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What is good my ex-homies? It is your boy Jacob Gooden and we are back for another week in the exhomeschoolers
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club. That is right. This week I'm joined by a brand new exhomie friend. That is my new friend Marsh. And they
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are going to talk about some really interesting stuff. We're going to talk about the ACES curriculum. We're going
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to talk about uh having your grandparents be your homeschool teacher. Uh we're going to talk about also the
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way that homeschooling has changed. Mars is probably the youngest person I've had
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on the podcast and so the most recent to graduate from the homeschool experience
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and uh it was just really cool to hear how things shifted and changed. Uh they have a very unique and interesting story
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and uh yeah, I'm really excited for you guys to hear it. Uh it's a little long
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of an episode, but that's because we were just having such a good time we couldn't we couldn't end it. Uh but
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before I turn it over to past me, uh I do want to ask a favor. If you watch this show on YouTube or if you're
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listening in on audio and you didn't even know that there's a YouTube channel
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associated with it, I would love if you would hit that subscribe, okay? I'm just
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shy of 200 subscribers and I'm just trying to hit that goal. I would love uh
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if you do me that favor. So, thank you so much. I'm going to turn it over to
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pass me and uh we'll see you in just a second. Well, Marsh, we are here. Uh I'm stoked
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to be chatting with you. Um, it's Yeah. Hi. Welcome to the Ex Homeschoolers Club. Let's just start there. I'm I'm
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happy to be here, but I'm happy to be out. Yeah, I like that X part. Yeah, that's a situationship I don't want to
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go back to. Yeah. No, I I don't blame you. It's not It's not for everybody,
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that's for sure. No. No. Well, we got connected, I think, over Tik Tok, um, if
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I'm not mistaken. And, uh, I had found your page on my for you page, actually.
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Um, I had been going through Reddit looking for I'm sure you've seen the
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homeschool recovery subreddit. Um, and I think that that infected my phone with just homeschool stuff all around. So,
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but hey, it led me here. Yeah. Well, I'm glad we I'm glad we got connected and it
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means the algorithm is actually working for us, not against us. Um, so without further ado, I I'm going to just kind of
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like turn it over to you just to give us like a little bit of like snapshot. Explain your homeschool experience. How
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long were you homeschooled? Maybe where siblings, whatever you feel like. Sharon, just
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give us a little over overview of uh of your homeschool experience. Okay. Yeah. Um so from a very early age, I started
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off in just preschool in small rural town Woodward, Oklahoma. Um but very quickly, I went over to a place called
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the the Woodward Christian Academy. Um, shortly after that, probably around second or third grade, I went into
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homeschooling due to just I was a young ADHD kid. I was struggling in that environment. Um, and my grandmother
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pulled me out. Uh, I was homeschooled on and off periodically through those first few years. Um, but
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once I hit fifth grade on until sophomore year, I was homeschooled. um sophomore year is where homeschooling
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ended for me. What had occurred was um we experienced a loss in the family that just hit us pretty hard and it caused me
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to run away from home. So that was kind of the final straw in my homeschooling career. My grandmother and I weren't
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compatible in that way of a teacher student. So she sent me to public school um graduating class of 13 kids. Yeah.
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Awesome. Rural Oklahoma for you. Beautiful. Yeah. But uh more in depth on my homeschooling experience, I stayed
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with the reason the Woodward Christian Academy is so prevalent is because that is where I received my homeschooling
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curriculum. It's technically what my grandma went through throughout my just
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homeschooling experience in entirety. Um they used what we what we call this accelerated Christian education system,
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right? Um, and that is not not only can you have accredited schools with that curriculum, you can also order the books
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and teach your kids at home. It's a very uh solitary learning environment. So
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whether or not you are in a room with peers of a similar age to you or you're
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at your dining room table, it's going to be about the same. You're going to read
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through your paces, do your work, you're going to check and grade your own work,
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and until you reach uh the test, you're doing it on your own. Oh, we got a little cat spot cameo. Yeah, cat cam.
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Sorry, she distracted me. But, um yeah, it it was just uh we had I I went to a homeschool co-op uh about once a week.
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um more in the middle school slash early high school years. Um and that was great for connection, but it
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was still rural Oklahoma. There were only so many people who would show up and if a family was sick, it probably
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meant five families were sick and it was cancelled that month. Um, and so homeschooling for me was just kind of
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like a I was already in a very small bubble with the location I lived in and homeschooling just further enclosed that
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bubble. So you brought up Do you have any siblings that were also home? No, I do not. Uh, I do not have
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any siblings. My I have spoken my grandmother. So um I was adopted when I was five by my uh biological
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grandmother. Okay. Um, and that already sets up for a pretty interesting situation, right? You know, you have you
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have kids that live with their grandparents, but I don't know. I haven't heard of many people being
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adopted by their grandparents outside of Oklahoma. I've met probably two or three
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people from my hometown that were also adopted by their grandparents. Yeah, it it's a little odd. It is It is kind of a
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strange experience. I had friends growing up who his grandparents also adopted him um and raised him uh and
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things like that. So, I'm a little bit kind of familiar, you know, the family
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dynamic of what that kind of looks like. They didn't homeschool their their grandson, but um but you know, it it can
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be it can be weird. It can be good. It can be a lot of different things. Yeah, it's a really big generation gap. And so
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there's there's an understanding there that you have to try really hard to
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achieve because it's two completely different generational mindsets and two completely different ways of going about
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life and one is raising the other. So yeah, raising a for example um a baby boomer raising a Gen Z as if it as if I
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I were um a millennial like my parents, right? And it's just it's a different
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era, you know? It calls for different times call for different measures. Yeah, absolutely. But um with with her
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homeschooling, uh I'm I feel like if I did have siblings, it it would have been a
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situation where we couldn't have been homeschooled. I feel like that would have warranted needing public school
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just with my family dynamic because I had a um uh from the age of two, my grandmother had hired a um a babysitter
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or a she later turned into a tutor. Okay. She was my homeschooling tutor for years until about um
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probably freshman year, I want to say. I I want to say she didn't feel like she
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could handle I remember her saying she didn't want to do high school algebra
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again. Okay. Yeah. I mean, can you blame anybody? Yeah. Science science and maths, they weren't I feel
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like that was something that was pretty difficult for me. I wasn't wired the way
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that my fellow homeschoolers were. And I feel like a big part of that was a special kind of ADHD. And I'm not
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specifically diagnosed with anything besides depression and anxiety, but there's obviously a wiring difference in
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the way that I view the world and react in the world versus the way that my peers then or now do or did. So I wanted
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to ask then like so you had a tutor. So how heavily involved was your grandma then in the homeschooling experience?
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Was she super heavily involved or was she just kind of like, okay, we're doing
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this cuz you mentioned, you know, there was some some dynamics in the family where you kind of needed to be
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homeschooled uh because of needing to go places or whatever. Um and so public school wasn't going to really work out.
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But uh so was she primarily a teacher or or was it mostly this tutor person that
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she had come in? So it was kind of a give and take situation with them. My tutor would be my supervisor. Okay.
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supervisor while I was doing my work. And my grandmother would more take care of the end of the book test things. So,
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in a in a sense, it's administrative versus secretarial, which is kind of what they were. So, uh my tutor Kathy,
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she would just keep an eye on me and make sure I was doing what I was supposed to do. Um and I loved her. She
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was great. She she is my godmother. She raised me practically because aside besides school, my grandmother wasn't
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really too active in my growing up years. She got a babysitter for me at the age
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of two and then my grandmother adopted me at the age of five. But throughout that entire time, Kathy was the one with
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me from about 10 in the morning until 4:00 in the afternoon, you know? Yeah. And that's a that's a little kid. That's
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a toddler. That's a baby. Yeah. So, she was my grandmother by any and all means.
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Okay. For sure. You also brought up using the the ACE curriculum, the AC curriculum. And uh for anyone who's not
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familiar with that, I highly recommend like looking it up because it is kind of an interesting thing. I had seen it
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before at a friend's house. I never my family never used it. Um we were more we
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started with a Becca just because that was that was what my mom had used in school. Um but okay, having seen um and
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now even like having kind of like pulled up their website and like flipped through it and been like, "Okay, let me
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take a look at what this looks like." So it very much is like a workbook like per
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section, but maybe you could kind of explain I guess maybe how it operates better than somebody who never did it uh
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could. But basically what it looked like to me was like miniature workbooks, which I believe are called the paces.
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Uh, and you kind of flip through those and almost a work at your own speed kind of a situation. Yes. Yeah. Um, and this
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was just something that I want to touch on before I forget. Was your mom also homeschooled? You said she used a Becca.
