On Homeschooling

Originally appeared on Medium: https://medium.com/@njess/on-homeschooling-40b06c4925cf

[Given the number of people in the world who aren't in school/won't be going back to school — and are trying to figure out how to learn from home and what it means, I've decided to finally share my story. If you find it helpful or interesting, feel free to retweet or share with families who are making the adjustment — and you can drop me a note, I'm pretty easy to find on email or Twitter. -Noah]

It is with some reticence that I write about my experience homeschooling. My hope is that my story serves as a useful aid to folks considering whether or not to homeschool their own children — a question I'm seeing with increasing frequency in recent years. I've never really written (or talked about) my experience publicly (except here and there to parents trying to make a decision) for a few reasons, which I might grossly sum up as i) uncertainty about how much of my unconventional path I really want to show and ii) the fact that I spent the better part of age 17-onwards trying to mask this very story, so that I could finally "be normal." It's finally time to take off the mask. To do so, I commit to tell the truth. There are certainly highlights — little polished gems of stories — I've happily recounted over the years, brushing aside the bigger issues at stake.

But what follows is the story I haven't told anyone yet.

In the 1990s, when you introduced yourself as "homeschooled" the first assumptions people made were usually one of the following:

  1. you must be highly religious or have parents who are hiding the subject of evolution, or
  2. you must be a disturbed, challenged, or otherwise "failed" child

My situation was even more idiosyncratic, but more idyllic. My parents had recently emerged from their Bobos-in-Paradise yuppie metamorphous — leaving starving NYC artist life, finishing law and economics school, and nesting in a neat suburban house outside Denver, Colorado. On weekends, they drove all through the state, looking for a property to someday build their dream escape from New York. Requirements were simple: space, privacy, and a dirt driveway for the children (us) to play in.

With my sister and my pending arrival, they set out to design us the very best possible upbringing. And rather than tweaks and changes, they decided to approach the effort with a full zero-based-accounting mindset. Convention would be shown the door, whenever it might interfere with the pursuit of the best.

My parents were both products of public school — and not particularly joyous ones at that. They felt that schools were simply an assembly line to morph children into the uniform bell curve of humanity, good for holding down jobs and serving some 1950's ideals. My mother in particular was a keen student of Howard Gartner's work (widely credited with studying multiple kinds of intelligence) — and they decided to let us evolve into whatever we were, rather than shaping us to the mold of (my words, their ethos) an agricultural-era, state-mandated babysitting service. The other influential thinking they learned from was John Holt — who I confess I've just looked up in earnest for the first time while writing this.

Also — many years later — I might imagine other factors that have gone unsaid. I believe my mother's intelligence and ability was not utilized by the school systems of the 1960's — she was at time just before women were encouraged to have careers. That played a factor. And some parts may have been fearful protection, or even outright stunting at times. Just as parents want to keep Santa Claus coming for one more year to preserve that youthful preciousness — by delaying my day-to-day battle with the gruesome realities of humanity, I might stay a child a little bit longer.

So, for many or few reasons, the decision was made. We would not go to school.

And at first, we wouldn't even be homeschooled.

Unschooling

The Wikipedia definition — which I've just looked up for the first time — is both helpful, and somewhat politically correct:

"Unschooling is an informal learning that advocates learner-chosen activities as a primary means for learning. Unschooling students learn through their natural life experiences including play, household responsibilities, personal interests and curiosity, internships and work experience, travel, books, elective classes, family, mentors, and social interaction."

From my perspective at the time (I didn't self-describe as a "learner" yet) — it wasn't something that you "do." Rather I became keenly aware that i) I'd somehow gotten a hall pass to my freedom to spend time as I chose and ii) anything I wanted to learn, we had the resources and energy to go after with aplomb. (And even at the time, I remember being grateful for the latter.)

I was also incredibly fortunate to have a built-in first best friend: my sister, who was just shy of two years older than me. Playing outside, rolling our little wagons down the "hill" (slight slope), catching grasshoppers, and getting our hands sappy on the pine trees with low branches. She was a much better reader than I was — and I quickly learned much of my persuasiveness trying to get her to read to me constantly.

Books were a huge part of our lives. To this day, I remember going to the library, and every time I went kindly asking the librarian where I could find the dinosaur books (it seemed the adults would ask for directions…I of course quickly knew where they were, but that's what the adults did). I loved trucks, cars and dinosaurs. To this day, cannot explain why. Lizards and motorcycles just don't do it. Very specific.

