Latest / The Christy-Faith Show / Ep. 9 - From Homeschool to Stanford (Part 1 of 2) // Amanda Reeves
Transcript
- I think at the end of the day what a classical education is training a student to do is to think and to learn welcome to the Christy Faith show where we share gamechanging ideas with intentional parents like you I'm your host christe Faith experienced educational adviser and homeschool Enthusiast together we'll explore ways to enrich and transform both your life and the lives of your children well hello hello everybody Welcome Back to the Christy Faith show let me tell you we have Amanda Reeves on today we had her in Thrive homeschool community on a homeschool panel last year and by far I kid you not she is my most requested person to come back to the community and I was thinking why just keep her close to the vest I think the whole world needs to know about Amanda Reeves I'm going to introduce her very quickly and we are going to Dive Right In Amanda Reeves is a homeschool adult herself she holds a ba in Latin and Greek from Stanford University where she discovered her passion for Classical Languages after years of detesting them in her 10 plus years as an educator she fiercely held the belief that every student can fall in love with Latin and has celebrated each of the times this has happened in her classroom as a homeschool graduate herself and Dean of the lower school at scole Academy which is an online school designed with homeschoolers in mind she supports teachers as they develop classrooms and curricula to help Elementary age students cultivate a love of learning in their pursuit of restful classical education welcome to the show Amanda I want I know what everyone is going to wonder first tell us about your homeschooled experience what is your homeschool story CU it is pretty unique and inspiring so I was homeschooled starting in kindergarten through my high school graduation before heading on to Stanford my parents were kind of accidental homeschoolers they didn't have this long-term plan of homeschooling us but what happened is my older sister when she was I think 3 or 4 years old she started reading and my parents thought my goodness if she's already reading at such a young age we need to get her into schools and then on top of it my sister being the dramatic one that she is she would start sobbing every time they drove pass to school because she just wanted to go to school so badly so my dad being kind of a this is a bunch of non sort of Personality decided that he would get her tested early to enter kindergarten when she was four and she did Super well on the test she seemed academically ready but she couldn't remember her phone number so they decided she doesn't know her phone number she's not ready to start kindergarten just yet and my dad again leading on that this is a bunch of nonsense personality said well here's what I'm going to do I'm going to homeschool her for a year and then we'll put her in as a transfer student the following year after just a year they started looking at what she was able to do and what her trajectory was in her education and realized that they were really going to be doing her a great disservice by putting her into the public school so that started our homeschooling Journey so for the first few years we just kind of did homeschool in a box you order a curriculum and all of your books come and then it was about oh I would say three or four years into it my dad started doing a lot of reading about classical education he realized that that's really what he wanted for my sister and I that level of thought and rigor but also just Delight in contemplating the great ideas of History was really what he was looking for in our education so then in third grade we switched over to a classical model and that's what I did until I graduated and he got a hold of one of those very famous books that transforms a lot of people can you tell us a little bit about that yeah my parents have a well-loved dogeared highlighted underlined colorcoded copy of the well-trained mind that was kind of the motherboard if you will for my education that's really what they used as our launching point for everything that we were doing and then they they built off of that and I'm sure read a lot of other books to accompany it did a lot of reading online and whatnot but that was definitely the foundation that they built our education upon your situation is unique because the majority of families in America who homeschooled it's primarily homeschooled by the mother I think it that's changing at least in our family Scott and I very much share the responsibilities because we both work full-time but in your situation I would assume that your dad was pretty brave because he was the primary homeschooler for you and your sister what was that like and did he struggle to find a place in community being the dude the homeschooling dude definitely 100% he he loves to tell this story of pretty early on in our homeschooling Journey when he decided that he would take us to a local co-op CU that's what homeschoolers did and he thought well I don't want my children to miss out so he took us to a a coop and he was the only dad there which I think it was at that time normal and all of the moms decided to spend their time while their children were off doing their work sharing traumatic birth stories and my dad never took us back he said you know what I think I've had my feel of this I think we're going to do this our own way he certainly was unusual especially at that time for being the the primary homeschooling parent when I think about it it's hard to imagine what my education would have been like if my mom had been the one to homeschool not because she wouldn't have been perfectly capable of doing it herself but I think that for my education to look the way that it did we really needed my dad's stubbornness especially thinking about how uncommon classical education was when we were homeschooling there were a lot of people who thought that what we were doing was quite strange even inside of the homeschooling community and the fact that my dad was so stubborn and so willing to just hang tight onto something that he knew was going to turn out well for us and was going to be what was best for us I think made our education what it was Amanda what I want to know from you is given that your dad was a Pioneer really before the classical movement became somewhat trendy and popular and