It's just really interesting that we do that with writing, which is way more complicated than any other subject. 

[00:33:09] Amy: I think that there was a very reasonable desire to make kids see writing as something that is fun to do. I think that a lot of this kind of just write for fun, just write what you feel, write whatever you want, comes from a place of wanting to make writing fun for kids.

But it turns out that for a lot of kids, not knowing how to do something well is not that fun, and they still hate writing, and they also don't know how to do it. 

[00:33:38] Blair: And so they hate it even more because they look at the person, they look at someone else in their age and they're thinking to themselves, wait a minute, how do they know how to do that?

I'm telling you, the older your child gets, the more, whether you see it or not, the closer attention they're paying to the work their peers are doing. My son in college, I hear him and his friends, they compare with each other and they talk about who's good at something and who is better than them and who came to them for help and it, they pay a lot of attention to that.

And so you are, especially with writing, you are much better off making sure that your child has the writing skills that they need. Yeah. And it's not that easy to teach, but take the time to think about the skills. And I actually would recommend all the way that you teach it skill based, with a skills based approach.

[00:34:46] Amy: It also takes away some of the emotional piece of it. Creative writing is really personal. And. It doesn't feel cool to tell your kids that they need to change their story because the plot structure, like the plot arc doesn't work. They need you need a climax, you need a climax in your bunny story.

It, it feels weird to critique that kind of thing when you're teaching writing to your kids. But if you're writing in a sentence about bunnies, a factual sentence about bunnies from what you've learned about bunnies in science, It's really easy to say, Oh you know what? I do think this is a great fact, but can we express it more clearly?

[00:35:28] Blair: So I think that a lot of people, kids, and we've already talked about AI, but I think that we I think that writing is so important. I think that AI is not going to do it all. I think that, first of all, it's got to get the information from somewhere. But I also think that there's so many forms that writing can take.

If you believe the world is moving increasingly online, I think that, and if you believe that AI is going to begin to do a lot of the jobs, I don't think writing then becomes obsolete. I think that the sort of writing that people are doing might change the way it looks or you might be writing, you might be spending more time writing things for online presentations or something like that.

But that the more skilled you are at writing, just basically skilled at writing, the better position you're in for any way that writing changes and all of the different iterations for how it might look. 

[00:37:02] Amy: Yes. I think it is so important to give people a framework to work from. It helps all of us. I think if you ask a kid to write a three page essay and you've never helped them learn how to write a great sentence, they're almost certainly going to use AI to write that three page essay. If you focus on the sentences, or especially early on, then I think kids are much more likely to try to write it themselves. I think there's something about the jump from sentences to essays where you haven't given them enough scaffolding that makes AI so tempting. I see this with students. They think AI sounds better, and so they want to use AI. But if you're focusing on a sentence instead of a whole essay, You can make your sentence better.

It feels much more accomplishable. 

[00:37:57] Blair: I agree completely. Something we haven't touched on, which is something I still write it. I have hundreds and hundreds of pieces of poetry that I have written. Only a few of them are in books of mine. I've been writing poetry, the first poem that I, I had a poem that was published in a newspaper when I was in fourth grade, and I've been writing poetry since before fourth grade.

I think that poetry is actually a really great tool to use in writing because It is a very sophisticated use of words. It's not a great place for grammar, especially if like me, you like e.e. cummings, but it is a, it's the amount of words in poems are, it's just really minimizes the amount of words for very effective delivery of information and I think that is something that—I know my son and I, he loved poetry right along with me. I don't think you just have to if you're like, we're not, poetry's not going to be for us. Songs! Songs are poetry. That, a good song has a story arc or just even if it's something silly. I think that songs do very sophisticated use and songs are interesting.

Because they're bringing in music. I love the way music supports the words in songs. I just think that melding is actually academically mind blowing, 

[00:39:53] Amy: No, it is. Some of the best work that my students have done in the world of writing about poetry has been writing songs in response to poems, where they try to use the same themes and the same images but in different ways and they set it to music and it is like you said, it's mind blowing, it's amazing, it's incredible and insightful. 

[00:40:16] Blair: And so I would encourage you to incorporate some poetry Now, one of the things that'll happen as a student starts to write poetry or songs is that some of what they give to turn in will seem imitative.

Imitation, that is a student finding something that resonates with them and what they're doing is they're practicing the writing style. That imitative writing is totally different than plagiarism. If somebody's directly copied, obviously that's plagiarism, or if they've changed five words, obviously that's a problem.

But if what you're seeing is the same structure, somebody takes oh, some famous Pink Floyd, I can't think of the name of it. Somebody takes some famous song, then, that has the same tune, has a similar structure, but the words are different. That's okay. 

[00:41:19] Amy: Yeah because we were talking earlier about how copying a writer's work for word verbatim in your own handwriting isn't really beneficial to developing writers, but imitating someone's style can be incredibly beneficial to developing writers. They're very different things. 

[00:41:42] Blair: Yes, and so I want to, I have that and frankly, in my own, when I was much, when I was in my teens, I can remember a couple of times using the structure and making something and recognizing it was imitative—and not being proud of it, and now as I understand how people learn and I understand what I was doing was I was teaching myself a structure that I actually really, that really resonated with me. And so just be thoughtful if you start to see that. And we, and I only bring that in terms of poetry because we don't actually have the same issue when somebody's imitative in another area.

For example, if you ask somebody to write a science paper or a lab—Hey, I want you to do a lab report—Imitative is not bad. What's bad is when you get something in your thinking to yourself as a teacher, somebody grading somebody's work, you're thinking, wow, okay, should they even understand what goes there?

So that sort of imitation as somebody is learning how, the structure of a certain type of writing can actually be very important, and it really depends on how someone learns if they use that or not. 

[00:43:02] Amy: I saw the funniest meme someone posted me about, about this, where they said that people who write, that we could consider all academic writing, academic fan non fiction.

So it's fan fiction, but fan non fiction, because you're basically just copying other people's styles and ideas and bringing your own spin to it and putting your own stuff in it. And I thought that was very funny. 

[00:43:28] Blair: It's actually really interesting. I write science courses, I think most people listening will know.

And I wouldn't be writing a good science course if I didn't present the facts that, if I'm teaching about weathering and I didn't present what a sixth grader should be learning about weathering it wouldn't be good. And so what makes nonfiction good, especially academic writing is that is the voice you bring to it.

And that's what's really interesting. So you really, you're stuck with you're secular, want to use evidence based, you're stuck with a, the same facts that someone else is going to use. And how do you present those? What words you use? What illustrations do you think do a good job of highlighting that?

And so it's really very interesting how you go about doing that. And so I like that.

[00:44:26] Amy: I just thought it was very funny because I do think that we all go through stages where we're—I'm, I know that I personally sometimes go back to my high school essays, and I'm like, oh, this is very T. S. Eliot fan nonfiction. Like I was basically copying T. S. Eliot. And I think that's like really normal.

And I turned out to be a reasonably fine writer. So I think, so I'm going to say it's like part of the process. Finding writers who you admire and who you want to emulate. That's part of finding your own voice as a writer. 

[00:45:00] Blair: I really liked for a number of years e. Cummings. And I can tell when I wrote during the e.e. cummings years my name, I didn't capitalize this letter on my name.

[00:45:19] Amy: I still don't capitalize my name and my email signature. 

[00:45:23] Blair: Let me, I want to come back to feedback just a moment. For a minute here and something we didn't bring up with the feedback and you said something it really reminded me of this with whenever you give feedback. This isn't just for writing. It's for anything. Be very targeted. Great job is just as bad of feedback as—I like Amy uses a green pen, not a red pen. That is so Amy—something is marked to shreds and the reason great job isn't good by itself. You didn't tell the person what they should keep doing to do a great job. So you should be very explicit with your feedback. It shouldn't be overwhelming. Find something that they did great. Find one or two things that were good that somebody really did a good job on and state that.

As far as what they should be working on and we can all work on something. Let's say you're working on writing and punctuating a complete idea and you've got a learner who this is the first time that they have done that. Great job. You wrote a sentence. It's a complete idea. And you remember to use a period and an uppercase.

You're probably going to stop there. This is a student who, they finally have turned this into. Let's say you get, you've got another student—this is how you can differentiate—working on the same assignment, who they've, they're, they have no trouble with sentences and they give you something like the boy was happy, punctuated correctly. Then for that child, you can circle the word happy and acknowledge the fact that they totally did exactly what you asked for. Circle the word happy and ask them to vary their vocabulary. Scaffold them if you need to.

So there's always work that someone can do, but feedback is a fine line between any time somebody has worked really hard and finally succeeded. That is all the feedback I think that you should give them. Don't you agree, Amy? But if maybe you don't agree. If you don't agree,

Amy: I actually do agree a hundred percent. And yeah, so don't, if you're like, Oh yay, we check that box. Now we're onto the next thing. Don't go onto the next thing too soon. Give them space to celebrate the victory.

For high schoolers, I think a really great piece of feedback is asking students to, to give feedback on their own work.

When my students turn in an essay or a paper, I always ask them to tell me the three things that they were focused on with the essay. What were the three things they were trying to do? What they think is the strongest part of their essay, the part of their essay that they feel like could be improved, and what they would have done if they had an extra 24 hours to go back over it.

And I get really good, and their comments are almost always the same ones that I would give them, because they're very perceptive by high school.

[00:48:46] Blair: So do your high school students, when the first time they're asked to do that, do they just sit there going…? 

[00:48:57] Amy: So the first time, they're really good at picking what they think is the worst part of their paper. They're terrible at picking the best part. They're really good at saying what they would do with the extra time. They're usually able to come up with one or two things that they're trying to do, but it's hard for them to come up with that third one. And so they grow in the process.

But yeah so there, there are some blank like stares, and they really hate saying what the best thing they did is, they really hate that. That is a big hurdle for them. But I think—like I say when they do it, they're almost always right. Like I guess that's not an objective, it's this objective thing. But I usually agree with them. I'm usually like, oh yes, that absolutely was the best part. 

[00:49:40] Blair: That's actually really—so because revision is the most important, really most important. You've got to have the idea got to revise there's—Getting it down just getting the ideas down, which is where we spend way too much time focused. If you've got a good plan for what you're gonna write, that's the easy part; the revision part is hard.

And so what you are teaching kids is the skill of being able to revise their own work. That's actually—kudos to you, Amy. 

[00:50:23] Amy: I do feel like most of my students leave high school as confident, capable writers, which is what I want. Not all of them are going to go on and do writing heavy jobs in their life, but they all know how to express themselves clearly, how to back up their ideas with evidence, and how to posit the counter argument in a compelling way.  

[00:50:48] Blair: Anything else for this subject topic?

[00:50:48] Amy: No, I feel—encourage your kids to write. Writing is good. And help them do it. Don't be afraid to help them do it. You helping them do it is not taking away their creativity, their originality, or their joy in writing. It can, in fact, promote all three of those things. 

[00:51:08] Blair: And make it skill based.

Honestly no matter what method you use, it really focuses on the skills. With the Hochman method, at the sentence level, they, I really, that really appeals to me. If you can't write a good sentence, why are you working on a multi paragraph essay? Why aren't you working on sentences? And you can write really complex informative sentences. No, they don't have as much information as a multi paragraph essay. But I've graded some multi paragraph essays for college students. You don't even, you get to the end of it, and you're like, what are, I have no idea what to do with this. And that's because they just did a word dump of every single thing. There's no cohesiveness and it's all over the place. And a lot of times it's super redundant. Yeah, you got three paragraphs, but you said the same thing in two of them. And they don't even know it. We're just not teaching people how to get their ideas out of their head on through their arm onto the paper, the computer screen—and that is something worth focusing on and it's worth focusing on much more incrementally than we do. 

[00:52:36] Amy: Blair and I are, in case you can't tell, huge fans of The Writing Revolution. If you are struggling with teaching writing and you're like, I wish someone would talk me through some ways to do this better, I highly recommend you get that from the library or your local bookstore. It is a really great resource.

[00:52:55] Blair: Everybody, not everybody, but the people who are paying attention are asking about Writing Revolution 2.0. I asked the company that, where it's, the publisher of it, and I was told that it's, there's not a big difference if you've already got one book or if your library's got one book. The other book has incorporated the information from some studies that show that a little bit of information about studies that are showing that it's a very effective method for teaching writing, but the other thing that they incorporate is just some new examples from other classes.

[00:53:37] Amy: So don't hesitate if you're like, I wish I had this book, but I'm gonna wait for the 2.0 to come out. Don't wait, go ahead and get it. 

[00:53:43] Blair: Although I think 2. 0 comes out either this month or next month. 

[00:53:46] Amy: Oh, so it's soon now. So it might even be out by the time you're listening to this podcast.

Yes. So I guess that is a wrap for this episode of Secular Homeschooling with Blair and Amy, brought to you by SEA Homeschoolers and home.school.life We will be back in two weeks. I don't know if you've noticed, but we're actually on a podcasting schedule where it comes out every two weeks. We're got a rhythm going.

And so we hope to see you then.

The world is not easy right now, y’all. In this episode, we’re talking about how to raise resilient, hopeful kids when it feels like everything is on fire.

CW: Mentions of self-harm, abusive childhood (not described)

We love to hear from you! Please email us with questions, comments, and ideas for future episodes!

Transcript:

We use an automatic transcription app for our podcast, which makes it possible for us to include transcripts for our podcast episodes — but it does sometimes make weird errors! We do edit it, but I’m sure we miss things sometimes.

[00:00:02] Amy: Hello and welcome to Secular Homeschooling with Blair and Amy, brought to you by SEA Homeschoolers and  home.school.life. We are recording this episode on Saturday, May 4th, so may the force be with you, Blair.

Blair: Got my Star Wars gear on.

Amy: Excellent. I still have my pajamas on, just for full disclosure. Today we are talking about a topic that feels really important in the world today: Resilience and how to teach it. 

[00:00:37] Blair: Yeah it just feels like there's a lot going on right now. This is something that Is really personal for me. I think about it a lot and I care a lot about helping people to help their children have the trait of resilience so I'm going to share a personal story to start this off.

I grew up in a very toxic family with a mother who was mentally ill. I've given a lot of thought to what it was. She committed suicide when she was 39, so I really don't know. I never knew her with me as an adult. I think she might have been bipolar. She self medicated. She was an alcoholic and she also took prescription pills.

She was both physically and verbally abusive. I was primarily the target and my father stayed married to her, but he was not there, wasn't present emotionally often physically, because that was how he escaped it. I have given a lot of thought to, I turned out okay, I turned out to be okay. 

[00:01:51] Amy: You turned out pretty good.

[00:01:53] Blair: How do you survive that? I remember being fairly young and thinking to myself that I wasn't going to be like my mom. That was what I really thought. And how do you get to be an okay adult without carrying a lot of negative feelings and being a negative person?

And how do you be resilient through that? It's really the trait. That's what I think about it. I think that I just must have had the trait of being resilient and I figured it out on my own. My late teens and my early twenties I was a hot mess for a lot of those and I didn't want to be, and so I worked very hard and to today, one of the things that makes me be able to be successful is I'm still resilient because the bigger SEA gets, the bigger the target is on my back . And how do you deal with that? And the way I deal with it is the way I dealt with what happened with my mom. And it is, I just let it go. If I've done something, I will work very hard at making things right.

But if I haven't done anything, I let it go. I walk away from it. It is completely out of my control. If somebody says something online that isn't true, I don't have control of that. And I actually don't do anything about it. Part of the reason I don't do anything about it is if I start going there, then all of the time I'm spending being positive is all of the sudden being spent being negative. 

My son, by the way, can struggle sometimes with being resilient. He had two complex concussions from accidents when he used to ski competitively. And something else a lot of people might not know is that he was almost murdered in a park. He had an African American girlfriend. He is white and someone made some racial slurs. He then defended his girlfriend and they stabbed him, missed his ,heart by less than a centimeter away from his left ventricle, about half an inch away from the base of his spine. So he bears the scars of that event that happened when he was 17. And so he has had to be resilient to — Oh, this is a very lot of personal things that I shared in this episode. 

And so how do you be resilient through those? I hope nobody ever has to go through what I went through or what my son went through. But I can tell you that as traits go, the ability to be resilient is incredibly valuable for your mental health.

[00:04:55] Amy: I have always admired the way that you are able to let things go. I am definitely the wake-up-at-three-o'clock-in-the-morning-and-think-about-everything-stupid-you-ever-did-and-everything-mean-anyone-ever-said-to-you kind of person. And it has taken me a lot of therapy, a lot of medication to get to a place where I can let things go.

It has been for me, resilience has been really hard work, and I am not necessarily coming from a place where I had a lot to overcome. Did I? It's funny because I was saying to Blair before we started, we grew up in a time where people let their kids ride in the backseat of a car without a car seat or a seatbelt.

But I think they also did that with our emotional health. They were just like, it'll be fine. Just throw it in there. I think most of us who are parents now are recovering from our own childhoods, even if they weren't actively horrible, even if there wasn't actual abuse. Things that happened to us when we were kids, we look back and we're like, Oh. No, that's bad. And we never want those things to happen to our kids.

And so I think that one instinct that we have is to protect our kids from trauma and sadness and hurt and loss. And that is lovely. And I'm glad that we do that. But also sometimes we can do that to an extent where our kids miss out on becoming resilient.

Because they never have anything that they have to be resilient from. 

[00:06:39] Blair: Part of the reason that I think this is important, after my mother committed suicide, I kept getting ill. I was having to be hospitalized for things and I remember overhearing a conversation my dad had with our family doctor and he said, what is wrong with her? Is she medically crashing or something? And the doctor said these are psychosomatic. She is stressed. She's so upset about her mother committing suicide. I really think she needs to see a psychologist or a psychiatrist. My dad said, my daughter is fine. Don't ever suggest that again. And to Amy's point, that is actually the sort of things that our parents felt. And so we had to figure it out and took me years to figure it out. I also want to point out that if you think that your child needs to see someone, or if you do yourself, please do.

[00:07:37] Amy: Yes. I really hope that we have destigmatized this enough. And, the last 20 years where people feel totally comfortable seeking mental health care. I have a therapist, my husband has a therapist, both my kids have therapists, my dog needs a therapist. 

[00:07:54] Blair: My son is okay today because of a wonderful therapist. He had PTSD actually really bad.

Amy: Oh, I can imagine.

Blair: After the incident. And so the therapy it can save your life, really. And by that, I don't mean save you from suicide, which it can do that too. It can give you, save your life so that it — my mother in her lucid moments certainly didn't want to be who she was at other times. 

[00:08:31] Amy: Which is why health care mental health care should be part of health care and available to every person, and there are a lot of low cost resources sliding scale therapists so there are affordable ways to get it —

[00:08:45] Blair: But there aren’t enough therapists, part of the problem is the wait list and time for therapy. I don't want to get into an area where Amy and I aren't experts. I don't want to trivialize anything, if you're dealing with something or going through something. It's why I'm very open about sharing what happened for me and my son is because I want people who are going through something to feel like there's somebody else who's dealt with some of the things that they're dealing with. It's the entire reason I share these sorts of things.

Yeah, so let's define resilience. I'm going to give it to you, Amy. And then we actually did some research and then added our own little spins on it to how you can teach resilience because I do believe that this is something that many of you hope for your children that they grow up to be resilient. I can tell you a little Teflon on the back is not the worst thing ever, especially as the world moves online. 

[00:09:52] Amy: So Blair and I looked up some definitions. I say Blair and I, Blair actually looked up these definitions for me because she's the best. So when we talk about resilience in this episode, what we're talking about is the ability to maintain or regain emotional balance during and after experiencing disruptive or challenging life events.

Specifically, it's the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties or adapt in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stress. When we talk about resilient people, we're talking about people who are able to manage stress effectively and emerge from challenges strengthened and more resourceful.

[00:10:36] Blair: I can tell you that is definitely something that I want for my child now, and I want for all my grandchildren. 

[00:10:44] Amy: Yes. And for all children. I think that's what, that's what makes the world a better place. It's people who can survive hard times and grow through them.

[00:10:53] Blair: The idea for having this episode came about because of the challenges that kids are facing. It's a challenging time for kids. The wars, the news, the political landscape. The climate. It just seems relentless. It's such a challenge to educate kids around this information in a way that's honest and have them maintain their mental health. I think that makes teaching resilience really important right now. And yeah, there's economic volatility, social polarization, political polarization. 

[00:11:40] Amy: And it is different from when we were growing up because kids have access to all this information all the time. Whether they're actively following news updates or not, their peers are, their friends are, they're seeing them on people's social media. I don't think that the world is inherently worse than it has been in the past, but I think that we are confronted with the terribleness of the terrible things in a way that is really harmful to kids' mental health.

It's harmful to my mental health too, but I have the context to know, okay, I'm gonna step away from social media for a while. 

[00:12:18] Blair: And the other thing is that the way people treat other people online. Oh. I encourage you, if you follow some people and if any of them are negative, I encourage you to think about why they might be being negative toward others. And then look to see if those other people are being negative in return because if they're not, the person that's not being negative probably isn't an ostrich. They are probably practicing resilience because it's like , one of my defining definitions for myself is that I am a nice person. Not because of how you treat me, but because I am a nice person. And that's actually a resilient trait. It is a resilient trait to be able to hold that line for yourself.

[00:13:11] Amy: I think the online world has spawned a really unique kind of negativity. And I have been really sad in recent years to see that negativity spilling over into real life social interactions. Thank you. I, of course, there are always people who are rude to their waitress at the restaurant, to their server at the restaurant. There are always people who are rude. But I see more of it and I see the rudeness. It's not about the speed with which your french fries are delivered, but about the way that the waitress looks, or her ethnic background, or her accent.

And yeah, it feels like we are now moving into a generation of people who have grown up with this kind of behavior online, and now think that is also an okay way to treat people in real life. And that is hard. If you are a kid and someone is yelling mean things at you, that really disproportionately because you stopped at the light, is it with turning red? And so that the person has to wait behind you for a whole extra three minutes, they come and knock on your window and yell at you.

That's not okay. What do you do with that? I feel like there is a real culture of meanness and violence happening in the real world that comes from that online world right now. 

[00:14:29] Blair: Do you think it's because social media makes it so you're not connected to others directly in an emotional way? 

