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What is good my exhies? It is your boy Jacob Gooden and we are back for another week of the exhomeschoolers club. Uh,
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got a special episode for you today because recently I've noticed there's
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been kind of this theme in some conversations I've been having behind the scenes as I'm I'm prepping some some
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cool guests that are coming on the show and uh they've turned around a lot of
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the questions that I ask them on me and been wondering like Jacob tell us about your homeschool experience and I know
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I've you know I've sprinkled it in a few episodes here or there. I've done a few
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episodes where it has been me mostly talking but maybe on a specific subject of of my homeschool experience. So today
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I figured, you know what? I'm just going to run down the list of questions that I
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normally ask you guys uh about your homeschool experience and I'm going to turn them on myself and we'll see uh
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we'll see how this goes. But before we get into that, I've got a quick favor to
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ask and that is I want you on my email newsletter. Okay, so top link in the description is going to be a signup
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sheet to get on my newsletter. I send it out every two weeks just about. I've
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been a little inconsistent, but I'm back. I'm back on the grind every two
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weeks an email. It's got the latest episodes with a little breakdown about them. It's got whatever I'm currently
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reading, uh, some of the things I'm watching, tools I find, promotion for stuff that cool homeschool people are
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doing, like music they're putting out or movies or YouTube videos, all kinds of
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different stuff. Okay. Uh, it is, I don't know, it's just been kind of a fun
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secondary outlet uh to this podcast and I would love to have you on there. So, like I said, link is in the description.
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Go sign up. It costs you nothing. Okay, now let's get on with the episode. So, let's kick things off with kind of
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the quick and dirty, the elevator pitch, if you will, of my homeschool experience. Okay, I started
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homeschooling when I was in second grade. So, I did a few years of public school uh before that, but second grade,
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it was me and my sister. She went all the way kindergarten through 12th grade. Um, but yeah, very much like a private
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homeschool education experience. Uh, it was Christian Christian homechool experience. And um yeah, in Southern
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California, we were involved in a ton of co-ops. I know socialization was like a
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very important thing and to my mom. Uh she did not want us to be the unsocialized homeschool stereotype. And
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so we were definitely involved a lot in co-ops and and just with other homeschool families and even like other
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church families and things like that. So they did a good job trying to get us out
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of the house, I think. And the overall my takeaway from my home school experience, I enjoyed it. Okay, I I
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liked it. I don't look back on it with too much distaste um or disdain. Uh it got me where I
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needed to go. I think of course there's holes in my education that maybe could
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have been done better. There's changes that I personally make from the perspective of who I am today.
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But overall, I think it got me to where I needed to go. Got me into college. uh which got me the skills I needed to to
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do my career today. So, you know, overall good experience. I don't have that much to to complain about, if you
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will. But before I go on, I do want to quickly like touch on the different types of homeschooling, quote unquote,
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right? Because I think there's there's some kind of I have a lot of different
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people on. We when we ask them about their education experience, it varies, right? And we've had people who have
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done more charter school type stuff, who have done the private homeschool thing.
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I haven't had any unschooling people, but maybe we'll get there. Road schooling. There's there's a lot of
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different paths you can go. So, my family fell under the private homeschooling umbrella category, whatever you want to
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call it, which basically means that my parents were in charge of everything. There was no funding from the state.
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There was no funding from uh the government in any shape or form when it came to my schooling. They picked all of
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the curriculum. They did all of the research for it. Uh they uh did all of the recordkeeping, all these types of
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things. Um and then they had to submit whatever they needed to submit to the California government to make sure that,
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you know, I wasn't going to get taken away for like child neglect or something
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like that. But I know this also varies stateto state. Every state is different. California tends to have a little bit
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more lax rules when it comes to that kind of stuff. But essentially, we were a private school operating out of our
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house. Okay, that's the best way to describe it, I think. Now, there's also
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public and charter school situations where it's a lot of like online teaching
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or virtual teaching. Back in the day, probably was like cassettes and DVDs, but yeah, so at home learning, but with
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the schooling of like a public school. Okay, so these are sometimes state funded um or government funded, so
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they're they can be a little bit less expensive. Um, but you're sacrificing
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that that aspect of like choosing every piece of the curriculum that your child uses during their school experience. And
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then lastly, the other major category that gets talked about is unschooling. And I'll be honest, I don't know that
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much about it. I'm learning some about it. But essentially, unschooling is this idea, this philosophy that we
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teach kids based on the things that they show an interest in. Okay? And that goes for everything. So when they
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want to learn how to read, that's when we teach them how to read. When they want to learn how to do math, that's
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when we teach them how to math. And so it's very much a childdriven education.
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Now, I think my experience with homeschool lended itself to my parents had guidelines and rules that they were
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like, "Okay, we know that we want to get our kid through these levels of math and
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these levels of English and he needs to be able to read at a certain level and all these types of things." They also
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did a good job of leaning into the things that we were interested in. I've talked a lot on the show about being
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really into the history of pirates and I remember buying a bunch of books about it. had coloring books and all kinds of
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different things to learn about the history of pirates and you know that very much was catered to me. It was
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catered to my education style and need uh in the same way like as time went on. I mean I remember one year my mom
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handing us a list of books and she had decided hey you're going to read these
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six books but you get to pick out five from this list that you get to read. Um, and so there was kind of a mix of of
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things going on there. And that was I think what set my homeschool experience kind of apart from some other people was
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like even though my parents made a lot of the decisions, my sister and I also got some say in what was working, what
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wasn't working, and things we were interested in. Okay. Now, let's talk about some of the curriculum I used
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because I was thinking about about this and for the most part once we found what was working, we
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really stuck with it. Okay, so those first couple years of school when we were getting our bearings, so second
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grade, probably second, third, maybe fourth grade was like a Becca pretty much everything. And man, oh man, it
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just did not work. It was not It just wasn't it for my family. And I don't even It's been so long at this
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point. I was 8 years old when we started homeschooling. I'm 29 now, so 20 years
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ago. I just remember it really not working. But once we started to find things like we found Matthew C. And if
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you don't know what Matthew C is, I highly encourage you go look it up. Uh but it's like building blocks and you
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learn how to do math based off of blocks, which as a kid who grew up playing with Legos, right up my alley,
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you know. Um it made sense. it clicked in my brain and I was able to like actually progress through math pretty
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quickly and at like a normal speed like I was on par with everybody and for my sister it's same deal like she thrived
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with the Matthew C stuff that's not to say there wasn't challenging aspects of
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it just was the thing that worked for us okay so Matthew C absolute like gold standard favorite what's interesting
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I'll get into the the religious aspect of of the curriculum in a minute but so
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some other things that we looked at. So, we did exploring creation for science. Um, I think that was primarily high
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school science. I I don't remember. I feel like there was another curriculum
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maybe in like late grade school, junior high um times that we used. But most of our science was all like a science or
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Christian based science type thing. But I do remember that exploring creation, I
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remember taking a few things that I feel like were pretty solid. Like when I was in college and took science
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classes, I was like, "Oh, I I know this um pretty well." And so overall, like I said, I think it did it
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did its job. It wasn't maybe the greatest, but it it it did its job. It got me where I needed to go. History, we
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did this thing called Story of the World. And I'm trying to think of how to describe this, but they were these
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little books and they almost look like thick novels and we would read them and I remember them being pretty good
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storytelling like books. Um, and then if I remember correctly, my mom would pair them with
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we read a lot of like historical fiction and some biographies and things like that. But
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so for in let me give you an example. So for instance, when we learned about like
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Louiswis and Clark, the expedition of Louiswis and Clark, we read in addition to reading our history book, um we also
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would we read a a book about Sack Jia and it was historical fiction, but it painted the picture so beautifully and
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it was such a great novel to read like as a companion piece to this because it really it was written from her
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perspective and being with these strange men that she was getting to know but couldn't totally communicate with and
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even some of the villages that they went to uh and meeting other like America Native American tribes and things like
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that and her struggle with knowing the languages. Uh it it was interesting. It was like a wonderful piece of history.
