Reimagining Education with Laurie Block Spigel | Homeschooling, Self-Directed Learning, & Creativity

What's a learning experience that really stands out? A moment where you really learn something when you were, say, between the ages of 6 and 18. What's a life changing moment where you change the way you saw yourself, change the way you saw the world, where your horizons were expanded? That kind of learning experience, A lot of people are hard pressed to think of one.

Hi, everyone. I'm Manisha, the founder of Modulo. And I am so thrilled to welcome today a guest named Lori Block Spiegel. This is a long overdue interview. Lori is a virtual legend in the New York City homeschooling community. New York, the us the world for that matter, definitely has a presence in Australia and all over. And she is an author, a teacher, a homeschooling Advocate with over 30 years of experience in homeschooling and alternative education. She's the author of Education A Guide for the Aspiring, the Foolhardy and the Disillusioned. And most recently she published Letting Them Adventures in Game Based Self Directed Learning, which chronicles her teaching experiences and, and has 75 hours of original curricula she's created for her students in her classroom. And I'm just so thrilled and I'm just so happy. Said it again. I just, I'm so excited to dig in today about homeschooling and education and everything else. Lori, so thank you so much for, for being here and, and your willingness to share your wisdom with our community.

Oh, always my pleasure.

Oh, fantastic. So I think, you know, I mean, you have such a fascinating story and I've heard bits and pieces before, so I would just love to hear, you know, how you got started homeschooling. I know it wasn't something you expected to go into and perhaps a little bit about your own homeschooling adventures and how you ended up becoming a homeschool teacher and developing this. Actually, I didn't even mention, but this incredible directory of experiences in the New York area for homeschoolers as well.

Well, it's been a lifelong journey with lots of twists and turns, which I think is the way life journeys happen. I don't think we can really plan everything out and expect it to turn out that way. I think we stumble over, maybe even stumble into our life purpose. At least that's what happened to me. So I have to say that when I was a girl, I swore I'd never become a teacher. And this is the first chapter in my new book. It's I swore I'd never teach my sister. We made the solemn vows to each other in Fact, we said the words, over my dead body. I will never, ever, ever. And this, of course, was because all we knew was school. All I knew was these overcrowded classrooms that bored me to tears. I seen my K through 12 years as an utter waste. My schooling as an utter waste. Not those years, because I was always learning. I loved to learn. And I had a very fortunately enriched home life educationally. Both my parents were professors. They traveled a lot. Travel alone is enough to expand your horizons almost infinitely. So here I was growing up in a library with an amazing art collection. That's what my parents did. My dad was a professor of comparative literature. He spoke all these languages. He translated books, wrote books. My mother was a professor of education. She had me assist her from age 7 on. I was helping her create curriculum. I was going into her college classrooms. She had me, I'll never forget this. I must have been eight or nine. She had me act out what my school teacher did as examples of what not to do. So I have to say, from a very early age, I never assumed my teachers had it right. In fact, I always assumed they didn't have it right. I knew what learning was, and it wasn't happening in school. And I knew what my mother was doing with her students. And she was making a dent in inner city education. She was bringing her student teachers into schools in Harlem, and she did something she named Project Muse, which I assisted her with. And this was teaching kids how to read through the arts, through primarily art and music. And I was at home, you know, at that point. There was no Google. We had no computers back then. Not in the homes, anyway. And to write down song lyrics, I had to listen to the record over and over and over at a slow speed. And I wrote down song lyrics because she said, these kids are already singing the songs. Let's give them the lyrics. They'll be reading, and they won't even realize they're reading. She had me make kits. She would say, you know how to make sock puppets? Put everything you need in an empty shoebox and write down step one, step two, step three. And she had all these kits to make a doll, to make a kite. And she showed up with her army of student teachers and me to this public school classroom in Harlem. And the first day there, I watched kids who were older than me, they were sixth graders, unable to read Dr. Seuss, unable to read Red Fish, Blue Fish. And I was devastated just by seeing it. I taught myself how to read at 3. I couldn't imagine being 10 or 12. And not knowing how to read, I could not imagine. And she would sit down, a kid, and she would say, everything that you need to make a kite is in this box. All you have to do are read the instructions. And after you make it, I'll take you across the street and we'll fly it. By the end of one year, these same kids who couldn't read or write had written, performed, directed and produced their own musical production.

She gave them the motivation and the reason to learn the skills.

She was there for the whole thing. And she had recently come back from a trip to Africa and she gave them her slide collection from all her photographs from Africa for the backdrops for their play. And I remember there was a really moving musical. There was a whole scene with a blind man. And the backdrop for that was a close up of an elephant's eye that my mother had taken. So it was unforgettable. The whole thing was unforgettable. And I also remember at the end of that, the tears in her eyes when she realized that her time with these kids was over. That they were going back into the same really damaged system, terribly damaged system that produced these kids that couldn't read. Without her and her student teachers and her staff, she'd be working with a different grade the next year. So I had these experiences when I was a kid at the same time as I was determined to never ever become a teacher. I didn't want to follow my parents footsteps as much as they were amazing teachers. I don't know how much I really liked them as people. And I got to see the inside of what it was like to work in a university setting. Didn't think it was a happy place to be. So it just seemed kind of insidious in. In that environment, political and all of that. A lot of backstabbing. So yeah, in fact, I worked pretty hard to avoid it. But sometimes your purpose comes to you, the calling happens to you, and there's nothing you can do about it. And I. I think I always was a teacher, no matter what I was doing. When I look back on it, I was teaching the first class I taught, I was 12 years old. I taught art in my basement. I passed flyers around the neighborhood. I got, I don't know, six or eight kids from the neighborhood to come over. And I created a curriculum by myself. And on day one, I changed it.

Wow.