[00:14:37] Amy: I think some of it is that The anonymity of the internet made it possible for some people who have bad intentions or want to experiment with being mean, which is actually a really normal thing. For middle schoolers and teenagers to want to do you practice being sarcastic, you practice making rude comebacks that, that is a very normal kid behavior, but I think the anonymity gave them a place to do it where there were no real consequences or repercussions, and so it became a socially accepted thing, they felt like that was socially acceptable behavior, and so they've turned, I would call it trolling, into their whole personality, and I think we see this with a lot of these like flat earther people who don't actually believe in flat earth, just enjoy arguing with people about it to because they can, or, like this whole crazy incel movement and all these I do, I think that a lot of these people — They just, they're entertained by it, they see it as like a kind of performance art and if someone that they loved told them that they were a terrible person, this was hurting them. I think a lot of them would be really hurt, but I don't think there's anybody telling them that. 

[00:15:55] Blair: I will tell you that that practicing to be sarcastic or that sort of normal behavior some people might think that's funny, but as a child who grew up in an abusive household, that was very toxic. I never found that funny. In fact, my husband and Sean sometimes teased me for not having much of a sense of humor. And I do have a sense of humor, but I don't like any kind of mean humor. If I think that in order to be funny, someone is targeting another individual, I do not find that funny at all, in any situation. The reason I'm bringing it up is because there are people who that is never going to be appropriate humor to. So you might want to be mindful if your child is practicing being sarcastic and everyone in the family finds it funny. There are going to be people out there and they might have a really good reason for not finding that funny. 

[00:16:58] Amy: I think that's part of the point is that when you are doing, when you are, when I was in sixth grade, if I was going to say something sarcastic and mean, people around me would have a reaction to it.

I'd be doing it in real life, in real time, and people wouldn't just be typing LOL back at me. I would see someone's face fall if they got hurt, and that would be like a consequence that would make me want to change my behavior. Or maybe my friend would say, hey, that was mean, and that would make me want to change my behavior.

Or maybe people who I thought weren't very nice people would laugh at it and I would be like, Oh I don't know that I want to say things that would make these people like think it's funny. So I think that we have lost a little bit of that with online interaction, the real life kind of social repercussions of those kinds of experiments.

I think it is very normal for for kids to start to realize that they can be sarcastic. Irony is like one of the first stages of humor for kids. And it is a long and annoying stage, a little better than the poop jokes, but…

[00:18:01] Blair: So one of the things that I wrote down as you were talking was trust. I think part of the problem with the online, Can you trust? I just happened to see an article that Russia has operatives right now putting out things on TikTok just to muck with the United States election. Their goal is to make, political and social groups more polarized. 

[00:18:36] Amy: I think that trust is a piece of it. I think that there's so many layers of human connection that don't happen online, and trust is one of them, and accountability is one of them. And consequences are one of them. When we start to pull those threads away, kids are left without a lot. With no real like protection from — kind of, oh that's the wrong word, but you know what I'm saying. I think when we pull those things away, like one thread at a time, we create an environment where, I'm gonna say meanness, where meanness can flourish. 

[00:19:20] Blair: So, let's talk about how to teach resilience. So how can you help your child be more resilient?

[00:19:29] Amy: So I am always gonna say the best thing that you can do for your kid, you know what I'm gonna say? The absolute best thing that you can do for your kid is number one, critical thinking and number two, let them fail. Do not protect them from every failure. 

[00:19:51] Blair: That is challenging. Are you going to give us a personal example? 

[00:19:57] Amy: So yeah. Many years ago, when we started home schooling, one of the things that I was really excited to do was the History Fair that I organized for our local homeschool group, and so many kids were excited about this history fair. I don't know if you remember, like, history fairs from when you were a kid. But, like, I had this great vision and everyone was so excited.

We were going to have the trifold boards! Some people would have digital displays. They all had really ambitious project ideas that they were so excited about And the night before the history fair was supposed to happen, I started to get these really upset texts and emails from parents whose kids were not going to be ready and were not going to be able to participate because they hadn't been able to finish their projects, and I was devastated.

I'm so sorry, but we've booked the space, and they just won't get to participate this year. And I felt really bad for them. And then, it turned out that my own daughter also had not finished everything that she needed to do. We had been checking in, she had written the report, she had done the research, but she had this very ambitious idea of designing this very complicated timeline. And she wanted to do it herself, she did not want my help, which I respect. And she didn't finish it, and she didn't get to display her project at the history fair. And it was really disappointing to her. It was so disappointing. She took the parts of the project that she had, and I think it was actually pretty good, like I was very proud of her and the good work that she did on it.

But she — the project did not turn out the way that she wanted, and I did not jump in and save the day for her. I did not cushion her from that. I let her experience what it was like to get too close to a deadline and not finish. Because she was, she never did that again. She never procrastinated again.

But even if she had, she would have learned that she could mess up and the world didn't end, that it was fine. She didn't turn in the project, and it was disappointing. But I still loved her. The sun still rose and set. She was still a good student. She still did good work. Nobody hated her. And I think that if we don't give our kids the opportunity to see that, the opportunity to see that they can totally screw up and mess something up — and it's fine. It's fine. You want to do better next time, but the world doesn't end. 

[00:22:12] Blair: There's a important aspect, If you're going to turn that into a teaching moment, let them fail, but then talk to them about how to make a project more manageable. Maybe you can't have 10 moving pieces, maybe only 6 can happen, because you do have other things that you're responsible for. We're really talking about executive functioning in that case. And executive functioning can be very important when it comes to academic work. In the tie in to that and resilience, you've got to be careful because your child might not be as skilled at them as you hope. Parents often think their children has mastered an executive functioning skill when it's just a work in progress.

[00:23:00] Amy: It is one of the I think it's one of the hardest things to do as a parent is to watch your kid not succeed a few years ago. Gosh, a few years ago, I guess it's been more than several years ago. I had a student in my high school writing class. He was a great writer, a really strong writer.

And I actually offered them an internship at the magazine that I was editing at the time over the summer. And I said, all you have to do is edit this and send me a copy of it, and I'll, I'll make you an intern. And I need it by this date. I'm just making up a date, like May 8th, or something.

And the student, who was, again, a great writer, a really talented writer, didn't do it. Couldn't do it. I gave an extension. They didn't do it. And then they sent it a month and a half late, and I was like, no, I'm sorry, I already have an intern. And it was — the student was really disappointed, and the student's mom called and was really upset with me because I should have followed up with the student and made sure that he was getting it in and and she was really upset because her student was so her student was upset, right?

Her kid was so upset and so disappointed. And this had been a really good opportunity that he had missed out on. But. Isn't it better to miss out on an internship with your high school writing teacher than to lose a job or fail out of college? I think when we let our kids fail we give them an opportunity to be better prepared for the rest of their lives.

I just want to be clear like i'm not knocking the student who is a very I’m sure still talented writer and it just it wasn't the right fit at the time, but I think it's an example of how if you try, if I had given the student the internship after all that I just don't feel like it would have been a great experience for either one of us. No, and it definitely would not have taught them anything that they needed to know about how to, you know, cope in a business world. 

[00:25:09] Blair: You know that's interesting. They didn't learn the skills they hoped they did, but they learned one of the most valuable skills in life that you could have. 

[00:25:19] Amy: And I think that a lot of times we think that when we're helping kids with all these executive function skills, like holding their hand through every step, that we are really helping them build those skills, that's not always the case.

Sometimes kids can become overly reliant on that scaffolding and when it's not there, they don't know how to do it. So I think part of building kids who can fail better every time is taking out pieces of the scaffolding bit by bit. And sometimes that means that they'll fall, but this is the time to do it, when they're kids and there are no major repercussions.

[00:25:55] Blair: So resilience is not just failing or falling, it's recovering from it. My number one thing that I would say it's that you model the trait of resilience. How do you recover from things? 

[00:26:12] Amy: So Blair, give us an example of how you model resilience. 

[00:26:17] Blair: Okay. Actually, I said it earlier. I am nice because I'm a nice person. And if somebody does or says something that isn't nice, what do I do about it? I run SEA homeschoolers, the target on the back just keeps getting bigger. People say things all the time about me or about SEA that just aren't true. How do I handle those things? I don't do anything about them, for the most part. They're trying to get people to like things or to interact or whatever because I am never ever not nice online 

[00:27:00] Amy: I've never seen you be not nice.

[00:27:01] Blair: That's not energy that I want in my soul or in me. And I let it go. Water off a duck's back. That's resilience. One of the things that I practice I stay within my circle. Can I control this situation? and if the answer is No, or the answer is, Not without a lot of negativity. I walk away from it I don't even interact. That is actually one of the skills that you are going to need to be resilient If you're online and you start to feel yourself get upset about something, do you have any control over that situation? And if the answer is no I recommend that you don't spend a lot of time focused on that.

If somebody's being personally negative maybe you need to address that but for me as somebody who has a social media presence, I just don't. Spend any time online looking at who I am and listening to what I have to say. I am absolutely a person that stays in positivity. The world is too full of people that are trying to tear it and every other person in it down. Let's talk about that a minute. There's this culture of tearing others down. 

[00:28:22] Amy: And I think that what you're touching on is another of the ways that we can help our kids grow into resilient people is by helping them understand what they're feeling. What are their feelings? Like how to identify and deal with your feelings.

So like my daughter. With her history project, it turned out that she had done like a hundred drafts of this very fancy timeline that she was doing, but she wasn't happy with any of them. None of them were perfect. And so it was like this perfectionist unhappiness that was driving her. And once we figured that out, like that was something that we could work on together, but we had to find the words.

Sometimes things happen and they make you angry. Sometimes they make you sad. Sometimes they make your stomach hurt. Like really helping kids name and identify and process the feelings that they're having, I think is a big part of resilience because I don't know about you, but like when I was a kid, I guess my parents idea of like feelings were like, okay, but just don't wear them out in public.

Don't do that outside the house. No feelings. 

[00:29:30] Blair: What you're talking about is important. Being able to identify your emotions, recognizing that your feelings are valid and important.

[00:29:39] Amy: And the physical reactions that they cause, right? Because when you're angry, you may get hot and sweaty and want to move. And when you're sad, you may want to go lay down. 

[00:29:48] Blair: But then also understanding that a part of being resilient is a part of recognizing when your emotions are taking you into territory that isn't as rational as might help you to recover from a situation. 

One of the books that in my life made the hugest difference was — I think his name is Bradshaw, and it is The Shame Based Family. If you grew up in a shame based family, that sort of shame where you can't forgive yourself and in part, it's because the people around you weren't very forgiving, that is something that therapy can help with that.

[00:30:41] Amy: Internalized shame is really hard to let go of. And that is, like for people who aren't resilient, that is sometimes what can happen. Because you cannot let go of things that you've done wrong or messed up or been hurt by. And so you internalize them. You internalize shame. You internalize anger.

You internalize self loathing. Because you're not letting it out. 

[00:31:06] Blair: So we want to model it. We want to develop and discuss for emotional awareness. Be honest with your children. My son brought up something just this morning that I had done once a long time ago. The one way that my mother showed love was through gifts. And so I have had to work really hard, not attaching all this crazy amount of significance to gifts. My son said, it's always so stressful, Mom finding a gift for you. And to this day, I have to work on that trait. My son said, I know it's a love language, and I know that's part of your love language. And I told him that is not how I feel. I work at it. I know that is a ridiculous thing that unfortunately is probably going to be a part of me, but I don't have any more emotional attachment to what people give me. But, when he was younger, I wasn't as with it. Twenty years later, I'm much better at it. 

[00:32:15] Amy: And this is it, right? Because I think one of the things that's really helpful with building resilience, and one of the reasons that I mentioned critical thinking early on at the beginning, is because I think it's really helpful when you're afraid or, nervous, or upset, or angry, or sad, to figure out why you're feeling that.

And a lot of times, the obvious why is not the why, right? I'm nervous about giving my talk at the SEA Conference. Every. Single time. Oh my gosh, I get butterflies. I'm convinced. I'm convinced that nobody's gonna come to my talk It's just gonna be empty and it's just gonna be me standing there and they're gonna be like, oh, sorry Nobody really wanted to hear you or that like people are just gonna leave in mass during my talk because it's so terrible.

But it's not because i'm afraid of giving a talk and it's not because I don't know my subject — it's because, deep down, I am still, there's still a part of me that is a little girl whose parents were always too busy to pay attention to her.

Who would get bored, like I could see their eyes glaze over when I started explaining what I was reading or the story I was writing. And so for me, like when I stand up in front of people, I automatically assume that I am going to bore them and I just I'm trying to get out of there as quickly as I can.

And it's something I've worked on in my adult life, but knowing that's what causes it helps a lot. It doesn't make me less nervous, but it means that I can say this nervousness is silly and I'm going to go do it. I'm going to go do the hard thing anyway. 

[00:33:56] Blair: It is hard putting yourself out there.

So one of the things that is on the list of teaching resilience is encouraging positive relationships. What Amy has done is she's gone out and found a bunch of people who are just as into the things that she is. Who recognize her brilliance and work as hard to build her up as she does to build them up. And that is a really important. I hope all of you have those sorts of people in your life. Because when we model things for our children, we're also modeling the sort of relationships that are essential for us. 

Personally, unless they're a direct family member, I put up with very little negativity from anyone who I'm close to.

That doesn't mean I won't be there for someone, but that means that if there's a lot of negativity directed at me. Look, I've got people who are like no and that's fine. I won't spend a lot of time there, because life's short. As long as I live, and I hope it's a long time, it's not going to be long enough. Make sure that you surround yourself with positive relationships, if you can. 

[00:35:18] Amy: As your kids get into middle and high school, this is really important for them to have a supportive, affirming community. That doesn't mean a community where every single person agrees about everything all the time. In fact, like respectful dissent is a really important part of a healthy community. But but kids really do need that. And it is. It is more work to do it as a homeschooler.

Socialization is not what people think it is. And it is not hard to socialize your children, but as kids get older, it can be hard to build a social network for them. And that is something that you are probably as a parent going to have to actively participate in, and it is worth doing. 

[00:35:59] Blair: Yeah. One of the things my son, as a young adult, the friends that he has around him, this is the most positive inclusive loving friend group. It just it's really awesome to see. 

One of the things we touched on, but didn't really talk about that I think is important is if you care about something, get involved with solving it. Resilience doesn't mean that you only exist in a space that is rainbows and fairy tales. Resilient individuals get involved with a focus on what they can control So that they don't spend too much time on what they can't. Those two things together I think are very important.

My son was telling me something that upset him that he finds upsetting and I said, what are you going to do to solve it? And he said there's nothing I can do to solve it. And I said, I'm going to recommend that you stop putting a lot of mental energy into this. And he goes then he took my advice. 

[00:37:06] Amy: Which is smart, because a lot of times, like you are a 16-year-old kid. You cannot solve homelessness. You cannot solve hunger, but you can volunteer and solve homelessness for one night for one person.

You can solve hunger for one meal for one kid. And being able to do that really does help you build a sense that the world can change for the better. That bad things don't have to stay bad if people are willing to work together to make them better. And I think that is the kind of hope and resilience that kids really need in a world that can feel hard.

[00:37:44] Blair: I like that too. We did a lot of service work and one of the things that happens is that your children start to meet people who are trying to be the change they want in the world. It really shows a goal of working further to make things better for the individuals who you can help. 

[00:38:13] Amy: Yeah, it can definitely be perspective building and not in a sort of grief tourism kind of way which I always, I've never heard of that, but in the way where where it is. It is really perspective giving to see how you have the ability to make the world better for other people. And by the same token, to see some of the better things about your world that you probably take for granted a lot.

I hope that my kids often take for granted that they have a roof over their head and clean water. I you want your kids to be able to take that for granted. But sometimes it's nice to remember that you are living a life that lets you take it for granted. And that's, there's a lot of privilege in that. A lot of people in the world don't have that. 

[00:39:01] Blair: They do not. It's important that we don't minimize what kids might be going through because the brains are developing. They don't have the same emotional tools that we do as adults. And so we need to recognize that. 

[00:39:14] Amy: So before we wrap up I want to say one thing and then I want to ask you if you have anything to add. What I want to say is that for me one of the benefits of doing this kind of thoughtful, loving work on resilience with my kids is that I have also gotten to do it with myself.

I feel like being the parent I wish I had, has healed a lot of things for me, for the person that I am. And that has been a lovely and unexpected benefit. I can now look at myself and my life and say, like the great Leonard Cohen, there's a crack in everything. That's where the light gets in.

[00:40:05] Blair: What it did for me is it got me to a place where I could, I didn't even know I needed to do it, but it got me to a place where I could truly and honestly forgive my mom. For a few years I wasn't as forgiving as, with her as I would have been for any other person. But in part it was because it was a I didn't have an escape.

[00:40:29] Amy: I was gonna say, it's in part because instead of having a safe place, you had a dangerous place and that's hard. That's hard. 

[00:40:38] Blair: It was hard. There is a lot of putting you down all the time. And in overcoming that, I might now overcompensate, but I did overcome it. 

[00:40:50] Amy: I've met your son, and I will say that he is a happy, confident, adjusted human being in the world. And whatever you have had to recover from you have not passed that trauma onto him. T

his is a very personal episode, but I feel like that's how we talk about resilience, right?

Resilience is personal. 

[00:41:10] Blair: Yeah, if anybody just needs to ever quietly reach out to somebody that they feel has had a shared experience and you have shared any of my experiences, the door is never closed to you, ever. Those of us who have survived things, it's important that we always know that we have other people who have survived those too. 

[00:41:38] Amy: So Blair is [email protected]. You can always reach me at amy@homeschoollifenow,com and you can reach both of us at [email protected].

I always drop the new podcast on instagram first, so you can always find the link to the episodes there. But if you're subscribed to our rss feed you always get it immediately, or if you follow us on Apple podcasts, it should show up in your feed there as soon as we upload it.

We’d love if you want to leave us a review or a comment or let us know your ideas for a future episode. Sometimes it's very weird talking into the void this way and it can feel a little bit like you're all alone out there. So we really love to hear from you so that it's — you know, I've just confessed to you my fear of nobody showing up to my conference talk 

[00:42:27] Blair: Amy, let's wrap up with a teaser.

So we, I know we normally go to what we're reading and I have been reading, and I think Amy's going to start reading it, climate change in human history, prehistory to present. And the reason we are both reading this has to do with the fact that Amy and are about to start working on curriculum, a multi subject curriculum, and we are going to build the curriculum around The Writing Revolution. We will be doing an episode on the writing revolution in the future if you haven't heard of the writing revolution, it's also known as the Hochman method. Look it up.

It's amazing writing method. And it's one of the important pieces of it is that it is content driven. And so we are reading this book, or the history piece of it. Want to tell them a little bit about it, Amy? 

[00:43:34] Amy: I was going to say just since we're talking about it that Blair and I are envisioning doing something really different with history, with the idea that we will follow the flow of humans across the geographical landscape of the globe. 

[00:43:58] Blair: Starting with when humans evolved. Starting, yes. When they went places and so the changing climate has a lot to do with that human homo evolved during a warm period, about 3 million years ago.

And that is where prehistory starts or it is with us. 

[00:44:21] Amy: So what we're hoping to do is create a history that actually decenters the white patriarchy and do that by telling the story of people. So we're really excited about it.

So now that we've told people, I actually have to hit all my deadlines, Blair. 

[00:44:41] Blair: So we're collaborating on all of this. We will use some existing materials. So it's not just going to be history. There's going to be science, history, literature, writing.

[00:44:52] Amy: And we'll make recommendations for math and how to use The Writing Revolution in math. We're super excited about building this multi modal, writing based, thinking centered way of exploring the world for kids from elementary through high school. We are, you're very excited about it. And now I'm going to have a panic attack because deadlines, so many deadlines. 

[00:45:20] Blair: And whether anybody's going to show up, Amy's going to be worried about that, whether they'll love it. You know what, Amy, here's a little resilience for you, everybody. Some people will love it, and some people won't, and that's okay. Nothing is for everybody. 

[00:45:38] Amy: All right, on that note, we'll call this a wrap for this episode of Secular Homeschooling with Blair and Amy, brought to you by that very resilient Blair of SEA Homeschoolers and the slightly less resilient Amy of  home.school.life. We will be back soon to talk about more topics around secular homeschooling.

In the meantime, you can catch up with us on Instagram and on the SEA homeschool boards on Facebook. Have a great week! 

[00:46:05] Blair: So much love, everyone. We are in your corner. Alrighty, bye.

In this episode, we’re talking about why a conceptual science focus can make a huge difference in your homeschool science curriculum.

[00:00:01] Amy: Hi, and welcome to Secular Homeschooling with Blair and Amy, brought to you by SEA Homeschoolers and home.school.life. I’m Amy. 

[00:00:09] Blair: And I’m Blair. And we’re talking about a topic that is near and dear to Amy’s and my heart, and it really came about because of a lot of conversations that I’ve been getting tagged into in SEA, and I showed up at the last recording, and I was still talking about it, and Amy thought this would be a great episode to help you as you choose science for your late middle schooler and high school age students.

Children are — homeschooling them — there’s two sort of camps that people will look at. They’ll look at the science that is very conceptual, and they’ll look at science that is pretty standard, the similar approach to what’s used in public schools, only with more experiments. They’re very strongly attached to that. There’s some problems with getting super attached to that for all the rest of the kids Do you want to define those a bit, Amy, the two? 

[00:01:07] Amy: So Blair and I actually even had a hard time coming up with what to call these two schools of science, but on one side you have what I guess we could call science for non science majors, which lets you focus on the concepts, the basic principles of science. How does science work? What are the key terms? What are the processes? What is the big picture thinking around this? 

And then there is what I think we could call science for science majors. Which we started out calling highly academic science, and I think that is because it is science that steers people towards academic science. And this ends up being applied math for physical sciences. And for biological science, it ends up being really specific biochemical engineering, which most people, the average everyday person, including me, I have to say, though I have a physics degree, are never going to use in real life. I don’t do biochemistry every week, Blair. 

[00:02:14] Blair: Or take engineering out, and put processes in there as well. I can remember looking at a high school biology textbook, and when they started talking about the different, evolutionary, like phylogenetic, and how you classify organisms, they went to the molecular level — great, but then kids were actually asked to identify some of the molecules. I was like, this is ridiculous.

I would have done a simpler treatment when I was teaching human heredity in college, just because I would have known I would have lost most of my students. It’s that type of science. 

Get into our middle school, the SEA middle school/high school group, and you will see people arguing in favor of this sort of treatment. Ultra rigorous science, and we’re not saying that’s not worth understanding. Every physical science course does not need to be treated like an applied math class, which is done. It just drives me nuts. And there are other scientists that agree with me because I’ve talked to them, and that every student majoring in biology is going into the biotech industry — that focus leaves a lot of kids without the basic understanding of the natural and physical world. 