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Now what's cool about the story of the world curriculum was that we also did it
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with a couple other families. And so we had kind of this co-op thing going and we would do we would get together
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once a month, maybe every two weeks, something like that. I don't think it was every week, but it definitely was
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fairly regularly. And we would do some kind of like I I'm going to call it a craft, but like
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an activity together. Okay. So, for instance, we at some point in our history learned something about
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Australia and there was something in the book about boomerangs and so we got together and we built boomerangs and we
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went to the park and played with boomerangs. It was dumb. It was little kids stuff,
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but it was so cool to be able to do that with other kids as opposed to just like
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my sister and I making them at home and then having nobody to play with them. That was what made that co-op so special
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was that it was like a play date mixed with school. And so we would get to do some fun activity. Like I said, I was
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really into pirates. So when we studied a lot of exploration, right, and discovery of the new world, very much in
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an era of pirates and we would make hard tac and we would make some kind of we made some kind of like,
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you know, beer or something cuz they couldn't take water with them was a little bit dangerous because it could
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get contaminated, but alcohol was a safer bet. Um, funny enough, but um anyway, story of the world. I don't
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know. I haven't done enough research into it to know totally like the accuracy or inaccuracy of those
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textbooks, but I do remember them being super fun. Okay, next up, Rod and Staff English. Okay, this I pulled this up
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last night as I was prepping for to record this episode. So, this was a Menanite based education system. So, Rod
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and Staff, big brand. They have a lot of different uh categories of um curriculum
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under them, right? All the different subjects. And we specifically used it for English and learning to write uh
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papers and stuff. It's funny because on the website there's a huge emphasis on like the
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Bible and uh the Menanite church and and those kinds of things, but as I'm looking back again, think it's 20
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years um at this point of when I would have used this. I don't remember it being super religious um in that aspect.
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But these books were I don't know they were these cute little hardbacks with it
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almost was like a fun with Dick and Jane picture on the front. And um I remember
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them yeah I remember them learning learn reading them and learning like sentence
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structure and learning how to put together a paper. They taught me how to address an envelope.
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All those kinds of things all the basics uh of what I needed to know how to do English essentially. And then
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once I got to junior high, we started up uh with Mrs. Yip's writing class. And
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man oh man, I gotta say she saved my butt so much in college. Okay, this woman, she would walk us through, I mean, all
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types of different writing, right? C from creative writing to doing a research paper to when I was doing um
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high school stuff with her, she was teaching us how to write uh college entrance uh essays and things like that.
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But I remember, I will never forget, she gave us these lists of sentence openers.
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I saved that and when I was in college, I taped it to my wall so when I would write my essays in college, it was just
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right there ready for me at any um whenever I needed it. Okay? And oh my gosh, her class, she she knew how to
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balance the fun and the serious, okay? Because obviously we're there to get things done. We can't just goof off the
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entire time. But she made writing into kind of it felt like a game at times, like I said, with sentence structure and
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like the sentence openers, but also the way she would talk about, okay, so there's all these different types of
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sentences and here's how you do this and here's how you avoid runon sentences and
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all these types of things. What was cool was then she started giving us guidelines to say, okay, you're going to
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write a paper and here's all the requirements for the paper. It has to have however many uh adjectives, this
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many adverbs, this many nouns, you know, all of these things, this many sentence
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openers, uh this many prepositions, all those types of things. So, it became like a game of like how many of these
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things can we check off? And what's so funny is that uh I was thinking about
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this as the other day because one of the podcasts that I work on, I also manage their blog. And while I
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don't do most of the writing for the blog, I do some of the editing for it. But one of the funny things about
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publishing things on the internet is SEO. And if you don't know what SEO is,
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it's search engine optimization. Okay? And so our blog has this tool on it that
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is it's like a s it's a search engine. It's an SEO optimizer type thing. And what
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it'll do is it ranks you based on how well you've done. So you pick keywords.