And so this has been the hallmark of what I do. I can think back to that time and I changed it because I could clearly see what they needed when I couldn't without having met them that first day, they were all drawing lollipop trees. And I said, okay, let's take a walk outside. And we walked outside and we looked at the tree because they had this brown rectangle with a green circle. Everyone did that. And we stood outside and I said, so how many colors do you see in that tree trunk? Name all the colors except for brown. And they saw green, they saw gray, they saw black, they saw red, they saw yellow. I said, okay, how many colors do you see in the leaves? I name all the colors except for green. And it was the same kind of thing. And I said, in what shape is the trunk? And I really had them look. And I said, okay, let's go back inside. And I didn't say a thing to them, what to do. And nobody drew a lollipop tree. Again, they were drawing magnificent trees. So it was more a class on how to see than a class on how to make art. And this was the realization I had on day one. This is the sort of thing that has been happening to me my whole life. So how did I homeschool? I swore I never would, just like I swore I'd never teach. And in fact, my oldest son, when he was five, asked me to homeschool him. I never mentioned it. He must have overheard it from some other parent. And he was younger than that. I think it was four. We were looking at pre K and he asked me if I'd homeschool him. And I did not even hesitate for a second to say no. I said, you don't have any siblings yet. None of my friends have kids. You're not gonna have any friends. You're gonna find your friends in school and I will do my best to give you as good an education as I can. Now, in hindsight, that was that mirrored my childhood where my parents sent me to school and gave me an education, a great education outside of school. None of that education happened in school. And when I think back on my response to that four year old boy, I realized I was only sending him to school for social reasons. I never once thought that's where he'd get his education because I didn't get mine there. So I just assumed that this worked for me. I lived through it, that that's what he would do. And it wasn't until he he'd had a negative experience in a public school and then a negative experience in a private school and it just wasn't working for him. And I realized I had no choice. It was mid year, he was unjustly kicked out of the private school for doing what they told him to do. And it was the middle of the year in my local public school. I knew they would have eaten him up alive. He was a real super smart kid with a smart mouth who could insult you very quickly and had no fight behind that. And I thought, oh my gosh, they're gonna eat him alive. So I chose to homeschool as an act of desperation. This was 1994, maybe 95, way back. And homeschooling was so new that and it was so hard to find any organization. I had nothing but the phone book. And there was nothing under H. There was nothing under homeschoolers. It was. The one group was New York City Home Educators Alliance. So you would have to have found it under nychea. But I didn't know Nietzsche. You know, I eventually found Nichea through friends in Maine who had a list of groups across the country. And they sent me the name Nietzsche and somebody's phone number, some homeschooling mom's phone number. But I'd already been doing this for months and without any support, in fact, with a lot of naysayers. Everybody I told was against it, except my husband, who couldn't understand it, but at least he didn't try to stop me, right? So that was a plus. But I had close friends tell me I was going to ruin my children's lives. A very common response was, but I thought you wanted them to go to college. And I thought that's ridiculous. Of course they're going to go to college if they want to. Why would homeschool? I just thought it was a ludicrous thing to say. So I didn't believe it. And I was maybe good at disbelieving the stuff that didn't make sense to me instead of letting myself become afraid. But I have to admit, I was daunted at the very thought of homeschooling. I was overwhelmed at the prospect. I didn't think I had the tools to do it. And I had so many more tools than the average person. I understood so much more about education, learning and teaching than the average person. Does that here, you know, I guess it took me about two weeks to realize I'd made the best decision of our lives. And it opened up everything, changed my life, changed my kids lives, changed our family's life. All for the better. They both went to college. They both went to their first choice colleges on scholarships. Far more generous than I thought would have been possible. They were actively sought after by top schools. So Here I had all this reaction that my kids were never going to be able to make it into college. So it never occurred to me that homeschooling would be an asset when it came to applying to college. So this was one of the big awakening moments for me, which I had many of on this homeschooling adventure. And it's one of the reasons I became such a strong homeschooling advocate and also always willing to answer questions. I'm always willing to explain things. Did a lot of work to try to demystify teaching and education, to re explain what education is. Because the way our school system delivers it to us is wrong. It's simply false. It sort of takes the nature of learning and education and stretches it and square squashes it into all these little bits. So there really is no learning or no education anymore. So if you are trying to copy that or do that, you're just, you're not gonna, you're not gonna get what you want. Your kids aren't gonna get what they want. They aren't going to feel the aliveness that comes with learning. I think learning is simply deadened in that system and in the whole testing, test driven system, the whole workbook approach, the whole textbook approach, it deadens the whole experience. And I don't think anything feels quite as alive as real learning feels. So I wanted to share this aliveness. That's really what all my books and my lectures are really about, is to improve the lives of children, parents and teachers who, who are all saddled and stuck in a place where there's a tremendous amount of confusion.

Absolutely. I'm so curious because when you started homeschooling in 1994, when there really there was no Google, really.

I mean, I remember there was no Google didn't exist. I didn't have a home computer, the library. I had to take my kids to the local library to teach them how to use a computer.

Wow. And so, I mean, when you were, I mean, searching around for these homeschooling experiences is quite a feat. And I'm curious, I mean now, I mean, you've consulted with hundreds, if not thousands of homeschooling families. So I'm wondering, you know, how you see the challenges for homeschoolers when you started homeschooling versus what the main challenges for homeschoolers are today. You know, it seems like even just finding and searching for experiences is difficult then. And what are some of the challenges or hurdles that you see homeschoolers facing now both as they start and, and throughout their, their homeschooling.

Well, I think in terms of the naysayers, I think it's gotten a bit better. I think homeschooling is more widely known. You know, when I started working with students in Australia and, and this is because I met this amazing special educator who had come to New York from Australia and wanted to bring me back. And so I, one of the things I asked him was, what have you learned since you've been in New York? And he, without hesitation, he said nothing. And then he said, oh, no, there's one thing I've learned that in New York, homeschoolers are proud to homeschool, and they're not in Australia now. This is new. This, it took. I've watched this in my lifetime as I've watched homeschooling mushroom, really exploded, explode across the US but especially in New York City. To give you an example, when I first started, there was soccer once a week in Central park, and that was it. Now you know what's going on in New York City right now. I mean, I think within maybe five years or certainly within 10, there was also soccer in Queens, there was basketball in Chinatown, there was archery in Queens, there was track, there was some swimming, swimming classes. Somebody had gotten together a bunch of mixed sports groups at Chelsea Piers. Parents were doing this all over. It was happening all over New York City. And when you think, well, Maybe there were 10 times or more the number of sports offerings that happened in every subject in every area, it just exploded. You had all these groups, you had homeschool learning centers happening. We have different directions. We have Brooklyn Apple Academy, we have Cottonwood, we have. None of this existed when I started. None of it. We had one group with one weekly event for the kids and one monthly event for the families. And that was it.

Kind of extraordinary. There's just been an explosion of resources to support homeschooling families. And I think that there's a lot more general consensus that it makes sense. Okay? If you're doing one on one mastery learning and tutoring, kids are going to learn at a much more accelerated rate. And now you have so many adaptive learning tools, also curriculum that people like you have written for homeschoolers and we.