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No, she was not. She went to a private Christian school. Um, and so a Becca curriculum, for anyone who's not
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familiar, a Becca curriculum is designed to be a like full school curriculum. And
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I believe AC also kind of can be as well. Fully fully accredited. Yes. You can graduate without receiving a GED.
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Okay. You get a diploma. Yeah. So, a lot of the the curriculums that I think become popular for homeschool kids tend
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to be those because I mean, if you're a homeschooled parent and you you have
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just decided to homeschool your kid, what is if you don't have an education in education, right? like how do you you
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don't know how to build out a curriculum and so my mom Exactly. I think she just
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kind of used it as a like okay here's an easy jumping off point for us and then
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we'll figure out what kind of works from that. She knew that there was other ways
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to do it because she was connected to a homeschool uh co-op and and um kind of uh networking group so to speak. But uh
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but she was like okay this will just be kind of the easy the easy way out to begin with and we can kind of feel it
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out. And it just it wasn't the right fit for us. So, as time went on, we we slowly progressed into more and more
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things. Um, and just to give you some context, I went to public school until uh through first grade and then
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transitioned in second grade. My sister was all the way through and uh and we did all the way through high school,
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graduated as homeschool kids. And so, I had kind of that public school mentality
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going into it where like that first year, second grade was hard because I was like, I'm used to going to a
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classroom with other kids. Uh my sister never had any of that. So for her it was
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just like oh yeah this is normal. This is what we do. It was there wasn't another experience to compare that with.
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Yeah. Exactly. So yeah. So share a little bit about the AC like curriculum and like what that looks like and things
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like that. So the ACE curriculum like you said it's just little I want to say
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approximately 35 40 page books and I may be off on that. Some were longer some were shorter. It just depended
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uh depended what they wanted you to learn learn through that little segment. Um something that the ACE curriculum
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prides itself on is that they they want to teach kids how to um oh what is what's the word? The ACE curriculum
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wants to teach kids to uh motivate themselves and um assign themsel with work they know they
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can complete. Um and following that I think it's funny that it's so um self-driven but there are still the
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rules and guidelines that you need to follow. So, for example, they want you to um set the your own amount of work
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that you want to complete each day in each book. We would have about five books. I want to say I believe when you
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get to high school at six. Um we would have to assign ourselves at least four to five pages depending if
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there was a checkpoint in between. You know, it would just you'd lose a page or
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whatever. Um, and you were meant to keep yourself motivated throughout the whole day to
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get through and check off that list and go through all those pages and get that done. And what's so surprising is how
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little that works. Um, in a in a cubicle type situation, at least for the the privatized schools.
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Um, at home for me it was it was drudging. I don't even know if that's the correct word to use, but it
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was um almost impossible to drag through. The ACE curriculum is such a literalist interpretation of biblical
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scripture. And that's in every single booklet that you read. It's not just a
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book, a booklet on the Bible that you learn from. Uh each pace was each pace had a scripture that you would
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have to memorize along with your uh information. So in your math textbook while you were learning geometry, you
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were uh memorizing Philippians 4:13. Okay? And in your social studies, you were memorizing
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uh a verse from Matthew. And it was just very slowly integrating just Bible verse
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by Bible verse in with what should be real world knowledge that you're learning. Let me ask you this because so
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like I had some of my curriculum was very uh had that Christian aspect to it uh where Bible verses were, you know,
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they they they were incorporated. Um we weren't necessarily memorizing all of
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them. And that was more of like a if you've ever heard of Awana uh Aana was like Aana was like it's kind of like
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youth groupish like a church youth group kind of a setting but it mixed with Boy
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Scout Girl Scouts. So you would wear like you had like a a a uniform that you would wear and we play games and then
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you had textbooks that you would or it's not textbooks but little workbooks you
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would work through and you'd memorize scripture and you got badges and and things like that. So it's kind of this
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hybrid of the two. Um, that's really interesting. It's It's mixing in a real
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merit system. Yeah. Yeah. And it would be based. Yeah. Exactly. And so it had this weird kind of uh like I said, it
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was like kind of Boy Scouty, Girl Scouty type thing with games thrown in there. So very like youth group Sunday
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schoolesqueness to it. Uh that was mostly where my like biblical memorization came from. Uh was
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things like that. uh less so my my textbooks. But but what I was going to ask was that the the the
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were these textbooks like my mom let me let me rephrase this. My mom really believed in like us learning
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what like math for instance. She was like you got to know what 2 plus 2 equals and not just in a way of like you
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can regurgitate it for a test and then it like leaves your brain kind of way. She was like, "You need to understand
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this concept of like how math operates and things like that." And you know, it
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gets to a degree where it's like, you know, you just need a basic understanding of how things operate in
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the world, whether it's, you know, learning how to read and write and do math and right like those types of
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things. And I know that lend you just kind of like it just memorize it and then you can kind
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of like wipe it out of your memory, free up that space and learn the next thing,
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right? And so I wonder if the AC's curriculum like lended itself more to that way of thinking or was it actually
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a good building block system of like, hey, you've learned this, now we're
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going to move on to this next thing. At least for me, um it was very much a once
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the test is over, you can kind of just let it go situation. And I don't know if
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partially that was because the the Christian values behind the education I was taking in didn't sit right with me
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or if it was just because this is a curriculum based on repetition and memorization. Okay? And it's evident
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that it's a curriculum based on memorization when at the end of every five pages you're rewriting a scripture
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verse. I don't know how they haven't been sued for students getting carpal
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tunnel. That's that cuz it's h but it's definitely um I think I think for if if my opinion
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could be true I would say that most students would agree with me when they would feel kind of just lent the
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short stick for educational matters. Okay. Um because a lot of it isn't the the educational material within the ACE
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curriculum isn't meaty. It isn't uh fulfilling. And I think that's something
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else too that and this is something I'm just thinking of that must have made it
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so in incompatible for me is I wasn't really being challenged. But at the same
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time, it was a little difficult for me to retain the information, which is something that I do lend to just the
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traumatic experience of it all lent in with rural Oklahoma. Yeah. I think too to your point of like the the the
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meatiness of of like a curriculum, right? Mhm. One of we talked about, you know, my family used a Becca to begin
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with and we transitioned out of that. And part of the reason for that was my mom started to realize, she's like,
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"Okay, the great thing about homeschool was that we could lean into the things we
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were interested in. So, we can give them the knowledge base of what they want to
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know. I loved pirates as a little kid. So, what are we going to do? We're going
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to just study pirates until Jacob knows everything there is to know about pirates, right? It's like, you know, my
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favorite pirate is Calico Jack. Why is that? I know the whole history of it, you know? Right. No one's ever heard of
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Calico Jack aside from another pirate nerd, right? Um I don't believe I've
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heard of Calico Jack. Everyone knows Blackbeard and Jack Sparrow. That's about it. Like that's kind of And Jack
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Sparrow is not even real, guys. Um these other guys are real. Not even a real pirate. Oh my gosh. No. I love This is
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This is so off topic, but I love that pirate culture is still alive and well in 2025. Yes. Um, and so they leaned
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into that, right? And so that's where like that meatiness that you're talking
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about kind of comes from where it's like, okay, my kid loves this thing. Let's just give them all of the
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materials they need to like further learn this thing. And I think with a curriculum like ACE and even I would
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argue maybe a Becca, it kind of lacks that because it's just may maybe it's
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meant to be the building blocks and the intention is like, hey, a parent can add
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this supplemental content on top. But if you're in a situation like you where
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maybe grandma doesn't have the capacity to even provide that for you, it it it
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really kind of cheats you out a little bit of the the educational aspect of it. Something that I think homeschooling is
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excellent for is being able to lean into your children's hyperfixations like that
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for sure. But uh something that I do think a lot of parental educators lack is being in touch with their children in
00:22:02
the way of seeing them as another little person who has interests and um things that they just don't like and struggle
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with rather than just seeing it as oh I need to, you know, make sure my kid learns this or blah blah blah or my kid
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needs to do this before they can go have fun with what they're interested in. Um,
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and I think at least uh more of the Midwest and South, that's just kind of the uh the societal climate at least of
00:22:36
just pull pull up your bootstraps and get school done. Yeah. Get it done. Go get a job. Go get a career. And that's
00:22:44
what's really difficult for homeschoolers, at least down here, I think, is that they don't get uh a
00:22:50
well-rounded experience before they're shoved out of the nest into the world.