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So, for instance, this podcast, one of the big keywords would be homeschool kids, right? Homeschool would be a big
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one. Uh, exeangelical is probably a big one. Uh, homeschool education, all these different things. Okay? So,
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you would pick your keyword. Now, what's cool about this tool on these blog sites
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is it it gives you kind of a ranking. So, you've got green, green is good, right? Yellow is it's kind of mid and
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red is this is really bad. Okay? But it has all these different things in it. talks about all these keywords. It talks
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about your sentence structure, all these things. And it's like that game that I
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used to play with Mrs. Yip of just like how many of these things can we fit in and how many of these things can we get
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to go green? And I remember in a private conversation with Mrs. Yip years and years and years ago as I was prepping
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for college, she told me, she's like, "Look, I pushed you to do all of these
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things. That doesn't mean that those things make great writing, okay? And you
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don't need to always do all of them all the time, but it was an exercise to get
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you to at least use them and know how to use them properly. And that's again, I'm still using that
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kind of a skill in what I'm doing today. So anyway, I've talked enough about
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English. Let's move on. Spanish Rosetta Stone. Okay. I'm gonna say this was a weak spot in my
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education because I think I would have definitely benefited from going to a class and learning Spanish with other
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students. Rosetta Stone. I'm sure it's probably a lot better now than it was
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then, but oh my gosh, I had this headset that I would wear with a microphone and
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then it was a computer program and so a lot of it was they would say a sentence or a word or something like that and
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you'd say it back and it would use, you know, computer knowledge to tell you if
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it was good or bad. Okay? And uh I just I just wasn't good at it. It did not
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teach me conversational Spanish, which is honestly what I probably kind of needed. Um, which is hilarious because
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I'm a quarter Hispanic. So, I Yeah, I can order food and I can count my numbers, but that's about it. Okay. I
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can't really hold a conversation very well. So, definitely a weak spot, I think, in the home homeschool education
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arena, but yeah. So, okay. So, in researching all these textbooks and looking all these things up, I was
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curious at the percentage of them being like a Christian curriculum versus a secular curriculum. Uh, those kinds of
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things because my family, we bought a lot of our curriculum. We would go to the Chia
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Convention and the Chia Convention was like a Christian home educator association
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uh conference I think uh is what it stood for. And essentially it was like a lot of teaching. Um they would do some
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classes for students about I don't even remember but I know for parents it would
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be about they would have some of the these people who created these curriculums come in and talk about them
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and then they had a big uh vendor room and you could go buy your curriculum for the year. And so I was just wondering
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percentage-wise. And so as I as I was researching this, I would argue 90% of of the textbooks that I used were
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Christianbased. That's not to say that some of them like Matthew C for instance, math, I'm sure
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there's some curriculums out there that somehow really finagle the story of Jesus into them. Uh but Matthew C very
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much very cut and dry of like we're here to talk about numbers and numbers only.
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kind of on that borderline of like it is a Christian company but not a Christian curriculum per se. So
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I bring up the Christian curriculum aspect because we talked we've talked a lot on this podcast, okay, with other
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people about the good and the bad of of being raised in a Christian environment, a Christian
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homeschool environment where that is all you ever know. There's something to be
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said about the lack. I I understand one of the one of the big reasons that parents homeschool their kids is to
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control what is going in. And there is a fear among parents, especially Christian
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parents, that when a kid goes off to public school, they're being uh fed lies
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about the beginning of the world, evolution, Darwinism, those types of things. That was a big emphasis, at
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least when I was younger. And so a lot of my friends, myself included, were forced fed science that was a young
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earth creationism, a lot of Ken Hamesness to it. Um, a lot of Ken Ham teaching to
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be honest. Um, and yeah, and given these talking points of like, no, here's like
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the truth without ever being given the opposite side of that. You know, what what is evolution? What are these people
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saying? Um, and what do I believe? Where is the evidence for these things? Ken Ham can talk a good talk. I'll give him
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that. Okay. Uh, I listened to a couple of his um talks recently. Uh, because I was
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doing some research for something else I was doing and I was like, man, he's
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still kind of got this charisma that I appreciate. And he speaks with very much an authority of what he knows uh of what
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he thinks he knows he's talking about. The reality is though that when you go
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to his website, oh man, it is not sourced very well at all. Um, they make very bold claims
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about dinosaurs. They make very bold claims about uh Noah and the flood and all these different things as if they're
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just well-known facts without giving any kind of research, data points, backing to these things. And so now as an adult,
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I can look at those things and go, "Oh, okay, like maybe he wasn't such an
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authority on this to be talking about these things." I'm also the type of
00:22:10
person I like research. Um, some of the books that uh I've been reading and rereading, you guys know, I just
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finished the I stating goodbye series. Uh, previous to that on the show, I read uh When Religion Hurts You. One of the
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stark differences between books like that was that in a book like I stating goodbye, there's little to no
00:22:34
sources cited other than the Bible and a couple Christian marriage books. Uh but
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no no backing no like oh this is actually you know there's uh you know there's
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evidence to show that actually doing it this way leads to longerl lasting marriages or uh healthier relationships
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overall. Whereas a book like when religion hurts you uh she has a lot of things sourced there. Uh a lot of the
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studies that she references all sourced all easily accessible for you to go and dig deeper right and find find for
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yourself what you're looking for. And as someone who has a desire to like know
00:23:17
things and learn about things like I go down these deep dark rabbit holes sometimes of like discovering all of
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this education uh stuff. I talked about looking up a lot of these curriculums uh
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over the last couple days as I've been prepping for this episode and man oh man
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I got lost in a couple dark rabbit holes of going into Reddit threads and off of
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you know maybe starting at a Wikipedia article but linking off and going down these rabbit holes of looking at you
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know the histories of these education systems and where they come from and I could bore you all day with some of that
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stuff and I'm not going to do that but again what I find so interesting about
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the very religious Christian experience homeschooling and curriculum is again there's a lack of perspective a lot of
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times and I think that that's somewhat dangerous um it hurt me when I left uh home because
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when I got to college I knew one way and one way only. Okay. And when I started taking classes and and people didn't
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agree with that, even though I was at a small Christian college, um it was hard because I was getting hit with these
00:24:34
things that I had never I feel like prepared for these questions and also these people who I was meeting who were
00:24:41
Christians but didn't believe in a literal 7-day creation or didn't believe
00:24:46
that Noah's Arc was a worldwide flood. Uh things like that. Uh, and so I had
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never been met with anything like that before. And so all I had was my talking point without having ever looked at any
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evidence for anything else. And so again, that's not to say all of these curriculums were bad. They got me to
00:25:05
where I needed to go a lot of times. Uh, science probably being the weakest one of the bunch. Uh, well, aside from
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Spanish, still can't really speak uh a lick of espanol. But yeah, I think like
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I said, I think overall decent. Okay, I'm going to give my parents a passing
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grade on the curriculum when it comes to that. Let's talk about socialization a
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little bit. I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, it was really important
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to my mom. Uh, right off the rip, I remember part of us also transitioning into homeschool was the fact that we
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moved. So, we had lived in Ventura County. Uh well, I guess we still technically lived in Ventura County, but
00:25:46
we had lived in Ventura and when I was eight moved to Oak View, so about a 20 to 30 minute drive depending on where
00:25:53
you are. Uh and yeah, it was a big shift. I was no longer going to be able to go to the same school I had been used
00:25:59
to going to. And my mom was like, "Okay, let's give this home school thing a
00:26:03
shot." Okay, but all of a sudden, I don't have friends. And so, how do we build those?