One of my favorite places in (my very small) world was a 4-story bookstore in downtown Denver ("Tattered Cover"). It was simply a palace, washed in green carpet with slightly musty wingback chairs tucked in the labyrinths of shelves. Unlike highly-crafted, shells of bookstores that exist today, it felt a lot more like a used book store with many titles and sections.

Whenever either my sister or I were interested in something, we'd find a way to learn about it. For instance, money was very curious. The whole thing seemed quite mysterious at 4 or 5 years old. After some negotiation (and the disappointing knowledge that it would be quite some time until I'd be allowed to work), our $1/week allowance was established (paid on Wednesday, the day the lawnmowers came). My mother took my sister and I to open our first bank account that day. We learned about interest and how to balance our checkbook.

Along the way, my parents had found the property they'd long been looking for. 20 wild acres, overlooking the entire Rocky Mountain range, abutted to a 4,000 acre farm. My mother, who had interned in an architecture office during her NYC days, drafted 7 different houses before the final house plan was decided.

While my parents had the house built, my sister and I were taken along — and actually involved in — nearly every step. We met every single contractor and most of the suppliers along the way. At the time I didn't know it, but I was getting a "full stack" view into how buildings are built. Then, multiple times per week, we'd visit the site. Playing with trucks in the dirt is fun — but even more interesting to watch them do the real work to build your future home.

Since I had never been in the school system — with different grades, ages, and separation between "adults" and "children" — I was at the time fearless, asking different tradesmen and artisans about their process, their business, how they liked to do things, what styles of work they liked. In retrospect, it was probably cute or a distraction, but I vividly remember sitting in the half-constructed mechanical room of the house, talking through every element with the lead plumber, much to my delight.

The other thing that 20 acres afforded was nature. My sister and I explored every meadow, every valley, and every wood on the property. We built crude maps, naming each of the areas. As the seasons changed, the prairie land blossomed — over 15 types of different delicate wildflowers. We carefully sampled and named (whether official or our own) and dried a collection. We caught bugs, peered in moleholes, wondered why two grasshoppers were stacked on top of each other with gusto (this prompted the "birds and the bees" talk). I cannot weigh how much access to nature shaped me, but never do I look back for want of sunshine or open fields to play.

Peers

You'll notice in all of the above there's hardly a mention of other kids or peers. That's because there weren't many in the early years. When I was very young I never felt deprived, so long as I was out in the world, meeting adults, and engaged in what we were doing or learning. My parents were not particularly social — never had habits of hosting at home, from their small NYC apartment days.

We joined some semi-local "homeschooler meetups" — I still remember playing dodgeball with other kids for the first time. But most of the other families were doing it for very different reasons, and (though it's fuzzy now) probably weren't the peer set that we were looking for. (I think fundamental religious groups and kids who couldn't handle school were the primary cohorts.) This could be entirely colored by my parents' view, though — but at the time, it did feel like a bit of a play date for somewhat abnormal kids.

The first organized activity that stuck was after-school theater — at a little theater academy and the local JCC. I had no idea of social norms, to say the least. I didn't have any particular interest in theater (my sister did though — eventually becoming a theater major in college). But it was fun to do things outside the house and be surrounded by similar kids. As an example of my unawareness to any social sensibilities, I decided that I'd assign my clothes to each day of the week. But with once-a-week after school theater session, one friend was finally nice enough to ask, with a bit of concern: "Do you only have one set of clothing?" With horror, I realized my 'Wednesday' outfit had been totally misinterpreted.

But with my somewhat limited scope of socialization, peer groups — rather than becoming the world I lived in — represented this curious exposure to both i) other and ii) reality. From my earliest memories, my parents always instilled in us that we did things differently than most people, shaped by (my interpretation) education, not following the crowd, and having a bit of style. So with this as a backdrop, I was more curious about this social world. I didn't particularly feel that it controlled my life — rather it was something to try to understand and learn. (I'll come back to this later — at some point this external life becomes full.) But for now, I very much had the training wheels on. I was just hoping to be not completely awkward, keep up, and maybe make a few friends.

What was nice from our theater groups is that the peer set was closer to what felt natural. Many of the kids had similar academic aspirations and came from relatable families.

