 Good morning, my beautiful Arnott friends. Welcome back to my channel. Thanks for joining me here today. It is a crazy time. I don't have to tell you that outside our front doors. I know that so many of us are stuck at home or choosing to spend a lot of time at home for the health and safety of ourselves and those around us. So with that being said, I've been trying to release a video a day as health allows and I asked on my community page what you would like to hear about. And one of the most upvoted comments was homeschooling. Was I homeschooled? What was that like? What were some of the differences? You know, how did I feel about it? How do jobs feel about homeschooling? Do they think it's a good thing? A bad thing? Do I get frowned upon? Have I run day shoes with it? This question was asked by Bruno and I'm going to cover everything that I know about homeschooling as I was homeschooled for the first 16 years of my life. As we dive into this video, if you want to give it a thumbs up for the YouTube algorithm, that would be fantastic. When I tell people that I was homeschooled, oftentimes I get sort of a squinty confused look and I get questions about didn't I have any friends or wasn't I lonely or how can I actually talk to people because aren't homeschoolers weird and awkward? Yes, yes, they are. I am weird and awkward, but I also can hold a conversation with other people. And there are a lot of stereotypes and assumptions when it comes to homeschooling. I'm just going to share my own experience and what I thought about it. Also, I know that my dad especially and sometimes my mom watches this video. So hi, mom and dad. This is going to be a commentary on the choices that you made for us. Won't that be fun for the whole world to see? I'm just kidding. I'm actually not just kidding. It is kind of a commentary on what you chose to do, but it's mostly good. So I am 28 now, meaning that when my mom first started homeschooling us many, many years ago, this was not a normal thing to do. Not that homeschooling is the norm now, but it's way more accepted than it used to be. I really have a lot of respect for my parents for making a choice that was very much against the status quo and was frowned upon. I remember us not really being allowed to go out and do things in public before a certain time when, you know, school kids might get off of school because people frowned on it. It was weird. Your kid should be in school. Why isn't your kid in school? So the reason that my parents decided to homeschool us in the first place is we were raised in a conservative Christian family. They wanted to instill into us the values that they wanted us to have. My mom in particular did not like public schools, did not feel like they were a safe environment for kids in really any regard, and she wanted to keep us safe in her eyes. She wanted to shelter us from, you know, the dangers of the outside world. So when we were younger, my parents made a conscious decision that my dad was going to work full time and my mom was going to take care of us full time. And along with that, she was also going to homeschool us. I just want to pause and say that I have a lot of respect for my mom for taking this on because the idea of being responsible for children's education sounds absolutely terrifying to me. So props to you mom. So what was being homeschooled actually like? Well, a lot of people think that it is an excuse not to do anything and that we stayed at home in our PJs all day and never left the house and never actually studied anything. But that's very inaccurate. My mom found courses for us. She taught some things herself. She had curriculums for other things. She formed a co-op with other moms in the area who were trying this homeschooling thing and planned out curriculum with them. And then we would have meetups once a month where we would have a history themed event. Doesn't that sound funny? It actually was. Like I remember ancient Mesopotamia day where we all dressed up like ancient Mesopotamians and participated in activities that they might do. That co-op was a really, really cool thing and I have some lifelong friends from that. So most days started at like eight o'clock. We would have breakfast together and my mom might start teaching some lesson over pancakes. I remember there was this one study in particular we did on the different character values like loyalty and empathy and courage and what those words meant and we learned about that over breakfast which was just delightful. An average day being homeschooled meant that I usually got done with school before most kids as well because I could take it at my own pace. Both my brother and I I think wanted to get our stuff done so we could play and hang out and do stuff. So we had deadlines for things. We had you know the course curriculum that we had to complete and if we got it done for that day then we got it done and we were able to do whatever else we wanted to do which was a real gift being a kid in particular. We also did a lot of field trips. We got to see you know basically everything in our area. I remember going to the aquarium a number of times and we would go do these activities and these things but there'd always be an educational thing about it. Something we'd have to learn or a paper we'd have to write but it was great because we got to go do and see a lot of things on a fairly regular basis. Now a lot of this was done with other families. I think this was one of the best things that my parents did when it came to homeschooling is that it was a very community focused thing. Even though it wasn't a normal or mainstream thing to do there were other families in the area who were doing this. So we would go on field trips with our friends or we'd you know play outside when we were done it too with our buddies down the street or you know fill in the blank. It was it was really that part of it was really cool and I think especially when I was younger I loved being homeschooling because of the freedom of it but by the time I hit about middle school and we had moved to Colorado by this point and life was a little bit different. I was done with it. I was real done with this stupid homeschooling thing. I just wanted to be like normal kids and go to school and about that time we started attending basically a homeschooled school. It was held at a local church there were at least 100 probably more kids who went there and different parents would teach different classes. It was mostly moms so you'd have someone's mom who really was good at trigonometry or algebra and other moms didn't really know too much about that and so uh all the kids in that grade would go to that class. It was really like going to a school except it was two days a week and it was just for a couple hours. It was an awesome place to socialize and to learn things but you know I started being an angsty 13 year old about that time and and hated all of it. I just wanted to go away from home. I wanted to go to school but my