Have the online platforms now. I mean, it's, it's crazy how broad the choices are. So one of the challenges for homeschooling parents today and families is making the choices. I, I tell them too many options. It's, there are so many options. I said, the good news is there's so many options. The bad news is there are so many options because you are going to have to choose and most of them don't know how. If you grew up in this system, which most of us did, you had no choice. Your learning was delivered. There was no such thing as child led or child centered or interest based curriculum. You were really lucky if you had a teacher who made thematic curriculum and connected it. But typically the different subjects or topics weren't even connected. It was one of the complaints I heard from a girl. She had been homeschooled and then she got into Bronx Science, which was an interesting story. And she immediately started to complain. She said, so we're doing, I'm trying to think, which period of history was she doing? Yeah, she said, so we're studying the Middle Ages in history, but in language arts we're reading 20th century American lit. Why didn't they give us Chaucer? Why aren't we reading literature from the Middle Ages? How does this make sense? And she was absolutely right. You really want to do a deep dive in one area. Make everything associate and you'll have more fun. You won't feel like you're totally switching gears all the time. You'll simply be able to have more fun with it. So. And that's the way her mother had been homeschooling her. Her mother was an historian and she connected everything through different periods of history. And now she was in a standard school, even if it was an accelerated school program for gifted kids, she still was not getting what to her made more sense educationally. So I think for parents it is stepping out of the way they've been trained to think. Stepping out of the oh, so many concepts that I want to fight against, grade level falling behind, all of this nonsense. You know, if we, if we really let kids learn to their capacity, K through 12, they'd probably include the first four years of college. And by the time they were finished with, certainly at a community college level, they would get that much further. I think the average schools, public schools in Europe are about two years ahead of us because they're all graduating with calculus. So we are just. We are. If you look at the ratings around the world, we are not high up on the educational ladder. And the system just seems to get worse because for so many reasons, too many reasons. But maybe the biggest reason is that testing is controlling it. Everything's coming. It's a test driven system. It's not even a teacher driven system. I'm advocating for a student driven system where the student lets us know what they need what they want, what will help them thrive. And we do that. And this makes most people think, well, you can do that on a one on one. But I do that in classes and in groups and it is not hard. And even though I'm very fortunate to work with small groups compared to a public school classroom, I am of the opinion that everything I do could happen in, in a school, in a more crowded classroom.

Yeah, I mean it seems that what you're alluding to both in how you were talking about not wanting to be a teacher and then becoming a different kind of teacher and in moving towards a student centered approach and parents expectations is kind of a change of perspective and how most people view learning and education and what learning education actually is. Could you help articulate your point of view on that?

You know, I recently saw a post in a Facebook group where a woman's kid was being evaluated and she listed all these things she'd been doing with the kid. The kid had just read a whole book out loud to her. The kid had done this experiment. The kid was learning how to ride horses. But all she thought she had to show this evaluator was two workbook pages because that was a sum total of workbook pages he'd done. The learning is not in the workbook pages. The learning is not in the test. The learning in fact cannot be evaluated by a test score. In fact, tests were created as diagnostic tools, not as assessment or evaluation tools. They can only tell us what the kid doesn't know, which might be how to take the test. It can't tell you what the kid knows. I, in five minutes of talking to a kid will have a better understanding of what that kid knows, what that kid has been learning and what that kid wants to learn than if I had a whole stack of test scores which really won't tell me anything. So one of the things I would ask parents is to think back on their own educational experiences, say pre K through college, and to recognize to recall the really outstanding school experiences, rather learning experiences that they had. Let's say we're doing it K through 12. What's a learning experience that really stands out? A moment where you really learn something when you were say between the ages of 6 and 18. What's a life changing moment where you change the way you saw yourself, change the way you saw the world or your horizons were expanded? That kind of learning experience. A lot of people are hard pressed to think of one, right? For many of them it didn't happen till after grade 12. If it did happen. I'll bet you it didn't happen in classroom, and I'll bet you it didn't come from a textbook. So just trying to first recognize what was a great learning experience for us, then think, well, can we give that kind of experience to our kids? That was sort of where I started from. For me, school K through 12 is one long blur of boredom. And I'm hard pressed to remember a moment that I thought was a learning moment that happened in school. So I wanted my students to remember and I wanted my kids to remember these learning experiences. So I set out to. I started by using all five senses. I thought if we can make this multisensory experiences, they're going to be more memorable. If it's not just reading from a book, but we are moving, we are touching, we are smelling, we're tasting, we're thinking about these things. And then if we can also make connections and then we can personalize it through so we can relate to it, now we've got something. So for me, these associations, ways we relate to it, ways something make us feel, these are integral to a learning experience. It's never about rote memorization. It's never about rote practice, even though practice is very helpful. You know, you won't get good at the piano without it. But if you really want to get good at the piano, start loving how the notes sound. Start imagining a picture in your mind from the music, Develop a relationship with the music and the piano, Start making up your own songs. You'll get to a place where music feels alive for you instead of a task to be done, instead of a forced assignment. And I'm forced to practice the scale and I hate it every time I practice it. I've heard kids practice scales where you can tell they love the scales. You can tell, you can hear it. So how do we get there? And one of the ways we get there is by the kid making the choice. If the kid has no feeling for the piano, but wants to try the trombone or the flute or something that isn't music, then we do that because we've already. Okay, here's my. If interest is present, learning is already happening, the wheels are already spinning. If the kid wants to reach for something, the process has already begun. Just this realization is so important to understand because, you know, typically a kid will ask for something and if there is a previous agenda by an adult who's in a position of authority, they will say, we don't have time for that. We're not doing that now. We're doing this, you're going to finish this task, this assignment first. And I'm saying, you've just wasted a great learning opportunity because that was already happening in that kid's head, and it might have taken a long time for the kid to actually verbally express their curiosity and their desire to do that thing, to learn that sometimes you catch it just in a look, you know. One parent said to me, my kid doesn't talk. I have no idea what she wants. I said, what does she look at? And she said, well, whenever we walk down the street, she's always looking up at this dance studio on the second floor. I said, have you ever taken her up there for a peek? She's looking, she wants to go ask her. You know, she might have questions. The communication might begin. But first, we have to really listen. We can't expect them to always listen to us while we keep delivering what we think we're supposed to deliver and expect them to take it in. All we're going to lose is respect in the relationship if we never listen to them. So I think it really is about listening to the child and taking the cue from the child. Every kid learns differently. Every kid learns at a different pace. Every kid learns in different ways. They have different intelligences, different styles, styles of learning. So this is the other problem with school. They're delivering most things only one way.

So.

And this is why the games made such a difference when I started bringing in the games, because. So my magic formula. I have a chapter in my new book called the Magic formula, which includes not just my magic formula, but a few others that I think are worth passing along. And my magic formula came about to me as a realization when I suddenly realized that these were three components that existed in all my classes, regardless of subject and regardless of age. And they were play a game, learn something new, and make something. And when we do these three things, a whole host of different learning styles and intelligences are incorporated. And you end up with this something for everybody. But you also end up with a real feeling of satisfaction. I had fun with my peers. I learned something new. And maybe that's an exchange of information, maybe that doesn't come from me. And then I made something, and I like what I made, and it taught me a new skill. And I have something to show for my hour or two this class. So just these three things together, I found I was doing them all the time. Even if I was working with a young group and they only had an hour, I could fit all three elements in and this is what made them want to show up early, want to stay late. This is what had them finishing projects at home that they had started in class, creating their own assignments which they were self motivated to complete. This is what brought the learning up to a much higher level. This playful approach where I'm listening to them, they're engaging with each other and with me. To be honest, I'm probably more of a team player than I am a teacher in terms of my role because I take a non authoritarian, non judgmental role, which is not the way my teachers were when I grew up. I think you're absolutely right. I became a very different kind of teacher and I became the teacher I always wanted to without even realizing what kind of teacher I wanted because I figured that didn't exist when I was a kid. I thought that didn't exist.