Lessons begin

Today, it's a bit blurry when my more "formal" education started. I'm pretty certain it was after I started doing more theater, meeting more kids my age. But I remember that I had a hard time writing letters, and I wanted to get learning underway. (Basic maths I'd picked up organically somehow.) To this day, I remember a warm late spring day on our front porch when I asked when, and how, I could really start learning. And so, at 7 or 8 years old, my formal education began.

To start, my mother structured my work as brief, concentrated periods of learning and exercises, which we called "lessons." Today, I can see that we basically set up 90–120 minute "dedicated practice" sessions, maybe without knowing that name or the practice's benefits. After completing my lessons, my directive was to play.

One of the most common questions that I get is "who drove your education?" The answers varied across the years, but in these early days my mother was absolutely the facilitator, and fearlessly did the legwork to help us establish our cadence and get our formal education underway. She was able to do her work from home, and dedicate material blocks of time to both curriculum construction and helping us in the day-to-day flow of lessons.

We started with math, grammar, spelling, and cursive writing. Our education, rather than dominated by a teacher, was shaped by the texts and materials we'd selected.

It's worth noting here that most textbooks are, by and large, complete rubbish. They are designed for teachers to assign problems, and the problem numbers to shift from edition to edition — this revenue maximization renders them largely completely worthless to the self-learner.

Even worse, topics tend to be exhaustively covered in one chapter. That chapter will cover everything about that topic, and the problems at the end of the topic will be the entire range of problems to select from, covering the entire subject. After you finish that chapter, that topic is gone.

To this day I'm thankful for the Saxon series: just do every problem in the book.

I was lucky to benefit from a series specifically designed to combat this phenomenon: the Saxon series of math texts. Unlike other texts, Saxon books are designed for the learner to do every single problem in the book. At the end of each day's chapter, you might expect to do 2–4 problems covering the topic you just learned. Then, over the next 2–3 weeks, you will see increasing difficulty and nuanced versions of what you've learned, averaging about 2 problems per lesson. Thus, for me it eliminated a large part of curriculum construction: the decision of which problems to do. And similarly, if you can easily do difficult problems from concepts you'd learned weeks ago, you likely have mastery. I had a largely unshakeable confidence in my math skills quite early — because I knew I could do problems of things I'd learned awhile back with ease. A gradual slope with increasing difficulty, continually new concepts, and nothing to do but every problem in the book. I cannot recommend strongly enough this method for self learners. Unclear whether this early strength and ease of learning is what led me later to major in mathematics. (Today, it's worth noting that the Saxon publishers have added grammar and writing, although I cannot vouch for these personally.)

For grammar, we used a similar mastery-style text in the early days (called Easy Grammar). It was a hands-on guide that I think led to pretty strong fundamentals. I remember doing many exercises like "underline the subject once and double underline the verb of a sentence." The nuts and bolts of how English is built.

Spelling and handwriting were pretty self-explanatory. It was just about getting the necessary reps in. To date, I'm thankful for spellcheck on computers, and my handwriting is questionable. So, I probably shouldn't offer any critical guidance here, other than to find a system to get the repetitions in. (I just used spell check to spell "repetitions" — so try to do a better job than I did.)

Establishing choice

Every few years, we'd have a genuine debate: should I cease homeschooling and go to school? The choices were, roughly: i) go to the local public school (large schools — average of 500–700 kids per class), ii) go to a pre-high school private feeder school, or iii) go straight to one of the two top private academies in Denver where we could continue until the end of high school. We were fortunate that my parents were able to make the financial sacrifice for any option.

Today, I remember the first tour of one of the small, warm private feeder schools. A lot of the people I knew from theater went to this school — and I remember thinking that it looked like everything a kid could want, at least on the surface. People cared, families were involved, and it would represent freedoms (of time, away from the house) that I'd never known. But I was also cautious. I knew I would have to sacrifice learning at my own pace. By now, I'd established a decidedly rapid pace in math, and a decidedly less-brisk pace in humanities. How much harder would it be to learn if I couldn't go faster or slower as I needed?

The other two academies (that went all the way through high school) were less inspiring. They were at a size where it felt like more of a mixing pot of i) wealthy families ii) families with means who were expelled from public school and iii) a smattering of smart kids. The mix — to an alien like me — felt even more forced than at the local schools. (Where the academic kids — whether labeled "AP" or "IB" viewed much of student body with the same puzzlement as I might.)