[00:03:34] Amy: Yeah, because it’s like it takes all these scientific ideas and it puts them into a funnel, and then the funnel only has room to drip out problems to be solved, like very specific math problems biology problems, and so the science becomes solving for a series of solutions instead of investigating, inquiring, engaging, which are honestly the fun parts of science.

[00:04:02] Blair: Okay, so I’m going to tell everyone a secret. Amy knows this secret, but it’s not something I talk about a lot. I don’t love physics. My physics classes were my least favorite science classes. I had the top grade in every physics class, college course I took — how I did I wouldn’t do it today, but on tests, I figured out that if you just looked at the unit. So if you look into a Newton and you break it down by units, you know exactly how you need to set up the problem to solve for it. If you can get an A plus in physics in college by using math skills. I think that’s a problem. 

[00:04:50] Amy: I think that people who don’t like physics got taught math. They didn’t get taught physics. They were sitting there solving math problems == because I will be honest. I have a degree in physics, but I did not love physics in high school because it was all math. I just sat there and worked math problems over and over again. And when I got to college and my physics professor was like no, but what if, I was like, Oh! And it was amazing.

[00:05:18] Blair: So speaking of math, I went looking for the statistics. So we could share with you why this is so important. The source of these statistics was a report from pewresearch.org. And they published it two years ago on April 12 of 2022. 

The number of high school graduates is — these are all U.S.-centric — the number of high school graduates who go to college, 66 percent. That means that 34 percent of kids, if they did not get conceptual science, do not have a firm understanding of how the natural and physical world works. Of the Americans who do go to college, half of them, or it’s not half —37. 9 percent of Americans — have bachelor degrees. So 30 percent of the Americans who go to college don’t end up with a degree. That is so all of those Americans would have been better served with a conceptual science class, if you ask me. Business is the most commonly held bachelor’s degree, followed by health professions. Now, those you might be thinking doctor, but really, I’ve taught chemistry. Most of the people in your class are nurses, vets, EMTs, who are in a college chemistry class. And many of them are really mis-served by the way chemistry is taught as an applied math class because they could actually use some of the more foundational conceptual principles.

The least common bachelor degrees in 2019 to 2020, military technologies and applied sciences. 

[00:07:11] Amy: I mean, I think that is that is where we run into the problem, right? Because for this very small handful of kids who know that they want to pursue a very specific applied science, this can be helpful, but even for those kids — like me in my physics class, right? My high school physics class. If you can balance all the chemical equations in the world, but you don’t understand how electrons transfer between atoms, you don’t really understand chemistry. 

[00:07:46] Blair: I will say that once you, if you major in these sciences  — I have a bachelor’s in biology and a bachelor’s in chemistry and a master’s in chemistry. Once you get past the freshman level courses in college, it becomes more conceptual. And every once in a while you get a professor who is conceptual from the very beginning. I actually have a chemistry degree. I was inspired to get a chemistry degree one quarter when I was one quarter shy of having my bio degree by a professor I had in organic chemistry. It was just —He really turned me on to the — I became fascinated with the behavior of electrons, this energy particle nexus. It’s just absolutely fascinating. It sounds crazy, but when I put a leaf, when I hold a leaf between my fingers, I find it absolutely fascinating that despite the structure of atoms and these electrons being outside of the nucleus that the leaf doesn’t become part finger and your fingers don’t become part leaf. I just find it fascinating. 

[00:09:03] Amy: Because it is fascinating and that is when we fall in love with science. That’s what we fall in love with. Not many people fall in love with an equation for, I don’t know, the redshift, right? Nobody is Ooh, the redshift, doing some math, that changes my life. But people fall in love with the idea of the paradoxes of relativity. That’s exciting and interesting. And then when you’re in love, the math, the problems that you’re solving, are like the language of that love, where you’re like fine tuning something that you’re already excited about. But if you start with, I think, that very narrow, specific kind of stuff, I think you lose people who could very well fall in love with science. 

[00:09:50] Blair: Again we are not saying that type of science course does not have a solid place and an important reason for existing We are really advocating for people to be thinking about where their child is going to go, because science is really important to learn. Think climate change, think your own personal health. Think just how the beauty of the natural and physical world and how it’s working. That is incredibly important to understand. It’s incredibly useful. And the most commonly held degree, if you have a child that wants to go into nursing or that wants to become a vet, trust me, as a chemistry professor in college, your children would be much better served with a conceptual class, and all the kids in the class that are just taking it because you have to as a part of a liberal arts education would be much better served with a conceptual class 

[00:10:58] Amy: Well, and Blair knows that I talk about this all the time, but one of the things that drives me crazy about the way that we teach science, especially in high school, is that we teach kids to look for answers instead of asking questions.

And that makes it seem like science is this finished thing. It’s done, it’s in a neat package, you go through the package, you find the answers, you put it away, you never have to use it again. But science is a process, and it is happening all the time. Right now, Blair is always — Blair is such a good friend, she’s always sending me cool articles about scientific discoveries. And you’re just like, they’re mind blowing! It’s like everything that we know about this tiny little slice of science is about to change because of one discovery. It’s great. 

And so science is not some cold, static, finished and done thing. It is this living, changing, exciting process that you and your kid can be a part of when you homeschool science.

[00:12:01] Blair: As Amy knows, because we were talking about before, when we got on, I fell down a rabbit hole of how changing climates has affected human evolution, homo evolution, including homo sapiens, and the migrations of humans, and one of the things that I find fascinating, and I think many of you will as well, is that, during cold periods you have lots of glaciers, lots of ice sheets, and water gets taken from the ocean, and the level of the water of oceans drop. The migrations to Australia and to the Polynesian islands, they happened during these cold periods where there was less ocean to navigate. 

[00:12:52] Amy: That is the thing is that this is the stuff that you get excited about and you talk about, and you talk about while you’re driving your child to their guitar lessons and their skate rallies and all of the places that you take your children. These are the things that you talk about at the dinner table.

These are the things that, I’m just going to say it, that make you feel like a good homeschool parent, because you’re having these big conversations about big ideas and it feels like your kid is connecting with the subject in a meaningful way — because they are because just like Blair, they’re like, this is so interesting.

And if you’re not ever running into those things that are so interesting, I feel like you’re missing out on a big part of what science actually is and not just what classroom science is, right? Because classroom science, you have a poster on the wall and a multiple choice test and a sharp pencil and you’re doing it. You’re solving the problem, right? 

Theoretical science, you’re like, whoa does that mean what about this? And I think that is just the coolest part of science. Not to say that being able to solve the problems doesn’t matter. 

[00:14:05] Blair: It does. And so what we’re really we’re really getting back to is something that Amy and I believe very strongly, no curriculum, no one curriculum is right for everybody. No one approach is right for everybody. And I think that the issue with science is we tend to treat it like a mono approach. Once kids get into high school, there’s a real mono approach. And I don’t even know that we do that with math anymore. I think it might be the only course of study, the only discipline that we still do that with.

[00:14:44] Amy: I think definitely there’s some of it in math, though it’s probably better in math than in high school sciences. I do. I think that high school science teachers lean really heavily into what I would call textbook science, where you read a chapter and you solve a set of problems, you answer a set of questions, right?

You answer a set of questions and then you move on to the next chapter. And the next set of questions, and you might do an experiment here or there, or watch an experiment on YouTube, but you’re not really engaging with any ideas. 

[00:15:21] Blair: I just read The Knowledge Gap last month, and she actually talks about science, and I have volunteered as a judge at several science fairs. when I do that, I talk to a lot of high school science teachers. And there’s a real problem for high school science teachers, because they’re not teaching, The Knowledge Gap discusses it, it’s a well known phenomenon. They’re not doing a good job of teaching science until kids get to high school, and all of a sudden these high school teachers have these freshmen that — there’s all these metrics and standards and topical areas that they need to get kids through by the end of the year, and you will have some kids who have solid science foundation, but most of the kids in the class don’t. 

And anytime you have a lot of standards that have to be met and you’ve got a big range in the knowledge base of kids, you’re going to have teachers go to —they’ve just got to stuff these facts in. When my son was in high school, he’s always had a lot of friends that went to public schools near where we lived, and I ended up tutoring three kids through chemistry and one of them through biology, and in high school, and that is where I really started taking a hard look at how science was being approached. And then as a teacher in California at the community college level in sciences, you get a lot of people in your science classes that don’t know science.

[00:17:04] Amy: And so this is why I think that we cannot overstate the importance of making sure that even your STEMiest kid understands conceptual science, understands the way that systems work. So I would say, when you have a middle schooler and you’re trying to figure out what should we do for middle school science?

What I would say is think about what would be the most helpful knowledge for your kid to go to high school with. If you’re teaching chemistry, general understanding of the periodic table and the parts of an atom is gonna serve you really well in high school chemistry. Even if you don’t get to anything else.

Understanding those things, how they work, having questions about them. That’s going to point you towards high school chemistry and biology. You’ve got to know the parts of a cell and classification. How do you classify living things? Really think about the fundamental ideas that kids need to know for high school science.

And then you don’t worry so much about the formulas they need to know because they can learn those. You can always learn the formulas. The ideas are what help the formulas make sense. Do you think that’s fair, Blair? 

[00:18:19] Blair: I think that’s really fair. In fact, I wrote some notes here. So what I would, so if you’ve got a STEM kid, conceptual in middle school, and then go to a traditional approach in high school, but based on the statistics, most of you have children who are not going to be science majors. For those students, a conceptual course in middle school and a conceptual course in high school, where you’re building on the foundational principles. And in high school. whether you like labs or not, and whether your kids like labs or not, what colleges really want to see are lab sciences. And from my own experience and from what I’ve heard from many other homeschoolers whose kids have gotten into very good colleges, the labs are what the colleges are going to look at. They want to know what your kids did for lab science. 

[00:19:19] Amy: Absolutely. I think, too, it can feel it can feel intimidating — how do I teach conceptual science if I’m not a scientist, right?

It’s very easy for Blair to talk about, teaching conceptual biology, evolutionary biology, because she has a degree in evolutionary biology. But that is where great science literature comes in, and I’m thinking about two kinds of great science literature here. One is nonfiction books, like The Mind of the Raven, like The Disappearing Spoon. You read these books with your kids, you get excited about the ideas, you talk about the ideas. These books are all about the ideas. 

And the other thing that I think is really fun, and I think, Blair, I think you talk a lot about this when you talk about homeschooling high school science, is to look at the questions that people are asking in scientific journals, like what’s getting published? And what’s the question behind it, right? What’s the big idea? Because it’s really fascinating the work that people are doing on the ground that we can see reported in scientific journals. And yeah, the journal article is probably going to have a lot of like math and formulas and specific discrete little containers of information. But the big question that they’re asking, that is fascinating. Don’t discount scientific literature that’s being published in journals because you think it’s too complicated because the questions are awesome. 

[00:20:48] Blair: We are really advocating for people to make sure that kids are getting the concepts In both high school and middle school.

[00:21:02] Amy: Yeah, because if you’re not, if your kid is not enjoying what they’re learning, I feel like as homeschoolers, that is the thing that we can pick. We can, we get, science is fun and cool and interesting. And if it’s not feeling that way, I think it’s really helpful to look at why it’s not.

All right. And to try to bring some of that excitement and energy back. I think so often science and math are the two subjects, I think, where we’re just like trying to check the box and move on to the next thing. And neither of those subjects is boring. They’re both full of cool questions and things that you can experience.

And so I think that we just, we really need to like, make sure that when we’re doing science, we’re not just checking off a long list of things and being bored, because that’s not science that our kids are going to remember. That’s not going to serve them well in the next stages of their learning life either.

[00:22:06] Blair: I like that you mentioned the literature, Amy, both nonfiction and fiction. You did mention fiction, didn’t you? 

[00:22:14] Amy: If I didn’t, I should have, because there is great science ha, science fiction, which is different from science-fiction. 

[00:22:21] Blair: I love that. I can’t think of the name of the book that won the Pulitzer a year or two ago. And it is science, fictionalized science. The Understory. 

[00:22:32] Amy: Yes, The Understory. That is an amazing book. And also fiction like The Martian. Oh yeah. It’s just so captivating and interesting that you want to go find out like is that true?

Does that, would that really work? Could you really live on Mars for that long? Could you grow potatoes there? And I feel like things like that really inspire us to want to learn more about subjects. 

[00:23:01] Blair: The Martian is a fantastic example, and the author followed it up with another book that was also really interesting. Have you read it? 

[00:23:10] Amy: Is it Hail Mary? 

[00:23:12] Blair: Yes. 

[00:23:13] Amy: Yes. 

[00:23:14] Blair: So interesting. What would happen if you were traveling the universe and you met someone and language was a real problem, and the conditions that the two different organisms had evolved in were so different that you couldn’t be in the room together without all sorts of contractions. It’s absolutely fascinating. 

[00:23:35] Amy: I mean, books like — I’m going to just shout out The Space Between Worlds, which is such a, it’s an amazing book. It is about parallel universes. But what’s interesting about it is that people can only travel to parallel universes where they don’t have a living counterpart.

So marginalized people from communities where you’re more likely to die in childhood, or die because you can’t get healthcare, or die because of violence, are better able to travel between worlds because there are fewer iterations of them. Which is a fascinating look at all kinds of scientific ideas.

Yeah, don’t discount fiction. 

[00:24:19] Blair: Amy comes back to something that I think is really important, and it is one of her points where she’s talking about people dying in childbirth. Why should we care about, not people dying in childbirth, not that. But why should we care about science?

If you do not care about your children learning it for any other reason, then it should be because it helps us understand health issues. Issues about health for ourselves, for other people, because the solutions to more equitable birth rates in all communities. That’s science. That’s where those answers are going to be found. The math is important, but it can’t be the centerpiece. 

[00:25:10] Amy: We live in the world, and so understanding the world that we live in and our space in it, that is maybe it’s a little bit dramatic to say, but I feel like that is a fundamental part of what it means to be a human is to be a part of this world, and so understanding this world is really important.

[00:25:29] Blair: You know what? I just realized that I’ve never actually thought before. So scientific models, when you are taking a chemistry class or a physics class that is basically an applied math class, they are distilling every single important concept down to a math model. Not to a more conceptual model, and that more than anything is what we’re taking issue with. And in biology, it is this hyper focus on the molecular mechanism that is driving biological functions. 

The processes are important, but it’s also important that we are able to pull back and see the beauty and actually understand the reasons for even learning this. I think a lot of kids get out of high school science and feel like they wasted their time. 

[00:26:21] Amy: Yeah, because it is it is like asking kids to memorize all the elements on the periodic table instead of teaching them how to understand how the periodic table works, why it’s cool, what its crazy patterns are. I would much rather have a kid not know what element number 37 is, but understand, the way that the periodic table trends toward this or that, than to have a kid who can name every single element but doesn’t understand how the periodic table works. 

[00:26:52] Blair: Okay, periodic trends are seriously interesting. All right, have we, do we have anything more to add to this? 

[00:27:03] Amy: I think just don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you have to be a scientist to teach scientific concepts. If you’re doing a curriculum with your kid, and it feels like you are doing — I mean I wouldn’t say busy work, right? If it feels like more busy work than thinking, maybe it’s time to shake things up a little bit. You do not have to be a scientist to make that call. 

[00:27:26] Blair: It just makes me really sad because I think a lot of the problems that we’re dealing with right now that people aren’t learning more conceptual science because I’ve talked about the importance of critical thinking and how definitely in a critical thinking crisis right now, but there’s a science crisis going on as well.

The whole anti vax situation is spurred by people not having solid foundation in science. The lack of agency around working toward solutions that make sense for climate crisis. Just all the doubting of science. I really think that science is partly to blame, and I think a big part of it is the way we teach science.

 Again, we’re not talking about the small section of really STEMy kids who will go on to upper division science in college and will get this. We’re talking about all of the other people who that’s not the situation for and for them to never get a good conceptual solid basis in science. We are exacerbating the issues around solving some of these issues, understanding a lot of these issues. As a science educator, it’s frustrating. 

[00:28:54] Amy: We make kids, I think that you’ve said this a few other times, we’ve talked about science, and it really, has stayed with me. We make kids vulnerable to these ridiculous conspiracy theories because they don’t understand the problems with the arguments. They don’t understand the fallacies because they don’t understand the scientific principles involved. And for no other reason than that, we should be wanting to instill our kids with a basic understanding of science and how science works.

So that they can confidently say, Oh, you know what? Pretty sure the Earth is not flat. You have a nice day. 

[00:29:29] Blair: I wrote The Science of Climate Change. I call it my protest book. So when we elected a denier, I said, this is so ridiculous because the science of climate change is not a complicated science. It is not complicated at all. There is this chemical reaction, this combustion reaction, you burn stuff, carbon dioxide, methane, some other things come off of it. They trap, very effectively, trap and transfer radiation, and it’s warming the planet and hey, 71 percent of the planets covered in water. What happens when you warm water? It changes the weather, changes the climate. To have so many people treat that as if, A, it’s not happening, and B, it’s complicated to understand. That is, in my opinion, the absolute best example, or it was the best example until the anti vax movement came along. People just don’t even understand. 

When you have a large cohort of adults who don’t understand those sorts of things. you have to go back and look at how good of a job you’re doing educating in those areas. You have to look critically and say, wow, if we were doing a good job, we wouldn’t be having this problem. Doesn’t mean we wouldn’t have other problems, but we wouldn’t be having this problem. 

[00:31:07] Amy: I think you’re right. I think conceptual science makes kids feel like science is something they can understand. And unless you are that really STEM focused kid, a lot of the ways that we teach science make kids feel like science is hard to understand.

And I think you just nailed that. Because science is not hard to understand. Some problems around science are hard to solve, but science is what’s happening in the world and if you pay attention you can understand it, and I think conceptual science is really empowering for kids in a way that I’ve never thought about before.

I love that you said that. 

[00:31:44] Blair: My grandson, who’s in second grade, was over two days ago, and he said one of the words, spelling words for the week was scientist, and I was teasing him. I said I certainly hope you can spell scientist. And he said, I learned that one right away, Grandma. He said, we’ve been studying science in school this week.

And I said what are you studying? He said. We’re learning about plants. I said, are you learning about photosynthesis? And he said, yeah. I said, come on, let’s go. We went outside and found a tree. I said, I want you to breathe in. He goes, yeah, I just breathed in carbon dioxide. I said you’re breathing in oxygen, the tree is taking in carbon dioxide. I said but you breathe out carbon dioxide, and I had him put a leaf to his lips, and breathe into the leaf, I said, that leaf just took some of your carbon dioxide, I wonder if one of the oranges that grows this year will have carbon dioxide that came out of you.

And so he turned to me when we did that. He goes I think I’m going to be a scientist when I grow up, Grandma. That is what happens when you teach conceptual science. You have kids become, and that’s just a single example, but there’s loads of examples, and to watch — a second grader and his parents then came over and he was going to baseball practice and his mom said, Oh, you’re getting so good. I wonder if you’re going to play baseball. He goes, I’m going to be a scientist, mom. And whether that happens or not, you want kids turned on by what they’re learning, whether they are in second grade or 12th grade or college. You can turn somebody off, but you can’t turn somebody on if you were teaching at a level where they really just can’t even digest what you’re trying to teach them. And I think that science is often done that way. 

[00:33:43] Amy: When you turn that light on, it illuminates the way for them. So when they, if they want to learn the more applied stuff, they absolutely can. And they’re excited to you because they know what it’s about. No, I love that story about the leaf. That’s like my new favorite story. That’s a great story. 

[00:34:01] Blair: Then he explains it to his mom, and he said, Nobody else can eat oranges off that tree. I need to eat the orange that has part of me in it. 

[00:34:11] Amy: That is what science is, our connection to the world that we live in, and I think that it’s so easy to forget that. It’s so easy to forget that. That even if we’re not sitting there working science problems, science is happening all around us, and we’re part of it, and that is so cool and amazing, and that is what we want to give our kids, is that understanding of how we’re connected to the natural and physical world.

[00:34:36] Blair: Absolutely. I want to reiterate — got a STEMy kid? want the math and the science? Fantastic. This podcaster is really geared toward the rest of the population 

[00:34:49] Amy: Even STEMy kids benefit from understanding conceptual science.

It’s just hand in hand. That’s the best kind of applied science is when you’re working with concepts that you’re comfortable with and excited about. So I guess that is what Blair and I really want you to take away from this is that science — it’s not hard to understand that if you want to sit down with the big ideas of science and your kid, you are totally capable of doing that.

And if you feel like, oh I can’t do this complicated physics. You actually don’t have to, especially not early on. The ideas are where it all starts. The ideas are where science starts. 

So Blair, is there anything else about — you are our science expert, is there anything else about homeschooling science that you want to make sure that we cover before we say goodbye? 

[00:35:45] Blair: Make sure that you are choosing a science materials that your child is able to understand to get some mastery over. If you have any questions or comments, you know where to get Amy and I, we are more than happy to help you figure this out. 

Don’t let people beat you up online if you want your child in high school to have a conceptual science course, and people get on those threads, and they behave as if, It’s not rigorous enough. You’re doing your child a disservice. That is their opinion, and they’re entitled to it. But recognize that’s just their opinion. And that a lot of scientists, besides Amy and I, disagree with them. 

[00:36:32] Amy: That would actually be a great slogan just for homeschooling. Don’t let people online give you a hard time homeschooling 

[00:36:38] Blair: Okay, are you reading anything, Amy? 

[00:36:41] Amy: I am reading this very, speaking of weird science literature, I’m reading this very strange book called Rouge by Mona. I can’t remember her last name, but she also wrote Bunny. And it is about a woman who finds out after her mother passes away that she’s part of this eternal youth cult that involves jellyfish. It’s really weird and really fascinating. Suzanne recommended it to me and she was like, it’s weird, but and she was right.

It’s weird, but it is amazing. I’m really into it. 

[00:37:18] Blair: Many of you probably want to know the book that I read. And I don’t have the title. Unfortunately, I don’t have my Kindle.

If you look at climate, if you look at the climate, oh, so these are climate change in human history. And the climate connection. Those are the two that I picked up. Found it fascinating, absolutely fascinating. Homo sapiens during time of climate change. And they walk away from that without explaining the evolutionary theory. It’s just a factoid that they throw out there and that’s part of what happens with these pop science books, but really fascinating 

[00:38:03] Amy: I’ll have to check that out. I’m interested in especially that movement of groups of humans because of climate change in the early stages of history. 