Yeah. So I was scrolling through the Reddit homeschooling group the other day, kind of just trying to see what are the needs of families. And I see a lot of posts from parents who are struggling with a child who is fighting with them every time they're going to learn. And I really have so much empathy for these parents because every child is so different and it's impossible for me on the outside to say, oh well, you're doing this wrong or that wrong. But, and, and, and it is a diagnosed issue too, oppositional defiance. So I'm, and, and on the other side, parents have a lot of fear, you know, that their child, they're getting so many messages that their child needs to be at a certain level of math or reading. Sometimes these kids might be two or three years behind. Where do you start?

And that whole messaging and level of behind I take issue with. So there's, there's been, I think this was an example that happened in Sudbury where all of Math K through 8 was taught in a single year. And that's written about an article. You can find that information, I can share that with you. And when the teacher did it, he was shocked. He thought this is impossible. Eight years plus kindergarten in math. Eight years of math in one year, it's not possible. So he called up his math professor friend who taught, I think at ucb, one of the better Canadian higher up campuses, and he said, how is it possible to teach K through 8 math in one year? And he said, well, the professor said, well that sounds about right. And the professor explained how much we slow that learning process down, how much of it is rote practice. So it really is almost illogical to slow down the Way we learn, the way school sort of spoon feeds it to us. And it's also illogical to expect any momentum to come out of that and expect the kids to not be bored. So, you know, my older son tended to be oppositional, so I understand. And I did get into a lot of fights with him, but I learned to pick and choose my battles, and I learned to put him in charge as much as I could. So, for example, he loved math, and he started in school. When he came out of school, I asked him what he liked best about school and what he liked least just in terms of trying to think of how we were going to create a homeschooling day. And his favorite thing was, had a wonderful librarian who read rare out of print children's books out loud and let the kids draw on the floor while she read. And I said, oh, we can do that. I can read out loud to you every day, and you can draw on the floor to your heart's content as long as you like. And he said, oh, good. And I said, what did you like least? And he said, what I like least is the 45 minutes that every subject had either 15 minutes into it, you knew you'd covered it all and you were going to be bored for the whole rest of the time. Or at the end of the 45 minutes, it was just starting to get interesting, and the bell would ring and you'd have to stop, and they'd say you'd get back to it, but you know that you'd never get back to it. So I promised him he could set the pace and he could set the time. And so sometimes math was 15 minutes and he was done. And sometimes math was two hours. And I was so relieved when he was done because two hours was probably more than I could handle in math. But at the end, I always said to him, you know, in. In a typical math lesson, at the end, you do a page of practice. And I knew my kid was gonna start climbing the walls after doing 20 or 30 problems of practice. So I might pick one in the beginning, one in the middle, and one at the end. And I'd say, do three. And then he'd finish the three, and I'd say, okay, now you have to make one up for mom. Now we play stump mom. And the only thing you have to know when you make up this math problem for me is you have to know the answer, because I'm really bad at math, and you have to know whether I get it right or not. So the very first time he's laughing to himself and he's going, you know, 100000 minus 99999. He's just rubbing his ass together and giving me a page where I have to carry every column. Stump mom really turned into something where he gets to be teacher. He gets to control even for that moment and put me through the paces and make this as hard as he can. And this might have been the best learning experience of the lesson. So wherever I'm getting the other information from or whatever else we're doing, he gets to stump mom and try to do something that he thinks is more interesting or more difficult or more challenging. So you know this playing games, putting the kid, asking the kid, so what would your, if you could devise a lesson, what would you like to learn? How would you like that lesson to be? Would you like it in a different place? You know, you can learn a lesson sitting in a tree. And for some kids that might be perfect. Some kids really need to be out there in the grass and the dirt. Other kids, you know, no, they don't like that. It's too distracting. So finding the right environment, finding the right tone, finding the right topic and then understanding, if you're going with this interest based curriculum, that any one topic brings all the rest along with it. So for example, I, I ran a lit club for something like 20 years. Homeschoolers where we get together. I did all different age groups. We'd get together and the kids would choose the books. So it was a democratically run book club and we'd try to make sure that every student got at least one of their first or second choices and the questions and the activities would evolve out of the books and every single subject would come into the room. Even though we're reading fiction, but every single subject would come into the room. There would be history, there would be science, there would be geography, there would, it would all be there. There would be math, it would all be there. So I taught a cooking class once called Cooking with Stories. I'm hoping to turn this into another book. Every single subject. Now I figured that there'd be science and math because there was measuring, but I had no idea how much science and math or where it would appear. So for example, once we were the salad class, a kid looked at the cut bottom of a lettuce and noticed the pattern. And there we were doing the Fibonacci pattern. And you know, which I, I should have known that would happen, but I didn't and it just appears so. There we are. Discussing all these different aspects of science with each recipe. Each recipe came from a different part of the world or had ingredients from a different part of the world. And I told a story that came from that part of the world, a folk tale that reflected the culture or the food. And so here it's primarily social studies and food. But we did everything. Everything. There was some chemistry, there was a little bit of everything. So I think once you understand that these subjects are not separated the way schools have separated them. Math cannot stand alone. Science cannot stand alone. Reading cannot stand alone. None of it stands alone. It is all deeply interconnected. You might as well learn it all together. It's much more interesting. Just like that first example of reading Chaucer if you're going to study the Middle Ages and bring it together and focus on that thing that the kid loves. So on my resources page, where I have a lot of free resources for homeschoolers, I have examples of interest based curriculum. And I chose four different interests. Food, art, mysteries and animals. And I could have done a lot more, but I think this will be enough to give a homeschooling parent the idea. And I have listed under all the major academic subjects and even the ones that aren't considered major requirements, I think I might have had phys ed and art music there too. Under each interest I've listed all these different things that relate that can be done. And it's vast. It's so vast that it absolutely makes sense that you could do a lot more than one year this way, you could do a lifetime this way. And many people do so. For example, I would teach an animals class because almost all kids in elementary age like animals, or at least some animals. They might have a favorite. They might not like bugs or snakes, or they might love snakes, they might not care, you know, birds, but there's some animal that they like. And in the course of that class, they'll each pick an animal and then they're free to change their mind at any time and they become an expert on that animal and teach about that animal to the rest of the class. And we will read fables about the animals. We will do charts, we will do graphs on the animals, we will do the geography of the animal, we will do the evolution of the animal so much every single subject will be present every single subject. They will be doing writing, they will be doing science, they will be doing math, they will be doing all of it. And they'll be learning something they already like, that they're already interested in, that they want to share that they want to hear everybody else's project, read everybody else's story. So think about people who are, let's say, experts on owls. That's a lifetime. And they're still studying one animal. So it's easy to see how you can do it, you know, on a sort of preliminary basic level and get more and more advanced each year. And this happened because my younger son was in love with whales.

He was.