00:22:54
And when you're in a curriculum like ACCE, and I also knew some people in Abeca. So, uh people in curriculums like
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that when your parent just has decided like, okay, this is good. This is good enough. it's
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past uh using it as a building block when um at least the mindset for Oklahomaans is
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this one's got to last a while. You know, it's for some reason it's the same
00:23:25
ideology behind um I don't know why this popped in my head. Buying good like machinery, buying the
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best fridge, you just want it to right work and stick around. And I feel like at least for my grandma, that was her
00:23:42
take on it. That it was good enough for her. It had to her a good moral leaning to her. It had enough proper education
00:23:53
for her to and my grandmother is a registered nurse. She's a smart lady in herself. And her reasoning behind not
00:24:01
putting me through public school is due to her being bullied in public school. And she went to school in the same town
00:24:08
that I was raised in. and she never really left Woodward, Oklahoma. Um, and with that,
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she's always struggled with moving with the times. And, uh, that was something
00:24:22
that just persisted throughout my ad adolescent life that once we had something that was good. Nothing needed
00:24:31
changed about it and, you know, we would just get through it. Uh, something that I will say my
00:24:39
grandmother did have a good point on is that the ACC curriculum is excellent for anyone experiencing like
00:24:49
um a nonstable period in their life. For example, my grandpa was going through some health challenges. So, we weren't
00:24:57
really home all the time. We were back and forth between Woodward and Oklahoma City for hospital visits. And the paces
00:25:04
are just something you can throw in a folder and carry around, right? It is the the ease is amazing. The ease is
00:25:11
great. Um, but that even further isolates you in a way when you're not even at your kitchen table anymore.
00:25:19
You're in your car. You're in a hospital where you don't this isn't a safe space
00:25:23
for you, you know? Yeah. But that's just the specific Yeah. Well, I think you
00:25:28
make a great point there of like and I I said this before too. It's like my mom,
00:25:32
we started with a Becca because okay, there's some structure to it. It's a
00:25:37
transition period. It's it's, you know, whether it's traumatic or just
00:25:41
overwhelming or whatever. You have this thing that's already structured and built for you. That's great, right? A
00:25:46
lot of people need that. Um, they need a jumping off point. It's that next step
00:25:51
of like, you know, the AC might be a great curriculum for some people. Um, you know, I didn't use it, so maybe it
00:25:59
is. Um, maybe it's not. Uh, Marcy might at least for those literal literalist
00:26:04
fundamentalist Baptists out there. If if that sounds like you, you're going to
00:26:09
have a heyday. Yeah, great promotion here for those specific people. Um, there we go. But it's a great jumping
00:26:17
off point to get that structure that you need. And then like we've been talking
00:26:21
about is just adding in those extra things of like that's the whole point about homeschooling for a lot of or I
00:26:26
think it should be at least is that extracurricular element where it's like you get to customize the education to
00:26:33
tailor your child. That's a huge deal. It is. And it can it can change it can
00:26:41
change a life and you won't even know because from such an early age you can
00:26:45
either have the best schooling experience or a really poor schooling experience that maybe sets you back in
00:26:53
the future. But if you know the the ideal so um at least my my take on homeschooling is you can do it wrong.
00:27:03
You can do it in a way that you are going to hurt your child whether it's um
00:27:07
educationally or mentally or emotionally. Um but you can also do it right. There is a way to go about it
00:27:14
where you can be a loving parent as well as the person who kind of teaches your child navigating
00:27:24
just life. Yeah. Um, and I think there there has to be a really good balance between um being a parent and being that
00:27:35
teacher. And I feel like that's something that a lot of parents struggle with. They they don't have a line in
00:27:40
between. Yeah. The two personas. And at least for as as someone who as someone who was a homeschooled child, I didn't
00:27:50
really particularly like my grandmother, the person who was supposed to be caring
00:27:55
for me emotionally, telling me I did a really bad job and I'm just I need to retake the whole book
00:28:03
and blah blah blah blah blah. That's just not, you know, kids don't show
00:28:08
their parents their grade cards for a reason. Yeah. They don't want their parents to hear about their grades. Um,
00:28:14
that's something that, uh, at least for my non-h homeschooled friends, I've
00:28:18
always said, "Yeah, you didn't want them to see your B minus. I didn't want mine
00:28:23
to grade my test." Yep. Cuz she Oh my god. It's just uh cemented in my mind
00:28:31
her pointing finger trailing across the paper with her red pen exing circling writing over my essay. I wanted to bring
00:28:43
this up too because you brought up a great point of um someone of like the the or something you
00:28:50
said made me think of like the isolation of also growing up in in rural Oklahoma.
00:28:55
you you said even just like when you did go to public school, your graduating class was 13 people. My graduating class
00:29:00
as a homeschool kid was 12 people. So, not a huge difference. That's something
00:29:05
that I thought of in public school there. It wasn't it wasn't a very big
00:29:09
change. Yeah. And I think one of the things that I'm learning a lot more now
00:29:15
is that because I'm starting to make friends who do uh road schooling where they RV and they they go around and I'm
00:29:21
like, "How do your kids have friends?" And they were like, "Well, there's the
00:29:25
internet." And I'm like, "Well, duh." And and their kids, they play video
00:29:30
games online and they they Zoom call each other and they, you know, they text each other and whatever. And I and I
00:29:36
realized I was like, so there really is no excuse anymore for homeschool kids to
00:29:42
be isolated and antisocial because we have the internet. We have these great tools to make friends online. I say that
00:29:50
in a kind of generalized parents should still be involved kind of like it is dangerous out there. The internet can be
00:29:56
a scary place kind of a way. But and it is it is for sure. But there are safe places for homeschool kids to make
00:30:04
friends from across the country and do pen pal. I mean people used to do pen pals back in the day like how did that
00:30:09
start? How do you get connected with somebody you know halfway across the world? Um I know you know so um so there
00:30:16
very much is like opportunities I think for a lot of these rural areas to have some of that diversity of like you could
00:30:25
have easily been friends with someone in California and someone else on the on the east coast, you know, in Boston or
00:30:31
or whatever. Um where you know we can kind of create these support groups almost of and these friendships where it
00:30:39
it limits that isolation to some degree. um as well. It definitely does. The only
00:30:45
thing that I see being kind of a blockade for that is at least uh in the town that I grew up in. Um and this is
00:30:52
something I'm sure you've heard being from California, having interacted with
00:30:55
people not from either of the coasts, the further in you get, the less technologically advanced it seems, at
00:31:03
least climatewise. Um, and my specific situation, um, I did not have a phone until I was
00:31:12
16. Okay. So, that was 4 years ago. God, that was about, yeah, four or five years
00:31:20
ago. Um, and you'll find a lot of parents who really do limit their child's uh, internet access and use of
00:31:27
technology due to it being a dangerous place for young people. And that is such a valid fear. I had my own experiences
00:31:35
online where I experienced grooming where I experienced sexual assault online from a young age. And that is the
00:31:42
real the real fear behind it. But there is, at least from my perspective being the
00:31:49
kid, there was taking it too far of, okay, your kid messed up once and it wasn't even really their fault and
00:31:58
you're going to deny them means to connection and means to anything but loneliness and isolation
00:32:05
for years, right? And that's the Midwestern stubborn attitude of you mess up once, you don't get it again. Um, and
00:32:13
I think that that is a real struggle with homeschoolers down here is that they either don't get access to
00:32:23
internet like, you know, most kids do and kids in public school, you know, having school laptops, for example. Oh,
00:32:31
sorry. It's never mind. It was kind of unrelated. I just thought of uh my brain
00:32:37
has been all politics recently and um Ryan Walters has this has to do with public schoolers, but public schoolers
00:32:45
aren't allowed to use their phone from first to last bell in school anymore.