So presuming we could get in anywhere (and we'd as a family make the financial decision) the school choices still looked uncertain:

  1. Go to the warm feeder school — but have to apply/transfer to a private or public high school later
  2. Go directly to the private academies — and hope you do well and like it enough to stay
  3. Go to the public schools and cede control of our education

Given this uncertain set — every time we opened the question, I concluded that I wanted to remain homeschooled, and remain in control of my education.

An assumption that was set — I cannot even place when or how — is that both my sister and I would go to top colleges. Anything other was basically not an option. Our job was to learn and to prepare. But weighing overhead on any decision about going to a school was the question of college placement. If I were to go to a school and struggle initially, that could mean disastrous things for either getting into the next private school I'd need to, or worse, into a top college. In a way, it's safer to toil on your own, earnestly pursuing learning, than to be subject to the standard mechanism of college admissions process. I think that I implicitly knew that if I were to go into school and struggle, this would handicap me more than where I was currently.

As for the bar of "top" colleges — as I reflect today, I realize that the assumption probably came from my parent's implicit understanding that the saturation of "just" a college degree was coming — and outcomes might become more logarithmic. I've thought about whether simply they might have wanted a "good" school for their own social standing (or to make up for their own lack of credentials) — but I really think neither of these were strong pulls. They always had a much more independent and bohemian attitude.

Measurement

It's worth noting at this point — I never took a single test until the SATs.

While touring these schools, listening to them tout their smart student body and challenging studies — the little voice in my head was urgently whispering self-doubt: "do you have any idea how to compete on this kind of playing field!?" I think this feeling weighed rather heavily on my choices. Better to stay put, forestall measurement, and hope to not be set on a lesser trajectory.

I was torn with the lack of measurement. Particularly in the early days of lessons, my progress was rapid and apparent, and I felt extremely confident in the material I was mastering. Cannot say that I had memorized important dates of history or similar "testable" things — but I knew that my studies were progressing rather rapidly. Later on, progress felt more tentative — especially with i) areas that we had a harder time building a good curriculum ii) frankly harder topics for me at that time in my life. Chemistry is one example for which I had (and still have) little intuition.

Mathematics, however, I felt quite black and white on my progression — again largely a huge thanks to the Saxon series. (Looking back, it seems little surprise now that I would go on to major in it.) With some of the less-explicit topics, it just felt hard to know how well I was doing at times. If I were to re-do, I might either have found some way to make these subjects more explicit in their learning — or taken the opposite approach and made them far more focused on getting depth in some limited but interesting fashion. (E.g. building complex model rocket engines is probably a more engaging and applied way to learn chemistry.)

With hands-on things, I felt like the standard world order was for a lot of kids to do projects that were largely cut and dried by nature. In college I would meet many winners of top science fairs and similar — this was a "scene" I wasn't really a part of. But I believe parents (or whoever is driving home instruction) can take it on themselves to let learners build/discover/create entirely new things. A new set of eyes and a lot of curiosity (and incentive of not being stuck in a textbook) is certainly a pretty powerful force for finding new ways to do things.

So, with so little real measurement — my family placed a lot of pressure on the SAT and SAT IIs that were required for most admissions at the time. I drilled countless practice tests prior — and must confess it was a pretty hard process. I wasn't used to the simple pressures of test day, the feeling of an important outcome, having pencils sharpened and a pile of nerves. There's also the skill of reading the test: what is this question trying to test? Sometimes thinking just about that question gets you halfway to the answer. All these tactics were foreign to me.

Fortunately, at 15 I sat my first SAT and scored at 1450/1600. Not what I had been hoping for…but seemed strong enough that I could build on this score or maybe go forward with it. (Subsequent SAT IIs were stronger, the exact numbers have thankfully faded from my mind, but mostly 780+/800…)

Developmental speed

When you control your own education, you have an incredible advantage: ability to set the pace of your studies. Things going easily? Never be bored…just go faster. Studies become challenging? Take more time for things to sink it.

Without much fondness, I remember the first time I had go slower in my studies. I'd tried to skip pre-Algebra and go straight in (keeping pace with my older sister) — but found that I was just unable to make the jump somehow. I felt ashamed that I couldn't understand — this was a strong subject, well taught — for some reason, I wasn't able to wrap my head around it. My mother and I elected to add an additional "semester" of pre-Algebra — which I was able to tackle with my normal vigor. I can't explain why I couldn't make the jump; all I know is that if I had been in a traditional school at the time, I likely would have floundered. Instead, we adjusted and all resumed straight away.