And you know, when they were little, I would take them to the library every week and I would say, you pick two, I'll pick two. It wasn't until years later I realized I was doing a child led experiment. I just thought they would become more engaged with being in the library if they did some of the choosing. And I figured they would get the books I chose, which I had proved to myself, you know, I enjoyed as a kid. But they never liked my picks. I was choosing fairy tales and Dr. Seuss, and that wasn't what they wanted. And my younger son, he chose Aesop and what Is a Whale? This is the first time, he must have been two, two or three. And that what Is a Whale? Was a board book. And I was so bored reading it to him every night, because the first day we'd get home and I'd say, okay, we're going to read them all. And then for bedtime reading, you get to choose. And they never, never chose my picks, not once. Which is a big lesson, right? And. And he would want that whale book every night. And all week long I kept thinking, thank God we get to return this to the library at the end of the week. And of course, he renewed it. He gets to the library, he talks to the library, and he comes back with the same book.

He's.

I learned I can take it out again. Okay, fine. Well, he took out a book on whales every time we went and they just got more complicated. And this is what he wanted to learn and what he wanted to study. He wanted to be doing ocean research and be chasing whales. And it was a lifelong interest. I'd say. He studied whales from age 2 to 22. He actually went to college to study whales. And when he left, he wanted to pursue something else. But he did have this deep dive. That's a good metaphor, into, into studying whales and seeing all the different things that he did with this and how much he got out of it and how it led to everything else really gave me the insight. This is. Every kid likes an animal. We can do this. At one point, the New York Times published an article on their front page against the idea that kids could choose their own books, that kids in school should not be allowed to choose their own books because if they do, no one will ever read Moby Dick. And I cracked up because that kid was begging me for Moby dick from age 11 on and I kept putting him off. And finally when he was 15 or 16, we took two copies out of the library and sat across the table from each other and read it. Took turns and read out loud the whole thing together. I had read it when I was a girl because I read everything when I was a girl. It wasn't my cup of tea, but I still enjoyed parts of it. I still remembered it, but I had a better experience reading it out loud with my son and pausing whenever either of us wanted to to discuss whatever we wanted to discuss in the book. And here I see this headline on the front page of the New York Times saying that nobody will ever read Moby Dick. And I'm thinking, no, you, you're, you're crazy. You're nuts. You haven't met my kid and you haven't met a lot of other kids who will choose something that seems far beyond their level because it contains something they're interested in.

Absolutely. I'd love to address a little bit the economics and mechanics of homeschooling. So you're an author and entrepreneur. What advice would you give for families who have two full time jobs who are interested in homeschooling and how to set up a schedule and make that work, if it's possible at all.

So a lot depends on the ages of your children and where you're living. And if you have any additional help or can afford any additional help. If you have a kid who's grammar school age, they need an adult companion. They need somebody who can, who they can go to, who they know is there and who's available to them? And once you get into middle school and high school, well, for example, in New York City we've got this great public transit system and teenagers can travel independently. So if you're a teen, if you have a teen, and if they have access to that kind of travel system, they can get themselves to and from a huge number of homeschooling activities, independent study, work at home, and they can do all that on their own and you can check in with them every day and see what's been going on. So a lot depends on that age. If they're young, hopefully you have a grandparent who can step in or maybe you can afford somebody who you can develop a relationship so the kid can develop a relationship. There are homeschool swaps, I mean babysitting swaps, that whether you're in school or not, you might be able to find one in your neighborhood and sign up and see if you can take somebody else's kid one afternoon and they'll take your kid one afternoon. I also think in homeschooling it might be possible to get a teen, a homeschooled teen, to pick up your kid and take them to and from homeschooling experiences, classes and so forth. So it's possible. It's a juggle in terms of making that schedule. It's different for everybody and it needs teamwork. And when I say team, I mean the kids too. I mean, you have to sit down and say, okay, what's most important to you? Can we prioritize that one thing? If we can't do everything that we want, where is it that you want to go? Where are you happiest? Can you try this place out and tell me what you think of this class or this group or this co op and see if we can make it happen? So in my case, I was self employed. My husband and I had an art gallery selling Native American art on the Upper west side. And so homeschooling, some of those hours my kid was in the gallery playing chess with his dad or doing reading or doing homework, he was sitting in the gallery. And other times he'd be with me. During those early years, even though we had our own business, we were broke. I mean, having an art gallery and trying to pay Manhattan rent every month we wondered how we were going to make it to the next month, every month. So I was totally broke. I couldn't afford anything. I could afford because we didn't have Metro cards back then for homeschoolers. I could afford bus fare or subway fare once a week. And that's. That was my budget. And yet I was in New York City, which has so much stuff that's free or dirt cheap. And that's how I created this list. What's free or cheap in New York City, which right now I think has over 1200 links. But a lot of that, a lot of it is dated.

New York is such a great place to homeschool. I mean, even New York is. I mean, it's insane.

I would tell people around the world there is no place like New York City to homeschool at. Every single art institute and cultural institution is mandated to do something for the community. That's how they get their funding. So they all have free lessons online on their websites. They all have activities for kids. Teachers know about this, teachers are doing, using these for field trips and using all this, you know, public school teachers and private school teachers and homeschooling parents. New Yorkers are pretty savvy and they find out about this stuff and they start using this stuff too. So, you know, there's a huge amount of stuff that you can do for almost no cost. And I also tell parents if you have a library card and Internet access, you need nothing else. You probably can get away without buying a book. Because we've got so many online libraries that are free and great stuff. I mean, Gutenberg, the Library of Congress, we've got so much great stuff that once again, just, just looking at what's free online, you'll have trouble choosing. You will not be at a loss for great choices. You have to work well in front of a screen. That has to be something that works well for you and for your kid. And personally, I think it's not nearly as good as doing something hands on, even alone at home, even, let's say deciding to build the science experiment or build the structure or make the costume is going to be more rewarding and more of a learning experience than it will be watching something online. But still we have all of this information and all of these choices and they cost us virtually nothing.

It's really, it's really quite amazing. You know, I was thinking back again about these two full time working parents and navigating that. I mean, let's say you are in a situation where perhaps you work remotely or you have the ability to hire a nanny or a teacher to help with the homeschooling. How can you prepare that person to take a student centered approach and follow your child's interests?