I am part of that movement I was definitely sold on the classical model that was my gateway drug into homeschooling it was very attractive to me for that academic piece when you and your sister were going along doing this weird type of education and saying dad what are you why are we doing this why do I have to read The Odyssey did he have messaging that he shared with you so that you had a Buy in it's a really good question there were a couple of things that I remember I mean for one my dad's personality again is just very much one of this is good for you so you're going to do it and that was sufficient for my sister and I but I also remember one of the say that he always always always always put in front of us which he would always say you can get a great education wherever you are using whatever resources whatever you're doing you'll just have to work for it harder in some places than in others with the implication then being that he was really trying to say I'm giving you what I believe is going to be the easiest way of you getting a great education and if I thought that there was something better I would give you something better but he also made it clear that you know we might have to work for it a little bit even still so those were some of the things that I remember sticking out to me when he was encouraging us to buy into the the educational model that he had selected I find that a piece of wisdom just for me and all those new homeschoolers out there who are listening that there are multiple ways to get an absolutely beautiful education and I think that what your dad realized through his reading and research and what we know now is that an education is the cultivation of of a human being it's not buckets and buckets right the the Ancients said this the igniting of a fire right we actually don't know who actually said that don't you think that that piece of wisdom gives a mama peace to know hey I'm not going to get this perfect I'm not going to get everything right but this is what I believe in my heart to be the best path and ultimately there are many ways to achieve the end of what we would call a beautiful education would you agree with that 100% I think my parents would be quick to say that they made a lot of mistakes along the way they didn't do everything perfectly and there were a lot of things that I'm sure even if they could go back and do it again they probably would have done it differently and yet at the end of it all I think that we can all agree that both my sister and I got a worldclass education even if they felt like they were stumbling blindly in the dark to figure out how to get us there and they're as confident as I am that they could have taken any number of other paths and arrived at the same end or arrived at different end that would have been just as good there are a lot of parents who love the classical framework and want to follow it is there one overall recommendation that you would give to parents who are interested in the classical model yeah if I were to make a recommendation for parents who are interested in the classical model I think for one I would just say Don't Be Afraid even if it looks entirely different from the education that you yourself received I think that by nature of classical education only coming back into popularity in the last decade or two we're only now getting to a point where homeschooling parents are sometimes graduates of that sort of an education themselves but I think many homeschooling parents are still finding that the classical education model looks entirely different from the education that they received I know that my parents experience that and I think that that made classical education more intimidating than it needs to be but I think that there's been a lot of parents over the years who have been able to provide their student with an education inside of the classical education model that really is different from their own but what they would want their child to have so I would say don't be intimidated even if it looks different and the other thing that I would say is be wise as you're considering different programs because I think that a lot of programs have a tendency to use the term classical in a way that perhaps is not actually true to what classical education is as an education that's founded upon the Seven Liberal Arts and who really strives to put truth goodness and Beauty in front of a student and enable them to think critically about the world of the past and the world as they see it today so just because something says that it's classical does not necessarily mean that it's classical so keep your eyes open and be wise about the decisions that you're making recognizing that if your student has truth goodness and Beauty in front of them they will learn to love the things that they are studying before we continue I want to share with you a program that has been a GameChanger for our family at our Learning Center we instructed and help kids through pretty much every program on the market so we know firsthand just how important a solid math Foundation is for our kids Futures finding the right homeschool math curriculum that didn't compromise academic Excellence but also didn't put me and my kids through the ringer was a challenge until one day I found CTC math you guys the rest was history first off it's a Mastery based program which means your child gets a full grasp of the material it's also loaded with mixed reviews ensuring your kids don't forget anything they've learned the questions are adaptive too which keep students confident and progressing at their own pace but the best part all the teaching grading and testing done for you with CTC math there is no compromise on Excellence your child gets a topnotch education and you just made your homeschool life easier visit CTC math to get your free trial today whether you're newer to homeschooling or you've been homeschooling over a decade the fact is creating a streamlined successful home school is hard the pressure is high and the weight of responsibility often leads to self-doubt second guessing and feeling completely overwhelmed with the excessive amounts of opinions and curricular options out there we love our kids and at the same time the stakes are high we don't want to mess this up so how do we build a home school that our kids will thank us for when they're adults and one that you have 100% confidence in the first step to to pulling all of