I believe my family also did a very good job stressing what is well known in literature today of "dedicated practice" — we focused very hard on our lessons for dedicated, intense periods of time. Rather than having the lecture / school system take the day, and work be shifted to the night — instead we treated days more like training days (as a musician or similar might). This gave plenty of other time for other interests, reading, and (eventually) a lot of extracurricular activities. The latter would largely be my social education.

The biggest way I pushed pace: as I began my 3rd year of "high school" studies, I decided that it would be my final year of my studies and I would go to college the following year. To this day, I do think it is an advantage to be on the older side of ones immediate peer group — so perhaps not ideal. But I had decided that I was having a harder time learning more complicated things by myself — and I think a large part was that I felt somewhat lonely (my sister was already away at college) and ready to begin the next phase of life, even if prematurely (maybe unsurprising for a headstrong 16 year old).

Admissions

Applying to college felt like a pretty pivotal thing in the world, at the time. It was a test if the path I'd taken to the point was….well, deemed worthy by people used to seeing lots of smart kids. Quixotically, I began to contact admissions offices to assess what they might want to see from someone who was 1) too young by most accounts and 2) lacked these pesky "grades" that most other applicants prized.

Again — privilege undoubtedly played a role. I was able to schedule meetings with the admissions offers, to show them how I was planning to apply and get their recommendations on improvements. My family was able to take me traipsing across much of the northeast in this endeavor.

It's worth noting at this point that I think I had i) very little grasp on what was considered normal and ii) not a ton of social skills — so I perhaps violated every standard recommendation from high school admissions counselors, or ran a campaign that looks far more cunning in retrospect.

At the time, I was trying to answer the following questions:

During the process, it was quite unclear how it would end. The day I met with Harvard (which seemed to go well), I received a phone call from one of my safety schools, who was bewildered with what to do with my application. But I kept making the rounds and refining how I'd tailor my application materials.

After getting a lot of positive feedback, I took a pretty intensive approach to my application: while I'd lack formal grades, I instead assembled a pretty complete view of my high school experience to date: essays I'd written at the conclusion of each semester (including where I'd struggled), an overview of the curriculum I'd built, photos from countless basketball games and theater plays I'd done — and even an audition CD for the theater departments (I sang a fair amount in those days). If an admissions counselor spent some time, they'd surely get to know me and my story a little bit.

My application, circa 2004. Yes, that's a bulging 4" binder worth. (And a huge shoutout to Annie and the entire admissions team at Brown — who were just tremendous — and very kindly returned my application.)

So from there — I assembled close to 15 of the the (pictured above) applications. I decided that MIT was where I'd go if I got in everywhere — and applied early action (which was non binding at the time). This felt like a long shot at the time; I'd applied as a classics major to just about every other school. Time would tell what would happen.

In December, a few days after I turned 17 — the news came in the form of a big envelope from MIT. This was greatly welcomed news. Let me not understate (many years later now) how thankful I felt that I was able to get in somewhere. In the broader discussion of homeschooling, you have to, at times, be very comfortable doing something without knowing how well you are doing it. This was my first external validation — separate from what was in my head and my skills — that it was working in harmony with the bigger system.

Matriculation

For Harry Potter fans, I felt like I was departing for Hogwarts myself. I was coming from a "muggle" household — to the great academy to be surrounded with Intel medallists who had worked their whole life knowing that MIT was the best place to pursue their research. For me, my "science" claim to fame is that I owned a microscope, a telescope, and liked to learn how things worked.

I elected to do things as "normally" as possible. Take the classes most people take — some of the introductory freshman classes had 300+ (30%) of each class in them. I would, for the first time in my life, be 'normal' — or at least would masquerade as such. I chose to live in the dorm that was somewhere between the most extreme or most stereotypical, extreme "MIT" culture — figuring that if I'd wanted the "Ivy" experience, I should have enrolled there instead.

Even in the earliest days, I could begin to sense the different factions emerging: the extreme prep school kids who thought this was all easy, the valedictorians suddenly facing being middle of the pack, the students from schools that really didn't prep them for an intensive college experience, and everything in between. All around, people were grappling with identity, freedom, academic challenge, and the like.