Well, it helps to interview a lot of people. You know, if you have somebody really stuck in one way of thinking, it's going to be very hard to get them to change. Kids will change, you know, in a minute. It's the adults have a lot of work changing and sort of reprogramming the way we've been programmed. You know, I was surprised at how much I had to let go of. And my husband used to say, how come you aren't ruined like the rest of us? And I would tell him these stories of, you know, acting out what my teachers did as examples of what not to do. I said, I don't know. I think I was lucky that I was given a different lens to view this through as a child. But most of us, I think, are brainwashed into thinking this is the way it's supposed to be and we simply have to comply, that we're forced into it and we have to submit. And I don't believe that's a healthy situation for anyone to feel they are forced to submit. So, you know, one of the I would get questions from parents, school isn't working, but do I dare take my kid out from school? Because then they'll feel like they failed and they didn't finish it. And I would go, no. This is the lesson in true empowerment. Think if you were in a workplace and you were bored out of your mind and everybody at the workplace was mistreating you or misunderstanding you, wouldn't you be thinking of where else to send your resume? Wouldn't you be thinking about getting a new job and changing your life? Or if you had a close friend in that situation, wouldn't you be encouraging that person to do just that? And so this disempowerment that children have in school is not a healthy thing. It thwarts learning, it thwarts independence, it thwarts growth. So I think it's hard to get parents to step out of it. If interviewing someone, I would ask them how they felt about their school experience, I would ask them what their greater learning experiences were. If you have somebody who already can express frustration and mixed feelings about school, you have somebody who's already open minded enough to think about something different and doing explaining certain child led approaches can help. So for example, I called in a math tutor for my kids because they were both gifted at math and it was not my strong suit. And when my oldest one asked me a calculus question when he was in fifth grade, I knew I needed help. But every time I got a math tutorial, all they were trained for was test prep or remediation. And I wasn't interested in either of those things. So I actually made a flyer that put on it every math joke I could think of. You know, it was very cartoonish and kind of ludicrous, but I thought, if somebody looks at this and laughs, I've got a chance. I love it.

That's your.

If somebody has a sense of humor about math and a different way of looking at it, I have a chance that maybe they'll work. And I probably had to go through about 10 tutors to find our dream math tutor, who was a little out of the box to begin with. She was all about all the different ways you could arrive at the solution and all the Thinking processes that you go through. She was not about the right answer. She was about how you got there. And I like that a lot. And she'd been raised by a physics professor, so she was kind of homeschooled in math and science. The way my kids probably got language arts and art from me, where it was always present. I was always joking about it or using it. She said we'd be on a car trip with the family and we'd go through a toll. And my dad would say, so how much do you think they take in in an hour? And I thought, oh, my gosh. And you're thinking about how to figure that out. It's not a about knowing, it's about how would you try to figure that out? That's the interesting part. That's the interesting part. So when she came on board, I would say, look, this is what they're interested in. The older kid's doing theater, the younger kid is doing whales. Incorporate that as much as you can. So she had all these different resources. She was using regular school textbooks. She was using some advanced stuff. She was using some stuff she'd gotten from private schools. And she was also using the migration paths of whales, their speed, their distance. She was using all that. She was the theater loving kid. My older one, he announced that. I think he announced in like 11th grade that he was done. He was done with high school. He was done with history. He was done. He said, last year I did comprehensive world history. I've done like US History. Every year I'm done. I've done. And I said, so, you know, it's one thing to let go of math and science. If you're going to go out for drama or film in college, they might not require the extra two years of math and science, which New York State does not require of homeschoolers. You can just do two years in high school. I said, but they will require humanities. They will want to see history and language arts for every year. So what do I put in your reports? What do I put in your transcript? And he goes, I don't know. And I said, he said, all I want to do is theater. I said, so how about the history of theater? And he went, okay. And he. And we did. We did the history of plays. He read nothing but plays all year. He started with the ancient Greeks. He read no theater. The Japanese, no theater plays. He went all through history from ancient Greece. He did anti apartheid plays from South Africa, right up to contemporary plays from London and New York. He did the history of the stage, of the theater itself, of the director. He studied all of this. He was fascinated. He couldn't stop. He became an expert in what he wanted to do. Then he started the history of film for math. He suddenly came to me and he said, so I want to design a set and it has to be done. He said he was going to design it. It was going to be needed to be done in metric measurements. But he was also going to need to know how to solder because he needed to be able to read electronic blueprints if he was ever going to do set design. I've never heard of electronic blueprints before. I don't even know what he's talking about. So I called up the math tutor and she said, oh, we can do this. Radio Shack was still around. She went over there, she got a little kit, soldering kit. She took him through the paces. I think in four months he was able to create, read electronic blueprints and able to solder anything. So he even did math and science through grade 12 because it related to theater.

Amazing. So if somebody is, I guess, already coming from a spirit of curiosity and awareness that they have been conned by the school system, Are there any books or other resources you might recommend in terms of someone who's really eager to change the way that they think about education and learning, but might need a little support?

There's a lot out there. But I can tell you one of the things that really inspired me and these were books that I read in my childhood was Sylvia Ashton Warner. She wrote Teacher. So are you familiar with Sylvia Ashton Warner? She's a pioneer in child led learning. So she was from Canada, she was a landed immigrant in New Zealand who was a teacher. And she was tasked with the job of teaching Maori children who she got at age 6 using a standardized British curriculum. And all the children failed miserably. So she got this idea, well, what if instead of the standard British texts, I use their words and their stories? And she created their own reading primers for them. She asked them what words they wanted and she gave them those words. She had this whole process that she did this by. And at the end of a year, they had radically surpassed their British peers. So reading about her, she was also a concert level pianist and she believed that the arts was the answer to violence. And I agree with that too. I've seen when personal expression and creative expression happen in a classroom, how everything changes and kids start wanting to listen to each other and wanting to respect each other's ideas instead of feeling Competition. I don't believe in competition. I don't believe in grading or in ranking. I think that kills creativity and personal expression. I believe in. You know, I don't even like the phrase the pursuit of excellence. I think it's. It's harmful. Even though my students, they do excellent work, they achieve excellence. But I think if that's what we think we're supposed to do and what we have to aim at ourselves at, I think we lose the fun, we lose the playfulness, we lose all of the peripheral, which is where excellence happens, for sure.

And I think there's another way to reframe excellence, which is what is the kind of contribution that you want to make, which can still be very motivational.

But that's also personalizing it. That's really saying what is something that you'd like to do that you would be proud of instead of what your parent or your teacher would reward? That is really what it's all about and how you figure that out. You know, the real learning path that we're all on is that path of self realization, figuring out who we are and what our purpose is. And if all we're ever doing is obeying another voice, we'll never figure that out. That is the big learning curve. And this is why personalization is so important. But if you bring this in, which your comments did, then it becomes present, and they start thinking, oh, what do I care about? What do I want to do? What matters to me? Because the same thing doesn't necessarily matter to everybody.

Wow. Okay. So we haven't touched on socialization yet. I don't really like that word, but it is the framework that a lot of people think about. Children making friends, parents making friends. And at the beginning of this conversation, you said that before you started homeschooling, you thought that school was the place you send kids to school to be social. And so I'm curious, first of all, what I mean. New York is such a vibrant, social, homeschooling community. What were some of the social experiences that were most meaningful both to you and to your children? And I'd love to hear any specific examples of meetups or groups or classes you're a part of that.