[00:38:14] Blair: One of the things they don’t touch, the deforestation of planet Earth happened way before now. And when once humans discovered fire, it began to happen And so that happened really early in human history. A lot of people and a lot of the literature talks about the deforestation that happened by Romans at the height of the Roman Empire when they were going out and conquering other groups. 

Oh, one of the fascinating factoids that I learned, though, that humans left the British Isles, they left the British Isles when glaciers covered them, and they didn’t move back there until 12,000 years ago. That is what the evidence says. I thought that was really fascinating. People were in Australia 60,000 years ago. 

[00:39:11] Amy: That is why science is so cool. Because you always learn something new. Every time you study science, I think you learn something new.

I guess that is a wrap for this episode of Secular Homeschooling with Blair and Amy brought to you by SEA Homeschoolers and home.school.life. Blair said, we absolutely love to hear from you. Email us at podcast at homeschool life now. We’d love it if you leave us a rating and a comment wherever you listen to this podcast, that would be great for us.

Share it with a friend, if you like it. We’d love to get the word out now that we have a great routine going. I feel like we know we’re doing a little bit. So if you have suggestions for future episodes, questions, recommendations, again, we’d love to hear from you. So talk to you soon.

In this podcast episode, we discuss the challenges of homeschooling during election season in the U.S. We emphasize the importance of teaching critical thinking and understanding the U.S. government to raise informed voters. We explore the significance of analyzing party platforms, engaging in local politics, and spotting misleading information, plus some of our favorite strategies and resources for homeschooling politics.

We love to hear from you! Please email us with questions, comments, and ideas for future episodes!

We use an automatic transcription app for our podcast, which makes it possible for us to include transcripts for our podcast episodes — but it does sometimes make weird errors! We do edit it, but I’m sure we miss things sometimes.

[00:00:00] Amy: Hello and welcome to Secular Homeschooling with Blair and Amy, brought to you by Sea Homeschoolers and home.school.life. I’m Amy. 

[00:00:08] Blair: And I’m Blair. 

[00:00:09] Amy: And today we’re talking about something that I know is on all of our homeschool minds right now as we move into the summer, which is homeschooling through the election season in the United States.

[00:00:24] Blair: Yeah, so we want to apologize ahead of time because obviously this is going to be U.S.-centric. However, what we’re going to talk about is valid for an election season in any country if we have any listeners outside of the U.S. 

[00:00:41] Amy: And before we get started, I feel like it’s important to say that in the past 15 years, elections have become incredibly fraught and emotional.

It is hard in the United States to follow the elections sometimes. It is hard sometimes to listen to things that some of the politicians say. And I think that you have to put your mental health first. I think you have to talk about this with your kids. And you have to educate your kids about the political process and what’s happening.

But I think you also have to take care of yourself. And I know that if you are a queer person, or a person of color, or a person who has family that’s immigrated to the United States, and listening to some of the political talking points that affect your actual existence and not just some theoretical idea of politics, if that is harmful to you, you have to take care of yourself.

So I can’t tell you how to do that, I’m not the boss of how you take care of yourself, but like I just want you to know that if election issues are hard for you and harmful to you, Blair and I see you. We’re here and we see you, and if you need to not listen to this episode to take care of yourself, please do that.

Because that is important. 

[00:01:59] Blair: Oh yeah. Especially for people in the southeastern part of the United States, this is a triggering issue. Most of our listeners, I’m assuming, are fairly liberal, centrist to liberal. If you are in an area that is very red, it can be triggering right now, and so we understand.

I’m gonna switch gears, though. I am by no means a scholar familiar with. But this is something I wanted to get right and I got right. And so you can really get this right. And I think it’s important to get right, if you care about raising a voter. And an informed voter. Along those lines, I think that the start of homeschooling during an election season does not start with thinking about politics, necessarily. I think you start by front loading two things, a course on critical thinking and a course that teaches the American government.

[00:03:09] Amy: Yeah, I actually really agree with this because I think that you can’t — one of the problems I think with politics in the 21st century is that people have stopped talking about things and started talking around things. And so a lot of people in the government even don’t know how the government actually works They don’t know what the government actually does and what it doesn’t do and how it’s set up And so I think it’s really important for us to teach our kids how the government works — and then, of course, every single subject, but maybe no subject more than politics, critical thinking, and especially understanding fallacies and bad reasoning. 

[00:03:53] Blair: Because we live in an age of Trumpism, if you are going to talk about the critical thinking component, American government might be the perfect course to pair, even better than science, and y’all know how I feel about science with regard to that, better than science because there is so much language right now from the Trump camp, about the rights of a president, and they’re just not even true, and people don’t even recognize some of the lies that are being told.

They don’t understand. Why does it matter? Why does it really matter that we’ve politicized the judicial branch, right? A branch that was supposed to not be political in a three branch system now is. How and why it’s a problem that two justices who, who I really don’t like — just telling y’all I did always believe Anita Hill — that these people are being paid. By the wealthiest individuals in our country, and when a president starts to focus on appointing justices in positions all across the country, why that’s a problem. You have to really understand, have a firm grounding in American government. 

[00:05:21] Amy: Yeah, and you have to read the Constitution because some things like — one that drives me crazy, Blair, one that absolutely drives me crazy is when people talk about free speech and don’t understand what they’re talking about.

Free speech doesn’t mean that nobody’s ever going to get mad at you for saying some stupid racist thing. People have every right to get mad at you for saying a stupid racist thing. They have every right to ask you to leave their house or their Twitter platform for continuing to do that. Free speech just means that if you criticize something, then you can’t be punished by the government for it.

That’s really all free speech is giving you. 

[00:06:00] Blair: It’s ridiculous. It happens numerous times during the year where someone will get into SEA, our private Facebook group and make comments that are counter to our rules, and they accused us of violating their free speech. We have actually had a curriculum company that is not secular, Acellus, threatened to sue us because we called them nonsecular.

[00:06:30] Amy: That is crazy. 

[00:06:31] Blair: They are crazy. Somehow they got my phone number and they started calling me to tell me they were going to sue me personally for violating their free speech. So I’m telling you right now, you shouldn’t be using a course that says they’re an accredited high school course that doesn’t know how to define correctly the freedom of speech. So what were you going to say? How do you know they’re crazy, Amy? 

[00:06:54] Amy: Oh because for the same reason, I belong to a lot of homeschooling groups. And there was a while there where every time someone would say something that wasn’t 100 percent positive about Acellus, they would jump in and start lambasting people publicly in their messages.

I yeah, I would be wary of a company like that. That’s just my opinion. I — it’s not really related to what we’re talking about — but they, but I am not, I’m horrified, but not surprised that they would call you at home because they really, that seems to be their method is to shut down the competition by just exhausting them.

[00:07:30] Blair: We’re not really the competition. Or not, 

[00:07:32] Amy: yeah, shut down people who don’t think that they’re the best, 

[00:07:36] Blair: They’re not secular. They’re not. As those of you who’ve been following our podcast know, Amy and I take issue with people who say they’re secular because they removed a few things. But then they didn’t add back in the theories, the understandings, as would be recommended by practicing experts in a field. Okay, but let’s not get sidetracked there. Other than Amy and I do not think you should be using curriculum from people who don’t know what free speech is, especially if it’s curriculum where they tell you they’re teaching your kids history.

I actually did use an American government course that I liked, but it was so long ago. I used it the year Trump first got elected. So they didn’t have a bunch of things in there in that regard. I’m leery about recommending anything now. Do you have anything that you would recommend that’s current or do you just write your own?

[00:08:30] Amy: I would not even recommend my own right now because I am in the process of big time revising it because so much has changed. I would think that every single U.S. government curriculum maker should be going over their curriculum because the world has changed a lot and since the last, even since the last election.

And I think it’s, we’ve got a real responsibility to make sure with government more than maybe any other subject that we are up to date. So there’s not really anything that I would recommend. I will say, I think the National Archives has some good stuff about the presidential election and the electoral process.

And so if you are looking for resources to get you going, you could certainly pull some of those together. 

[00:09:16] Blair: I’ll tell you what I used, it’s not a secret. I used Thinkwell honors American government course. I learned more using it than I learned in all the years at school, and I don’t think it’s because I didn’t pay enough attention. It was a pretty challenging course for my son. But it was a really good course, like Amy said, look to see when they last updated. But you’re going to need a curriculum unless this is an area where you have expertise. 

Okay, so if you’re homeschooled during election season, I think you should front load. In other words, teach before you really get too into the election, critical thinking paired with American government. Then after that, learn about the party platforms. He knew what political party, my husband and I belong to, but I told him that I wanted him to choose his own political party after reading the different platforms. The Republican party platform is interesting. One of their platform issues is that we should legally be able to hunt wolves 

[00:10:23] Amy: I actually didn’t know — that’s fascinating 

[00:10:28] Blair: At least it was about four years ago when I last looked. It can be really interesting to look at the party platforms You think to yourself, who, why is this a platform issue?

I would have to think with the changes in the Republican party with them getting rid of Rona McDaniels and now it’s one of Trump’s daughters who is the chair. I would be thinking that platform is getting some major updates. that would be pretty interesting. 

[00:11:00] Amy: That’s an interesting point if they, if the Republican Party in its current state stopped publishing platforms altogether because they, I mean they don’t, it often seems that they’re not really interested in following the conventions of the political process. It seems they think that people should vote for them based on the person who’s running and not on any politics that the party supports.

[00:11:28] Blair: Yeah, for those of you who don’t know, I have a daughter-in-law who’s Ukrainian, so I lean pretty heavily in that direction. She is here. Her kids are here, but her family, who we know and are close to, are all in the Ukraine. I find it horrifying how some of those decisions are really similar to the sort of decisions that someone like Putin makes where it’s really hard to get the information on the party’s positions and stance and how it’s all this identity politics. But anyway, this is supposed to be how to teach it? 

[00:12:08] Amy: Yes, I think that this is, we, I think we are getting to the root of why it’s really important to focus on the structures and the critical thinking is because when we talk about politics today is virtually impossible to not have strong feelings about it.

We are smart educated human beings who care about the world. I’m assuming that if you listen to this podcast you are an educated person who cares about the world and the people in it, and it is really hard. Politics are really hard right now because it does feel very much like that’s, there’s half the country or that doesn’t matter and you can really easily get distracted by your own feelings as Blair and I do.

I don’t know. So that’s why critical thinking and processes are a great place to start because they are neutral and not in the creepy neutral way that some science curriculums are, but genuinely neutral in the sense of there are facts and — there are facts and there are definitions. 

[00:13:09] Blair: One of the things I like about the party platforms is that it gives you a place to apply critical thinking tools. First of all, why is this issue even there? Obviously, they want, I don’t know, keep the wolf hunters in Alaska, I have no idea why the wolf hunting thing was in there. But why issues are in there, how the issues are presented, because a lot of the issues, as somebody who has read party platforms four years ago, of some of the way some of the languages around the issues is confusing, and when you really think about it, it is designed to obfuscate, not to make their position clear.

It tells you the party, so the party platform is the document that you can think of it as the party’s mission statement. And I think that’s really good for kids to understand the platform, and I agree with Amy, after studying the Constitution, which is really the mission statement of our country, and then have your child choose the platform issues they think are the most important.

And when we did that, we wouldn’t tell our son what platform issues that we think are the most important, and interestingly enough, at the time, everyone, when we finally then got together and all said what our platform issues we thought were the most important, my son’s was income inequality. I want you to think about this.

This is a 10th grader. Who is literate enough on the platform issues to think income inequality is the most important issue. And whether you agree or not, pretty sophisticated position for a 10th grader, and then, based on his views on the issues with income inequality, he chose a candidate and the party that he felt was most consistent. My husband, I can’t exactly remember his driving issue. Mine was what it has been since I was a kid, the separation of church and state. So, shouldn’t be as surprised that I formed this large secular group. But that issue for many years when I would tell people, they thought I was nuts. All I’m going to say is I don’t look so crazy now. 

[00:15:33] Amy: You definitely don’t look crazy now. No, I think you were like, you were ahead of the time. You knew. Yeah, I think looking at platforms is great. And I would say one thing that I think is super helpful, especially with little kids is, or younger students, is don’t just look at the presidential election.

It’s really tempting to feel like the president is the only election that matters, but you can get involved at a grassroots level in your local elections and in local politics, and you can see firsthand. I remember my — this is a silly story, but my Girl Scout troop, I ran a homeschool Girl Scout troop when my daughter was little, and it was in this little suburb of Atlanta.

It’s called Dunwoody. And my daughter and her friends, there was a law in Dunwoody where I live that you couldn’t have chickens in your backyard. It was against the law to raise chickens inside the city limits of Dunwoody. And so my daughter and her friends really liked chickens and really wanted to have chickens.

And so they were able to get a meeting with the mayor of Dunwoody. Who — Dunwoody is like a little city, so my husband tutored the mayor’s kids, so I’m sure that helped. But they were able to get a meeting, they were able to present a proposal. And I don’t think it’s just because of my daughter’s Girl Scout troop, but it is now legal to have chickens within the city limits of Dunwoody.

And so that was just like, a political issue that they cared about. It was. It seems like a small, silly issue, but they genuinely cared about it, and they figured out a way to act on it, and they did, and they felt really good about their participation. That’s something that you don’t get to do with a presidential election, unless you’re like, super rich, and you’re a super donator or something.

[00:17:23] Blair: That was one of the things that I did with my son. I think it’s really important. If you want to raise a voter, it’s really important that you focus on your local and state issues. That’s important because you have a much bigger impact.

I live in a suburb of San Diego called Escondido, it is an incorporated city. Four years ago, the mayor won by four votes. It flipped blue by four votes. Your vote can really make a difference. And, even though our kids are homeschooled, school board elections can be really fraught.

 Many years ago when I was still teaching college, I was tapped to run for a school board, I was going through divorce at the time, so I didn’t do that. But a very conservative group had managed to elect a slate to the school board. Nobody was paying any attention to that. And they managed to have a recall election and the Democrats were a shoe-in to replace them. You really want to pay attention to those issues because things like school board issues, even if they don’t impact you, they can have a huge effect on the local library. You owe it to your community to pay attention to those smaller local issues, and it’s, as Amy said, you can make a real impact locally, if you care about something. 

[00:18:56] Amy: Which is awesome. I would say, if you have a high schooler volunteering with the political process, either as I don’t know — In Georgia, it’s a page. You can volunteer as a page with the Georgia Senate during the season that they’re meeting or you can volunteer for to work on an election campaign. I have had a lot of students over the years who have actually started out as volunteers and ended up getting full-on internships because they participated, and some of them have even gotten to go to Washington as part of that, which is really exciting and an awesome experience. And because they’re homeschoolers, they’re able to do it. They’re able to just pick up and go to Washington for a couple of months and get this amazing experience in politics.

So if you have a kid who’s interested in politics, that can be a great route to take. Everyone needs volunteers during election season. No one is going to turn away a volunteer during election season. 

[00:19:54] Blair: Volunteering can be really exciting. You can meet some pretty cool people. A lot of people, they’re trying to change the world. That can be really exciting for your child to see people who are trying to be the change they want in the world.

[00:20:10] Amy: Yeah, it’s pretty amazing. And I think that it really does inspire kids to not just care about politics theoretically, but to want to be active in it.

[00:20:22] Blair: Amy, not everybody can volunteer, though. And even if they do, we’ve got some other learning strategies. One of the things I recommend is that you watch candidates’ speeches. Now, I’m very familiar with the candidates speeches right now because my husband, he is a news junkie. There’s some crazy speeches happening. What do you think? Watch candidate speeches for sure, and then use your critical thinking. 

[00:20:52] Amy: Read the speeches, right? If you watch them, also read them. Because so much changes in delivery. So much changes in delivery. And if you are looking at the actual words that people are saying, and I actually think that this applies across the board, oftentimes.

People sound like they’re saying a lot, but they’re actually not really saying anything. And I think that is, when you read it, that’s very clear in a way that isn’t always when you’re pulled along by the excitement of speaking. 

[00:21:23] Blair: And no matter how much you like a candidate, they all do that. 

[00:21:26] Amy: Yeah, a hundred percent.

[00:21:29] Blair: Yeah. And then, I think it’s important, especially with kids, that you have a conversation about what was heard in a way, and this can be hard, in a way that you’ve got to support their viewpoint. And question anything if you think the sources might not be valid.

But if your child doesn’t agree 100 percent with your position, especially in this kind of crazy election season. A, some they’ll mature, but B, raising a voter, if you really want to raise a voter, in my opinion, you do it in a way that makes sure they understand the importance of voting, but doesn’t indoctrinate because I don’t think that necessarily is effective as a long term strategy for a voter.

I think you just need to raise somebody that understands why their opinion matters and how voting is one of the only ways that their opinion can make a difference. 

[00:22:31] Amy: I also think it’s so important and so hard to teach your kids that before you can argue with a position, you need to understand it. And I’m just, I’m going to name names here because I don’t know, it’s just easier. Sometimes whatever Donald Trump says makes me mad.

He could say the sky is blue and I would be annoyed about it because I have really, I feel, I have really strong feelings about him as a person. And I think it can be that way in politics. You hear somebody saying something that you disagree with and you immediately want to argue, but good critical thinking does mean you have to understand what the person is saying before you argue.

Now, this isn’t the same thing as seeing both sides of the issue, which, we all — you already know. I think there are some things where there are not both sides. Slavery was bad period. I’m not, I don’t care if you think there’s another side. You’re wrong. It’s basically where I am on that. But I think it’s different to make sure that you understand what somebody is saying.

You want to make sure that you are clear on exactly what they’re saying, and then you can argue with it all you want to, but you have to, you can’t just jump into arguing without understanding. Or honestly, you are as bad as the people who are just using hollow words, because you haven’t, you don’t have a foundation.

[00:23:53] Blair: A good strategy for that is to actually say to someone, this is what I’m hearing you say. Am I correct? And one of the reasons to have a discussion with your kids about this is it is really important that when you feel strongly about a position, that you’re able to articulate it. By reading, or watching, or coming to understand what other people are saying, and then having a discussion that doesn’t get turned into an argument can lead to helping people articulate their stance on important issues. 

While you’re doing this, I think a really fun game that I did with my son, is to make a game out of spotting misleading information. 

[00:24:44] Amy: Ooh, I love this! This is genius. 

[00:24:48] Blair: We went out to lunch yesterday. Sean was facing the screen that had soccer on it. Jim was facing the screen that had women’s basketball on it. I was facing the screen that had four news channels and the weather channel.

So I was able to watch, at the same time, CNN. MSNBC, Fox, and BBC News, and it was a really interesting. The jobs report was actually really good that came out yesterday, and the way Fox was dealing with the good job report was they were attacking Joe Biden as a person. The news is good, so how can we make it bad? I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I could read the headline that’s Joe Biden flakes out or something. 

[00:25:30] Amy: When I was a teenager, and my parents would say I couldn’t do something, and I would immediately say, you never let me do anything! 

[00:25:38] Blair: Yeah, claiming a single event will inevitably give rise to a chain of future events. And this is interesting because, if the event is good, then they claim way beyond. And if it’s bad… You might not realize it, but if you watch Fox News, you would, the United States is going through an apocalyptic event.

Joe Biden, if he’s reelected, it’s going to be an apocalyptic event and the U.S. will be like you’ve never known it. But with really ominous music playing. That was their argument four years ago and it hasn’t happened. The problem with that is there’s this feeling that it’s never going to be a problem, the United States is going to keep being what it is, but I think that’s why people like my husband, even the word Trump just triggers them, which I want to take issue with. Totally ruined a perfectly good word. 

[00:26:38] Amy: It’s such a useful word. A lovely word. No, I think that you’re right. I think that about when I was a kid and our arguments were about, it felt like every political season, one of the big issues was gay marriage was the big issue.

And I remember people, like my teachers, people at football games that I went to arguing that, if, once you allowed gay marriage, people would be marrying dogs, right? That was the next step. And we’ve had gay marriage for a while now, and I don’t know anyone who’s married to a dog.

My dog is really great, I am, like, I do, I am really fond of my dog. But this does not seem like it’s actually gonna become an issue. I, I think, yeah I think that we are really prone to more — That’s not an argument that we need to give respect to, right? That’s not a real argument. That’s not, that doesn’t deserve our thought and respect. It’s ridiculous. 

[00:27:38] Blair: It’s ridiculous, but something that isn’t as ridiculous that people do is they say that gay marriage is going to lead to pedophilia. And the reason I don’t think that’s as ridiculous is that what it does is it connects pedophilia with the LGBTQ+ community. And it’s really unfair. But that’s also been pretty effective. 

[00:28:05] Amy: It’s really — smart feels like the wrong word, but like it is a very smart strategy to link something that you want people to think is bad with something that people know is bad.

And to compare them so often that they start to feel like the same thing. That’s great. That is a really good propaganda technique. 

[00:28:26] Blair: This conservative movement that has pervaded education, it’s one of the reasons that you and I decided to have this podcast actually, was because this is a very effective strategy. These strategies that you see happening, whether it’s gay marriage, or whether it is, educational issues. These are really effective strategies. This right wing Christian conservative movement is at the leadership at the top, even if you can’t figure out why they’re doing something, they’re brilliant.

I’m not saying Trump is brilliant. He’s their stooge, and he’s a very effective spokesperson. There are people behind him that are directing this narrative. It’s scary. I don’t want to scare everybody and I don’t think I’d go there with an educational issue with my kids but they know what they’re doing. Look at how they finally were able to overturn Roe v. Wade 

[00:29:28] Amy: Okay, I think that’s the thing that’s worth talking about especially with your middle school and high school students. I see a lot of students. I see a lot of teenagers who genuinely feel helpless about the state of the world and who feel, because of that helplessness, who become apathetic about it, who feel like, and —

[00:29:49] Blair: don’t vote, they don’t vote because of that. That’s a strategy as well, Amy. Amy. 

[00:29:54] Amy: Yes. Yes. And so I think that is a really important piece of talking about politics and studying the election process with your kid is showing them all the ways that vote do make a difference, that you can look at the long picture of history. I always go back to reconstruction because I feel like reconstruction is, it’s so parallel to that situation that we’re living in right down to the impeached, almost impeached president.

Right? Where it’s like you’ve made this tremendous social, political, progressive change and the people who benefited from all the things that existed before that change are pushing back so hard against it, right? And so it’s like you’re taking steps backwards. But if you look at that, you can see that in the aftermath of Reconstruction, we saw the Progressive Reform Movement, which made great strides in making the world a better place for lots of people.