parents weren't going to be cool with that and it wasn't until I was 16 that I started going to a charter school which basically allowed me to start taking college credits because of the way that the program was structured so I pretty much went from being homeschooled full time to going to college full time. Sometimes people will say aww but then you didn't get to go to like any high school dances or anything like that and for the record I don't know if it'd be a huge loss if I never did but I did get to go to a prom. My best friend and her boyfriend and her good friend and I all went to prom together. It was a blast. I got the experience of you know dressing up and looking pretty and going to this dance. Side note I actually went to prom with my best friend's boyfriend like her current boyfriend at that time and she went with a good friend of hers who she is now married to. Funny story I should probably do a video on that whole situation because it was quite um it was pretty fun. It was pretty funny how things actually happened. Anyways so I did have the experience of going to a high school dance. A valid comment that I hear from time to time is people making you know quips about well it's easy to get A's if your mom's grading your papers and and by people I mean Brian. Brian makes a lot of jokes about me getting all A's because my mom was grading my papers but she wasn't. She was. My mom did grade most of my papers and tests but we also had that homeschooled school that we went to. We also had that co-op and so a lot of other people were involved in our upbringing in our education and in grading our papers. One of the questions that you guys ask me about homeschooling is what do people view it like when it comes to getting hired? Have I ever had any issues with that or anything like that and the answer is no. People didn't care about me being homeschooling at any job that I've ever tried to apply to or I've ever interviewed for anything like that. I had the privilege of being able to go to that charter school where I did take college classes before I technically graduated high school so I had those on my transcripts and I think once people saw that they don't really care about what's before. Just in general I've also never heard anyone when it comes to getting a job being given a hard time about being a homeschooler. I think people generally accept that there are some standards when it comes to homeschooling because there are and generally the education is pretty decent. If you're making the decision to stay home with your kids and be responsible for their education, the vast majority, though not everybody, the vast majority of people are going to try to do a good job with that and pretty much every homeschooled person I've ever met had a good education. So what about sports? That's another question that I get. Being homeschooled with only my brother, I obviously didn't have enough people around me to have a sports team or anyone to compete with so what did we do when it came to that? Well, I regret to inform you I was not a very athletic kid. I would much rather stay inside on the computer and play horse land. I don't even know if that website is still around. Please let me know if anyone played that game when you were a kid. I would love to know if anyone was as much of a nerd as I was. I was really home-based until I started horseback riding and then I got outside and then I started really enjoying going to the gym and then I broke my ankle which has brought us to this point here today but long story short, I never participated in sports that were not summer related. There were a lot of summer camps and I did have summer as a homeschooler that I would go to. I liked soccer but my brother really liked soccer. My brother was and is crazy talented at that game and he actually joined the local high school's soccer team because you can totally do that as a homeschooler at least in my area so he would get done with school and then he would go to soccer practice and many of my weekends were spent at soccer games. He actually went away to college to play soccer and played for a couple years there. It was really really good but ran to a lot of injuries and eventually decided it wasn't for him but sports are something that are actually accessible to kids even if you aren't going to public school. When I was older in my high school homeschooling career I started participating in something called K-Chudow which was a martial art. There was a class that was offered at that sort of homeschool school in self-defense and the instructor was a black belt in this martial art and I absolutely loved it. I was like this is this is me this is something I need to be a part of and so we just paid for me to go take classes there like you may have paid to go to karate so they're absolutely sports that you can participate in as a homeschooled kid and I did but much more heavily my brother did. I think a big variable in being homeschooled is the quality of your learning. Obviously it depends on who's teaching you to some extent and what curriculum you're using but I think a big asset of being homeschooled is that you really learn a lot about teaching yourself things. It's self-paced it's a lot of it's self-learned from books or from videos or you know from other people from time to time but I think that's a really great asset especially when I went away to college. I was very familiar with reading textbooks and learning things and figuring things out on my own. I think that piece of sort of learning and intellectual independence from having to have something taught to you from a very young age has been an asset to some extent. Now do I think I got a better education than people who went to public school? No, not necessarily. I like the level of education that I got being homeschooled. I think my parents did an absolutely fantastic job with that side of things but I think you can also get a great education going to a public or private school. There's so many variables involved. I think watching my parents take the risk of homeschooling us at a time when it was very weird and there wasn't any set standard for it probably taught me a little bit about taking risks and doing things against the status quo. It was the environment that I was raised in and not like I'm a crazy rebel or anything like that but I think it's been good for me to have that example of my parents going against the grain and knowing that sometimes that's okay. Sometimes it's okay to challenge what's normally accepted. Sometimes it's okay to try something and fail miserably. Not that they failed miserably. I just mean that like if I was trying to teach myself something new or learn something new and it just didn't work we would try something else. There was a lot of flexibility and figuring out as we went that was involved. So I'm going to move on now to talking about some of the less sunny aspects of being a homeschooler now that I am adult. Looking back I realized at the times that