Before we had kids we met a homeschool family.  There was something so different–so refreshing–about the teenagers in this large family in Arizona where we lived at that time.  I wanted to raise kids like that.

I had wanted to be a teacher since I was an elementary school student.  I have this crazy memory.  It’s crazy to me now, but it wasn’t at the time.  It seemed perfectly logical.  What is crazy to me now is that I was so young having such logical thoughts.  I knew I wanted to be a teacher, but I could see that dealing with behavior issues would not be fun.  I had visions of Mrs. West in utter frustration dragging Mike out of the room by the nape of his neck.  True, doing that today would be the last day of your teaching career.  (My hat’s off to elementary school teachers!)  I eventually concluded that it would be better to teach adults, thus I eventually spent several years teaching college Spanish.  But I also enjoyed teaching a variety of ages.  At the time I met this homeschool family I was substitute teaching mostly middle school classes.  I really enjoyed it and loved the students, but I could see this was not a good learning environment.

So I began to research the idea of homeschooling with what little material was available in the mid to late 1990s.  I was convinced this was the best path for our family so that is the world we have lived in since our first was born in 1996.  People would ask me about homeschooling and I’d end up writing long emails and having long conversations (which I love), but I decided it would be more practical to write down things I kept repeating to people, so I wrote an e-book in kindle called Homeschooling for Those Who Think They Can’t.  

I wrote a ton of blog posts and articles on homeschooling that I published over the course of about five years on principlebasedlearning.com.  My website was hacked a couple of years ago and I lost all that I wrote on homeschooling and education in the blink of an eye.  I will post here parts that I have recovered (not much) and new thoughts as they come.

If you are reading this and wish I’d write more on this topic, an email with specific questions will motivate me to write more.  Or I might send you a long email.  Or we might have a phone conversation.  Whatever works.