00:32:49
Okay. Not one bit gets taken from him for I believe it depends on the school, but they can take it for the whole
00:32:55
school week. Dang. I might be I I just know he blocked. Yeah. Anyway, I have my own feelings. Yeah, it
00:33:04
can be it can be good. I think um there's something to be said about teaching proper uh phone and laptop
00:33:12
etiquette. I I'm a big advocate for things like uh there's a great book called Indistractible which talks about
00:33:19
it talks about these guys right here. It talks about the dings, the bings, the the whistles, uh the whistles, not the
00:33:24
whistles, um the whistles. um and and how you can like you know you you need to teach yourself how to how to ignore
00:33:32
those things so that you can actually maintain being a productive person to some degree. Um and I think that those
00:33:38
are things that should and will get taught at some point in in the education system and at young ages and parents
00:33:44
need to learn them as well. Um right and e thinking about it even further you know uh millennials or my generation
00:33:53
were really the first generation to full have like almost lifelong access to the
00:33:58
internet. Um and that's something that I feel like maybe humanity as a whole hasn't
00:34:05
realized how new technology is and how much it probably is [ __ ] us up and we don't even we aren't even able to look
00:34:13
back and realize. It's kind of like um uh scientists wanted to figure out the
00:34:19
effects of microplastics on the human body, but they couldn't find a control
00:34:22
group. And um I believe technology is the same way. Um we won't know until 50
00:34:30
more years down the line, wherever it takes us. Yeah. Um what that does to a person's brain. And uh at least
00:34:40
for adolescents who were at home maybe doing um their schooling through the internet, you know, Abeca was mostly
00:34:47
online. Correct. Uh when I did it, it was it was textbooks, but I'm sure that
00:34:53
I'm sure that it's probably primarily online at this point. Um Okay. I'm from
00:34:58
You and I are not that much older. I was going to bring this up because you you're fairly fresh out of the
00:35:03
homeschool world. Yes. Yeah. Uh when did you you left sophomore year which was 20
00:35:11
so that was 2021. So my grandpa grandfather passed away in 2020 which shortly shortly after led to
00:35:22
me leaving home and then um staying the summer of 2021. Yes. With my father in South Dakota. So
00:35:32
that was a big change, a big abrupt and then I went to public school which was another complete change to the world I
00:35:39
had known. Yeah. Because that even though I had gone to a private Christian school and I had had about the same
00:35:45
classmates that I did at that first public high school that I attended, it was still
00:35:52
it still felt different because uh privatized Christian schools, we didn't leave our classroom. Our grade had a
00:35:58
classroom. uh this small public school I went to, I was following um the same kids around to different classrooms each
00:36:06
day, but it was still one group of uh 10th graders. 10th graders, is that what you were sophomore year? Uh no,
00:36:14
sophomore uh Yeah, sophomore was 10th grade. Yes. Yeah. Um it was just 13 10th graders walking down the line to our
00:36:24
coding class, to our English class, to our math class. And in a way it kind of felt like um what I had been doing
00:36:32
mentally through the years of homeschooling. Uh home something that homeschooling I think lended me or maybe
00:36:40
blessed me with was I have a great imagination. And something that it leans into is uh the fancy term for it is
00:36:49
maladaptive daydreaming. But it's basically just disassociation into another world almost entirely to
00:36:57
where you're just so dissatisfied with where you are currently being in a fictional reality
00:37:04
is better than being where you are. Um, and I can vividly remember uh almost seeing myself like a CCTV camera. Um,
00:37:16
just zoned out, falling into whatever headsp space it was, sitting at my kitchen table, staring at the words in
00:37:23
my paces. Um, and so, uh, homeschooling in that way, it can easily easily fall down the rabbit hole of this isn't
00:37:35
healthy for a child anymore. Yeah. And it takes a it takes a level of parental supervision,
00:37:42
aides, besides from the educational work itself, it takes checking in with how is
00:37:50
this kid just doing in general? like besides academically what's going on within is the development developing if
00:37:59
you will. Yeah. Yeah. I would imagine too because I know some states when it comes to the homeschool world there's a
00:38:10
lot more guidelines and like checking up that has to happen within uh within that space. California is
00:38:18
pretty loose, uh, not going to lie, with like you set up your school and like you're pretty good. Um, you don't really
00:38:24
have to do follow-up exams and testing and things like that. Other states, I know, uh, I believe it's Missouri has
00:38:31
much more of like a yearly like you have to pass, your kid has to pass a test and
00:38:36
then the state helps you kind of assign where they're at and things like that.
00:38:39
But it also helps, you know, with that kind of like not necessarily needing to always keeping things on track, maybe
00:38:46
not having to get CPS involved in and you know, stuff, but seeing where kids sit uh mentally, physically, th those
00:38:53
types of things, right? It's that it's a it's a checkup. It's a yearly checkup
00:38:57
almost um is the way I kind of looked at it. And so, but I I know for a fact, I don't know all of them by memory, but
00:39:03
I've been learning more and more about the Midwest is that mix of like some other states are really loose with like
00:39:09
you can just kind of get away with murder. um and others you have more of that structure of like you know there is
00:39:16
a checkup and and and so to your point about that dissociating and kind of like seeing yourself almost like through CCTV
00:39:24
camera it's like there in some states is are things in place to kind of like help
00:39:31
protect kids from from doing that or to at least help educators know like okay hey like your kid is acting this way
00:39:38
this is not normal they there's something bigger are going on here. Um, and yeah. Yeah, there's just a form of
00:39:46
like it's so easy to in in most states I feel like it's so easy to say, "Oh,
00:39:51
we're doing homeschooling now." And not many people these days will bat an eye
00:39:56
because of how popular it is and almost uh I feel like it's been since co it's
00:40:02
gotten more and more popular because everyone was a homeschooler in 2020. Yes. And a lot of people realized how
00:40:09
nice it was and how easy it was to be at home. And um for a lot of parents, I think if you know they were able to
00:40:19
continue working from home after the pandemic pandemic, sorry, my accent comes out sometimes.
00:40:28
Pandemic. God. Um, but uh if people can stay home, they will. Like we were talking about
00:40:38
earlier, our desk is our comfort space. Like this is where we feel just at ease.
00:40:44
The stress of the world melts off your shoulders and the only thing you have to worry about are your probably your
00:40:49
editing deadlines. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, this is what I do for a job, too. So, that's that's
00:40:55
like I work with other podcasters, so uh Yeah. And that's epic. Yeah. That's just
00:41:00
editing. This is the editing zone right here. Yeah. Yeah. It's where you eat. It's where you
00:41:07
breathe. It's where you sleep. Exactly. Exactly. I did want to ask I kind of
00:41:12
wanted to pivot just a little bit and talk about Go for it. Creativity and where that kind of came in and how
00:41:20
that came into into your world. If people are watching the video, it you look like a creative person. you look
00:41:27
like someone I would meet on the street and be like, they make art of some kind.
00:41:32
That's an artist. And which we don't my brain I don't typically associate that
00:41:39
with rural Oklahoma. Um and so right so just I I don't know maybe um I I'm
00:41:46
trying to think of what my question is here but like can you unpack for me a little bit of like where the love for
00:41:51
art comes from? And you talked about kind of, you know, disassociating, going to that fantasy realm. Does that play a
00:41:58
part in it? You know, anything like that? Yeah. Um, so I feel like I really started drawing. I had always been a
00:42:05
doodler and I remember uh being younger and watching um uh Ink Masters with my grandpa on TV and being like, "Oh, I'm
00:42:13
going to be a tattoo artist one day." And making my little flash doodles, right? Um, but uh I do have a specific
00:42:21
memory of getting my first like actual sketchbook um on a trip to Walmart while we were in uh I believe it was Oklahoma
00:42:28
City or Tulsa for a hospital trip to keep me occupied while we were in the uh whatever his room is. Is there his
00:42:38
hospital room? I was trying to think if there was a better word. No, I think that's Yeah, that's right. I think
00:42:43
that's just it. Yeah. But uh that was when I really was like, "Oh, okay. I
00:42:49
kind of like this." And I think I think part of the reason that it resonated
00:42:53
with me so hard is that it was almost shutting off my brain or at least quieting it down enough to where I could
00:43:01
just concentrate on what I was drawing and I could just watch the line transform the paper into something else
00:43:08
entirely. And I think kind of hand inhand my I have a very vivid mind's eye. Hand in hand, I think they both
00:43:18
helped each other. It was like a knife sharpening a knife in a way. Um cuz my I feel like after
00:43:26
after I left homeschooling and coincidentally also regained access to the internet, I had a phone, I had a
00:43:34
computer, I feel like my creativity had dulled down. Um, but that was just due to the fact that I didn't need
00:43:42
distracted constantly anymore. Um, and that's something that's been kind of
00:43:47
difficult to uh realize and not hold it against myself that, oh, you don't draw like you
00:43:53
used to 5 years ago. Okay. Well, you're a lot happier now. Yeah. And life is
00:44:00
life is those waves too of like Yes. of having a creative moment and then you know sometime and then it'll it es and
00:44:08
flows right it comes and it comes in a big wave and you're like okay I got all
00:44:11
this really cool stuff just like it's almost too much where you're just like
00:44:15
calm down I need to like I can't get it up right I can't like process it fast
00:44:18
enough and actually like create it um fast enough um and then and then before you burn out yeah exactly and then you
00:44:25
go through maybe a wave where you're just kind of like it's even just a struggle to like create something
00:44:29
because you're just like I don't it's it's the the well has run dry in a sense
00:44:33
of like okay maybe I can do something but it's not the same degree. Um and I
00:44:38
think we always crave that like going back to like that time of like oh I was like so I call it productivity I but
00:44:45
like just that creative just like it's just an overflow of Yeah. It's just
00:44:50
there's always ideas there's always something there. Um, yeah. And I think I
00:44:55
think part of that for me was finding comfort in the creation of new ideas because of how uh stagnant my life and
00:45:03
situation was while being homeschooled, while even though it was better once I went to high school, it was still, you
00:45:10
know, it you said it sounded very just similar to where I was before public school. Yeah. Um, but it still felt like
00:45:20
uh something to fall into and something that was always there for you whether you need it or not. To me, creativity is
00:45:30
almost an entity in itself. It's a mother that you can crawl to when you need help. when you can't um describe
00:45:37
how you feel or you can't really even mentally understand what you feel, if you sit there with a paper long enough,
00:45:46
it it will come out. And that's something that uh had always helped me. It whether it was just event drawing in
00:45:54
my sketchbook or stupid stupid fan art. It it always just managed to make me feel a little bit better to see, oh, I
00:46:02
can I can create this and I like the way that this looks. Life isn't that bad.