that off is joining Thrive homeschool Community Thrive homeschool Community is where you learn The eight-step Homeschool success framework to build an undeniably successful home school each year and each kid presents us with Uncharted Territory but when you have a good plan the right plan you can rest in the security and confidence that you are doing a great job the path is easy join Thrive say a quick hello to your new friends start The eight-step Homeschool success framework and kiss anxiety goodbye it's risk-free no contracts you can cancel any time no questions asked go to christ-focused to ask you in your own words you touched on it but I would love a more robust explanation for the parents listening who maybe you know there are nine different homeschooling Styles I have a five minute free homeschool style finder on my website that helps it narrows it down for you to figure out like what is really in your heart and I would love for you to explain in layman's terms because the classical movement is is pretty intellectual the thought leaders I remember going to my very first homeschooling conference and thinking well it's pretty clear that the smartest people here are the classical people so I think all look into classical education further but it took me like probably two years to actually wrap my brain around what it is and I know it's hard to do but I would like you to try well I'll do the best that I can so classical education is really trying to return education to what it once was where students were engaging deeply with the great ideas of history and literature and philosophy theology math The Sciences both U natural and otherwise as well as studying logic and rhetoric Latin and Greek many times understanding the mechanics of how the world works it's many times also kind of centered around what we call the trivia the three ways of education and it's designed around different steps that are developmentally appropriate for students so there's the grammar stage where there's a lot of learning of mechanics there's a lot of learning that happens through song a lot of repetition and memorization well at the same time integrating play and joyfulness into studies then you move into the logic stage where students begin to think a little bit more critically about the things that they're reading and they begin to ask more questions about the things that they are learning and the things that they're seeing in the world around them with it then leading into the roric stage where they are trained and able to express their own ideas and to look critically at ideas and compare and contrast them with each other so that's kind of a basic framework of it really I would say that at the core of classical education is the idea that students are perfectly capable at looking at the thoughts and the ideas of the greatest thinkers of history and they're able to evaluate the claims that they see they're able to converse with those ancient texts and they're able to come to a deeper understanding of the world as they see it through it and how does that so high level and that was a great explanation by the way I love it thank you I could see a lot of parents listening to this right now and saying all right well how is this going to prepare my kid to be an architect or a nurse like how does this because ultimately I think that well we know the studies show that people homeschool for first for environmental reasons but also academically and I think part of that is our culture is obsessed with vocation and this is something too that if you're listening to this and if you are of the mindset right now I lovingly want to nudge you in a different direction if you are a person listening to this right now and this is the first time you're hearing that perhaps an education is more than vocation training I want you to listen up because that's kind of what we're getting at here and I would love for you to talk about you getting into Stanford University and what your experience was entering that high academic environment being completely differently educated than most of your peers there but first I want to ask you how does a classical education prepare a child practically for their life I think at the end of the day what a classical education is training a student to do is to think and to learn and whatever subject is then put in front of them they're going to be able to take those tools and those skills to it so you can take that certainly to a rigorous study of Latin and Greek you can take that to a study of rhetoric and the Art of persuasion but you can just as easily take that to baking or learning a language or learning how to repair a car learning how to build a business learning how to do X Y orz thing whatever it is the tools that you're given with a classical education are not merely a bunch of high and lofty Ivory Tower sorts of big brain ideas instead you're learning how to take a subject break it into part you're understanding how to understand the individual Parts but then you're understanding how to integrate them back together and to see how you can then use the thing that you've built as a whole to move you forward in your life and that's a a tool and a skill that's going to serve you whatever industry you find yourself in wherever life leads you it's going to be an education that will take you wherever you need to go I absolutely love that and I have a confession before my deconstruction we made our living off of the system both public and private we owned a private Learning Center and consulting firm helped thousands of students and families we were running a home school and I remember sitting in and I for I don't remember which speaker it was it's usually like kind of the same people who go to the conferences to talk about classical education but there those of you who know me now you'll know of course Christy you did this I stomped up afterwards I I I wish I could remember who it was I don't know but I said my kids's grandmother is Latina why on Earth would I have them learn Latin and I'm from California don't you think they should be learning Spanish I don't see the practicality of learning Latin and I wasn't disrespectful but it that was where I was mentally and I would love as because as I don't know we didn't introduce yet that you are a Latin teacher but I would love to hear the perspective of the value of learning a language a dead language such as Latin oh my favorite question I love