00:26:11
Well, lean into church a little bit more. We got involved with a local Aana in our area, which Aana is essentially
00:26:20
the best way to describe it for people who don't know, I think is probably it's
00:26:24
like a mix of Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts with a game aspect to it. So, imagine once a week and also like a youth group
00:26:34
element uh to it as well. So imagine once a week going to a church and you spend some time learning and memorizing
00:26:45
Bible verses and reciting them and based on you it's like a workbook. So based on
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how far you get through the workbook, you earn badges similar to Boy Scouts except these are tied to Bible um and
00:27:00
scripture memorization as opposed to actual like useful life skills that you would learn um in the scouts. Um, and
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then there was a time of like games. Okay, so and they had I'm gonna hand it
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to Wana. They knocked it out of the park when it comes to games. Okay, so they basically had the circle and the circle
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was like a square asphalt area and you had four colored teams. So it's like red, yellow, blue, green I think I want
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to say. And um but this circle was designed and painted in such a way that you had all these like little markers
00:27:35
all over the place. And so you could do laps around it. You could do uh there was different games we would play with
00:27:42
like dodge balls and things like that. You had inner and outer circles uh those types of things. And so we play like hot
00:27:49
lava games where the circle would creep in and um things with bean bags where very similar to like cornhole. you got
00:27:56
to land the bean bag on a certain mark on the ground and all all these different things. Anyway, look it up. If
00:28:02
if you Google Awana and then Google like Awana like circle or something like that, it probably will come up or I want
00:28:10
to like activity circle or something like that. But anyway, so heavily involved in that. I met a lot of
00:28:17
homeschool kids through that. A lot of those people have been on the show or we've chatted off air um recently as
00:28:25
we've gotten reconnected. But man oh man that fun times I got to say the games
00:28:29
the games was it but also my parents got us involved in some wreck stuff. Um so I
00:28:35
played soccer for a little while and I played tennis for a couple years or maybe a year I don't know. Uh tennis was
00:28:42
not my game. Um and did like basketball camp and things like that. The other thing that my mom did was got involved
00:28:50
with a couple co-ops. So, the two main ones being group solutions and Achieve. And Achieve I don't think
00:28:59
is technically a co-op. I think it's an association of homeschool families that
00:29:05
kind of bond together to do some stuff. So, but we're let's talk about group
00:29:08
solutions first. So, group solutions, the basic premise of group solutions was meeting twice a month to give kids, give
00:29:16
homeschool kids a little bit more of like a schoollike experience. And so, parents would teach a class. So, you and
00:29:24
then kids would take it and it was maybe 15 students per class, maybe a little bit more. And so, Group Solutions taught
00:29:31
us a bunch of different things. I took some science classes at groups. I took music lessons. I took we did a uh there
00:29:40
was a boot camp for boys class that was very kind of Boy Scoutes. It was eventually
00:29:46
taught by a former Boy Scout Eagle Scout, John Slagboom, who's been on the show. Shout out John. Um
00:29:53
we did he did another survival class. We did um I'm trying to think what else we
00:29:59
did. There was cooking classes, there was sewing class, art classes, uh literature classes, uh all kinds of
00:30:06
different aspects, okay? And it was all these homeschool families uh in the Ventura accounting area that would come
00:30:12
together and do this. And so I remember the first couple years doing it, it was big, but like by big maybe couple
00:30:20
hundred people. And by the time we were leaving uh that, which was right around high school for me, they were splitting
00:30:27
off and actually turning group solutions into like two separate uh town events because the homeschool group had just
00:30:33
grown so exponentially uh throughout that time. And so anyway, very cool experience. I think what was so great
00:30:41
about that was it was an opportunity to make friends. It was also an opportunity
00:30:47
to socialize, to have a real school environment. So, we learned things like how to raise our hand in class, right?
00:30:54
How to ask questions and how to have meaningful discussion. My mom taught English class for many years at group
00:31:00
solutions and uh both like British and American literature and all these different things. She she's good about
00:31:07
creating a cool discussion group. Uh and and so we could like we learned how to have like actual meaningful conversation
00:31:16
around the books we were reading. Uh as opposed to just being like oh I kind of like this character. It's like well no
00:31:21
tell us about that character and why that speaks to you. And so another useful skill thank you mom. uh that came
00:31:29
in handy when I got to college um because I could actually hold meaningful conversation around textbooks and
00:31:36
research that we were doing uh and why things stuck out and spoke to us. So, shout out to that. Also, shout out to
00:31:44
the Sanchezes who put that on because I'm sure that was a nightmare at times
00:31:48
probably for you guys. So, shout out to you guys because that was an incredible time and I know myself and a lot of
00:31:54
other homeschool families appreciate the effort and the time that you spent doing
00:31:59
that. Okay, so thank you. The other thing that we were heavily involved in was Achieve. And Achieve, like I said,
00:32:07
was a little bit more of an association. I think it stood for the Association of
00:32:11
uh Christian Home Educators of Ventura County, I think. And this was a group that so it was like a membership and you
00:32:21
would pay to be a part of it. It was exclusively for private homeschoolers. So we didn't have any public or charter
00:32:27
school kids in that group. And it gave you access to a couple different things. So we had like park days, we did school
00:32:36
dances, there was a spelling bee, science fair, um there was like curriculum swap or like a curriculum
00:32:43
like yard sale type of thing. It was also a way for parents to get to know each other and so getting like the moms
00:32:52
together uh for like a mom's night out kind of a thing and similar like for the
00:32:56
dads and get them involved. There was I think I said the dancing stuff already. So yeah, swinging ballroom dance,
00:33:02
English country dance, graduations happen through Achieve. Uh, so we had actually like normal uh, well
00:33:09
quoteunquote normal graduations, but more of a traditional graduation ceremony as opposed to in the homeschool
00:33:15
world. I'm sure there's lots of kids who their parent just hands them a diploma
00:33:19
and it's like here you go. Um, no, we actually had like a ceremony with capp
00:33:23
and gown, uh, you know, the progression, all that kind of stuff. And I think they
00:33:28
would do that also for like eighth grade. So like exiting junior high and going into high school and then exiting
00:33:34
high school going into college age. So yeah, a bunch inside of Achieve. Achieve I as someone who had parents who served
00:33:44
on the board of Achieve. Uh I know that there was a lot of messiness that happened behind the scenes with that.