00:46:07
And it was just minimizing well, I guess it was zooming in to those very small happy moments to block
00:46:15
everything else out. Yeah. So, like in a way zooming in on the pixels to not see
00:46:20
the rest of the image. Um and growing in my creativity after um high school, which it's only been two almost
00:46:31
three years. Um it's something that I've definitely had to I've had to find that drive rather than
00:46:38
have no other option than to create. It's finding that will to do it just because I want to. Yeah. Just because I
00:46:48
want to uh have these finished products and I want to feel this satisfaction just because it doesn't feel as natural
00:46:57
anymore. It wasn't natural. It was um it was survival. Mhm. And that's something
00:47:03
that I feel like if any other creative homeschoolers out there, and I don't think it sticks to homeschooling at all,
00:47:09
just any creatives out there growing up or getting out of like that really heavy
00:47:15
canon event part of your life of your adolescence, it's it's something that
00:47:20
you just you age a little bit and you realize that like it's just it's like
00:47:27
you said, the eb and flow of life. The other the thing that I love so much about creativity and and my art form, if
00:47:38
you will, is is uh well, it's like two things, but like I I consider my like
00:47:43
recreational fun is like I love Lego. And the great thing about Lego is okay, you can follow the instructions, which
00:47:49
like I'm a big I'm a firstborn kid. I'm like a rule follower. Give me the
00:47:54
instructions, I'll build whatever it is kind of a thing. So like I love that.
00:47:58
But then the great thing is you take it apart and build something completely different with it and the imagination
00:48:03
aspect of it. And so a few years ago, we talked about like the dry spells and the
00:48:08
needing to push yourself. I hit that in my life and it was like burnout nastiness and I was like I got to go get
00:48:15
a real job to some degree. Um I got to like get outside of the house, do something this to to reset my brain. And
00:48:22
I worked at a toy store um that was primarily Legos. Okay. And we were like secondhand Legos, so we just had like
00:48:28
big bins of just like loose pieces. And the cool thing about that that's sick.
00:48:34
Yeah. And the the great thing about that is that like I would just build stuff. And I remembered I was thinking back to
00:48:41
when I was a kid and like the challenges I would give myself as a kid sitting on
00:48:45
the floor playing with my Lego and being like, can I make a ball? Can I build a person? Can I build this thing? like and
00:48:52
and so can I only use one color to make something right? It it's a problem-solving creativity exercise that
00:49:00
for me was just like it it's like a necessary thing to like challenge myself
00:49:05
to do it and then once you do it it like unlocks that next thing. Do you have anything like that where you're like I
00:49:11
get stuck and I'm just like okay. I mean you brought up like d you know doodling
00:49:15
in a sketchbook and just like it will come out eventually even if you sit there long enough. Is that kind of your
00:49:20
version of that or do you have something else that you do? Something that I love
00:49:23
to do is mindless. So I I do just draw obviously, but at least for me there's a
00:49:30
there's a difference between um working on an idea or throwing pen down just
00:49:38
immediately. Um, something that helps me really process things is such it's so
00:49:47
simple, but it's just hatching out lines and filling it in with webbing. Okay.
00:49:52
And for some reason, the physical act of um hatching out what looks just like a complete mess and turning it into
00:50:05
something that still looks cohesive. It's something that by the end of, you know, a few hours of filling in the
00:50:12
lines, it's almost like a trip of okay, no, no matter what issue it is, if you
00:50:22
just work at it long enough or you think about it long enough that you will find
00:50:26
some sort of answer. whatever it is I'm struggling with, it helps me figure out
00:50:35
the little minuscule um thought like connections between the behaviors. I think I'm thinking of a specific um type
00:50:46
of situation. So, say um I'm in like another just specific rut like you said before when you were
00:50:57
working in your the Lego shop and just putting things together. Um if I've had like a a depressive week or
00:51:08
a depressive day and I pull out my sketchbook and I'm just frustrated and I'm just almost fuming. I feel the
00:51:16
anxiety and stress creeping up my back, I attack my paper. And that's something
00:51:20
that's really helpful for me to get out that energy and then it goes into the
00:51:26
the deep scribbling while my thoughts are connect while the synapses are firing and the tiny little micro thought
00:51:34
connections are happening. I guess what I was trying to say was the the subconscious thoughts underneath the
00:51:42
conscious thought pattern. Yeah, if that makes sense. It's the the mentally unspoken things that um very tactile
00:51:54
um movements help me work through. So, kind of like you putting putting your Legos
00:52:01
together. It's really that scribbling on paper for me as well. It's it's such a
00:52:06
weird reconnect between the physical and the mental. And I feel like that's a lot of
00:52:13
times just what is lacked is you've disconnected. Yeah. And you need to get back into your body. It's interesting
00:52:20
because the brain does this thing where it will problem solvers. That's what humans do.
00:52:27
We solve problems. And so what happens and the reason people burn out and the reason people like overwhelm and things
00:52:34
like that is there's so many decisions we make in a day and there's so many
00:52:38
problems that we solve in a day and it's all up here. It's all in the brain and
00:52:42
it's it's a lot. It is more information we are processing on the daily than at
00:52:48
any other time in history. It's constant. Like you said, it's also on our phone. It's the dings. It's the the
00:52:54
the noises outside on our street. There aren't quiet moments anymore. And that's
00:52:59
what doing something creative and putting pen to paper, putting bricks together, putting paint on a canvas,
00:53:07
whatever your art is, and I think art is subjective. Um, this is something else we could totally get into, but but it is
00:53:15
uh it's one of those things where it for whatever reason it quiets the brain and
00:53:21
it will it will problem solve for you what is going on. So, like I I had this uh I had an issue with like a client and
00:53:30
I was trying to figure out like how to deal with it appropriately and it was just kind of a like I don't want them to
00:53:35
be mad at me. I'm lowkey mad kind of a thing and and I was just uncomfortable
00:53:40
and I didn't know what to do about it and I was like okay like let's just do
00:53:43
something creative and whatever it was whatever creative exercise it was I just did it for like an hour and like at the
00:53:50
end of it I was like oh this is a great solution. It just came to me after an hour, but it
00:53:55
was that hour of like taking all the other things out of my brain and putting them in that energy into something else.
00:54:02
Um, it like reset me. And so I think that's important. It's stopping that
00:54:07
overthinking that uh merciless cog turning smokes coming out of your ears. You can just tell when
00:54:17
your brain is just frying because of the the cortisol that's actually rushing
00:54:22
through your system and just it's turning off any type of um you can't think logically when you're stressed
00:54:31
out. All you can think about is what it is that's stressing you out and you know
00:54:38
the whole alphabet of what you can do about it. But nothing is just good enough.
00:54:45
where you feel safe and stepping and letting your brain reenter itself and letting yourself
00:54:54
regground to where you are and letting those emotions settle and simmer. It's
00:55:00
like a can of soda. It's shaken. It's stressed. You sit it there for five or
00:55:04
10 minutes and you can drink it. Yeah. And that's just the human condition, too. It's not We're just cans of soda.
00:55:11
Yeah. This brings up a great point too of of something I've been learning this
00:55:15
past year. And anyone who has watched the show knows like I read a book not that long ago called When Religion Hurts
00:55:23
You. And one of the things that they talked about in that book was this always on kind of stress level in the
00:55:31
background. Um, exactly what you're talking about, the cortisol just running
00:55:34
through you at all times. And when your body is in that stress mode, you go into
00:55:38
like fight and flight mode. Um, yes. And so you exist in that forever and that becomes your new natural after a while.