And the Civil Rights Movement, and the Gay Rights Movement, and the Latinx Rights Movement, and the Women’s Rights Movement. And so I feel like we’re right now at that stage where people are pushing back, but this is the time when those movements can start to form and grow and build and make a big difference.

And I think we really need to give our kids that, that too, right? That possibility, that hope for the future, that hope for change, is historically accurate. 

[00:31:18] Blair: I’m smiling. You can’t see it, but Amy can, because you’re basically describing two steps forward and one step back.

We’re in the one step back period right now, everybody, but that means that we’re about to experience two steps forward, which is —

[00:31:36] Amy: so good, which, yay hooray. So —

[00:31:40] Blair: Barack Obama was two steps forward, and it tore the covers off of all the racists. Oh yeah, and then a woman. Okay, those of you who didn’t know where Amy and I were politically now know a lot more. 

The other two things that I think is really important, and especially one of the things you can do, no matter how old your children are, is to have them see you vote, and to talk with them about the choices you are making. Talk to your kids as a family unit. That’s really good when your kids hear you having those kinds of conversations. 

[00:32:21] Amy: I have two things. One thing is a really fun way to get involved in local politics is to sign up to work voter registration drive. They’re really fun here in Georgia, our Women’s Democratic League runs them and you go around or you man a table and you help people register to vote, and it feels very empowering and kids are welcome and I, I think that’s great. You’re not registering people to vote for anybody specific, you are just registering people to vote. So so that is a very cool thing to participate in.

And I just finished reading such a fun mystery, if you are an old school mystery fan, like a golden age of mystery fan, and you grew up on Agatha Christie And Sherlock Holmes mysteries and all of that, there is a writer, Benjamin Stevenson, he has two mystery books out now in this series.

One is Everybody in My Family is a Murderer. And the other is Everyone on this Train is a Murderer. And they are very fun because they play with all the conventions of the detective genre. The writer is very, okay, so now I am going to do this because that’s what happens at this stage of the detective novel. But it’s still like very twisty and fun and surprising. So if you’re looking for a fun mystery read, highly recommend Benjamin Stevenson and his two books. 

[00:33:42] Blair: I will have to look those up. 

[00:33:44] Amy: They’re very entertaining. 

[00:33:47] Blair: All right, everyone. If you have any questions, any comments, we are always happy to entertain those.

[00:33:54] Amy: Yes, leave us questions. Please leave comments. It makes us feel like we’re not floating alone in the podcasting world. 

[00:34:01] Blair: We haven’t heard that much. We were a little surprised when we went and looked at our subscriber numbers I think we were pleasantly surprised.

[00:34:09] Amy: So thanks for listening We appreciate you so much, and I guess that is a wrap for this episode of Secular Homeschooling with Blair and Amy, brought to you by SEA Homeschoolers and home.school.life.

We’ll see you soon. 

[00:34:24] Blair: Bye

We dive into the challenging world of secular science in homeschooling, discovering how tricky it can be to navigate through seemingly neutral curriculums that are anything but. Our conversation takes us through the pitfalls of evangelical curriculums, the importance of critical thinking, and how to vet for truly secular science resources. Join us as we unpack the layers, share our personal experiences, and offer tips to secure a secular science education for your kids, ensuring they're not indoctrinated but enlightened.

We love to hear from you! Please email us with questions, comments, and ideas for future episodes!

Transcript: Episode 7

We use an automatic transcription app for our podcast, which makes it possible for us to include transcripts for our podcast episodes — but it does sometimes make weird errors! We do edit it, but I’m sure we miss things sometimes.

[00:00:00] Amy: Hello and welcome to Secular Homeschooling with Blair and Amy brought to you by SEA Homeschoolers and home.school.life. Today I’m so excited because we’re talking about one of the things that I think maybe most new homeschoolers, when you start homeschooling, ask the most, which is how can you tell that your science curriculum is secular?

And I’m so lucky to have Blair talking about this with me today because Blair is the secular science expert in the secular homeschool community. Is that fair, Blair? Can I call you the expert? 

[00:00:38] Blair: Just, let’s go with most outspoken expert over the years. 

[00:00:43] Amy: Blair has made more people mad about secular science, how about? 

[00:00:49] Blair: Because there’s some really good scientists in our community. I actually was surprised. I always thought this was going to go away after we started writing about this many years ago. 

My science articles that are the most read. Why Neutral Science Isn’t Neutral, and How to Vet for Secular Science. Amy actually came to me with the idea of writing the second of the two articles. And I just thought people would get this. And in fact, in talking to Kat, what we’ve been noticing lately is, this is, a problem is really gaining traction.

People coming in or wanting to recommend science courses that aren’t secular, and that they think are. Or that they purchased and turned out not to be secular. 

[00:01:35] Amy: I want to say here at the beginning for full disclosure, when we started homeschooling, my daughter was in second grade. And we did it on a whim.

She was having a really hard time in school. We weren’t really sure what we should do about it. So we were like, let’s pull her out and we’ll homeschool for the rest of the semester and figure out what to do next. Of course, she ended up homeschooling all the way to high school graduation, she’s in college now.

So it worked out really well for us. But when we started doing it, I didn’t really know what to do. And I, like so many moms who start homeschooling, I went to a bunch of homeschool park days near me, and I was just like, I had my big listening ears on, I was like, what curriculum do you recommend? What are you using? What’s working for you? And I ended up buying based on the recommendation of these very nice women, like a whole group of lovely women who I met at park day, I ended up buying a really unsecular science. I’m almost embarrassed to say it to you, Blair, because it was —

[00:02:35] Blair: No, no, you have to say it because I know the name and they are doing a lot of advertising and it’s causing a lot of problems again.

I was just saw a thread where people were talking about NOEO all at them. 

It’s infuriating because there are some people on the thread saying it’s got to be secular. It was a NOEO ad I happened to see on Facebook this morning. It’s got to be secular because charter schools will let you buy it.

I’m going to tell you a dirty secret. The charter school system, there are people in the charter school, working for the charter schools, and I know this happens, who are evangelicals and actually don’t have a problem with people buying non secular science curriculum.

So it’s an ongoing problem that the charter schools are consistently dealing with because in California, you can’t use materials that violate the separation of church and state. But the state of California is part of the problem, because they’ve never really done a very good job of, they need to like, reach out to SEA and say, we will pay you for a list of what is not secular, and so things slip by all the time that charter schools let people by. It’s a real shame. 

[00:03:48] Amy: That is it. I think that when you go into homeschooling, and you are a secular person, you are not going into homeschooling for religious reasons, and you start looking at curriculum, it honestly doesn’t occur to you that most curriculum is going to be religious.

Most of the curriculum that you find is going to be evangelical. It is going to be religious. And it’s not always very upfront about disclosing this, and so as secular homeschool parents, that is what I learned that very first purchase. We have to be really thoughtful about what we buy, and a lot of times, we don’t we don’t know how to do that because it doesn’t occur to me that somebody’s gonna try to teach biology without evolution.

[00:04:36] Blair: I came to homeschooling because no child left behind. Sean was an early reader, was the only person in the class who was not receiving really adequate education on, from the teaching end because he already read and nobody else in the class read. So I ended up homeschooling him the following year.

And I am a scientist, degrees in evolutionary biology and chemistry, did not grow up in a particularly religious household, I live in the west coast, so I’m in like the blue bubble, and I really, I had no idea that this was really a thing in the homeschool community. And I was shocked to realize how pervasive it was through the non secular community.

Unfortunately, most people don’t pick up on things. You have a science degree, Amy, but you’re a physicist, and you really, a lot of your time has been spent in the humanities. I have a degree in evolutionary biology, so for me, it was a lot easier.

I knew what to look for. 

[00:05:46] Amy: It’s crazy that you would have to have a degree in evolutionary biology, that it’s that bad and not upfront about its values. 

[00:05:57] Blair: The other thing is you and I are both the activist type, obviously. We are not afraid to stand up and say this is not okay. A lot of people at that time — first of all, we didn’t have the online community we do now, so the information wasn’t as easily available.

But the other thing is that if, there’s, you’re in a group where there’s, let’s say, ten, and most of the group is religious, it’s not always comfortable to say no, that’s not secular, and so it can be really hard, especially in those smaller communities where most of the homeschoolers are religious.

It can be stressful to stand up because what if your children then don’t have anybody to play with? And so there’s a lot going on as to why people don’t stand up and say that’s not secular. Also a lot of people don’t feel they know enough. And then now, they lie, like a situation like NOEO, you heard us with Rebecca Keller.

These people are trying to indoctrinate your children. The biggest reason I initially stood up is that, I’ll be really honest, that pissed me off. The thought of people lying to children, I think of it as like a tabula rasa and the plasticity of the human brain to lie about what is factually known.

And what is it to say, to redefine scientific theory to be the common use of the word theory? That just makes me mad. 

[00:07:43] Amy: It’s maddening. It is, and it feels unnecessary, too. Because clearly, there are homeschoolers out there who — this is what they want. They want this kind of evangelical curriculum. And go buy it! 

But they should make it clear to people that’s what it is because nothing is more upsetting than to feel — I felt this way — like you have failed your kid because you bought this crappy,.. I think we got through one and a half lessons before I was like, wait a minute. 

But I really felt like I had failed as a homeschool parent because I had bought a curriculum that went against everything that I believe.

[00:08:25] Blair: For me it was Story of the World, the first book, I’m reading the chapter where Abraham’s conversation with God is treated as if it was an actual, historically valid event. If you believe that, great, you probably aren’t listening to our podcast. It’s a part of Christian mythology. I’m reading this to my child. So then I’m having this conversation with a seven-year-old about how nobody knows if that was actually happened. Nobody ever documented a conversation with this almighty .

I didn’t feel like I failed, but I felt like if I was going to continue to be a part of this community, some educating about critical thinking around where there is factual information in support versus not. And I think that’s probably what happened to you too, Amy, because that’s how you and I came to understand that secular homeschoolers really need to start critical thinking teaching with their children early. 

[00:09:29] Amy: Yeah, no, it’s so true. It’s so true. Because I think that it is going to be really rare to be a secular homeschooler and to never stumble into any kind of evangelical content through your homeschooling journey.

Because it’s not clearly labeled, it’s not clearly named, it gets recommended everywhere with no caveat. So yeah, critical thinking is the way that our kids can navigate this, but we can also, I think, if we go in armed with the right information, which I wish I’d had back then, we can do a better job of vetting science curriculum.

What makes a science curriculum secular? And Blair has, Blair has spent years refining this question and breaking down the different pieces of it. I’m really going to let her do most of the talking here because she — and you just take notes, just write down what she says — because she really knows what she’s talking about with this.

[00:10:26] Blair: The first thing I want to do is actually let you know why this is important. Because one of the things that we see all the time is, why is this important? It’s only first grade science. It’s only fourth grade science. And Amy, I do actually want to hear from you about this. 

I was drawn to science. Nobody in my family is a scientist. To this day, about half of my family think anybody who goes into science should get an MD, because why else would you go into science? 

Science spoke to me. There’s like this purity to it. There are answers, but there’s also huge discoveries yet to be made. If you have the type of intellect that is engaged with scientific thinking that explains how the natural and physical world works, you can come to some truths this way. You can come to understand some things, but there’s still other things like — One of the things that to this day I find kind of magical is atoms are moving all the time, there is an electron cloud, and when I touch a leaf, that the leaf doesn’t become part human and I don’t become part leaf. I know that sounds crazy, but the whole chemical aspect of that, I find really intriguing and I find it very magical.

[00:11:50] Amy: And the more you think about atoms, the more magical that seems, right? Because neither of us is a solid thing, neither you nor the leaf is actually a solid thing. 

[00:11:59] Blair: There’s more empty space than there is particles. And it’s energy. It’s absolutely amazing. And frankly, I think it’s a really serves children badly who are not given the opportunity to come to understand this discipline. If you have a first grader and they’re not learning the actual science, I’ll go back to what I had to say about Keller the other day. I think that you are putting your child in a position where they’re more open to believing in things like conspiracy theories, because a part of what they were taught as factual actually isn’t. 

[00:12:39] Amy: I’m also gonna say, how much do you remember about what you learned in first grade? Because I remember a lot.

The stuff that you learn in those early science classes is foundational to your entire scientific understanding. It is — it is the foundation, and if you are building on a broken foundation, on a foundation of indoctrination and deliberate misunderstanding, then I think that that is very hard to fix.

It is much easier to fix a janky wall than a janky foundation. 

[00:13:14] Blair: I’m writing an article right now about using what I’m learning in these classes for The Writing Revolution science classes. And they break vocabulary and then skills to level one, level two, level three, and they talk about what makes what you learn in first grade important are the level one skills and the level two skills that you’re going to need when you get to the level three skills.

And kids who have had a solid Foundational focus, conceptual education around science are better able with the level two vocabulary and skills that you get in later grades. 

[00:13:53] Amy: Yeah, I would say — I feel like this is a crazy thing to say, but it’s almost better if you accidentally end up with the evangelical curriculum when your kid is in high school.

Because it’s very easy for you and them to critique it and put it aside and do something else. It’s much worse, I think, to start out with curriculum that isn’t secular. 

[00:14:15] Blair: Oh, that’s a good point, Amy. So you’re saying that if your first facts are false, it becomes much more challenging to be able to recognize when the information — I have never thought of it like that, but I’ve got to agree.

[00:14:31] Amy: Let’s hope that we never have unsecular curriculum, but if you do try to get it in high school. 

No but — but talk us through so it is, it matters every step of the way, I think is what’s important. And this isn’t to make you feel bad if you’ve messed up and done something wrong because, hello, me, I’m sitting here, I did it, my kid turned out fine.

But it is also, it is because there is stuff that we can do and we have learned, sometimes the hard way, what are some of the things that we can look for when we want to vet a curriculum to know if it’s secular? But you have to start out by believing that it matters, that it’s important to use secular academic science curriculum.

[00:15:13] Blair: Then the next thing you should do, I’m going to give you tips and information, just go into the SEA Homeschoolers Facebook group. The reason I suggest that you go into the SEA homeschoolers Facebook group is you don’t have to go through all the steps that I’m about to tell you.

The best place to get the information, even on a program that isn’t being honest with you, the very best places to just go to their own website. That’s where you’re going to get a lot of this information. Do they have a statement of secular purpose? Now, if you’re looking for homeschool curriculum, they generally will. But a lot of secular science curriculum that’s not developed for the homeschool community, they won’t. This tends not to be a problem in the way that it is for history, although who knows in Florida, maybe it’s becoming a problem, and in Texas, I guess it is a problem. Yeah, go into SEA. Don’t — I’ll tell you right now, Prager U — don’t use it. 

[00:16:11] Amy: Also Ron Paul, I saw some people talking about Ron Paul’s curriculum this morning, not in SEA, in another homeschool group that I belong to. And so don’t use that.

[00:16:20] Blair: But I recommend that you go to the publisher’s website . The first thing is to look for their statement of the secular purpose, and if it seems like they give you this roundabout explanation about what secular is, or they seem to be redefining it, you’re going to need to, more research is needed. 

[00:16:38] Amy: Can you give us an example of what does it look like when someone’s avoiding saying it?

[00:16:43] Blair: Friendly Biology, which people in our community want to recommend, Friendly Biology. Friendly Biology. “The Christian worldview version of Friendly Biology gives credit to God as the creator of all living things. This credit is omitted from the secular version.

“The theory of evolution is not included in either version as it is our goal in writing the course to present currently accepted observations of living creatures in today’s world.” That’s just not even true.

[00:17:20] Amy: Okay, so they’re leaving out evolution in both versions. They’re not talking about evolution because they’re focusing on observing things? 

[00:17:35] Blair: “The currently accepted observations of living creatures in today’s world.” So that’s actually interesting that you picked up on that. Because, nobody’s observed an organism evolving. 

[00:17:46] Amy: Which isn’t actually true. 

[00:17:48] Blair: Especially in the microbial world. It’s totally not true. 

[00:17:52] Amy: Even just the Victorian moths, right? That were, yes, just like very basic evolution in action.

[00:18:01] Blair: Right, so for people that don’t know where during the industrial revolution, there started to be a lot more pollution and moths that used to be white speckled, that blended in with trees very well — the pollution, the smoke coated the trees. So the bark of trees was darker.

So over two generations the moths became, the white speckled version became almost non-existent or at a very low percentage of the population and the moths became dark. Because the birds would eat the white moths, and so the genetic variability shifted so there became, there was more, the phenotype, genotype shifted.

[00:18:47] Amy: I only bring that up because you don’t even need a Petri dish to understand, but so saying that evolution is not “accepted observations.” 

[00:18:56] Blair: So this is what they go to. They go to currently accepted observations. One of Keller’s things is, the way she gets around the chemistry of evolution, is that you’ve never seen a rock turn into something else. You could sit and look at a rock for your entire life, and you would never see the rock evolve into something else. 

[00:19:17] Amy: Yeah. Yeah. So watch out for these things because if anyone says they have a secular version where they don’t give God credit and that’s what makes it secular — I would be very wary. 

[00:19:29] Blair: Advertisements that state, or when you go to their website, that parts can be removed. That’s a problem. You’re going to want to search, the way you look for this is you’re going to want to search on a publisher’s website for climate change, evolution, the big bang, the age of the earth, and look at how they treat this.

Okay, so here’s an example of from the publisher of Elemental Science and Sassafras Science. Again, non secular science. In the intermediate years, the pages that deal with the theories of evolution and the Big Bang are included as optional studies. Now a lot of people think that makes this secular.

Secular science courses do not consider the two central scientific theories, one explaining how all organisms and the other explaining how all matter got here, to be optional. Part of the problem with that is that both should be taught early so that you can incorporate it through the entire rest of the curriculum. It’s a thematic element. 

[00:20:32] Amy: And in biology, how do you teach anything in biology if evolution is optional? Evolution is a — I mean am I crazy? Evolution is a really important part of biology. 

[00:20:45] Blair: You need to have at least a basic understanding of it to learn about genetics, obviously, but also anatomy and physiology, systems of classification, medicine.

[00:20:58] Amy: So evolution needs to be woven throughout biology — it’s the most important. Pull it out, that’s not a good curriculum, right? 

[00:21:07] Blair: Moving Beyond the Page does it, too, for evolution. And the only reason that chapter’s in there is so that charter schools will buy them. This is an area that for a lot of homeschoolers is really grey, because if it’s there, it must be secular. It’s much more complicated than that. This is not oh, we’re not going to learn about the circulatory system this year. Evolution is how all organisms came to be and how they’re all related. 

[00:21:38] Amy: And you can’t study the science of life and pretend that’s not part of it. 

[00:21:44] Blair: And the Big Bang, the reason the Big Bang’s taken out is to be acceptable for young Earth creationists. That’s really not secular.

Then third thing to look for is you’ll see people talking about opposing viewpoints. Okay, Amy, can you think of a couple of opposing viewpoints in science? I’m going to toss this back to you. I, if you can’t, I can, but what would you say are legitimate scientific opposing viewpoints? 

[00:22:13] Amy: So I’m going to say that a really interesting opposing viewpoint that that I think is like happening in physics now that we’re like, looking at, is trying to resolve the tension between the theory of gravity and the theory of quantum mechanics.

Because in lots of ways, some of the things about them contradict each other. And yet, they both work perfectly for the things that they describe. And so I think that is a really, people are like trying to find ways to prove that one is more right or figure out like, where’s the exception?

How do they fit together? So I think those are — maybe that’s too nuanced?

[00:22:56] Blair: No, that is a good one. The opposing viewpoint I want to share with people is around climate change. What’s going to happen to the ocean currents if it keeps warming? There’s different theories of exactly what’s going to happen. 

[00:23:09] Amy: Is a virus alive, which I guess you do in high school.

[00:23:14] Blair: Oh yeah. What do you think, Amy? 

[00:23:16] Amy: I think yes, too, but I definitely respect the no opinion, right? I think the no opinion has a lot of I — I think it’s a valid argument. I just don’t agree with it. Which is why it’s an opposing viewpoint. 

[00:23:29] Blair: The scientists at NASA think we just need to redefine what it means to be alive. Their concern is when they look at exobiology, so off planet biology, their concern is how planets are classified and what that might mean for the future of space travel.

I don’t think, just because of how long it takes to get places in space. I don’t think I’ll be around to see anybody get there, but, I think it’s cool that we’re thinking about this, 

[00:23:59] Amy: So like those are reasonable opposing scientific viewpoints, but give me an — I can think of a lot of examples, but I’ll let you. 

[00:24:07] Blair: Did organisms evolve? Is the earth flat? How old is the universe? Is global warming and climate change, number one, happening, and number two, caused by humans pumping, dumping carbon dioxide into the air? There’s no opposing viewpoints on those by anybody who’s not being paid. An opposing viewpoint that held on for a long time: Are cigarettes carcinogenic? Those things that I listed go into the are cigarettes carcinogenic category of legitimate science or propaganda.

I should have gotten an example from Prager U, because Texas has adopted videos from Prager U, where they’ve created this line of videos that are propaganda paid for by the fossil fuel industry, which is, has a big toe, foothold, toehold, whatever, in Texas. These videos change the narrative about how the environmental movement is harmful to people that rely on the coal industry for their livelihood and environmentalists, who think we need to shift away from fossil fuels, are creating a situation where those people won’t be able to feed their children and make their house payments.

[00:25:35] Amy: Shame on us, Blair. 

[00:25:37] Blair: Yeah. 

Okay. We touched on this, but does the publisher redefine terms? And I went back to Elemental again, because I thought that people might think just the whole removing the chapter thing wasn’t going to be a problem. “At Elemental, we treat scientific fact as fact and scientific theory as theory. We are not Christian or secular. We are just science.”

I’m going to tell you right now, anytime you see that, you are looking at non secular science, if it’s developed for the homeschool community, that should just send all sorts of alarm bells. 

But she was on — this is an important distinction and good to understand if looking for secular science.

Oh, okay, so now she’s dialing in for the secular scientists. Scientific curriculum should treat scientific facts as scientific facts, theories as scientific theories. Many non secular science materials use the definitions for fact and theory based on their everyday usage, not their scientific definition.

“In everyday usage facts take precedence over theories. In science, the opposite is true. In other words, using the word theory tells other scientists that this idea is still being worked on. But the word fact says that the idea is proven to be true.”

[00:27:02] Amy: Wait, she just contradicted herself. 