00:33:50
Don't know if it still exists today or how it's changed. Um but I know my
00:33:55
experience with Achieve from is great. I loved it. specifically the dancing. Um,
00:34:01
you know, I'm going to get into extracurriculars in a minute, but yeah, it definitely was like a big deal and I
00:34:07
loved I loved it so much. It also just opened you to a network of people, which was cool because even when I was in high
00:34:15
school and starting my own businesses and wanting to teach guitar lessons and wanting to to offer things to my
00:34:21
community, I had this network of people that I could put that out to. Um, and so
00:34:25
I wasn't just like left with nothing, you know what I mean? So, other co-ops
00:34:32
and other socialization things. I kind of hit on this when I talked about my history curriculum, but
00:34:39
my family was involved in some smaller like three to four family co-op type things where we get together for history
00:34:48
or I know in high school we also kind of did small co-opy things with uh English
00:34:54
lit um with science, those types of things where we would get together with under 10 families but maybe a little bit
00:35:02
more than four. uh and do like our labs together for science or do some kind of uh like a like I talked about discussion
00:35:11
groups, my mom teaching that kind of a thing. Uh so there was that. I feel like there was another subject that I'm just
00:35:18
totally spacing on. But a lot of particularly in the Ohigh Valley, which is where all of my homeschool years
00:35:25
happened, there was always opportunities for, you know, someone's mom is is going to teach
00:35:31
a baking class or someone's mom is doing this or so and so's dad uh wants to
00:35:36
teach, you know, all the boys how to drive a tractor or, you know, whatever. There was just opportunity to do things
00:35:41
like that. And so, I don't know if those would maybe 100% be labeled co-op. I'm
00:35:47
just kind of putting that label on them to be like there was also a lot of just this kind of support system because
00:35:56
as I've gotten older and I've talked a lot more to homeschool parents um it's
00:36:02
really interesting because like my parents both college educated people my mom wanted to be an English teacher um
00:36:11
kind of a thing so she has some of the knowhow for like how to do that and I have other friends who their their mom
00:36:18
was a school teacher or went to school to be a school teacher and so their homeschool experience is pretty
00:36:25
I'd say it's like pretty solid because their parent like knew what went into
00:36:30
like managing a classroom. Uh and then you have other homes parents who didn't
00:36:35
have any of that. And I'm not saying that they gave their kid a terrible experience, but just it's
00:36:41
interesting to see the parents that maybe only have a GED or a high school diploma
00:36:46
became teachers and became, you know, and and and homeschooled their kids and why they did it. Um, that kind of a
00:36:53
thing. All that to say, it was important for the families of Ohio in particular to bond together, hopefully to help out
00:37:00
in the weak spots that some parents had. Um cuz even my own parents, they were not good. Science was not their area and
00:37:08
thankfully we had friends who that was their area and so we leaned into that and we used them as best we could uh to
00:37:14
to make that happen. So let's talk about extracurriculars a little bit. I've
00:37:19
talked a lot on the show previously about swing dance being massive for me. And you know what's so funny about that
00:37:25
is that I think I started dancing when I was 11 years old and my mom stuck me in this
00:37:32
class. And I think it was with the mindset of let's Jacob's about to be a
00:37:38
teenager and he's going to need to know how to talk to the opposite sex and to
00:37:43
not be weird. Um, I don't know that it totally succeeded in that, but it definitely gave me an
00:37:51
opening to like understand like that dynamic, the boy girl dynamic, I guess. Um, and so it was cool.
00:38:01
Definitely shout out to the Bozart girls for teaching me how to swing dance. Shout out to John Pettit for teaching me
00:38:06
how to swing dance. I loved it so much that I ended up taking over um when they all graduated high school and I taught
00:38:13
dance for a number of years, but so much fun from East Coast Swing to Lindy Hop,
00:38:18
Charleston. Uh learned a little bit of West Coast Swing as well. uh was not the homeschool community preferred east
00:38:25
coast swing because it's a lot more like big band um kind of a thing where west
00:38:29
coast swing what's funny about west coast swing is the reason it's called
00:38:34
that is because it's a slot dance and I could talk all day about this if you
00:38:38
want to know more comment down below let me know I'll do a whole episode on swing
00:38:41
dance if you like but uh it's a slot dance that was designed for the movies okay and so east coast swing is danced
00:38:50
in a circle And so so when the movies became big in the 1920s era, right, they needed to do d they they wanted to put
00:39:02
dancing in the in the films, okay? And they needed dances that still showed uh either a person's profile or the front
00:39:10
of a person. And so Charleston and West Coast Swing became the thing. And so they turned East Coast Swing uh slowly
00:39:17
but surely into West Coast Swing. And it became a slot dance. And so when you dance it, what I mean by that is that if
00:39:23
you're staring directly at your partner, let's say you're my partner, okay, as we
00:39:28
dance, when when uh we're going to swap spots and then swap back, okay, that's
00:39:34
what a slot dance is. And so you would always have, let's say your camera is on
00:39:38
your left side here, pointed at you, your profile would always be uh visible to the camera um whether it's your left
00:39:48
side or your right side. Okay. uh east coast it was always it was a circle like I said and so you would never end in the
00:39:54
same spots. Sometimes back would be to the camera uh and that was just not ideal. And so when they were filming
00:40:00
movies especially dance sequences like I said you needed to be able to like see the person but also if they needed to
00:40:06
shoot direct on someone was having conversation while dancing or something like that. Even if they moved they
00:40:12
needed to make sure that person was going to end up either right back in the same spot or on the opposite side. uh
00:40:19
kind of thing. And then Charleston, if you don't know what Charleston is, look
00:40:23
it up. But Charleston is a side by side uh swing dance. So you hold your partner
00:40:28