00:55:44
And I think this I'm going to tie this back into the homeschooling, but like a
00:55:49
lot of homeschoolers were homeschooled for religious reasons or with religious curriculums. And so religion played a
00:55:55
significant role and unfortunately religion tends to kick on that cortisol, you know, push. It does. And it's it's
00:56:06
unfortunate cuz it it you know it it messes with you truly. Uh when you're a
00:56:11
kid, you can't you can't tell the difference between literal, oh, I could
00:56:16
die tomorrow and go to hell if I don't act right. You know, at least that's
00:56:20
that's what that spurred for me. But continue. Yeah. Well, I was going to say
00:56:23
because I wanted to bring it back because you had mentioned something earlier about,
00:56:28
you know, the ACE curriculum being that Christian curriculum, kind of growing up
00:56:31
in that Christian environment, but always having this thing in your back of the brain that was like
00:56:38
not really buying into that. And so I wanted I was wondering if you could, you know, uh explain more of of your
00:56:46
thinking when it comes to that. Yeah. Okay. So, uh, my religious upbringing, my grandmother her whole life, I believe
00:56:55
her mother was a Lutheran and my grandmother also had an experience with running away when she was a child and
00:57:01
she fell into the arms of Baptists. Uh, and in Woodward, Oklahoma, Bapt Baptists as far as far as the I can
00:57:10
see, they're everywhere. Um but uh she eventually when I got when I came around
00:57:17
we were going to like a non-denominational church. Um but church was fine and Sunday school was fine. I
00:57:26
had friends there. Church wasn't a a bad environment for me to be in. So, my
00:57:33
religious trauma wasn't necessarily from the church more than it was just from my grandmother, which uh with the
00:57:41
AC curriculum that that's the AC curriculum is built upon a literal fundamentalist
00:57:49
Baptist view of the Bible, right? So, it was right up her alley. Um and a lot of
00:57:58
uh sorry I just thought of this. I had found a quote earlier um from the uh CEO of well the previous CEO of the ACC
00:58:11
curriculum. It was founded by this husband and wife and later their son just ended up taking it. But um
00:58:21
Howard, the CEO, called AIDS a godscent plague meant to punish gay people and other idol worshippers, including
00:58:29
feminists, pro-choice, and Planned Parenthood activists. And from a very early age, I
00:58:39
wasn't a fan of what I didn't know was bigotry until I got older and I learned more words. I
00:58:48
wasn't a fan of the attitude that a lot of people in my circle had towards people that I saw on my TV that I didn't
00:58:56
really see in my hometown. um and mixed in with just Christian ideologies and you know you
00:59:07
need to uh live this way, you need to act like this otherwise God won't be happy with you and
00:59:14
you you'll have to redeem yourself, whatever. Besides that, at least in rural Oklahoma, obviously homophobia was
00:59:23
mixed in. Unfortunately, racism was also mixed in and sexism was mixed in and all
00:59:29
the isms that you can think of. Anything that a white person can hate someone else for, like that was somewhere in the
00:59:38
community. Um, especially within the private school slash the homeschool groups weren't as bad because uh
00:59:48
specifically there was the family that ran it which they were kind of hippie- dippy. They were from California. I
00:59:55
loved them. Um, even though they were still very strict in their religion, they were more of the actual
01:00:06
uh hate the sin, love the sinner type, but flip-flop it. Love the sinner, hate the sin. They would be the type to put
01:00:12
that first. Um, but uh at least I started rambling with uh my upbringing and the bigotry and the
01:00:23
hatred just not sitting right with me not being something that I could bow and go along with, which is something that I
01:00:29
feel a lot of kids do to receive the um the affection and approval of their parents. You know, your parents, at
01:00:37
least in the Midwest, it's cute to be the mini me. It's cute to be just like
01:00:42
your dad or just like your mom, you know. And um it's there's another addition into it of it
01:00:53
depends how uh it depends how radical your parents are with their own religious and political
01:01:00
beliefs, but it can quite literally be beaten out of you as a child, at least down here. Um, and that's something that
01:01:10
I never experienced. I was not a victim of physical abuse from my parents, but I
01:01:15
do know people who dealt with that whenever they were caught having lipstick in their drawer, if they
01:01:22
weren't born a girl, you know, or if they were caught uh going by a boy's name online or, you
01:01:30
know, etc., etc. I've always held a lot of empathy within myself for people around me and that includes the
01:01:39
minorities around me within my area. And I'm white obviously, but I'm obviously
01:01:47
gay as well. I'm part of the LGBTQ plus community. And I think in a way that
01:01:53
just also goes to prove that uh you're born this way. And it's not that you're
01:01:58
born gay or lesbian or trans. It's that you're born with an innate moral code
01:02:06
and a sense of empathy that sets you apart from other people in your life and sets you with a group of like-minded
01:02:14
people who hold the same opinion of humanity. That there's no need to be strict with the human condition. that
01:02:23
we're just existing and that a lot of the um rules placed on people or stressors
01:02:32
placed on people's shoulders to behave a certain way in order to fit in doesn't really matter. Yeah. But rural
01:02:41
Oklahoma, you know, wear your jeans, wear your boots, wear your overalls, go to work. That's that's the area. Yeah.
01:02:48
You bring up a a great point too about rural areas and and lack of technology which kind of can lend itself to lack of
01:02:57
education unfortunately and and I even hate to say that lack of experience lack of experience. Yeah. Exactly. And so I
01:03:03
think it can foster this area of of fear of the unknown. And not that that doesn't happen. I mean
01:03:14
I grew up in a decently big city. Um, like I didn't grow up in LA. I didn't
01:03:19
grow up in San Francisco. But like I grew up in a bigger city in California. There was still a lot of fear around gay
01:03:26
people. There was a lot of fear around trans people. There was a lot of fear around like in my circles were were
01:03:32
Christian about uh Planned Parenthood and and things like that, abortions and like all that kind of thing. Um, it
01:03:39
existed. However, I also wasn't walking down the street like if I saw a gay guy.
01:03:45
I wasn't like losing my mind. I wasn't freaking out. Uh bec because it wasn't
01:03:50
it wasn't uncommon. Uh if that makes sense. Like there was no avoiding it. A
01:03:56
fairly there was a fairly diverse area there for you. Exactly. I I think it's
01:04:02
it was interesting to move from California to Illinois and be in the Midwest and and kind of have this I grew
01:04:08
up conservative. I was like I'm a Republican. You know, if you're a Christian, you're a Republican. That's
01:04:13
the deal. like we love our guns. Like that's that's kind of the thing, right?
01:04:17
Um and um but I yeah, I love God. I love guns and I love girls. Uh that was like
01:04:24
the thing. And I got to college and it was weird to be labeled as like a liberal conservative because I was just
01:04:31
like if I saw a gay person, there wasn't a physical reaction out of me. I just
01:04:35
was like, "Oh, that's just a normal person living their life." I can
01:04:38
disagree with their lifestyle at that point. At that stage in my life, that was what I believed. But but I was like,
01:04:45
but me, I don't need to be outwardly uncomfortable or verbally. It doesn't
01:04:51
need to be demonized. Exactly. Um I also grew up my my view on religion was that
01:04:59
the way you win people over is through relationship and it's through you get to
01:05:03
know somebody, right? And you can then have those deeper conversations around what you believe and what you think is
01:05:09
right and what you think is wrong. Um, and that's the way you do it. You don't
01:05:14
do it by standing on the corner of a street and yelling at people that they're going to go to hell. Um, kind of
01:05:19
a thing. Um, Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So, it's Yeah, it's kind of interesting to
01:05:26
look back at some of those things now and be like, "Oh, wow. I'm Yeah. Um,
01:05:30
because I have been that guy. I've stood on street corners as well with signs and
01:05:33
and promoted things." But you brought up knowing too that at a young age of like
01:05:40
maybe not knowing, but like you can recognize in yourself that you were like, "Okay, I am part of
01:05:46
the LGBT. I am I'm different. There's something about me that's different."
01:05:50
Um, and that's okay. That's just inherently part of you. Um, it's something that I knew at that age. It
01:05:58
wasn't chosen. It was something that I discovered about this consciousness that
01:06:02
I was embodying and this life that I was a part of. It was something that even at
01:06:08
a really young age I could tell like not even that I could tell at that young of
01:06:12
an age my thoughts weren't necessarily going to my thoughts and reactions weren't really going to lie to me like
01:06:18
that because there was no other way for this kid to genuinely react besides what
01:06:26
they were feeling in that moment or over the course of however many years of adolescent growth. you know, thinking in
01:06:34
your own head at a really young age, um, okay, but I don't like girls. Okay, but
01:06:41
what if I do and no one in my family supports that? And it comes down to a point where, I don't know, maybe you're
01:06:48
10, 12 years old, I wouldn't still be thinking about it if I wasn't. It wouldn't matter this much. And that's
01:06:57
something it comes down to. It's it's uh unless you're uh in a very affirming
01:07:04
area, if you're anywhere near at least an anxiety that you might not be safe
01:07:10
where you are, if you are queer, just any anything that's not normal or just
01:07:17
Yeah. Um, if you're nervous at all or genuinely stressed out about this new discovery
01:07:29
about yourself, no one could choose that. No one would choose that discomfort and no one would choose that
01:07:37
life path if they could choose the easiest way. If I honestly though I love being alternative and though I love uh
01:07:47
being queer, I do know that life would be so much easier if I weren't right.