[00:27:04] Blair: Yeah, she redefines the word theory to be the common everyday usage for the word theory, not this scientific theory. That is what these people do. This is how they get people to buy their curriculum.

[00:27:25] Amy: Feels really sneaky because she’s done all the right things up to then. 

[00:27:31] Blair: Yeah here’s Layers of Learning, another one we, it’s not as popular, but people think is secular. “Layers of Learning is a springboard for pursuit of knowledge. We provide facts, topics, resources, questions, and experiment ideas, and then allow you to explore and establish theories, beliefs, and ideas.”

In this case, scientific theories are being equated with beliefs. That is something you see all the time. Rebecca Keller does it, Layers of Learning does it, where they bring your child into the conversation so that your child decides if they think a theory, a scientific theory is valid or not. 

[00:28:12] Amy: Oh. Which I mean, which sounds like what homeschooling is all about, right?

But it’s actually not, because that’s like disagreeing that the sky is blue. It is not like disagreeing — which, oh my gosh, I’ve disagreed about this a million times in my life with my children — whether they need a jacket today or not. That is an argument that children of 6 and 10 and 12 are totally ready to have, and their opinions count in it, but it doesn’t matter if a kid believes in evolution at 6 or 10, because evolution is just true.

[00:28:54] Blair: In science, a theory is bigger, more profound, and encompasses than a fact. A fact, is not, doesn’t take precedence over a theory and neither does a law. If you are on a website and you see them making the facts sound like they are taking precedence over the theories, they’re misleading you. 

[00:29:18] Amy: If a scientific fact contradicted a scientific theory, you’d look more closely at the facts.

[00:29:25] Blair: Sure, and the theory, that’s how theories — that’s how we come to new understanding.

So one of the — so what’s happening with the theory of evolution? Scientists are working really hard to understand the first organisms, were they RNA organisms or DNA organism? The first organisms, there’s thinking that they evolved at hydrothermal vents in the ocean, because this pumping of warm water, and it’s got nutrient rich warm water, has everything needed. This is really all comes down to how did self replicating molecules evolve? 

That evolution occurs is, you can consider a fact. It’s just true. It does. There’s no credible scientist, that’ll tell you that it’s any other way Than through evolution. There’s nothing about evolution that actually is anti religious. 

[00:30:19] Amy: I totally agree. I have, I’ve always thought that it was a little bit crazy, not — crazy is maybe not the right word, but a little bit problematic to pit evolution and creation against each other because they really don’t —there’s nothing in religion that wouldn’t support the ideas of evolution.

[00:30:42] Blair: We’ve got a little off topic, but an interesting off topic. Another thing you can do is to check out the speakers and authors at the Great Homes School Convention.

I will share a secret with everyone. I have applied for the last 10 years to be a speaker at the Great Homeschool Convention. And the reason that I did this is I wanted to see if they would let a secular scientist speak. Because their science talks are like refuting evolution. And they have a bunch of non secular, let’s call them faux secular people at them, like Paige Hudson, the author of Elemental. If you’re a secular scientist, they will not let you speak at the Great Houseworking Convention. 

[00:31:33] Amy: I am not surprised, but also that is surprising, because you would think that they would. They definitely seem excited to get homeschoolers’ money and to get homeschoolers to come out.

[00:31:44] Blair: When they go to these non secular conferences Paige Hudson, she takes her, oh, I write secular curriculum coat off, and she’s honest with that community because they’re not looking for secular science.

Now, I’m going to tell you something that’s not foolproof, it is to Google authors. If you can’t figure it out any other way. If you’ve ever heard of Supercharged Science, this is the credentials of the person writing Supercharged Science. I just took this from her website. 

“Aurora Lipper here. I’m a mechanical engineer, instructor, pilot, astronomer, and busy momma for I’ve taught science classes and workshops to over 10, 000 kids since 1999. I have a bachelor’s and master’s degree in mechanical engineering with a minor in mathematics and a specialized study in high temperature gas dynamics during my PhD work at Stanford.” And she used to have as a part of this that she had done work at NASA. So I don’t know why that’s not on there anymore. Sounds great. Doesn’t it? It’s very impressive. She has decided not to weigh into the secular/non-secular world. So all of her materials are neutral.

[00:32:53] Amy: Neutral science is the absolute worst because it’s so misleading as a name. Because you see “neutral” science and you think, oh, okay, this isn’t religious. So it must be just like regular science. They’re just calling it this so that religious people will understand that there’s no God in it.

And that is not what it means. 

[00:33:18] Blair: For those who are curious, go over to the SEA website and read Why Neutral Science Isn’t Neutral. It’s also going to be in the SEA magazine in the April issue. It’s such a good article. Kat said it’s such a problem that she wants more people to read it. 

[00:33:34] Amy: No, I think that’s true.

I — and I think that because this is it, like, all of us, when we come to homeschooling, as secular homeschoolers I don’t think we expect this. I don’t think that we expect that companies are going to be trying to trick us into buying evangelical curriculum. 

[00:33:53] Blair: We do not expect all of these Christian homeschoolers to be such liars is what it all comes down to. It’s like they’re just lying. 

No, that’s terrible, but you’re right. 

And someone like Lipper — I don’t know if a Lipper is a Christian homeschooler. What I know is she is lying to get the money of everybody possible. And she’s making it sound like this is going to be this really, solid science curriculum. You won’t find anything in her curriculum about the age of the universe, because she doesn’t want to offend young earth creationists, .

[00:34:31] Amy: Our kids deserve better. And honestly, I think a lot of us as homeschoolers, I know for me it was surprising to me with homeschooling how much I got to learn with my kids. It was like there were things that like suddenly clicked for me in a way that they hadn’t before. I saw connections that I hadn’t seen before.

And so I think as parents, we also deserve better. We deserve curriculum that we can trust to give us scientifically accurate information. 

[00:35:00] Blair: Yeah, right, because you shouldn’t have to have a degree in evolutionary biology to know if the teachings in your biology course are actually scientific facts that support scientific theories, not a redefinition of them.

[00:35:17] Amy: So I’m going to go back to something that Blair said at the beginning of this podcast episode, which is that the SEA forums are a fantastic place to ask these questions. And I want to say, I think that SEA sometimes, especially like in other spaces, gets a lot of flack for holding the line about what is secular so hard.

And I want to say that when it comes to things like science — It’s so blurry, it’s so intentionally blurry, made so intentionally blurry by some of these curriculum companies, that it is amazing and wonderful that SEA is there to say — I mean you have an evolutionary biologist vetting this curriculum for you, looking at this curriculum and saying, yes, this is secular. No, this isn’t. And SEA is the only place on the homeschool internet that I know of where that happens. Where you can count on the curriculum, all the curriculum that’s there is absolutely secular. And if it’s not, there’s somebody who can explain to you why it’s not. And I think that is so important.

[00:36:25] Blair: I didn’t come to the homeschool community realizing there was this separation, and then I would see this misinformation and it made me mad because I knew these people were lying. I guess I just got on my soapbox about it, I started writing about it. 

So when SEA was founded, it was given, it was going to be secular because I wouldn’t have anything that wasn’t. We hold the line. But we, we are fair. If someone writes a truly secular version and sends it to us, we look it over. We are really fair when we say something is not secular. We have people get mad at the admin and us all, and me probably all the time, but if you want to use non secular materials, that’s okay, just don’t be recommending them in SEA. And if you think your material is secular and we don’t, you’re incorrect. We don’t say something is non secular unless we have evidence that it’s not secular. We’ll tell you if we haven’t checked something out, but if we say it’s not secular, it’s not secular and we have the evidence to support it.

[00:37:34] Amy: And I think that is, there’s a really important distinction to be made here between a secular curriculum and a non secular curriculum — and an inclusive curriculum, or a decolonized curriculum or an intersectional curriculum. Because a curriculum can be totally secular, and it can be janky with regard to its treatment of LGBTQ+ people.

And the line of secular/not secular is the line that SEA holds, and it’s a great line. I think it would be impossible for anyone to hold all of the other lines. 

[00:38:09] Blair: It’s why we have opened it up to really focus not so much on whether it contains religious information but whether it’s evidence based or not. We had to because of climate change. We have a whole bunch of people who aren’t of faith, but also don’t believe in climate change. It was really good that we did that because of the issues that come up with humanities curriculum. If somebody were to want to recommend a curriculum that was not a problem from a secular standpoint that said that what was it — enslaved people benefited from being enslaved —

[00:38:44] Amy: Yes, because they learned skills there —

[00:38:45] Blair: Yeah, that’s not an issue religiously, but the evidence doesn’t support that, and so we wouldn’t allow people to talk about the curriculum, and so we try to be pretty good.

Occasionally, as you pointed out, there does, there’s a bit of a gray area. 

[00:39:03] Amy: But if a curriculum is evidence-based and secular, then that’s the criteria for SEA. 

[00:39:10] Blair: You’ve got to have a criteria, and it’s not always perfect. 

Yeah, I did want to, I did want to say one other thing, and that was that you can check reviews and recommendations. For example, let’s go back to Supercharged Science.

Aurora Lipper says that Supercharged Science has been recommended by several sites, including 100 Sites for Homeschoolers by homeschool. com, which says it’s inclusive. It’s actually owned by the person that owns Time 4 Learning. So it recommends Time 4 Learning all the time. But it has a lot more non secular than secular information on it.

The Blue Ribbon Award by Old School House Magazine. If you do not know that already, and you’re listening to this podcast, they don’t get much more religious than that in Old School House Magazine. So that’s an award for non secular. Top 101 Picks from Cathy Duffy, who shows — Cathy Duffy is definitely a non secular homeschooler.

She occasionally will do a review of secular materials and increasingly is doing them, but if I were to have looked at those recommendations, I would have said, for a secular homeschooler, her list of recommendations is a red flag. 

[00:40:27] Amy: But that’s the thing is that you have to know these things and so now we hope that there are a few more of them that you do know so that you can make better choices for your kids and your homeschool and your curriculum. Because that, that’s what it’s all about is being able to make the best choices for your kids.

[00:40:44] Blair: Yes, and not letting some person who isn’t even being honest about what they write indocrinate your child. 

[00:40:52] Amy: It’s really stressful and it’s — the world is — There’s a lot of that happening in the world right now, especially in the field of education And so so I feel better knowing that I can do things to make choices that won’t indoctrinate my kid.

So before we go though Blair was telling me before we started podcasting about this amazing book that she is reading about one of my heroes.

So Blair, will you tell us about your book? 

[00:41:20] Blair: I’m reading The Outlier. So I never was not a Jimmy Carter fan, and I’m older than you, and I remember the Watergate years, although I was young then, but I remember them and I even met Spiro Agnew. A family friend knew Spiro Agnew, and we met, we, he came to dinner one night.

It was very friendly, actually. I would call my family kind of purple, as far as politically, but I was always blue. And so Jimmy Carter, I liked him. I know people felt that Jimmy Carter rained on the parade, but I don’t have trouble with those kind of truths, especially since Jimmy Carter also followed that up with what we were going to need to do to to evolve in a way that honored all Americans and so that always really appealed to me.

[00:42:17] Amy: It turns out that he was not wrong about a lot of things, right? He was right. Yeah. 

[00:42:24] Blair: Yeah. People didn’t want to hear it. And then the shocking thing that happened is that the evangelicals sided with Reagan, and they’re doing it with Trump against Biden. Whether you like Biden or not, he’s definitely a man of faith. That has been very important in his life. And Carter is also a man of faith. And for the religious community to not support. It’s either cognitive dissonance or they don’t really care as much about the Christian ethics as they say they do. It’s one of the other.

[00:42:58] Amy: I’m from Georgia, and Jimmy Carter was actually president when I was born. What I really admire about him is that he did not let any of that kind of evangelical backlash against him change any of the kind of ethical ways that he believed it made sense to live his life. He went, he taught Sunday school up into his old age, and like, when he realized that he disagreed with the church that he belongs to’s position about women in the ministry, he quit the church that he belonged to his whole life.

I think that’s huge. He and his wife worked at Habitat for Humanity, like, all the time. They were always there, and without cameras, and oh, look at this famous person holding a hammer, they’re holding a hammer. 

[00:43:44] Blair: And the work he did in the world to make free and fair elections. It’s so sad that he’s watching America go through this period where free and fair elections are problematic. 

So the book opens, with story about when he was president, he freed an African American woman from death row. She came to live with him in the White House. She was the nanny who took care of their daughter. And she still lives in a house on his property. This is who he is. He believed in her innocence and then put her in charge of taking care of — he and Rosalyn. He would never want all the credit. He and Rosalyn put them in charge of taking care of their child.

[00:44:38] Amy: When Trump was running for president and refusing to share his taxes and give up his business holdings while he was in office, I couldn’t help thinking about Jimmy Carter and his peanut farm that he loved so much, that he gave up when he became the president because it would have been unethical for him, because maybe he would have voted for peanut subsidies in a way that would benefit him. And I just it’s such a difference. It’s just that, I miss earnest politics. I miss people who believe in things and act on those beliefs and not just people who have talking points.

I hate soundbite — I hate soundbite politics. 

[00:45:21] Blair: It’s so sad. I wish we started having people running for president who didn’t say, I’m like Reagan, or I wish we had people running for office that said, I’m like Jimmy Carter.

That’s who I want to be. 

[00:45:32] Amy: I actually think, maybe I hope, but I actually think that we are going to see pushback against this age of Reagan-esque presidents. Presidents who are, well —

[00:45:44] Blair: Trump is not Reagan. 

[00:45:45] Amy: Yes, but presidents who like thrive on the media and on soundbite and on saying things that they don’t mean — I would love to see a pushback. 

[00:45:55] Blair: I’m going to tell you who I would like to see as the next president. I’m going to tell y’all right now. No, I don’t mean in the next president, Biden versus Trump. I’m not even going to go there. 

[00:46:03] Amy: We’re all going to vote for Biden. Even if we’re tired of voting for old white men, it’s our job to vote for Biden. 

[00:46:07] Blair: But this is, this is who I would like to see run after Biden, after this, in four and a half, five years.

Michelle Obama. That’s who I want to be. That’s who I want to be. You’re so good at doing it. You don’t know what you’ve got.

[00:46:19] Amy: If she doesn’t want to do it, I wouldn’t blame her because she has already given so much of her life to this crap. 

[00:46:28] Blair: She is a person that holds the line at truth and honesty and love for her people. For the people and just — I’m a fan everyone. 

[00:46:40] Amy: She’s an amazing woman. She’s yeah, she’s super amazing. She could be the next Jimmy Carter. She, 

[00:46:46] Blair: That’s what, don’t use, she’s got me in her. So anyway. 

[00:46:50] Amy: Thank you. Thank you so much for listening read he Outlier if you too are a closet Jimmy Carter fan And we will see you soon for more talk about secular homeschooling. Have a great week. Bye everybody. 

In this episode, we’re chatting about how secular homeschoolers can decolonize our curriculum — and why it’s an ongoing project and not something we can buy in a shiny new curriculum package. Plus why secular history matters and why even though some history is sad, it’s still the most hopeful discipline we have.

Transcript: Episode 6

We use an automatic transcription app for our podcast, which makes it possible for us to include transcripts for our podcast episodes — but it does sometimes make weird errors! We do edit it, but I’m sure we miss things sometimes.

[00:00:00] Blair: I think this is a really important topic right now. You’re going to do most of the talking today, Amy, because this is an area that I homeschooled, but it’s not where my academic spot is, but it is where you have spent a lot of time teaching. Many years ago when I wanted to teach this, there were a lot fewer resources. When I decided to teach American history before Columbus, it was not easy to find information that hadn’t been whitewashed.

[00:00:32] Amy: No, it’s tough. When I started homeschooling my kids, when we started homeschooling, one of the first things that I bought was The Story of the World by Susan Weiss Bauer. I was like, I’m going to get this. I’m going to do this as a read aloud with my kids. It’s going to be great. 

And pretty quickly after I started using it I started to run into what felt to me like problem. Right? Problems with that perspective, problems with whitewashing, problems with it not totally all the time being completely secular. And so because I am me, I spent a little bit of time looking for other curriculum options, and when I did not immediately find the history curriculum of my dreams, I was like, oh, I should go back to school and get a doctorate in history.That would be the best way to tackle this problem. ]

I really enjoyed it, and it was really fun to get a doctorate in history, and I’m glad I did it. But I do not think that it solved the problem of secular homeschooling history. 

[00:01:38] Blair: Okay, so I did not realize that you got your history doctorate while homeschooling your children, and that is such an Amy thing to do, but I almost got a doctorate after I was done writing Biology Two. I got accepted to a doctorate program at Stanford, in the science education program, and I decided not to do it because I decided that I don’t enough hours in the day.

[00:02:11] Amy: There’s definitely not enough hours in the day. I’m glad I did it because I can say, and I can say to you, you are not ever gonna find a perfect, not whitewashed curriculum that does everything that you want it to do. That is never gonna happen in history. Because history is changing all the time.

What you want to do is you want to make sure that you are changing all the time and you’re changing the way that you talk about history all the time. So if you get a secular curriculum that you like, you’ve got to do the work of un-whitewashing it. You have to do the work of bringing critical thinking into it.

You have to do the work of looking for the people whose stories aren’t told. And if you do that work, then you are going to have a great history curriculum that you’re really happy with. 

You’re not going to find it. You’re going to have to make it. And I think that is one of the first lessons of secular history, that you understand going in that there is no perfect curriculum. And if you stop looking for the perfect curriculum, you can go a long way towards building a secular history that you’re going to love. 

[00:03:23] Blair: I want to interject one thing, because you called Story of the World out. So, I started homeschooling, probably before you did, based on the ages of our kids. In 2006, a lot of people would argue that was secular. Totally not, it actually treats biblical stories, I think the story of Abraham talking to God, it treats it as if that is fact. I’m not doing an ad here that you should use Story of the World. I’m actually, you wouldn’t use it. There’s some much, much better choices for a secular homeschooler. But I did want to point out that. In the olden days before these people were writing curriculum it was hard. 

One of the things that when you tell people to write their own. There’s a couple of things that I have found. One, either people are thinking, I’m never going to find the time to do that, or they want to, and then they get in there and they realize it’s a lot bigger job, but the other thing is, how do they know? How do you know what the missing pieces are? 

[00:04:32] Amy: So one of the things that I always tell my students every year when we start history, one of the first things that we always talk about is history and the past. The past is every single thing that ever happened, every person that ever happened to, every experience, every moment, the ones that got written down, the ones that didn’t get written down, but history is the stories that we tell about the past.

And so when we read history, we’re looking at the stories that people have picked to tell. And the people who’ve written down those stories have a lot of times been people who have the privilege and power and education to know how to write, to have time and space to write. And so whenever you look at history, you aren’t, you cannot ever have a completely accurate full version of the past because history and the past are never going to be exactly the same.

What you have to do, you don’t have to make your own curriculum from scratch, but what you can do is you can take the curriculum that you have and you can look at it and you should look at it with your kid and you can say. We’re reading about this king. We’re like, say you’re reading about the Magna Carta, we’re reading about King John, and we’re reading about all these really important, rich British people who convinced him to sign the Magna Carta, who wasn’t involved in all this, and how might they have felt about it?

And you can say, oh hey, we treat the Magna Carta like this really amazing document of democracy. But, what if we look at other countries and see what kind of democratic stuff was happening there? And maybe you go to Africa and you look at the Mandan Charter, which is roughly contemporaneous with the Magna Carta.

And you’re like, oh, wow. Here is a ruler who is doing the same, who is making the same agreements to his people that King John made, but nobody is actually forcing him to do it. He’s doing it voluntarily. That’s cool. So it’s really just, there’s no easy answer, right? I can’t say, okay here’s a list of five things that you need to look for.

The answer is, just look, questions, see who’s missing, say, oh hey, why aren’t there any poor people here? Oh hey, I wonder how this would have been different for women? Oh hey, if you were a person of color here, why don’t they get mentioned? Were there no people of color in this part of the world at this time?

And then go find out, because I promise you, the more you ask these questions, the more of these questions you will find. The more of them you will find, and so you’re never going to get to a point where you’ve answered them all. So you just keep asking them. 

[00:07:14] Blair: So basically, let me distill this tip down. Look for who’s missing. 

[00:07:19] Amy: Yeah, that is a very much shorter. 

[00:07:23] Blair: No, we need yours, but I want to make sure that we give people the tools that they need. The other thing is really look who’s missing. And then I think we can assume that women are present, people in the LGBTQ plus community are present, people of color are present, and that then becomes really important to include.

I was in Peru and we did some museum hopping. I was really horrified that only one museum in all the museums we went to mentioned the enslavement of the Incan people. One museum, and they were low key about it, one museum mentioned the successive viral epidemics viral and bacterial, the epidemics that wiped out 80 to 90 percent of the Indigenous community.

 And look for that, but you have to know your history to know what’s missing . And so that is where it becomes complicated, and I will recommend If you are unsure about what might be missing, that is where groups like the SEA Homeschoolers Facebook group can be really important as you start to put together a curriculum.

Once you look for it, once you look for information, about the enslavement of the Incan people after 80 to 90 percent of their population was wiped out over 40 or 50 years. Once you realize that happened, you can then find information about it. I could not believe that they had taken that out and people were okay with it.

[00:09:26] Amy: It’s really surprising and upsetting that it’s still the case, it’s not like this is magically changed. We are in the process of changing, and so you could be part of the process of changing by the way that you homeschool. The other thing I think, and it goes along with this, is that if you really want to do good, meaningful, decolonized, secular history with your kids, You have to slow down sometimes and slowing down means that you are not going to cover everything.

Oh my gosh, I love the homeschoolers who come in and they’re like, okay, we’re in kindergarten and we want to cover the entire history of the world from the Big Bang to the present day before our kids graduate from high school and you cannot do that. In a meaningful way, you absolutely can’t.

If you never slow down and really dig into specific events, you miss the opportunity to look for the people whose voices are missing because the problem with this big chronological story of history is that it tends to be the story of western history. It tends to be the story of colonizers because they’re the ones who wrote stuff down. And they’re the ones who start the wars and they’re the ones who have the “scientific revolutions” and so if you’re following those stories, you are never going to get beneath the surface to the missing people so I think it’s really important to have this kind of timeline to give your kids a sense of the Your Historical Timeline.