um as as the lead, you hold your partner with your right hand um and you basically are in an open V formation and
00:40:36
they would point you at the at the camera and tell you to boogie on down. Okay, so little history lesson kind of a
00:40:44
thing. Uh correct me if I'm wrong if you swim dance people. Maybe I maybe I have
00:40:48
my facts wrong, but that's what I remember uh in learning swing dance type stuff. But anyway, I also brought up
00:40:56
extracurriculars. Okay, extracurriculars. What else we had? I kind of brought up tennis and and soccer
00:41:02
and basketball. I was not a big sports person uh at all. I played basketball like in my neighborhood just on the
00:41:09
street and things like that, but I definitely I didn't like it. I was I was always the artsy kid. um kind of a
00:41:18
person, but I did get into airsoft and that was so much fun and paintball. And when I got into those things, those kind
00:41:25
of became my sport uh of choice. And so me and my buddies would get together at least once a month. Then the summers I
00:41:31
felt like we got together like every week, sometimes like all weekend long. Uh we would play, but yeah, we would do
00:41:37
we would do that just like get outside, get dirty, roll around, have fun. um you
00:41:44
know like an elevated Nerf battle uh so to speak and so that was a lot of fun. Obviously, I brought up like church and
00:41:52
Aana and youth group. Those things played huge roles as extracurriculars in my life. Like, uh the different churches
00:42:00
that I went to, not only did I attend and was a member, but also like would serve on the worship team or sound team,
00:42:08
lights, multimedia, uh children's ministry, a whole plethora of different things, uh
00:42:16
as well. And the same with youth group. like not only did I like attend, but I ended up on the worship team and then I
00:42:21
ended up like going to junior high camp as a leader a couple times and uh being on the band and stuff. So definitely
00:42:27
like was heavily involved in those things. Um as well music was like a huge extracurricular. I started playing
00:42:36
guitar. Oh man, I want to say I was like 12 years old. Could have been a little earlier than
00:42:43
that. I don't 100% remember. But uh I started Roseanne Walrip was my guitar teacher and uh I played we rented a
00:42:54
crappy guitar from her and I would play and I was learning scales and learning little songs here or there and the deal
00:43:01
was I think at 6 months or a year or something like that. My parents would buy me my own guitar
00:43:06
and I hit it and I was like yeah I want to I want to play guitar. And they were like are you sure? Yeah, absolutely. I
00:43:14
want to play guitar. And so we went and bought a guitar and I was really shy. Uh
00:43:20
super super shy to the point where I wouldn't touch the guitar in the store.
00:43:25
Mostly I I know for me there was there's two aspects to this. One, I did not want
00:43:31
to play in front of people because I didn't know if I was any good. And when
00:43:34
you go to a a little guitar store, you know, you're hearing people shred. You're hearing people who are incredible
00:43:40
guitar players do their thing. and I knew that I wasn't that. And so I was I
00:43:45
felt like I was just going to be embarrassing myself. But two, um I also had this nervousness that I
00:43:53
was like going to break it. And so I feel like I didn't want to touch anything because they weren't mine and
00:43:59
they're expensive, right? Guitars are crazy expensive. And so anyway, so the
00:44:05
owner of the store, such a nice gentleman, he would play the different guitars and I picked a guitar based on
00:44:12
the sound that it made and what I liked. And so we found this really nice guitar,
00:44:17
got a great discount on it. Um, I still have it to this day. It's a beautiful,
00:44:20
beautiful handmade guitar from Canada. And um, what's funny, took it home, still had not played it, pulled it out,
00:44:27
tuned it up, played the guitar. Both my parents went, "Oh my gosh, Jacob can
00:44:31
play guitar. Yeah, I could play guitar. I just had been playing on a piece of trash. Um, so
00:44:38
anyway, like I said, shout out to Rosanne Walrip for those early guitar lessons. I then transitioned Tim Frans.
00:44:45
Uh, you guys know Carrie and Ellia and Katrin who've been on the show, but Tim
00:44:49
Frans uh was my guitar teacher for many, many years. Got me into electric guitar,
00:44:53
taught me how to play bass, taught me how to run a studio a lot about microphone placement and all these
00:44:58
different things. But anyway, phenomenal guitar player and instrumentalist. Absolutely incredible. But yeah, he kind
00:45:05
of took me to that next level and um just so much fun. I loved music and that's what I ended up going to college
00:45:12
for originally was I wanted to work in the music industry. We're going to get
00:45:16
there in the college years in just a minute. But yeah, so music huge part of my education. I'm also trying to think
00:45:22
about extracurriculars. There was something else I thought of and I cannot place what it was. I've got it. The
00:45:30
other big extracurricular item on a lot of the homeschool families uh was theater and
00:45:39
it's so interesting because it all revolves around the Mitchell family. I think my personal opinion but the
00:45:45
Mitchell's had would do theater in the round at their house. They had a round driveway and right in the center
00:45:53
we build a uh stage and have plays every summer. Uh yeah, pretty much every summer. And uh they had already been
00:46:03
doing it for a couple of years before I got involved. And like I said, I was a shy kid, so most of the time I just did
00:46:09
backstage stuff, wear all black, go out, do my thing, change props out, whatever.
00:46:15
Not a big deal. Uh, as time went on and I got a little bit more uh, courage, uh,
00:46:22
I started making my way out on the stage and singing and dancing and, uh, having
00:46:27
fun. And what's so funny is like it's such a important memory to me because I
00:46:35
gained so much confidence doing theater and I never went on to do theater like in college or anywhere else other than
00:46:43
the Mitchell's backyard, but it gave me so much confidence to just be goofy and
00:46:49
silly and have characters and that kind of a thing. I did improv in college and like it just I had so much more
00:46:55
confidence from having that that theater background. Um, so anyway, but I also, like I said, I loved music and I love
00:47:04
like the entertainment industry in general. And so it was just like such a great
00:47:09
fit. And so I think there's many of you uh who were my friends back in the day.