01:07:53
Like that's just something I I know I would get a job way easier if I had brown hair. I would, you know, not to
01:08:01
mention the face piercings, just brown hair, a natural hair color. Um, you know, maybe if my sense of humor
01:08:10
were more typical, I would get along with more people in more spaces, but some some people are just made to be a
01:08:19
little funkier. And I think that's fun. Yeah. I I think uh a lot of those funky
01:08:27
people unfortunately or fortunately um I think it's 50/50 end up being homeschooled just due to school not
01:08:34
working for them being like a different case where you know school is cookie cutter. It's not made for everyone.
01:08:43
There are some kids that just will not thrive in a public school situation the same way some kids will not thrive in a
01:08:49
homeschool situation. there is a a time and place for everybody to be able to learn the way they need to and to grow
01:08:58
the way that they need to in a healthy way. Um, where was I going with that? Well, I
01:09:05
think I I wanted to to ask this now too was like Yeah, go ahead. You're a couple years out at this point
01:09:14
of homeschool. I'm about I'm a little over a decade at this point. you are the you are I think the youngest
01:09:21
person or one of the youngest people I've had on the podcast and so you're
01:09:25
the closest to it where like I can kind of look at it now and and I I have 10 years of reflection on it. Um, and so,
01:09:32
right, maybe have gone through the cycles of anger to grief to acceptance to, you know, all these different uh
01:09:39
emotions. And I'm not saying you haven't done that yet, but I do wonder where you
01:09:44
sit with the homeschool experience now of like looking at it and going, okay, if someone comes to you today, and you
01:09:52
kind of have answered this already, but if someone comes to you today, it's like, hey, I'm looking at homeschooling
01:09:55
my parents. What are you saying to them? What are you what are you advising them
01:09:59
on? Right. I would just I would honestly have them sit down because I would say,
01:10:06
"This is going to take a minute." Yeah. They would, at least from my perspective, I would want to make sure
01:10:12
that they knew that it's not going to be as simple as whatever curriculum tells you it's going
01:10:20
to be, right? Your child will deal with um dissatisfaction. Your child will deal
01:10:27
with frustration. You will deal with a very similar type of frustration when you feel like you're doing the best you
01:10:35
can, but your child still isn't working with you on that. And there is a level
01:10:40
of stepping back and not taking it so personally that as a parent, I feel like they need to realize
01:10:49
it isn't me. It isn't my parenting. It's the way that I'm going about this.
01:10:54
Whether it's schooling, whether it's even just being at home more often, if
01:11:00
another pandemic were to come around and someone was to be like, "You were homeschooled. What What was being with
01:11:07
your parent like all the time? What was that like? How was that?" And I can tell them like you need to
01:11:16
treat your child with a little more respect because at the end of the day they are still another human being and
01:11:23
they deserve to be listened to and their emotions are as true and honest as a human's emotions can be because they are
01:11:34
a child. Even if you're getting into those adolescent years where um misleading comes into play, if your
01:11:41
child is misleading you, there is still another issue that's underneath that
01:11:46
that needs to get talked about. And I feel like parents and their children can have
01:11:56
great relationships um if parents would just listen a little more. And you know, I feel like we are
01:12:04
getting out of that age of children are to be seen, not heard. I feel like that's something that even though we
01:12:11
feel like as a society we aren't in anymore, that kids are get a lot more lean leniency than they did 20 30 years
01:12:19
ago, which I do fully agree with. We're still as a society kind of dealing with our
01:12:27
just lump of collective trauma and collective aging. So if that makes any sense, we're
01:12:37
coming to a realization that kids aren't not people until they turn 18. You are raising this kid to be the
01:12:49
person you want them to be. And if you want your child to be aggressive and not listen to authority and break rules, be
01:12:59
mean to them and homeschool them horribly. And that's exactly how they will turn out. Um, if you are your
01:13:05
child's first bully, you will be the first person they run away from. And that's just a hard truth that I feel
01:13:12
like a lot of parents before they get into homeschooling need to swallow. That genuinely if you
01:13:21
It's kind of like a Pandora's box in a way. Once you open that, there's just you keep going in the best
01:13:30
way that you can, in the healthiest way that you can while listening to your emotions as a parent teaching their kids
01:13:39
and making sure to listen to the little guy that can't really fight for himself.
01:13:44
And that is your child who you are teaching who is stuck in your house whether they like it or not until the
01:13:49
age of 18. Um, and for uh adolescence and homeschooling, I feel like there should
01:13:57
be a certain point where a parent takes into consideration their child's opinion
01:14:01
on where they feel like they need to be or if the child feels like they are out of place or if they feel they are behind
01:14:10
not connecting with peers that are their age or in the similar age group. There's
01:14:17
there is an age where a kid reaches where they they're autonomous. They have
01:14:25
their own feelings, their own processing, their own their own cortisol rushing through their head. And it takes
01:14:32
parental empathy to look at your child and say, "What do you need?" not what is
01:14:39
easiest for me and my situation raising you, but what is going to turn you into the most successful adult you can be.
01:14:49
And that's what I feel like a lot of just homeschooled parents don't take
01:14:52
into account. Yeah, I 100% I agree. I think um something I've been looking at
01:14:59
more is there is that there's a line between listening to your kid and and the
01:15:06
guidance that you're talking about because if you veer too far to the I'm
01:15:11
only going to listen to my kid. You end up in an unschooling environment. I don't know if you've ever heard that
01:15:16
term before, but unschooling for anyone who doesn't know is is the point of homeschooling where it's like we're only
01:15:22
going to do what the kid wants to do. So the kid has to want to learn to read. They have to want to learn how to do
01:15:29
whatever. Um and I think personally I think that's too far like you are a parent still and you do need to create
01:15:37
some guidance and things like that. But I think more to your point of what you were saying was
01:15:42
there's also a point of looking at your kid and saying they are not thriving in
01:15:46
this environment and I need to listen to them when they say this is not working for me. Mhm. That's where we make the
01:15:54
shifts. And you we talked about it before, like my family, we started with a Becca. It did not go well. It was not
01:15:59
fun for us. It was not fun for my mom. It was not fun for me or my sister. Like it was just not fun. It did not work.
01:16:06
Lose lose. Exactly. It was not good. Um and that's why we started to pivot and
01:16:11
we changed things up and we were like, "Okay, let's try this other math. Maybe
01:16:15
that one didn't work." Okay. Once we got to the thing that worked for us and we
01:16:19
were like, "This is it." Uh, which was Matthew C, by the way, for anyone who if
01:16:24
you know it, you know it. Um, but uh, Matthew C is is like I think I'm going
01:16:31
to say it's like a cult, but like if you know it, you know it. That's all I'm
01:16:34
going to say. Um, Matthew, I'm going to have some Googling. Matthew C was great.
01:16:39
Um, but, uh, once we found that, it was like this is the thing and it just like we latched on to it and it was good. Um
01:16:47
but that took my mom looking at the way we learned and being like okay like we can make adjustments here we can do this
01:16:55
we can pivot we can shift. Um she also had that network of people who were in her corner also saying you can
01:17:03
shift it's okay like it doesn't have to be golden every single year and you can
01:17:07
catch up like if if one year just goes really badly you can still make it up you know. Um, that's the beauty of
01:17:14
homeschooling. It It really is. It makes school nonlinear. Yes, 100%. Well, and you have in in
01:17:22
situations like myself where it's like I my sister's three years younger than me.
01:17:26
There were times where we were learning very similar things and so there's a lot
01:17:29
of overlap when it comes to that, right? Maybe it's a similar history or whatever. The the actual workload is
01:17:35
different. Maybe I write more papers and she's doing coloring pages or, you know,
01:17:39
something like that. But but it was overall it was the same thing. So you kind of can do this this double duty of
01:17:46
like okay hey we're going to like this is what we're going to focus on. This is
01:17:49
how we're going to do it. You learn to for for us we learned how to learn in an
01:17:54
environment where you have two very different thinkers. I'm pretty atypical.