We still — upstairs in our hall, we still have the big timeline from the Big Bang to the present day, and we refer to it frequently and I will probably never take it down because I love it so much. But but the real, the best history that we’ve done together is the history where we dig into a specific event. We spend an entire year looking at something like the Salem Witch Trials, or the Boer War in South Africa, or the Incas. You would spend an entire year looking at something that takes up only a tiny fraction of historical time. Because that is where you can really get intersectional. That is where you can really do the work of finding those missing voices.

[00:11:49] Blair: Here’s the thing, though. From someone who did my best. I had to recreate a couple of things, but I did my best to outsource history or find curriculum that did it for me. You have to know something about that history. The fact that the enslavement of the Incas was missing, and when I asked Peruvians about it, they said, Oh, I think they mentioned it somewhere. I finally asked if it was taught in school. And it’s taught as a small piece in one of the grades. What the people are being taught is that the Incan faith was so closely aligned with Christianity that it was a really easy segue into Christianity. And that’s not true.

So Amy, you say you should spend a whole year on an event. How do you do it if you, how do you choose the event? How do you build it to be enough to be meaningful? Not okay, we’re spending another 15 minutes this week on history. Because what you’re talking about is building in the skills of historical literacy and how you apply critical thinking to history and how you incorporate those experiences. To learn different events and how you choose, because the parent then would also have to choose resources. Give us a step by step how someone might do it, because I think that would be really hard for most people to do.

[00:13:36] Amy: First off, I think that as homeschool parents, specifically, because we are homeschool parents, we are not, we are not teachers necessarily. We are learning along with our students. And I think history is a place where we can really lean into this because you don’t know, right? There’s a lot you don’t know, and so the best thing that you can do is model that kind of learning for your kids.

Show your kids how you learn something that you didn’t already know, right? Pick an event, pick something or person that is interesting to you, that you and your kids have talked about and been interested in. So it might be something that feels whitewashed to you, like you’re like, oh my kid is obsessed with Benjamin Franklin, but I don’t really want to deep dive Benjamin Franklin, because he’s an elitist white guy. And he is an elitist white guy.

But if you deep dive into Benjamin Franklin, you find all kinds of interesting intersections of race and class and gender in colonial America and beyond. Really anything, remember, any subject is fair game for really deep historical thinking. So pick a subject, pick anything, don’t be too precious about it, because it’s gonna grow and expand.

The deeper you go, the more roots you’ll find. So just don’t be afraid to pick something that you’re interested in, honestly. I feel like one of the great things about homeschooling is that we do not have to go through this checklist of things that you have to cover that are really boring that you don’t like, right?

You can skip over those things. Like with my kids, we barely did any war at all. Hardly any war at all, because I don’t like war, and when I was in school and we had to read about like military campaigns, it bored the heck out of me, and I didn’t want to do that with my kids, so I didn’t. We knew that things like that, that the Haitian revolution happened.

We didn’t spend a lot of time on troop movements because I wasn’t interested in that. If they wanted to learn more about it as they got older, they totally could. But I wanted to teach them the skills of history. So the couple of things that go with that, right? So once you pick your event, you want to track down primary sources.

This is actually not that hard. And if you get stuck on something like reach out to me because I am like a treasure trove of primary sources. I’m obsessed with that. So feel free to email me. You can email me, and Blair, at [email protected], and we will happily hook you up with some primary sources. Honestly, you don’t need me, because you could do it yourself. 

And you want to be thoughtful about your primary sources, right? Because one of the things I think that’s really important when we’re trying to decolonize our curriculum is to think about primary sources in a different way. We’re so used to reading things. Newspapers, and journals, and articles, and essays, speeches. And, using SOAPSTONE, good old SOAPSTONE, to analyze them. But you don’t have to do that with just written work. If you just are looking at written work, then you’re leaving out big chunks of people for big chunks of history. So look at artifacts.

Think about who would have used this kind of basket. How would it have been made? What would its purpose have been? Who would have, who would have owned it and who would have used it? What would happen to it when it was worn out? You can analyze objects the same way that you analyze primary sources.

You can analyze art the same way that you’d analyze a written primary source. You can analyze music the same way that you’d analyze a written primary source. And the more you expand your definition of what is a primary source, I think the deeper you can get into things and the more people you’ll find, right.

You’ll find the person who’s carrying the basket. You’ll find the person who made the basket. And I think it really opens up that whose story aren’t we telling a little bit more? 

[00:17:27] Blair: I don’t totally agree with you on leaving out the warring parts. You say you left out war, but I can’t, but if you but you couldn’t have left out all of conflict. The War of 1812 wasn’t covered the actual event, but you probably included what led to the War of 1812 and possibly even some of the outcomes, correct? 

[00:17:57] Amy: I actually find the War of 1812 hilarious and fascinating, and we definitely talked about the War of 1812. But for instance, when I was in elementary and middle and high school, we spent a lot of time on the U.S. civil war. And we spent a lot of time looking at the armies and the specific battles of the specific war. And that is what I mean. Obviously, you cannot study history without studying conflict. 

[00:18:26] Blair: I have an idea, if you’re going to stay with an event, how historians learn history, one of the things is they ask questions, and so I think you could model that for your kids. Let’s say you decide you’re going to learn about the War of 1812 and you’re spending some time on the War of 1812, you could look why Amy thinks it’s hysterical why would anyone think it’s hysterical? 

[00:18:53] Amy: Please go and read about it. It is. It’s, it is a hoot. 

[00:18:58] Blair: Let’s take something a little more serious. The —

[00:19:03] Amy: The Vietnam War, I think is a great —

[00:19:06] Blair: The Vietnam War is much more serious, and ask questions and then have your kids ask questions and then explore the answers to those questions. And I will say the first question I think anyone should ask with war is why were we fighting it? Yeah, I think that’s really important. The question of why we were fighting in Vietnam, why we invaded Vietnam. That actually is really interesting, and my understanding from my reading, because I’m very interested in the time period between the end of the Second World War, called post war, and then the conflicts that came after it, Korean War, Vietnam. Russia who had aligned with Europe and America closed its borders very quickly after the war. Germany was defeated and began gobbling up these countries that Germany had been ruling, as Germany pulled back and, my understanding is America was really worried about the spread of communism in the world. Because what Russia did after World War II was unexpected. 

[00:20:28] Amy: Yeah, so why are we fighting is a good question, and who’s benefiting from the fighting, right? Because wars, historically, are big money makers. People make money off of war. People get what they want from war, and so it’s really interesting to see who is benefiting from war.

[00:20:45] Blair: Who’s benefiting? And the other thing that I think we should always ask is, what were the repercussions for the losing side? Yeah, because a lot of people think that what was done to Germany at the end of World War One is the reason that the German people were willing to go to war a short period later in World War Two.

Anyway, 

[00:21:08] Amy: And there are obviously exceptions to this. Like Hitler is terrible, but most of the time in war, there’s not a clear good guy and a clear bad guy. If you look at like the history of conflict, a lot of times it is more complicated than oh, here is the hero and here is the villain.

Which is not to say that there aren’t people with better and worse motives and people who are acting out of better and worse faith. But it’s really rare for there to be like such a clear-cut villain as someone like Hitler — Hitler is very bad and I think that because that World War II was such a formative war for that the 20th and the 21st century We tend to think that all war is like that where there’s like very clear evil and very clear good. Turns out that is not always the case even something like the American Revolution is way more complicated than yay, freedom, boo, monarchy. It’s a lot more complicated. 

[00:22:06] Blair: A lot more complicated. With all of the time I’ve dragged Amy into a discussion of war, you would think she’s actually really, does like to study it. That’s not the case. 

[00:22:16] Amy: I don’t like the fighting. I’m interested in like the ideas and the things that make people do that, but I never ever want to read another thing about, like, battle strategies and battalions and skirmishes.

Never. 

[00:22:31] Blair: If you’re going to study conflicts, ask about the people who are fighting for these leaders. In World War II, how did the Russians get so many people to, a lot of died on the eastern front. And Europeans or the Americans, especially the Americans, they were surprised, just how do you get that many people to be willing to die? They would shoot people who wouldn’t fight. It was a willingness to slaughter their own citizens. I think you’ve got to ask those questions. 

[00:23:13] Amy: That is what history is, it is asking those questions and then asking them again. And don’t forget that a lot of these questions we’re still asking today — one of the benefits of really digging deep into a subject is that you start to notice it appearing in the news. 

You’ll be reading the Times or the Post and you’ll be like, Oh, wait, there’s an article about the War of 1812 here. Somebody just made some new discovery about it that’s really interesting. Or you read something about the Incas. Somebody finds a historical artifact that kind of changes the way that we see how Incan civilization worked. I, only very recently did I find out that in the American Revolution, most of the people who lived in North America at the time didn’t actually want to rebel against Great Britain. It was a very small percentage of people who led this war movement. And they ended up, having the biggest force and carrying the day. But I did not know that. I grew up thinking that everyone wanted to be free from Great Britain. So it’s, it’s like there’s new stuff all the time.

History is still happening because again, history is not the past. History is the stories that we tell about the past and we’re still telling those stories. We’re still writing stories about the past that become history, which is so cool. 

[00:24:35] Blair: My husband likes to get news from different sources. He will get online, look at an event, and see what Russia Today, how they’re reporting it. He’ll look at how Al Jazeera is reporting something, and he will look at the New York Times and the Guardian. He will go and look for information just to see when the news differs. 

In Russia today, they basically have made their free press illegal. Why do that? That’s the other thing to realize about history, Putin is controlling the news , and we look at that and we’re like, that’s terrible. That has happened so many times in history. 

[00:25:24] Amy: This is it, right? This is, we think about primary sources as being these ancient parchments tucked away in special boxes that you can’t touch. Literally, the headline in the New York Times today is a primary source, and we should be treating them all like primary sources. We should be reading, we should be looking for this variety of viewpoints, just like your husband.

Because that’s how we understand the world, it’s not from one story, but from as many stories as we can possibly find. 

[00:25:56] Blair: I want to go all the way back, because you said today we were also going to talk about critical thinking. And I really would love to help people apply critical thinking. Reading an article from Russia Today, The Guardian, and The New York Times is actually great. How do they differ? How can we use critical thinking to determine that Russia’s portrayal of the conflict in Ukraine is inaccurate?

[00:26:28] Amy: The classic strategy for tackling primary sources, the one that I teach my kids in middle school, is the SOAPSTONE strategy, which probably everybody knows, but I’ll just briefly go over. It’s an acronym. So each of the letters stands for something. So soapstone, the Stands for speaker.

You’ve got to figure out who is telling the story, who’s giving the information you need to think about, oh, the occasion, why is this being written at this time, when and why is this document being written? The agenda.

[00:27:05] Blair: that the individual has. 

[00:27:07] Amy: Yes. Then is the audience, the A is the audience, who is it written for, right? Who is supposed to be reading this and what are they supposed to be getting from it? And then the purpose. Why would somebody write this particular text for this particular audience? What’s the reason? What is it, and then there’s the subject, of course so once you know the audience and the purpose of a document You can better understand the subject, right?

Because a lot of times you think an article is about one thing, you think a diary entry is about one thing, but it’s also about other things. And then of course the tone. Tone all runs together as one word. When you look at things like word choice, how it’s organized, what rhetorical patterns get used, what rhetorical devices get used, what evidence is there, it How does the author feel about what they’re saying and how do they want you to feel about it?

I think SOAPSTONE is a really easy starting point for analyzing primary sources And it as you become a more sophisticated reader and your kids become more sophisticated readers the SOAPSTONE project becomes more sophisticated, too. 

[00:28:17] Blair: When you’re dealing with history, I think the other thing that needs to happen is that there needs to be a defining of terms. Yeah. And I think that you should teach your child to ask people to clarify. For example, Amy earlier said, Hitler, I’m going to take something really easy. Hitler is a terrible person. We agree on that, but that is such a generalization that it’s actually meaningless. Okay, Amy, you gave me your opinion, support it.

And that’s one of the things that a lot of times it doesn’t happen. It very often doesn’t happen in primary sources. 

[00:29:11] Amy: It absolutely doesn’t happen in a lot of primary sources. 

[00:29:13] Blair: One of the things we haven’t talked about yet is actually getting out and doing what I like to call field research. That’s actually any field trip that you go on. I like to get out and look. For example, Chaco Canyon, which I love to visit, I like to go out and look at the indigenous civilization. Go to things like the Hundred Hand Wall that we went to in Utah. There’s a hundred different handprints. Why? What were they trying to say? What was the purpose? And then, try to put that in the context and perspective of what you would be trying to say with that. A lot of that is guess-timation, but so is some of the history that we learned as truth. 

[00:30:11] Amy: Yeah, I love what you’re saying here because I think that is one of that — I don’t want to call it a misconception, but I think this is one of the ideas about studying history that we tend to have is that it’s either something that you do, something that’s all over and done with, and so all you’re doing is reading about it, or it’s something that is only done in super important History Places, like the Smithsonian or the National Archives, when, in fact one of the best places to do history is in your own backyard, almost everywhere.

If you live in the United States, almost every town has its own little historical society where they have they do not have the original Declaration of Independence, but what they have is so much cooler because it’s the history of the place that you live and the people who lived there. One of my favorite projects for high school homeschoolers — It’s sending them to their local historical society and asking them to find the story of a group of people that’s story isn’t told in the historical society. And so they build their own kind of collection for their historical society, which historical societies often appreciate. So it’s a great project that gives back to your community if you want to do that.

But it just reminds you that history is the story of people and a place. Not super important, super special people in a super important, super special place. Like you are history, right? Right now you are gonna be history. And I think that’s just really cool. It’s not all like big events and special moments.

[00:31:43] Blair: One of the things that I think is important is you’re going to use your historical society is to look at their representation of people of color . That can sometimes be missing and to be polite, ask for, but ask for resources. Who were the Indigenous people that lived where you lived?

 So I’m going to ask you a question that you hear all the time. Why is history relevant? Now I know people make the case it’s because history repeats itself, but I want you to explain why history is relevant to learn. Without saying, because it repeats itself, okay? 

[00:32:28] Amy: I think that history is the one indicator that we have that ordinary, everyday people have the power to change the world, to make a better world, to make what they believe is a better world.

History is the story of people doing that. It’s the most hopeful discipline there is, because while we see war and tragedy and difficulty, we also see people getting better and kinder and more open minded all the time. We see the world getting better for more people all the time. And I don’t know about you, but I feel like the world is a complicated and sad place.

My kids worry about climate change, they worry about overpopulation, they worry about using up natural resources, they worry about hate and division. And I think history shows them that people change the world for the better, all the time, and they can do it too. How was that, Blair? 

[00:33:34] Blair: That was awesome. I’m a total optimist. Despite being really aware of some of the things I work hard to live in, what I can control. I thought you did a fantastic job. 

[00:33:48] Amy: But also, history does repeat itself. It does repeat itself. It’s legitimately true. Okay. I do a four year cycle where I look at the Romans, and the Victorians, and the United States, and African kingdoms, and Japan.

And it is hilarious how they all hit the same moment, and the same problems, and the same challenges. Because it does. We keep doing the same thing. And that’s beautiful and human, and also we can do better, y’all. 

[00:34:18] Blair: Okay, so I want to take us back, to just a little bit about critical thinking. So when we talk about defining terms, it is really important. What do you mean about Victorian, Amy? Are you including the Victorians that were colonizers in India? I think it’s really important that we teach your kids to ask those kind of defining questions. Hitler’s terrible. I want the specifics of why you feel that way.

That is a big, important part of figuring out where you don’t agree necessarily on a definition or a descriptor and where you do agree with someone be respectful, but ask them to keep building out. 

We did this with our son. And he is way better at this than I am. When he does not completely agree with me, I’m in trouble. Because he knows that’s coming, and he makes sure that he is really comfortable and knowledgeable about every single point that he’s trying to make.

 Okay. Once you’ve decided on the definitions, what do you do next, Amy? 

[00:35:36] Amy: Once you’ve agreed on your terms, once you’ve looked for evidence and found evidence, you built your own ideas, which is what your son is doing, right?

Which is what we want our kids to do. We, I mean, we’re right. So our kids should agree with that because we’re obviously right. No, but we want kids to have their own ideas. We’re not trying to raise kids who think exactly what we think, exactly the way that we do. We’re trying to raise kids who can think for themselves, who have their own ideas, who are capable of defining terms and building evidence and creating theories and ideas.

[00:36:13] Blair: It’s an evolution. 

[00:36:14] Amy: Part of developing your own ideas and being an independent thinker is strong ideas. 

[00:36:20] Blair: And exploring those ideas. 

[00:36:22] Amy: Yeah, and changing your mind about something that you thought you believed.

Gosh, I will know when I stop doing that, that I need to stop sharing my opinions because if they’re not getting interrogated and changing, then I’m not being the kind of thinker I want to be. Yeah. Thank you. 

[00:36:36] Blair: One of the things to be careful about as a part of critical thinking, I just want to interject, is it can be really important to not allow people to use, one word in a derogatory way to shut the conversation down at a point where they want to shut it down.

For example, you see this happen all the time where people go, Oh, the woke agenda. What does the woke agenda mean? 

[00:37:01] Amy: I actually think that it would be a really fun episode to go through some of the fallacies that people use to do that and to talk about ways that we can help our kids respectfully disarm that kind of commentary.

We live in unprecedented times. I wouldn’t mind living in some precedented time for a while. I would be really happy to have some precedented time. It’s definitely — history is happening all around us, but always is, even when it’s not terrible.

[00:37:28] Blair: Yeah, it’s really interesting. Okay. I think that’s it.

[00:37:31] Amy: Yeah, so that’s a wrap for this episode of Secular Homeschooling with Blair and Amy brought to you by SEA Homeschoolers and Home.school.life. We’ll be back soon to teach you more.

Our AI tell us that in this episode, Blair and Amy discuss the impact of AI on writing and education, sharing insights from their conversation with a friend working in AI. They explore the challenges and benefits of using AI in writing, emphasizing the importance of teaching kids to use AI responsibly and as a tool to enhance productivity rather than replace human creativity.

Transcript: Episode 5

We use an automatic transcription app for our podcast, which makes it possible for us to include transcripts for our podcast episodes — but it does sometimes make weird errors! We do edit it, but I’m sure we miss things sometimes.

[00:00:00] Amy: Hi and welcome to Secular Homeschooling with Blair and Amy brought to you by Sea Homeschoolers and home.school.life. I’m Amy. 

[00:00:08] Blair: And I’m Blair, and today we’re going to talk about AI, artificial intelligence, and this idea came about because of a conversation that I had with a friend of one of my sons, and he works for a company called ServiceNow. I’m just going to read what ServiceNow is for those of you who’ve never heard of it. ServiceNow is a software company that develops a cloud computing platform to help companies manage digital workflows for enterprise operations. And ServiceNow has they, let me think Goldman Sachs, Disney, Coca Cola.

Those are just a few of the huge companies that they service. So he was saying to us that it was really interesting. He’s in sales. He said, you know, it’s really interesting. The people that he’s dealing with, they either embrace AI and say, Bring it on. We want AI to help us with whatever it can help us with to make our life easier.

And then you have people who are so resistant to anything AI. They want everything, basically, what he said was old school. And he said, there’s not a lot of people in the middle. And I said, well, you know, there are some problems with AI. And he looked at me and said, so tell me what the problem is. I said, well, the other day I happened to see that there’s this new tool where you could upload some writing and it will tell you how much of it is written by AI. So I was really curious how good of a job it did. So I went and pulled a chapter that I had cut from a book in 2017. Not one edit has been done on this since 2017 and it was never published.

I then put it into AI and it said that 30% of it had been written by AI and I, so I said, so that doesn’t really work, because 0% of it was written by AI. And he said, how many books do you have out Blair? And I said, all told if you count the unit study, the multi-week unit study, 17. He said, you can’t use your writing to determine if it’s written by AI. AI used your books. 

He said, you’ve been used by the algorithm. And I said, what? He said, yeah, published authors can’t put their own stuff that has not been written by A. I. Into AI to see if it was written by AI because you’re part of the algorithm, and that was obviously that led to a pretty fun discussion and then everyone at the table wanted to know how I felt about it and I am not a person, you know, I’m not —what is it? There are two huge companies that are suing AI or two huge authors. I’m not them. So for someone like me, who doesn’t have the money to sue, you know, and obviously all the authors that were used by AI can’t put together a class action, because what would we all get? Like a penny? So that’s not even worth the waste of time.

So I think what you do is you just go with it and figure out how to use AI on your own. When it’s helpful, and how, and then you just have to recognize that if you think somebody’s work has been written by AI, if they’re a published author, you’ll never have any idea if they used AI, because it they’re part of the algorithm.

But I guess my feeling is, It’s going to be here, so we need to figure out how to use it. But now, I know you’re working directly with kids right now, and I am sure that this is something that you’re dealing with, because you teach middle school and high school, Amy? 

[00:04:08] Amy: Yeah, yeah, so, so, I mean, AI just kind of like, as we all know, like came from out of nowhere, right? Like one day, it’s like, oh, AI might be a thing, and then the next day, everyone’s using it. For everything. And I have all kinds of conflicting thoughts about it. The first thought that I have is that art and writing are two of the things that make human beings, human beings. And I’m not sure why we want to source out creative pursuits to machines.

I feel like just kind of fundamentally, philosophically, I, I am not sure, like, why that is what we’ve immediately leaped to using AI to do, because it can do so many really useful things. It can write a literature review for you, which is amazing. It can write an outline for you for a paper that you’re working on, which is so handy.

It can give you the five questions that people ask the most about, I don’t know, how to, how to start a saltwater aquarium, so it’s very handy for things like that, but it is kind of it is tricky because, well, because like you say, you can feed something into an is this AI checker, and you can’t be sure that it will actually check it, and there’s a problem with inaccuracy.

I mean, I’m sure you saw early on all those mushroom books where they were telling people to eat poisonous mushrooms because they’d been AI written and the AI didn’t fully understand how to tell poisonous from non poisonous mushrooms. So yeah, so I mean, I, I think it can be a great tool. But I don’t think it’s a solution.

[00:06:00] Blair: Well, so my immediate, by the way, response to Cam, was no way. And so what Cam did is he put in, what’s Blair Lee’s philosophy when writing science? Not anything, you know, around my name besides just my name. Okay. And AI gave a very thorough response that, I mean, my marketing team at SEA wants to use some of the language for marketing. They did so good. They’re like, wow, ChatGPT, which is the AI, service that, Cam used. They nailed it. They totally got it. And so I think. I, first of all — I think, we think it came out of nowhere, but I don’t think it came out of nowhere. 