My problems were a bit different in nature than my peers. Rather than freedom of time or change from schooling of the past, I was trying to take notes in a lecture format. I'd never had to write while following along from a blackboard before, and was finding it very challenging to take notes at all, let alone coherent ones. (In freshman chemistry, the famed professor actually had 2 grad student staff aiding his lectures, continually prepping and cleaning blackboards, while he rapidly filled and refilled the 3x3 blackboard array…)

Tests were another matter that was nearly entirely foreign to me. Filing into a room with 100 test takers, I couldn't help but feel a bit of my own sense of wonder (and a bit like the great hall in Hogwarts…again for Harry Potter fans) — I'd never seen this many people furiously taking tests, let alone this serious of a bunch. And there was lots of brow furrowing to go around: many of the exams were tailored to have the average be between 40–60 out of 100 — so most people left each exam hoping to have passed, with bonus points for doing well. (To MIT's credit, the first semester is pass/fail, to give people time to adjust.)

But for me — I didn't feel like I would get much sympathy; no one wants to hear the kid who has no idea how to take tests doing similarly to the never-failed-before valedictorian. I realized I should keep my novice to myself, and try to figure out how the heck to prepare and do well in this new world.

Problem sets were another matter. MIT explicitly tries to make homework an extremely challenging part of the experience — and encourages collaboration between students. I'd never really had experience with either of these, but thankfully found groups for some of my classes. I also observed a whole dark side of education I neither knew anything about or understood: group subversion. Particularly in the Greek community, "bibles" of previous answers were carefully curated from generation to generation. It seemed that many people went far beyond the "collaboration" that was anticipated and expected. These kinds of moves — from my somewhat pure and naive worldview — were both alien and detestable.

Overall, I'm not sure my particular variant of homeschooling prepared me extremely well for this environment. I would say that it was certainly better than many of my peers, but not among the very best. I do think I could have remedied some of this by willing to do not "normal" path at MIT — e.g. groups existed to do teaching in smaller groups, or cover the same classes on different paces. But I was in a hurry to be normal and get my life underway…so some of those benefits were lost on me.

As an adult

For much of my college and 20s, I didn't ever lead with being homeschooled as a key part of my background. Maybe this was a missed opportunity — but it felt like a relief to have people assume something else. That was a little piece of proof to me that the experience was "reversible" — or at least didn't bare the permanent mark of social dysfunction that was often an assumption in the 1990s. Even today, while writing this piece, some of my closest friends didn't know I was homeschooled. (But when they find out…I must say they tend to say "oh, it all makes sense" vs complete surprise…but that's another topic for another day.)

Advice, in brief

Lots more could be said here — however I shall direct your (likely weary, by now) attention toward a few key points:

I would recommend to homeschoolers to spend more time thinking about how testing is done — not so much for the knowledge that it makes you gain on the underlying subject, but rather the art of understanding what the test writer is asking. So much of the skill of test taking is trying to decipher what piece of knowledge is being tried at any moment. I think great tests do push hard into new applications of material — to see if students really understand the underlying — and know when to apply the tools they've been taught. Similarly, it gives a way to separate the best students. In very easy classes, it felt much more about not messing up vs. demonstrating learning. E.g. one little arithmetic error was the difference between an A and B on a test. Similarly, I'd add that getting comfort tackling meaty problems — sometimes over long periods of time — is a skill in and of itself.

Much of life looks more like the typical homeschool problem: how can one quickly 1) understand what you need to learn about a given new subject and 2) learn a sufficient amount of that subject to let you progress in your studies. There remains deeper layers — maybe which are critical to traditional scientific inquiry — that take going a little bit further and taking more time to wrestle with the problems to ultimately prevail.

To parents who decide to homeschool: my simplest advice is to give the responsibility to the student. What matters is keeping our born-curiosity alive — and instilling the value of having one's own mind. Education is how we make our own mind — and to those able and willing, it's an incredible journey.

But Noah…would you homeschool your own children?

The short answer: yes.

The longer answer: likely not all the way until college, timing would depend on the personalities of each child and the community we live, and would want to find deep ways for them to find their identity and place of belonging early in life.

Thank you to Kevin Kwok and Kim McCann for reading early drafts — and to a few other folks (you know who you are) for asking that I share this.

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If you read this far — or think this post might help parents you know — consider hitting "👏" below to help spread this piece. Thanks for coming for the journey, and excited to see more and more families taking education into their own hands.

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