01:17:59
Like I just my brain just I would argue operates like quote unquote a normal person. Like I don't have the ADHD. I
01:18:06
don't have the dyslexia. I don't have anything like that. My sister is the
01:18:10
polar opposite of that. She's got some of those things and so the learning style is just very different. Well, you
01:18:15
have to tailor it to that person, which is what we've been talking about is like
01:18:19
figuring out what works and roll with it. That's what it takes. And uh you know, at least for my specific
01:18:27
situation, I just had a stubborn bullheaded grandma. And I'm sure there are countless other homeschoolers that
01:18:34
are in that same parental situation. And the only thing that I want anyone still
01:18:40
in homeschooling in a situation like that to know is that they are not alone and eventually they will be free. It
01:18:47
sucks. It sucks so much. But it is uh encouraging to hear that like okay some homeschoolers do succeed and they do
01:18:58
turn out really well and they leave their hometown and they escape. they they embrace their true colors and they
01:19:07
blossom once they're out of that system. And with public school, you know, that's
01:19:12
a whole another system that people blossom out of. But yeah, you said something at the near the beginning when
01:19:18
we were talking about your your homeschool experience and you were bringing up your grandma being the one
01:19:23
who homeschooled you and and almost raising you with that mentality of what she would have raised like a millennial
01:19:30
uh with and that schooling thought process. And I would and and I've kind of been mulling that over in the back of
01:19:37
my head this whole time and and thinking about it and I was like that's how like my parents were brought
01:19:42
up. Like when my dad talks about going to school, he talks about feeling like a dumb kid sometimes and being left
01:19:49
behind, but his parents were kind of that what you're talking about the refusal to change it because they were
01:19:55
like, "But this worked for me, so it will work for you. We just you'll get
01:19:59
there eventually." And then my grandma had that same thought of I was bullied
01:20:03
in high school, you're going to be bullied in public school, right? So it's
01:20:07
that it's that same thought of it doesn't change. Yeah. She maybe wanted
01:20:12
better things for you, but also missed some of the opportunity to like actually truly make it a better environment for
01:20:19
you, right? Yes. She was so It's It's being wrapped so wrapped up in, you
01:20:26
know, your own trauma that you can't see that little um things might be different and different
01:20:35
outcomes are possible. And that's just on whoever's so wrapped up in their in
01:20:41
their stress response that they can't step out of that. And that's really
01:20:46
unfortunate. I I feel like we could talk all day. This has been a great conversation. And I was looking at the
01:20:52
time and I was like I was like, "Oh my gosh, we're almost at an hour 30 at this
01:20:54
point." Um, which um has been great. It's just been a Yeah, it's been a great conversation.
01:21:01
I think it's it's really flown by, but I want to I want to give you the opportunity. Um, you know, we talked
01:21:07
about art. You're an artist. If people are looking for art, what do you what do
01:21:12
you offer? Do you do you make art? Where can people connect with you? That just let me hand it to you. Yeah. So, uh, I
01:21:19
do I do some silly doodles. Uh, I do take commissions. Um, but more so I do it for the enjoyment of it. Um, you can
01:21:28
find me on Tik Tok, Martian to Battle. You can find me on Instagram. Uh, my Facebook is dead. It is dead dead. And
01:21:37
I'm really bad about posting, but I will respond. I promise. And I also have a
01:21:43
portfolio, which I can send you a link for if anyone's interested in what the
01:21:49
inside of my brain looks like, which Yeah, I love that. Yeah. And I'll link I'll make sure all that stuff is linked
01:21:55
in the show notes as well so people can find you and connect and all of that all
01:22:00
that jazz. But yeah, Mar, this has been this has been awesome. I really appreciate you. And before I really shut
01:22:07
it down, turn it off, I guess. Uh is there anything else that has popped in your brain that you're like, "Okay, we
01:22:13
didn't touch on this. We need to quickly touch on it." I think my usual answer is no. I don't think I
01:22:23
have any questions. But let me look through my tabs here. Oh, this was something that I just I was
01:22:30
just researching on earlier and I thought was so funny. So, the um the original founder of the AC curriculum,
01:22:40
his name is uh Donald Howard. Great name, right? Um, I found this this random article just while searching like
01:22:50
a net worth blah blah blah uh campaign contributions. Just trying to dig up the dirt I can, right? I find out that um
01:23:02
I'm just going to read this verbatim from a Paththe blog. Mr. Howard, AC's
01:23:08
52-year-old founder is involved in a church controversy and in embarrassing civil litigation. In a civil suit in US
01:23:16
District Court in Missouri, two marketing consultants charged Mr. Howard with breach of contract. The suit also
01:23:23
states that he was subject the last he was subject last September of a Christian tribunal. An unofficial jury
01:23:30
of five fund fundamentalist church deacons in Dallas judged Mr. Howard unqualified to serve as a pastor,
01:23:38
deacon, elder, or Christian leader, according to the meeting's minutes. Why,
01:23:43
you ask? The tribunal said that Mr. Howard has presented himself publicly as a preacher of the gospel and a Christian
01:23:52
educator at the same time. The evidence revealed that he carried on a series of clandestine, immoral relationships with
01:24:00
young women in violation of his marriage vows. According to the meeting's minutes, an attorney for Mr. Howard
01:24:06
denies the allegations, but what uh assaultant doesn't deny their allegations. And I
01:24:15
think that it's just whether or not, you know, this went on, there's really nothing about
01:24:22
this man's wife online so far that I've been able to dig up. I'll have a
01:24:27
hyperfixation moment on it probably here in the next few weeks. But this this sparked something in me today to hear
01:24:35
that the the founder the original creator of a fundamentalist Christian education meant to bring children up in
01:24:43
a righteous way under God to teach them selfm motivation and you know keeping track of
01:24:50
your your own work and kind of just building up that ability to push yourself that that man who wanted to teach
01:25:04
children all these values would break his own moral code that quickly and that easily. And it's just
01:25:14
it it kind of shatters the whole house of cards. Yeah, it does. Yeah. I that's
01:25:21
the eighth curriculum. I don't blame you for Yeah. hyperfixating on stuff like
01:25:26
that because I I've been learning more and more about that and one of the reasons we got connected was one of one
01:25:32
of the the the callouts I did on the show was that I wanted to talk to people about their curriculum and the first
01:25:38
thing you messaged me was hey I did the ACE curriculum let's talk about it kind
01:25:42
of a deal because what I've been learning as I've been educating myself and not just
01:25:48
homeschool curriculum other curriculums and things like that is is just things like this right you trace it back to who
01:25:54
created did it, the founders of it, anything like that. And you start seeing these weird people were there. Who are
01:25:59
these people and what do they do? And I think there's a level of people can be
01:26:03
redeemed. I I still believe that. I think people can make a right rights out of their wrongs. Um, but you look at the
01:26:10
histories of some of these curriculums and some of these things, and it really makes you start to question,
01:26:15
is this the thing that I should actually be handing over to my kid um, and putting them through. And so, I just
01:26:24
highly encourage if there's any parents out there listening, like actually take
01:26:28
the time to do the research on what is the history of this company. And I'm not
01:26:31
just talking about pull up their web page and look at, you know, what they say about their company. I'm talking
01:26:36
about actually doing some of the dictates you. Yes. Yeah. They will give you all this bells and whistles on their
01:26:42
website. The AC curriculum website's so polished. It looks beautiful. It looks
01:26:47
so godly. And then you read the comics and the book and the black students don't go to the same school that the
01:26:56
white students go to, right? Within the curriculum's entertainment. And that's a lot of
01:27:03
people don't want to teach their children just inherent racism. You know, maybe if you
01:27:10
live in Oklahoma, that's a different Maybe that's a conversation I don't even
01:27:15
want to bring. That's a whole another podcast and maybe we need to have at some point. Um yeah, get some diverse
01:27:23
voices in here and and chat about those things. But um yeah, cuz I but yeah, I think that's a great point to bring up
01:27:30
here at the end of just like please educate yourself on like what is it that we're teaching our kids? What is it that
01:27:34
we're promoting and pushing? And do your own research. That's just just do it. Take the time to do it. It's
01:27:42
worth it. I promise you. Half the time Reddit does it for you. It's not that
01:27:46
hard. Exactly. Exactly. I also I argue like Wikipedia it can be a great jumping off point of like learning things and
01:27:54
but it's going deeper than just the article. It's going deeper than just the
01:27:57
Reddit post. It's looking for that next level. But yeah, for sure. For sure.
01:28:03
This has been incredible. I thank you once again. Thank you so much for having me on. This
01:28:09
has been a great conversation. Yeah, I appreciate it so much. And for the audience, I hope you guys enjoyed it as
01:28:14
well. You know what to do. If you if you enjoyed it, thumbs up, like, subscribe,
01:28:19
do all of the things that you know you at this point, we've been on the internet long enough. Yes, please do.
01:28:24
Um, and press the buttons, interact, you know, and if you've got uh questions,
01:28:30
comments, concerns, compliments, uh, you can feel free to shoot me an email at [email protected]
01:28:37
or a DM at exhsclub on Instagram, Tik Tok. I think that's the only places I have DMs at. Uh, but I'm on most of the
01:28:45
socials as that as well. So, that's it. Until next week, we'll see you. All
01:28:50
right. Peace and love. [Music] [Music]