I want to tell you one story because I think. I think it's a myth that a room full of people who are your age are going to supply you with your friends. I mean, if somebody said to me right down the hall, everybody's your age in that room, don't you want to go there? And I'm going I don't think so, no. I don't want to meet everybody who's as old as I am. And I don't think we'll have anything in common. If instead somebody said, there's a whole bunch of people in a room down the hall and they're all interested in alternative education, I'll be out of my seat, I'll be halfway down. So it's like, I think common interests are a much better way to create a social connection, regardless of their ages than finding people who share the same age and maybe live in the same city and have maybe nothing else in common. So, yes, I thought that my kids would have social opportunities, but I didn't necessarily think that they'd build friendships. I didn't have many friends in school. My kids, my kids both started out in school. They didn't have friends in school either. It's really hard. So you're in a. So you're in an overcrowded room where nobody's really allowed to get out of their seat, nobody's really allowed to play or honestly communicate with each other. Maybe there are 35 kids in that room with one teacher who can't possibly see or notice or listen to everybody in a given day. It's very hard. It feels more like a prison. And most kids will refer to school, they will say, school feels like a prison than like a playground. So in terms of interest based situations, my older son, because homeschooling was so new, never really had that choice of homeschool gatherings that my younger son, who was only five years younger, five and a half years younger, and by the time he came along, it was everywhere. He started homeschooling about the same age his older brother did because I gave him the choice, even though I wanted homeschooling. He said to me, isn't school a building where everybody goes just to learn? And I said, well, that's the general idea. Because I didn't want to put my opinions on him. I wanted them to make up their own minds about as much as they could. So we said, then why isn't everybody there all the time? I said, if that's how you feel about it, go try it out. And there were some years he was crying himself to sleep and I really wanted him out of there, but I let him have his choice. And it wasn't until third grade he said to me, the teachers are a problem and the kids are starting to get not nice. I think I want to try homeschooling. So here they both had had the social Opportunities of school. And neither of them came away friendships at least. The younger one had no friendships. The older one had one or two friendships that lasted for a few years that he kept from school. I've known lots of kids who keep their school friends and develop homeschool friends as well. So the story I want to tell you about is the nychea Chess club, which existed only briefly, maybe two or three years. I'm sure someone's going to start another chess club soon. And we met at the Hungarian Pastry Shop. This is such a New York store.

I love that place.

Directly across the street from. Is it the Cathedral of St. John the Divine that has the carnival of animals outside in the poet's corner? And I mean, it's just. It's a really special block.

Unlimited coffee, right?

And the parents loved meeting at the Hungarian Pastry shop. We could have coffee or tea and pastry. And the kids are flitting from table to table to table. And I don't know, after a number of months, the pastry shop owners told us that we. That they wanted us to leave. I think they were not doing as much business with the. With the homeschool chess club. But at any rate, so I brought my younger kid there who loved chess, and he was maybe 11, 10 or 11, and he's running around and I'm talking to the moms, and this was really great. I wish that that had lasted forever. And he comes back and checks in on me after I've seen, you know, who he's played with. And I said to him, I point to these two kids. Almost everybody in the room is younger than him. They're like ages 6 to 12. And I point to the only two kids who I think might be his age. Maybe they're 11 and 12. And I said, why don't you play with them? And he says to me, oh, mom, they're just beginners. He's the kid I want to play with. And he points across the room to a kid who looks like he's seven, and he drops what he's doing. He says, the chair's open. And he makes a beeline for that table. And he sits at that table and he stays with his. He's the best player here. He said to me before he leaves, he's the best player in the room. This and. And I was. Had this light bulb moment because I was just confronted with my own age prejudice, my own prejudice that I developed growing up thinking, no, you're supposed to be with your own age. That's who you'll have the Better time with. That's who you might click with. But no, he wanted to be with a kid noticeably younger than him, and that's who he had the best time with. So what level you're at, how ready you are, how ready you are to communicate, it isn't about age. It was about playing chess for him. Then it was about finding a worthy opponent who he thought was at his level. And he found it in a kid several years younger and not in a kid his own age. Right. I also get parents worried that their kids don't have enough social interaction. And here's the thing. Some people are natural loners. And it's not a bad thing to be a natural loner. They are very productive, successful people, as a rule. And they have social skills. They can be friendly, they can be gracious, they can be communicative. But they don't necessarily like socializing. They don't necessarily like having to do those things. And maybe they're uncomfortable being put in these social gatherings. So, you know, let's have a little more recognition of all these different personalities that are out there. And if a kid's saying, I wish I had more friends, well, we'll get them more gatherings. But if they say, I really, I'm really just fine with my one neighbor friend once in a while and I don't need more, well, then maybe that's the truth and maybe that's where they need to be. So. And, and we can't assume that what we needed, our kids needed. Just like the books that I love turned out not to be the books that they loved. The thing that really helped me with learning style was we did. I did a self test for me and with my kids, and we all had three different dominant styles, and mine was visual.

Interesting. What is this test called?

It's out of a book. I'll have to send you the book. It's. I have it on my website, but I think it's called discover your child's learning style. But I'll send you. I'll send you the link. You did it.

And they did it.

I did it, and they each did it. And here, you know, I think standardized school is developed for the visual learner, and I am the visual learner. I never had a study. I aced all my spelling tests. Spelling is remembering what the word looks like because every spelling word is broken at least half the time. So here, that's proof of what a visual learner. In fact, I was such a visual learner, I had a near photographic memory as a Girl, I could actually remember the book and draw up the page. So I was acing all my tests. I could do all that. I wasn't getting the real learning that I needed because I wasn't getting physicalized learning. I wasn't getting hands on learning. I wasn't getting a balance of it. But I was the kid who does well in school. So I'm telling my kids to do what worked for me. I'm telling them, turn off the radio, get quiet, focus, have the book in front of you. That works great for me. I love quiet. I love doing it visually. But my older son, it turned out he was an audio learner. He needed the music on here. I'm telling him to turn it off. He can't work without the music. He became a writer and he develops a playlist for every setting and every character, and that's how he gets there. He cannot do it in quiet. He can't. I can't do it with the noise on.

Yeah, yeah.

So then with my younger son, I'm thinking neither of these things are working with him. He turned out to be a kinesthetic learner. So just when he was, I'd say kindergarten, first grade age, and I was trying to teach him how to tell time, and he wasn't getting it. And finally I had this inspiration, and I wrote on scraps of paper the numbers 1 through 12 and put them in a giant circle on the living room floor. And I said, you're the hands of the clock. Get in the middle and with your arms and legs, show me 10 minutes to 2. And he'd go like this. I'd say, okay, show me a quarter, Pastor. And he got it because he was acting it out. And this was true for him his whole life. When he went to college, if. If the. The coursework was all based on a paper, that was the final grade, he could struggle. I need to get a C. But if it was a live presentation with the same material, he'd ace it.

Amazing.

And I knew he was going to end up in a lifestyle where he was on his feet all the time. And that was true. He's had a str of jobs. He's always been very physical, always on his feet. And I knew his older brother would be the opposite. So when you. You can see different learning styles, different lifestyles, different energies, you know they're going to be aimed at something different. They shouldn't be in the same environment, they shouldn't have the same curriculum. They shouldn't be on the same path when it's so clear how different their paths are going to be later on. And the thing is that I think every parent and every teacher knows this. This knows that no kids, two kids in the room are the same, knows that they're all learning at different paces and in different ways, knows that they're going to have a different outcome, different profession. They're not all going to be nurses or teachers or. Right. They're all going to be something different.