it you got to answer it every time girl the show will resume in just a minute but first I want to share with you an incredible resource that is totally free to homeschooling families everywhere have you ever felt like you were on trial for your homeschooling Choice when visiting a doctor or another service provider it's unsettling especially when someone misinformed has the power to threaten your family unfortunately we have heard countless stories of parents who have felt trapped in offices and met with suspicion rather than support simply because they were homeschoolers I've been profiled and interrogated myself and I'm sure many of you have as well enough is enough it's time we proactively vet service providers before giving them our business and our money enter christe face list a directory 100% free to homeschooling families connecting you with homeschool friendly service providers who promise to support you in your homeschooling choice we want every homeschooler in America to know about and be using this list so here's how to make Christy Faith's list a household name one tell all your friends about it let's show the market just how powerful The Homeschool movement is number two check Christy face list website before stepping foot into any service provider's office to make sure they are on there and number three if your favorite service provider isn't on the list make sure to refer them there's a button on the homepage of the website it takes only 30 seconds and that way we can send them a lovely invite if you're listening and you are a homeschool friendly professional we want you on the list we're eager to connect homeschooling families with you shout your name from the rooftops and bring you tons and tons of business we have plans for every type of business both small local Nationwide and worldwide check out Christy Faith's list . today hi mama if you like my social media content and my show I'm pretty sure you will love my book homeschool Rising shattering myths finding courage and opting out of the school system my book is for homeschool parents both veteran and new and the perfect book to hand any homeschool Skeptics in your life so they can better understand why you've chosen this amazing lifestyle this book will challenge you Empower you encourage you and give you solid Mindful Answers to all those questions you get about your homeschooling Choice grab your copy and maybe an extra one for your mother-in-law today homeschool Rising is available wherever books are sold I do I'm oh man I'm one of these days I'm just going to have my answer so memorized so elevator pitchy that I can just drop it at if you were to wake me up in the middle of the night and give it goodness no I I think that there's immense value in learning what some would consider to be a dead language and I think in my own experience one of the beautiful things I've noticed is the efficiency of learning Latin first you were mentioning you know shouldn't my students be learning Spanish well the fun thing about learning Latin is as you're learning Latin you actually are also learning Spanish and Italian and French and Portuguese and Romanian and all of these languages that are built off of it I had the really fun experience of having studied Latin for many years myself showing up in my first semester of Italian in college because I decided I was going to be moving to Italy after University so I should probably study Italian and my teacher thought that I would unusually Advanced for Italian because I knew so many different words that had not been taught in our textbook she just thought I had kind of an unusual pronunciation but what she realized really quickly was uh I was actually just using the Latin word whenever I wasn't quite sure what the Italian word was I just see how it went and more times than not it would work so there is the benefit of studying Latin as it relates to making every other language you're ever going to study easier but also I think that what Latin does is it trains you how to approach a language and it trains you to think about a language systematically well at the same time enabling you to read beautiful works of literature and poetry and theater and political thought and philosophy and all of these other sorts of things so all the tools that you're going to learn with Latin are going to apply to other languages but at the same time learning Latin is gets you halfway to learning a lot of other languages right and I don't you think there's a strength too in the logical reasoning I have heard that about Latin it's very orderly and once you understand a rule you can see how it applies in a slew of different situations which then you're able to look at something new and unfamiliar and see the patterns and start to figure out some of the rules for yourself which I think trains your brain to figure out how a language works even independent of more formal instruction with us if you're enjoying the show and you don't want to miss out on future episodes hit that like And subscribe button and show us some love with your comments those five star reviews really do make a difference yes yeah and I think that's something that is important in terms of when we talk about cultivating a human being some things like for example having your kids learning an instrument and being able to read music they've been they've done studies on what that does to right brain left brain it's not just for being able to be in a band later it actually is extremely beneficial for the growth of the mind and I think that there's that to learning Latin as well I know the audience is dying to to hear about why Stanford how did you get in as a homeschooler who didn't learn anything and who's not socialized and what was your experience getting there and being there your very first year yeah I'd love to talk about that so kind of something that's unusual maybe is when my parents first started homeschooling well this isn't the unusual part I mean what homeschooler has not heard this but when we they first started homeschooling the question on if everybody's mind was but how will your daughters ever go to college however will they be able to leave the nest at the end of the day that think my poor parents probably heard that question 40 times every time they left their house practically but my dad as he was doing research about homeschooling and making some of those decisions for our family he read about how Stanford University