I was like oh this sucks. I don't want to do it anymore. It was probably just me being an angsty little kid and it wasn't a bad thing at all at that time but I do think that one thing that homeschooling perhaps particularly in a religiously encased environment is that you don't learn a whole lot about what the real world is like. Hey it's sick Joe popping in real quick to say. Another thing that I think homeschooling did miss out for me on was diversity. Everybody I knew was homeschooled, middle class, very Christian, predominantly white, a lot of the same life experiences. All the kids around me had very similar life experiences and it wasn't until much later in my life that I was exposed to people who were oh my god atheist. They don't believe in God. Who doesn't believe in God? Turns out a lot of people. I've really enjoyed making friendships with people who are very different than me whose lives were very different. I think that's one of the richest, coolest things about being a person interacting with other people. I love that. I love hearing people who have different backgrounds and different viewpoints but growing up I definitely was not exposed to a lot of that. That came late high school and mostly honestly into college. You learn a lot about great education and exploration and taking risk and teaching yourself things but I was very, very, very naive to the reality of how harsh the world could be, the reality of the choices that people make and how people hurt each other. I don't blame homeschooling for any of the things that I have experienced but I was not very prepared for the world that we live in and it took a while to adjust. A good contrast for that is I went straight from homeschooling and taking those college classes through that charter school to going to a Christian school for the first year of my out of home college experience and it was great but it was also a little Christian bubble where you followed the rules and I'm sure there were like rebel kids but I wasn't one of them and you went to chapel three times a week and everything was very sheltered and very safe and that's awesome. There's absolutely nothing in the world that's wrong with that but then I wasn't able to stay at that school any longer because of health issues and I came home. I was at home for a while, took care of what I needed to take care of then I ended up going to a school in Gunnison, Colorado. I believe it is the coldest county in the United States. I could be wrong on that but I remember walking to school because my car wouldn't start because it was negative 30 fairly regularly with you know long underwear on freezing cold but it was beautiful there. I liked it a lot but this was not a Christian school. This was a school where I literally saw professors smoking weed, gasp, the horror with college students and I didn't know anything about anything at that point. People didn't care about school there. They didn't care about classes. They were just there to have fun and party and do a lot of a lot of drugs, a lot of different drugs for the record. I don't think weed is bad at all. Most people I know partake to some extent. I've tried it myself as well at this point but at that point it was like a it was like a bad kid thing to do in my mind and everybody was doing it. It was so weird to be cast into what essentially was a public school environment for me because I was so used to everyone caring about their faith and everyone going to church and all of that so it was weird for me and I only stay there for a semester because it was not the kind of culture at that point in my life that I wanted for myself. I only stayed there for one semester and then I came back to Colorado Springs and ended up finishing up here but I had sort of my environment here. I had people that I knew but I was learning a lot more about the world at that point. That's when I experienced a lot of trauma which I talked about in other videos and it was not a fun time so that's really when my world shifted. Like I said that's not the fault of being homeschooled but I think when you grow up in a very sheltered environment it's hard to be prepared for what the rest of the world is actually like. My brother I'm not going to speak for him actually I kind of am going to speak for him so feel free to correct me Sam if any of this is inaccurate but I know that he does not have a good taste in his mouth about being homeschooled. He graduated at 18 and then went to state school and the environment was very very different there and I think he had a hard time maybe not so much a hard time adjusting but just realized how sheltered our world had been and did not appreciate being homeschooled at all so both of us coming from the same environment have different thoughts and feelings about it. At the end of the day I don't really think that there's a bad option with any of this when it comes to homeschooling or going to a private school, public school, charter school, fill in the blank. I think the different options work for different people. I'm really grateful that especially when I was younger I had the flexibility to explore and take risks and learn different things and pursue what I wanted to pursue. If there was something I really wanted to learn about we'd learn about it and you don't have that freedom generally speaking in public environments where you have to take care of a lot of kids and tailor the education to a certain level so I got to go as fast as I want. I got to slow down you know if stuff was too hard for a little while and I had a lot of help a lot of personal one-on-one help. I had a lot of time with my family. I had a lot of time with close friends. I had the freedom. I think freedom is the biggest word that I would think of when it comes to homeschooling. I really appreciate that my parents took this risk. They're definitely pros and they're definitely cons but overall I'm grateful for the experience that I had and that's a little bit about homeschooling. Let me know if you have any questions. I would love to answer them down below. At the end of the day it's not really as weird as it seems. You don't just stay indoors all day in your PJs and you know eat chips though you do stay at home in your PJs and study things. Thanks for listening guys. Like I said I'd love to hear your thoughts and your comments down below. If you liked this video give it a thumbs up. Consider subscribing to my channel if that's your thing. If you want it I'm not going to tell you what to do. Thank you to my patrons over on Patreon especially during this hectic crazy time for choosing to continue to support me there. I really appreciate you guys. Thank you for spending a few days out of, oh god I always say this, a few minutes out of your day. You didn't spend a few days out of your day listening to me. You spent a few minutes out of your day listening to me and I really appreciate it. Thanks guys. I love you. I'm thinking about you and I'll see you in the next video. Bye guys.