They just brought it to the point where it could write essays. And I agree with you. The real dilemma is yes, there are inaccuracies. I put in something and I cannot remember what it, the question was and it gave me this book title and I thought, I’ve never even heard of Secular Homeschooling, blah, blah, blah, and I went and looked. There’s no book called that. They just completely made it up AI did. 

But, It’s going to be used. I think in education, what we have to figure out is how we can make sure that kids do actually learn to write. And the immediate thing that comes to mind is my absolute least favorite way to check to see if somebody can write, and that is in class writing. I hate in class writing it completely does not mimic the type of writing that real writers do. Right, Amy? 

[00:07:55] Amy: No, no, it’s not at all because real writing is about drafts and going back and polishing things and you cannot do that in a 45 minute class period. 

[00:08:10] Blair: But the other thing that AI can’t do sort of that innovation of thinking. That, that the human mind is so awesome at. But now you were telling me a story . Let’s segue back to your classroom. You told me that your high school students are dealing with it one way and your middle school students are dealing with it kind of in a different way and it sort of, cause the neurocognitive development of those two, we tend to think that that’s sort of a, this easy continuum and it really isn’t. 

[00:08:44] Amy: So I wanna say if you have a middle schooler, the chances that they’re using AI to answer questions that you ask them if you ask them to do any writing are like 99%. Almost every middle schooler that we have is using AI in some capacity. And so I think that this is, if you have middle school students right now, you have to talk about this with them.

You can’t just like pretend that you can say, oh, well let’s not use AI and they won’t use it because they absolutely will. So some things that I have found helpful., one thing is to encourage them to use AI to help write a thesis for their project. So have them put in a prompt, you know, that’s like, I am writing a paper on Ona Judge.

And I want to talk about, you know, her relationship with George Washington and how she’s self liberated… what are some theses that I could use? And ChatGPT will come up with a list of thesis ideas for you, and that can be really helpful for kids who don’t know where to start, right? Coming up with a thesis is really hard in middle school, and so ChatGPT can be helpful with that.

It can also be really helpful if you’re like, I want to do a report on Ona Judge. What are the five most important things that I should talk about, and it will give you the list of five things that you should talk about. But my favorite, my favorite strategy for middle school is to have them write a paragraph and then put the paragraph in ChatGPT and ask ChatGPT to critique your paragraph.

What could you do better? How could you improve it? And then you take the notes from ChatGPT and you use them to improve your own writing. And so those are three little things that I have found have been really helpful with middle schoolers. So they’re able to use this new tool, but they’re not using it to replace their own thinking and writing.

[00:10:46] Blair: You know that I’m taking these courses through the Writing Revolution and coming up with the thesis statement is something that is a particularly useful philosophy for doin. I would be a little concerned with kids using this to come up with thesis statements because they are hard to come up with, and as long as you know you’re going to get to it in high school to teach that, I think that’s okay.

But. Right. The harder something is to do, in my opinion, the more a teacher has a responsibility to actually be teaching that, as long as it’s age appropriate, because if you don’t, then you get a student that never learns. My other concern would be that, that they give, that not all of the five facts are actually real.

[00:11:43] Amy: Right. Well, so that is definitely something that you have to kind of work on with kids because I think a lot of them think that if chat GPT tells you something it’s true. If it gives you a title secular homeschooling in the real world or whatever You kind of assume that it’s a real book. But you shouldn’t, and so it’s really good to have kids doing that early on and fact checking the chat GPT results because that encourages them to be rigorous about it, to be, you know, to not automatically trust what they read and to get in the habit of fact checking the information that they get from ChatGPT.

[00:12:21] Blair: I absolutely love the idea of having ChatGPT do the analysis of a paragraph. Though, and is it, does it do a really good job with that? 

[00:12:35] Amy: I would say it does a pretty good job. I think especially, because a lot of middle school students are really insecure about academic writing. They really struggle with it.

And I, I, I’m so excited that you’re taking the Writing Revolution classes. I think that you can see a difference in kids who have, who use programs like that, because they are, they’re much more confident writers, but a lot of kids who haven’t done a lot of writing are really not confident about academic writing.

And so they make a lot of the mistakes that you would expect somebody who’s not confident about writing to make early beginning writer mistakes. And ChatGPT is very good at picking those up. My high schoolers would not use it for this because they are writing much more sophisticated stuff, and ChatGPT is not as good at analyzing sophisticated stuff.

[00:13:26] Blair: Do you think that for middle school students, it seems like an easy way out of an assignment? 

[00:13:35] Amy: Yeah, I 100 percent do. And I don’t think that they’re doing it because they’re trying to be sneaky, or, you know, they’re engaging in bad faith academics or anything.

It’s a tool. It’s there. And it’s faster than thinking on their own. And so they, they use it unless somebody explains to them why they shouldn’t, or explains to them how to use it in an academic way.

[00:14:00] Blair: Well, I agree with you. I agree with you that the conversation has to be had because everybody is doing it. I actually was at a marketing presentation just because I was curious. So Neil Patel had his team, one of the top marketers in the world, had his team put together ChatGPT versus Gemini. And I signed up just to listen to it because I was curious. I wonder which is best. And I will say, we keep mentioning Chat GPT, but Gemini, hands down, is considered to be the best.

Although Niels said, look, these are changing so quickly that what’s the best today could be not the best tomorrow. But one of the reasons that Gemini is the best, which I did not realize, is that in 2022, ChatGPT closed itself to inputting new learning. So it’s not processing anything anymore. And that has to change, it’s hard to imagine them not changing that. 

Actually for one of the talks I’m giving in March, I couldn’t find an image that I wanted, so I went to DALL-E, so chatGBT4, just so I could see what the illustrations look like. If you want writing in the illustration, it’s really, really interesting because it can’t spell. Which as good as Chat GPT is at spelling, the DALL-E part of its program, is not good at spelling. 

[00:15:33] Amy: Some of the stuff that you can do is, is so silly. I know, I am the parent of a teenager who enjoys making weird AI pictures, like a dog wearing a pizza hat and like texting them to me throughout the day.

So it’s also good for, you know, staying in contact with your, your teen while they’re out and about. 

[00:16:00] Blair: So you think we should sit our kids down and say, let’s talk AI? I think in the future there’s going to be like short semester long AI classes.

But I mean, what do you think? Let’s give people the tips they need to deal with what they’re going to need to deal with. So you sit your kids down and say, there’s AI. Everybody’s using it, and this is what it’s okay for you to use it for, and this is what you shouldn’t use it for? What do you do in your middle school? Class? 

[00:16:30] Amy: I think, I mean, we treat it like we treat Wikipedia. Have you sat down with your kids and talked about Wikipedia and how it is, it is crowdsourced, and it is a great starting point for doing things, but it is not the final point, you shouldn’t use it as an academic source, but you can definitely use it to find academic sources.

You need to fact check any information that you get there. I think we should treat AI the same way that we treat Wikipedia. It can be a great, incredibly useful tool. We can be so glad that it’s there. But I think we actually need to sit down with our kids and say, Look, here’s what it’s okay for. Here are great ways to use it.

And here are things that maybe you shouldn’t use it for. And here’s why. Okay, what would your why be? Well, certainly, one of my why’s would be that you can’t be sure that the information that you’re getting is accurate., so, you know, you definitely would need to make sure that you fact check everything that you got.

And if you’re going to all the trouble of fact checking anyway, you probably will stumble upon other interesting facts that AI doesn’t bring up. Because AI is really general. AI doesn’t have, I mean, I, you know, I teach history and I teach literature, and I think the greatest history and literature work that people do, writing wise, is the work that gets into those really silly, specific details.

Like, I love the story about how, in the Victorian era, London greengrocers, when they came to sell their produce in the city, would dip it in the sewer because the gas in the sewer would make it greener. And crisper. I mean, that is a great story. Like, I want that in my paper.

[00:18:17] Blair: But not in your salad.

[00:18:18] Amy: So, I think, you know, you get general information, but to get the really good stuff, the stuff that sticks in your mind and is interesting and makes people say, Wow, I think you kind of have to, do your own work for that, that you don’t get that from AI. 

[00:18:39] Blair: You’re alluding to where I thought you were going to go right away, because you talk all the time about thinking. Whereas I talk a lot about learners in the context of education, you talk a lot about thinkers and thinking in education, and that is what concerns me. What I have found in my own writing is that the more thinking you do in general, the more sort of flights of fancy and connections and just a little more like everything is firing in your brain. Yeah. And when you look at neurological development that is supported. People that have a very active cognition, they actually have more connections across the two sides of their brains. And most people who you consider to be really well learned have a lot of connections. It’s one of the interesting neurological traits that you see. What do you think, Amy? 

[00:19:50] Amy: Well, I, I think it gets down to the question of what is the point of asking a middle schooler or a high schooler to write something?

It’s probably not to get a certain number of words on a page. It’s probably to encourage them to write. To think about something, to reflect on something, to develop their own ideas or argument about something. And if that is your goal, then no AI is going to be able to do that for you. Because the point of the writing is for you to do that yourself.

[00:20:30] Blair: Because you can use AI, I think the onus it puts on educators and curriculum developers is to make sure that what you’re asking kids to do is purposeful. 

[00:20:44] Amy: Certainly my high schoolers make fun of me and say that I write questions that are impossible to use AI on because there’s just no way to really use AI to answer the kinds of questions that I’m asking them to do. So it doesn’t even come up for the high schoolers because if they tried to use AI, it would just, it would be more work. It would be more work to take the AI answer and try to make it an Amy answer. 

 There are a lot of stages of writing for kids, and there are some stages where I think AI can be really harmful, and I think there are stages where AI can be really helpful. 

[00:21:22] Blair: Okay, what’s the stage where it’s harmful? Tell us. 

[00:21:25] Amy: Well, I think certainly a stage where it’s harmful is when kids are using it as a substitute for answering basic questions, right? Like when you’re reading a book and you’re a sixth grader you’re reading a book and you have a question where like you need to describe a character, right? Or you need to say what you think is the climax of a story. Well, you can use AI to answer that question but that’s not useful to you at all.

That’s only going to make you not really understand. You’re not ever going to have to be able to develop your own ideas because this is where you’re learning how to develop those ideas, so if you’re using sort of AI to, to skip that part, then you’re actually skipping that part, and when that’s the foundation for more sophisticated analysis that you’re doing in high school or college, you’re kind of screwed because you never learned how to do it early on.

It can also be helpful. 

[00:22:25] Blair: As far as the harmful, I think we can all agree, that’s where it is harmful. Best case scenario, every kid’s going to use it occasionally. Yes, yes, yes. I know there are like five of you whose kids are never going to use it, but for the rest of us. 

[00:22:41] Amy: Yeah. I absolutely think that we should assume that our kids are using it for, for stuff. And so we want to help them use it for the good stuff.

[00:22:49] Blair: So tell them, other than to edit your own paper, tell us. 

[00:22:54] Amy: So one thing that I think Chat GPT is really great for is, so I, I write sometimes, books and there’s that joke about what does a poet do all day, you write one word in the morning and you erase it in the afternoon and that’s like the work of your day.

I think that for a lot of people, not just kids, but people, getting started writing something is really, really hard. And so I think that saying, Hey, I’m writing a paper about this. This is my thesis. Write me an introductory paragraph. And then you start writing. You always have to go back and change your introductory paragraph, and I’m always trying to convince people that they don’t have to write the introduction before they start the paper, that you should just go straight to the body paragraphs.

Please tell your kids to go straight to the body paragraphs because you don’t know what you’re going to talk about until you know what you’ve talked about. You have to write the introduction last, it only makes sense. But for kids, this is really hard to do, so if you ask chat GPT to write you a get-started introduction, then you eliminate that step of sitting there staring at your page, not knowing where to start, and you can jump right into the body paragraph, and then go back and rewrite the introduction when you finish your paper. I think it’s really good for being stuck. 

[00:24:17] Blair: So, I have to write the introduction first, and I can change it, but I, Yeah, I have to.

[00:24:26] Amy: I, that really, I understand. This is like a thing. 

[00:24:31] Blair: And if I’ve got five chapters to write, I’m gonna tell you right now, chapter four cannot be written, my brain can’t go there until one, two, and three are written. So I was a bit stumped on a article a while back. I had gotten to a certain point, and I was like, gosh, I have all these ideas, and now I’m having a hard time putting it together.

So I went to Gemini, just to get ideas, not to have them write it, and then brought those ideas in. A week later, I still didn’t have something that I was satisfied with. I had to scrap the entire thing and start all over again. Because it just, in my brain it’s spaghetti noodles, and I do best when I can find one spaghetti noodle and follow it out.

And what happened to me for chat GBT was like spaghetti noodles was why I couldn’t get it all out and it added more spaghetti. It didn’t help. So Chat GPT, I could see it helping, but I could also see for some thinkers, that it can make it overwhelming.

[00:25:49] Amy: I could see that. No. I think that, we have the advantage of being writers with a lot of experience, and we know even if, if we can’t articulate what we’re trying to say, we know what we’re trying to say, and so we know when it’s not what we’re trying to say.

I think for teenagers sometimes that is a little bit harder, and having, like, like floaties, I think, I think of it as like little floaties, like they’re in the pool and they have little floaties, little, little AI floaties, that can kind of help them, uh, learn how to swim independently. 

[00:26:26] Blair: Let’s, so say you have a student hand something in to you, and you suspect that they have used AI for part or all of it. How are you going to handle it, Amy? 

[00:26:38] Amy: I’m going to say that there is no, like, subtlety when students use AI. You know, it’s like I have never had a student use AI and it not been like so crystal clear, obvious that they used it, particularly in middle school, because it absolutely does not sound like them.

You’ve been reading their writing for years and all of a sudden they’re, they’re sounding like a machine. Well, it’s because it was a machine so I think that it is really important to kind of, first of all, consider the scope of the assignment, right? Was this something that they were trying to do at the last minute just to get something handed in?

Because that is — that feels like less of a big deal. That’s just like kind of doing your homework in the car on the way to school to me — you’re doing a quick, sloppy job and it’s not good, but  — or is it something like where they were insecure about their own work? If I’ve looked at like, several drafts of their work that read like a 6th grader wrote them, like a smart 6th grader wrote them, and then their final draft sounds like a machine. Like there’s a confidence gap there, right? There’s like, they weren’t confident enough in their own writing and their own ideas to use those, to keep building on those, and so they, they cheated expertise and polish and sophistication that they don’t really have, but that is a different kind of problem to work on, right? That is an issue to solve with the student and confidence.

And then sometimes there are students who do it because it’s easy. And, you know, that is, I think what I have the — I don’t want to say the least patience with, because I feel like I’m pretty patient about it, but that is what I have kind of the least sympathy for, because I feel like if you, if you don’t want to engage with an assignment, there’s not a lot that anybody can do to make you want to engage with the assignment.

[00:28:55] Blair: So, would they have been better off not doing the assignment? 

[00:28:59] Amy: So, in the junior high, Suzanne teaches a literature class, and this year, for the first time, she has had students just using ChatGPT left and right to answer basic comprehension questions.

But, they have to write their comprehension questions on a sheet of paper. So, even if they are getting the answers from AI, they are at least writing them in their own handwriting, and so they have to, like, engage with the letters and the words that they’re writing in some way, so for kids who would otherwise not do anything, she feels like that is a plus.

[00:29:36] Blair: Does she let them know that she knows it was written by Chat GPT? 

[00:29:40] Amy: So. The one thing that Suzanne has started doing that I think is so smart is that she tells the kids that she fed the prompts into chat, GPT. She fed the questions into chat GPT, so she knows what the chat GPT answers look like.

And then, but okay, but what does she do? And so when she gets one, she says, wow, this looks just like the answer that chat GPT gave me. You used chat GPT for this. And they’ll say, yeah. I mean, she says she doesn’t give them, the option, right? She doesn’t., I think this is probably very smart. She isn’t like, did you use chat GPT for that?

She’s like, well, you used chat GPT for that. Because if you ask them, sometimes they won’t tell you the truth, not because they’re trying to be deceptive, but because everyone tries to avoid conflict, and especially at that age. You’re not giving them the choice, just saying, yep, this is the, this is the answer that Chat GPT gives, and they will always say yes, and that they got, you know, they thought it had a better answer, they didn’t understand the question, there are many things that they will say.

[00:30:48] Blair: I would guess a lot of people that are dealing with that, and you’ve given some strategies. How would I handle this? The first thing I would do is before it ever happened, at the very beginning, I would sit down and say, hey, this is the situation.

I would say, so answer this question, and you, if you don’t have someone who really likes to write, just write their answer down and then feed the question into Chat GPT.

I would compare the answers, and then I would talk about, you know, kids, almost all of them are gonna look at the Chat GPT and go, it’s so much better! And then when we talk about whether it is better to use your own brain or not. And if you never use your own brain, what’s the downside? And I know that a lot of kids don’t hear you for a while when you do that. But eventually it shows up in their brain, even if they don’t remember you’re the one that said it a million times. And I wouldn’t end there, I would spend a little time there, because what you don’t want, is you don’t want to give someone an assignment, and then have to deal with it in a disciplinary situation. 

[00:32:11] Amy: Right. I think it’s really easy to think that a chat GPT generated paragraph, an AI generated paragraph. better than a paragraph you’ve written. Because it’s fancier.

[00:32:26] Blair: Well, especially if you’re 13. Yeah, I mean because they don’t have a good judge of — they don’t understand you don’t want chat GPT’s answer.

You want 13-year old answers 

[00:32:38] Amy: Well, and it’s like an instagram filter, right? Like the content is what’s really important, the ideas in the paragraph are what are really important And the fancy words and the semi colons, that’s all really cool But it’s the ideas that really matter. And I think a lot of times your ideas might be better than the AI generated ideas, even if your sentences aren’t as polished. 

[00:33:06] Blair: One of the things I really think this gets back to is something I was saying earlier about purposeful. I think we really need to talk to kids about why we want it to be their work because we want to help them grow in the skill set, but it also means you should be really intentional when you’re evaluating work. I always think of the math problems where someone will — you’ll ask your kids if they’re working on certain skills in math.

And the paper ends up with all these red marks because the numbers aren’t perfect . Are you evaluating on handwriting? Because if you are, your students should know. 

I think we sometimes make kids less confident. I think kids don’t understand what we want from their work so that we can give feedback. We want to know exactly where they are because to give something from Chat GPT doesn’t help with the targeted sort of feedback that we want to give that learner to help nurture their growth.

[00:34:27] Amy: Well, it is. I mean, I, several years ago, when I, when we first started homeschooling, I had all these like really complicated thoughts about, well, if there are built in grammar checkers and spell checkers, how important is it to actually learn grammar and spelling — if you can just run a spell check, do you still need to learn how to spell? And I really wanted to take time to sit with this and think about it.

But now I’ve gone through you know, kind of a whole — sudents who have gone through a whole cycle of their learning lives, with grammar checkers and spell checkers, and those things aren’t always effective for them if that’s all they rely on because you can spell something so wrong that your spell checker won’t pick it up.

You can use complex grammar and your grammar checker will say that it’s wrong. And so I think that on some level you do need to have this kind of fundamental basic knowledge of how words are spelled, how sentences are put together, and then, you know, for the AI stuff, how ideas come together into arguments and sentences.

[00:35:42] Blair: Okay, I really like the connection that you just made between AI tools that we’ve used for a long time and are aware of the problems with them. You know, with it. I know I’m pretty sure you know this and I just want to make sure our listeners know too, skills like grammar and spelling are considered to be lower level thinking skills when compared to idea creation. What writing experts will tell you is that you want to teach those because otherwise they get in the way of idea creation and the thinking that needs to happen to write. So, if you’re relying on spellcheck, you still stop if you don’t know how to spell something and it interrupts your flow of thinking even for people who are super experienced writers., 

Do we have any more to add to AI, the discussion about AI? 

[00:36:46] Amy: I think just that this is a conversation that you’re going to keep having with your kids, so you might as well start right now because AI is going to continue to be a force in the world.

It’s not going to go away.You know, it, I think it’s fine if you want to exclude it as an option for your kid right now, but be aware that it is going to be an option that’s out there for them, and you probably want to be the person who introduces it to them so that, like Blair says, you can sit down with them and you can look at it together, and you can look at the stuff it’s good for and the stuff it’s not good for, and you can, you can talk about it together.

That is the great thing about homeschooling.

[00:37:28] Blair: Yeah, and, and just understand, if you’re a person who has really embraced AI, I think it’s important to recognize that there’s a lot of skills that go into writing. There’s a lot of skills that go into synthesizing a question and putting together the facts needed to answer it, and so That is why we need to have kids work on these, work on just that sort of skill building.

There’s a lot of conversation about looking forward — is AI just going to replace human thinking . And so it’s going to become even more essential that we teach our kids how to use AI in a practical, responsible, ethical way, and then how to use it as a piece in the same way we use spell check, but not as the idea creator.

Those things AI isn’t doing. 

[00:38:44] Amy: AI can’t do. People do that. 

[00:38:48] Blair: Yeah, they can, you might never have read the sentence, or the, you know, factoid that AI put out, but it got it somewhere.

[00:39:00] Amy: I definitely think that, it’s exciting, always, to be in a period of big educational change, and I think AI is a period of big educational change.

So, it’s just, you want to prepare —I mean, we want to raise kids who can learn whatever they need to learn for the rest of their lives, and AI is going to be a piece of that going forward. 

[00:39:23] Blair: I do think it’s a mistake to not include it at all, I do, because I think that there are some significant benefits, as Amy highlighted, as Neil Patel said, there’s a lot of things AI can’t do, but it can actually make you more productive if used right. And I think that is true.

I think that if you can use AI, figure out how to use AI to be more productive, but that’s almost an adult thing, isn’t it? Well, actually, when you’re talking about coming up with the thesis, that’s, that would be using it to be more productive. 

[00:40:01] Amy: I think it can be really helpful for, for getting over little humps. And I feel like there are a ton of writing humps., you know, where you’re just kind of stuck and you don’t know what to say next. And you need a, you just need a sentence so that you can keep going because you’re like Blair. You have to write them in the order that the things come. You cannot write paragraph three before paragraph one.

And that’s, that’s totally fair. And so I think AI can be really helpful for kind of easing you over those bumps. I mean, I think that is exactly what it’s a great tool for. Awesome. 

[00:40:35] Blair: Well, if you have any questions, you know where to get us. 

[00:40:38] Amy:, so I guess that is a wrap for this episode of Secular Homeschooling with Blair and Amy brought to you by SEA Homeschoolers and home.school.life.