00:47:14
You guys know the Mitchell's Backyard Theater Productions was like the place
00:47:18
to be during the summer. And uh yeah, it was great. So that's kind of uh probably
00:47:24
the majority of my extracurriculars. I wanted to also briefly touch on uh college and that experience because
00:47:33
when I was growing up there was just somewhat of a stigma around homesooled kids being able to get into college and
00:47:38
what that looked like. And I think you know the history of homeschooling you know it took a while for it to get kind
00:47:45
of more socially accepted and adopted in our country. And so, but I think I was really on the tail end of that where it
00:47:55
was pretty legitimate where my parents kept a really good record of what I did and I had transcripts and all those
00:48:01
types of things. So, for me, college wasn't really an issue as far as getting
00:48:06
into it. Okay. I also had parents who thankfully got me the help I needed as we got closer. So, I had a college
00:48:14
guidance counselor who helped me pick out a school and figure out what I wanted to do because originally I was
00:48:18
like, I'm not leaving California because why the heck would I not going to go
00:48:22
super far away? Um, I want to work in the entertainment industry, specifically audio engineering, and I want to make
00:48:28
albums. I want to make music albums. Okay, not a lot of schools uh do that surprisingly. Uh, it's probably a few
00:48:37
more, but in 2013, 2014 when I was starting to look at colleges, that was not the case. Um, there's a big music
00:48:45
school here in Nashville, Tennessee called Belmont. They do that. Uh, there's a couple schools throughout the
00:48:50
Midwest. There's a big school in Chicago I'm blanking on the name of right now
00:48:54
that does it. There's Fullale University in Florida, uh, that is not a bachelor's
00:49:01
program. It's more of like a trade school type of thing. there's still a
00:49:04
lot of question on if it's legitimate or not. So, I knew I wanted a four-year
00:49:08
degree because I wanted I wanted a bachelor's to be able to fall back on if the music industry thing didn't work.
00:49:14
Okay. Um, but I wasn't willing to leave California. At the time, there was only
00:49:23
two schools, I think, in California that were offering what I was looking for. One was a master's college and one
00:49:32
was a state school and I can't remember which one it was but anyway but what was
00:49:39
so funny was I had all these other criteria that I wanted to meet. Okay. I was really scared of going to a big
00:49:44
school because well I wasn't used to being in a classroom with a lot of people. I like the smaller intimate
00:49:49
settings. So they're like okay that's big school's probably going to be out.
00:49:54
Okay so there was that. The second thing was my guidance counselor was like, "Okay, well, I think you need to start
00:50:00
looking outside of California because you're starting to put your eggs all in
00:50:04
one basket, which was the M's College." And thankfully, they were just like,
00:50:08
"Why don't you just apply some of these other schools?" Cuz at the very least,
00:50:12
even if you don't go to them, you can get the financial aid uh offer and then
00:50:17
you can use them against you can use the colleges against each other to get the best offer possible. And I was like,
00:50:24
"Okay." So, I started applying applied to Greenville College, applied to a
00:50:28
school in like Iowa and some other school in the Midwest and uh I think somewhere in Colorado potentially just
00:50:35
like kind of spread myself a little thin and some of them didn't really have
00:50:39
totally the degree I was looking for but maybe had something adjacent to it and surprise surprise got into every single
00:50:47
school I applied for. I am not a smart person by the way, okay? Not super smart. did very average on my SATs and
00:50:54
ACT scores. I got into every school I wanted. Um, and I got two schools that offered me really good packages where I
00:51:02
was like, "Okay, I'd be kind of dumb not to." And, uh, yeah. So, anyway, weeded
00:51:07
it down, ended up in Illinois, went to college. It was both the best three years of my life and the worst three
00:51:14
years of my life. um for for varying reasons, but college was really crazy because it was the first time I'd ever
00:51:23
really been on my own and it was the first time I didn't have friends. And two things that were,
00:51:30
I think, big and important was one, I chose not to identify as a homeschool kid right off the bat. It came out
00:51:39
probably at the end of my freshman year, and it's not like I lied to people. If
00:51:43
people asked, I would just say it. But I didn't, if someone was like, "Oh, tell
00:51:48
me about your education." I'd be like, "Oh, I went to private school in
00:51:51
California, small private school in California." kind of a thing. Um, as opposed to saying, "Oh, I was
00:51:56
homeschooled." That kind of a thing. And um, so I did that. And then the other
00:52:01
thing was that I learned that I actually my socialization skills kind of crap. Um, I was used to being around
00:52:09
homeschool kids and we're a bunch of weirdos. And that's I mean that in the
00:52:13
best possible way po, you know, ever. But, um, we are a couple weirdos. And so, I'm thankful I had a college
00:52:20
professor who was like, you need to learn to chill out, okay? You need to like tone it down. You're you're at an
00:52:26
11. Bring it down to like a six. Um, you know, or a five and just like chill. Just like be cool. Be in the room. And
00:52:35
especially if you want to work in the entertainment industry, uh it's all about like can you hang? Uh which is
00:52:41
very true, still remains true to this day. Okay? Can you be a good hang? And so anyway, college was great. Gave me
00:52:50
some great friends. Um met my wife. It was tough. Classes were hard. Um tell you that right now. Um I got like my
00:52:59
first like B's and C's in college and I was like, "Oh man." Um, I got a D in
00:53:04
college, somehow still graduated. Uh, but yeah, it definitely it woke me up, I think, to a lot of
00:53:13
things. It was this big shift in my life where I was I started thinking for myself uh in a lot of ways. And uh at
00:53:20
the tail end of it, I definitely I had definitely changed. Okay. And what I mean by that is when I when I talked
00:53:31
earlier about my curriculum and it teaching a very one-sided perspective, I walked out of college really feeling
00:53:37
open to a lot of different things, which is crazy considering I went to a small Christian college that very much like it
00:53:44
was a Methodist college, think United Methodist. So we had a lot of rules around everything we could and couldn't
00:53:50
do. We had all of our a lot of our teaching was very much still based in like a Christian aspect. Uh I took
00:53:58
religion uh religions class. I took an Old Testament class. I had Bible class. I went to church. I served at church. It
00:54:05
was mandatory that we go to chapel like three days a week. Uh be in Bible studies and all this different stuff.
00:54:11
But I think what it taught me, one of the big things that I woke up to in college was the fact
00:54:18
that like even though a lot of the people there were Christians, we believed vastly different things.