Sure, sure.

So why not approach them like that from the outset?

Absolutely. So to take it back to the chess club, you know, I'm thinking of a specific example of a family where the parents are a bit more introverted and the child is more of a social butterfly and they live in a rural area and they tried to set up a chess club and, you know, one or two kids came and then they didn't show up and that kind of fell apart. Could you offer some practical tips, maybe, for a family who's living in a less urban area and how they could successfully get a small group going in their community if their children, if they want to connect with other homeschoolers?

So one way would be to pol the community and offer them choices. Would your kid be interested in chess? Band, theater, a choir? Come up with a list of activities that maybe your kid would be interested in and see if you can get a larger number to sort of vote on one. Another way of doing it is to pair it with a family activity. So once a month we're having a big potluck dinner, and in one corner of the room there's going to be chess.

Yeah, right.

So I remember when there was a. I was living in the Bronx and I found through word of mouth, a Bronx homeschoolers group, which no longer exists. And I brought. I went over there with my kids, and afterwards I asked my younger son, so how did you like that? And he said, I'm not interested. I don't like any of the kids. None of them play chess. That was his basis. He asked them all, they said, no, that's it. I don't want to go again. And I said he was, I think, a bit of a loner himself. And I said, well, I need the group. I need to be with the other moms, and I do a lot for you. So you're going to do this one thing for me. You're going to come just for me so that I get to be with the moms. The third time he went, he taught them all how to play gin rummy. And on the Way home that day, suddenly, he said he liked all the kids. So that was just a really good example of how socialization takes time.

Sure.

We need to sort of hang in there and here. More than one thing was going on at this place. And because this was a monthly event, the parents got together and we created the history fair. Before Nietzschea did the history fair. And the game, the who am I? Game that Nietzsche plays. We did PI day for math. We did. I would usually do a poetry thing once a year. We might have had a talent show. And parents also in the group chose one field trip a month, and they were usually choosing something that they thought would be appropriate or desirable for their kid. So I don't think any kid ever went on all of them. But there was enough going on so that we stayed a group and we made good use out of the group.

And I love that you highlighted how that parent expressed her need to her child. I think it's really an example of successful homeschooling when you don't simply sacrifice yourself for your child, but you actually recognize when you're doing something for your own need and you have a conversation so your child understands that. And I think parents would often be surprised at how easy it is to get children on board when you say, I need you to work independently because I need some time to recharge, and then we can have a lot of fun together. Or I need to go to this community event because I need to make friends. And I really appreciate you being my support in this time.

Exactly. And I think being that honest and not pretending that everything's okay without those things sets the stage for the child to be honest with you and say when things aren't okay with them. So I think that it's. There tends to be this desire for false happiness in America. Like, we want everything to look that it's okay. We only want pictures of our kids when they're smiling. We want them to be smiling all the time. Time. It's just not realistic. And if you. If your kid picks up on that, that's what you want. Maybe they won't let you know when they're unhappy.

Exactly.

And kids. Kids have difficult lives, too. With all that we do for them, they still go through fear and trauma and worry and distrust and all of the emotions and things that adults go through. So we want an open dialogue where it's a safe place for all of that to be shared. So thank you for that comment.

Absolutely. I mean, well, the time has flown by, and you are such a treasure trove of information. I feel like we just, you know, opened the lid on this treasure chest and just looked at a few of the coins on top. But I would love, just as we wrap up, if you could share with families and some of the services that you offer to support them with their homeschooling.

So on my website, loriblocksbeagle.com I have a resources page where I put resources for child led learning, for creative learning, for play based learning. I have resources for games. I have resources for bookmaking. Hands on bookmaking. That's one of the things that we might make at the end of a short class, very easy, simple bookmaking. I do a lot of that. So I try to share as much of that as I can for free. And I also have New York City specific information at Homeschool NYC which is going through hopefully a growth phase, a regrowth phase. I offer classes via Zoom, I offer via Zoom and in person, if I can travel, workshops, talks. I will talk about my book. I'll talk about childhood learning. I'll talk about how to teach. Writing is at the core of much of what I do, but also a variety of other things. I offer consultations. I can help a parent to create an interest based child led curriculum for their kid. I, I do a lot. I, I can't even tell you the number of courses and classes that I teach. Yeah. So, and I will always answer a question, no charge. Send me an email, post it on the Facebook, ask me what your pro, tell me what your homeschooling problem is. I will send you a referral. I will refer you to teachers or tutors for no free fee. I will give you as much as I can. I will point you in the direction that you seem to want to go in. And yeah, I think, oh my gosh, there's, there's so much more I could say there's a lot of references that I try to put on my website and I put a lot of articles on for homeschooling help, for making learning fun for things like this.

Yes.

And I'll come off speak at a library. I'll speak at a homeschooling group. I'll, I'll do a Q and A, anything to help encourage people to take this. What often feels like a big scary step always feels daunting at first. I think take this leap into homeschooling and into hopefully a teamwork where you can work side by side with your kid, where you can team up to make the best educational experience for your kid and it's a great relief to not always have to be in that authoritarian position, to not end up always fighting with your kid or always trying to make them do something. I will say nothing can happen by force. Learning certainly cannot happen by force. We can't make someone else learn. We can't learn for someone else. It's a personal, private, internal thing that happens. And so if we see it happening, if we see the curiosity, we want to get run with that. It's already happening. We want to go with that. Something special and magic is happening inside that kid. I would love to, you know, I would love just to talk with you another time, Manisha, and talk more about games. The different. Because a lot of people think I'm using Jeopardy and bingo or board games and card games. It's not. Not the case. I'm using games that access intuition and imagination and bring your sense of self out. So this is really, for me, the secret key that I discovered that changed everything that I do in my work is the application of these theater games and also, I think, taking an improvisational approach to teaching and learning where if a kid is curious or something else happens, we are willing to let go of our agenda and our plan and do the other thing. You know, I tell people it's like taking a vacation. You do the research, you make an itinerary. You don't want to miss the good stuff when you're in this amazing new place you've never been. But if it's bad weather on the day you were planning to go to the park, or if on your way to the museum, you go through a street fair, you want to be able to change your mind. You want to be able to do what feels right in the moment. So I think plans are necessary. Curriculum is just a plan. Plans are necessary. They are only a problem when we're forced to stick to them, especially if they're not working well.

So well put. Well, thank you so, so much again, Laurie. It's been such a treat and I can't wait to continue having the conversation with you in all the forums that we run into, each other, conferences online.

I look forward to that too, Manisha.

And it's just I. I feel so grateful to know you and for all your generosity, kindness, and good listening now and over the years. It really you. Your. Your generosity is just abundant and infinite. And you're. You're really a light in the community. So thank you so much.

Oh, you're so kind. Thank you.