of all places was actively recruiting homeschoolers at that time because they really valued independent thought at their institution and they were noticing that it was the homeschoolers who were coming in with the ability to learn and the independent thought that was required to thrive in an intellectually vibrant environment so they actually started recruiting homeschoolers so my dad read about this and again kind of going to his this is a bunch of nonsense sort of Personality whenever anybody asked him oh but however will your daughters go to university he would always respond just the most dead pan fa face that he could he would say Oh Our Girls not only will go to university they're going to go to Stanford and then he would tell them about it so I heard this from a very very young age and I said from I don't know the tender age of six or seven I'm gonna go to Stanford someday and ironically that's how it ended up turning out I ended up applying to a lot of countries all across the country but Stanford was always the one that I wanted and and thankfully that's where I ended up getting in so yeah it was a process to get there actually the first time that I had ever written an essay was my application essay to St but it turned out well they had a lot of questions along the way in the application process because I had taken so many classes at home and then some online and then some in local schools and then some here some there so they were a little bit confused about you know where I went to school but with a little bit of extra clarification they were perfectly happy with the situation and they were apparently happy to welcome you into the school and when you got there what was it like were there any I have heard from from homeschoolers that there there were some bumps in the road in their first year especially in Generations past I think that the landscape of homeschooling has changed so much where socialization I mean we're if anything we're overs socialized I'm exhausted from my kids social activities and I think a lot of parents listening but I do think that that you grew up in a different generation where your homeschooled experience was you probably had Seasons where you weren't in stuff and then Seasons where you were I want to hear both and I want you to answer both of these questions first what was it like academically entering Stanford how did you view yourself compared to the other students there and then after that I want to talk about your social experience absolutely yeah so academically I think that I went into Stanford knowing that I was well prepared and that was pretty quickly confirmed upon arriving there I remember in particular there was an advanced chemistry class that I was taking my very first quarter there at Stanford and we showed up the very first day of class and they said all right welcome to chem 31x your first test is in one week we will not be teaching you any of the material on the test and they just kind of left it at that and of course you have this room full of freshman students in their very first week at college just Eyes Wide Open absolutely shocked that such a thing could possibly happen and you know to their credit I think most at least many of them Rose to the occasion admirably I'm sure some of them just dropped the class right then and there but I think that I realized really quickly that I didn't have a challenge to rise to because I had always been expected to learn the material myself my education had been one in which my parents found the best resources they could they put it in front of me with a goal in mind and they told me to learn the material so when a college professor was asking me to do the same thing it just felt like what I was used to so that was one experience I remember another one where I did an intro philosophy class that actually was one of the ones that inspired me then to end up majoring in Latin and Greek and we were reading all of these great texts I think we read Augustine's confessions we read aristophanes's Birds we read Plato's eutha one of the platonic dialogues and they were all books that I had already read before I remember actually signing up for that class because I thought it would be a really easy way to meet some of the requirements because all of the material was already familiar to me um and then I actually ended up having a really rich and vibrant reintroduction to a lot of those texts I just remember in each of my different classes realizing that I know how to learn I know how to study this material so even if there's material that's particularly challenging I have all the tools that I need to approach it so academically I found it to be a very easy transition and that's that's not to say that there weren't classes that really gave me a run for my money I remember taking one of my beginning calculus classes and just thinking oh this is not my cup of tea this is going to take a little bit of extra effort so I think that like with any student certainly there were challenges and I I don't mean to suggest by any means that it was all um easy breezy lemon squee easy going to Stanford but I had the tools and the equipment that I needed in order to approach it with some degree of Grace and ease socially I think I mean going to college is going to be an adjustment for anybody I don't know that anybody arrives in their freshman dorm and is just perfectly prepared with everything that they need because at the end of the day that's a huge transition point in a child's life regardless of what they are transitioning from but I found that I had a really positive experience I really quickly found a whole bunch of friends that I really enjoyed and are still my friends to this day and generally speaking as I was interacting with people in my dorm and sharing some of our Lives before college and all of that I just found that they had a lot of curiosity simply because my life had looked a fair bit different from theirs but I think everybody was so intrigued about that and was so interested in how I became the person that I was that I didn't feel any sort of negative social interactions or any sort of disparagement coming from my PE I really felt like they were curious and interested and more than willing to just welcome me into the fold with open arms thanks for joining us for part one we hope you gained some valuable insights be sure to catch part two where we're going to continue this great conversation