00:54:27
And it was okay to ask questions of each other and it was like this safe environment to kind of do that and we
00:54:32
would disagree on a lot of stuff and uh I had a buddy who's like he was a Calvinist and I was non- denominational
00:54:39
with more of an emphasis and like a Baptist background um kind of a thing. And so if you're not religious and you
00:54:45
don't know anything about like there's Christianity and then within Christianity there's all these little
00:54:51
subgroups of what's going on. um it is crazy church drama inside of there and
00:54:57
there's crazy like little tweaks that people make um and and two uh it's it's
00:55:03
their interpretation of the Bible, right? It's their interpretation of religion and the history of religion and
00:55:08
all these different things uh that set us on these paths of like I must identify with this and I must identify
00:55:14
with that and that kind of a thing. And I think that's great. That's wonderful
00:55:17
that we we can be that way. Um, but like I said, I think college gave me that freedom finally to like ask in a lot of
00:55:25
senses dumb questions of people and be like, "Okay, so why do you believe that?" And because I started getting
00:55:31
asked that question a lot. And it made me realize that I was like, "Oh, maybe I
00:55:34
need to actually like think about these things more than just like my pastor told me this or my mom and dad told me
00:55:40
this or this was my understanding of what the Bible said." um and kind of look at actually like you know some
00:55:49
theological evidence for those things. And so that served me well because when I left college and I
00:55:58
was out in the real world then you really start to come across vastly different world beliefs. And as I got my
00:56:04
first jobs and I started asking people questions and all these different things. I've always thankfully worked in
00:56:09
environments that the people I work with are very open about what they believe and they're very
00:56:16
willing to talk and they're very accepting of who you are as a person and that kind of a thing. And so it also set
00:56:24
a very hopefully good standard for me to be the same way uh to people and say, "Okay, let me just like meet you where
00:56:30
you're at and uh ask questions and that's cool." So anyway, I could rant
00:56:36
and rave about that all day of like that transition away from from Christianity uh and and
00:56:43
my belief system and things like that, but I already made an episode on that and my why I deconstructed uh and I've
00:56:48
talked pretty extensively on this podcast about it. But all of these things to be said, okay, I'm now
00:56:56
officially 10 years, no 12 years, oh my gosh, 12 years, uh, out of home school. Okay. Or coming up on 12 years out of
00:57:05
home school. And I still look back on it very fondly. I still look back on it and it's one of
00:57:13
those things where if someone comes to me and they're like, you know, I'm
00:57:16
thinking about homeschooling my kid or, you know, maybe I'm just like, you know,
00:57:20
exploring education options, I will talk about it from a very fond perspective because I had a great time. I learned a
00:57:28
lot of really incredible things that I don't think I would have learned in public school. I also missed some
00:57:34
important things that I probably would have gotten in public school, but overall, I came out okay. I survived. I
00:57:41
survived college. I've survived uh I mean almost a decade out of college. Uh
00:57:47
now, uh dang, that's crazy. Uh and I'm alive. I'm thriving. My career has been
00:57:55
what it's been, you know, like I I have done the thing. I have succeeded uh in a lot of senses. And so anyway, so
00:58:05
like I said, when people come to me and they're talking to me, the things that I
00:58:07
point out to them are like to me, the reason that I'm successful is because my parents advocated for me
00:58:17
having education that I needed to succeed. When I struggled in something, they helped find a new curriculum or a
00:58:24
new way of teaching it that made sense to me and my sister. Okay? when uh you know when I had questions, they didn't
00:58:32
always steer away from every little thing. And sometimes they did, but they would
00:58:40
encourage us to research and to learn things and to ask questions. And when I say that,
00:58:47
it could mean a lot of different things. It could obviously mean religion, but I
00:58:50
I'm thinking more in the sense of when I was really into something specific like
00:58:56
music and really got into like John Mayer or Eric Clapton or something like that, wanting to learn the history of
00:59:03
those people and what they've played and the styles and their teachers and all
00:59:06
those types of things. Like my parents gave me the tools and the resources to get that knowledge. Uh, and so it gave
00:59:13
me a deep appreciation for learning and it gave me a deep like wanting to learn.
00:59:18
And so anyway, I still hold that to this day. So I think that that's more important. And that's why I say I think
00:59:26
my parents were great advocates for me and my sister uh as as students um because they gave us the tools. They saw
00:59:34
where we were lacking and they helped give us the tools we needed to to make it. Okay. So that to me is the more
00:59:40
important thing as someone who's looking at like the best education style for
00:59:44
their kid is like, well, where's your kid at and what does your kid need? Because it might be public school
00:59:49
because they're like super social butterfly need to be around people 24/7 kind of a person. Um or maybe they're
00:59:58
more introverted and school is overwhelming, right? The big classroom setting is overwhelming. So like looking
01:00:04
at those different things is important. Um, the other thing that I say to those people is like, why do you want to do
01:00:12
this? Is it selfish or not? And I think there's a large there's a vast majority
01:00:20
of people who I think do it for selfish reasons. They want their kid to be, and I don't know that they would argue that
01:00:28
it's a selfish reason, but they want their kid to turn out maybe just like them or to be protected from all these
01:00:36
different things. and um and not go through hardships, which I don't think is like totally always a bad thing. And
01:00:42
and like I said, it's kind of painted in this light of like it's for you um kind
01:00:46
of a thing, but what is your motivation for doing it because it it sometimes is selfish and but if
01:00:54
you can come at it from a non-selfish place, if you can come at it, like I said, from wanting to give your kid the
01:00:59
best possible uh education possible, I'm using possible a lot. Um can you tell?
01:01:07
Maybe it's it's stemming from a good place. So anyway, I've rambled probably
01:01:13
long enough at this point on my homeschool experience. And um yeah, I hope that's cleared up maybe some
01:01:20
questions that people have around it. Um if you got more, let me know. I'd love
01:01:25
to answer them. And uh yeah, I'm trying to think. Anything else? You got anything? Okay, good. I guess it's just
01:01:34
me. This has been fun. Uh, it's always fun chatting with you guys and um, yeah,
01:01:40
do all of the internet things that you know how to do. Get the show, share the show with someone uh, that you love,
01:01:45
someone you care about. Uh, leave me a comment, leave me a like, do whatever you feel comfortable doing uh, to help
01:01:52
get the show out to more people. Remember, subscribe to the newsletter. Uh, link is in the description. It's the
01:01:58
top one in the description. Just do it. It cost you nothing. If you don't want
01:02:01
to get the emails, but you have a burner email account, put your burner email account in there. Okay. Um,
01:02:08
and uh, yeah, and if you want to get a hold of me, you know how to do that. You can either email me at [email protected]
01:02:15
or you can shoot me a DM at exhclub on Instagram, threads, and Tik Tok. Uh, yeah, that's where I'll be. So, until
01:02:23
next week, we'll see you. All right. Peace. [Music] [Music]