Thirteen years ago, on the very first episode of this show, Felice Gerwitz said something out loud that most people would have edited out: “When I had this idea to create this radio network, I had no idea if it would even work.”
Within three weeks, the shows launched anyway. HomeschoolingIRL on September 13th. The Homeschool Sanity Show on the 14th. Vintage Homeschool Moms on the 17th. Two more by the 25th. Every one of those episodes is still on this website.
So it worked. And to mark thirteen years, we’re doing thirteen short episodes — thirteen things we’d tell a brand-new homeschool mom.
This is the first one, and it’s the mistake nearly all of us made.
We tried to build a school in the dining room. Desks. A bell schedule. A wall calendar with somebody else’s year printed on it. And it lasts about three weeks — then one Tuesday nobody comes to the table, and you sit down certain you’ve failed.
You haven’t failed at homeschooling. You’ve failed at being a school, which was never the assignment.
In this episode:
- Why a school is an answer to a problem you don’t actually have — one adult, thirty children, a building, a bus schedule, a fire code
- How much of what looks like “school” is really crowd management
- Why copying that form into your house makes everything feel so heavy
- The difference between structure (good, necessary) and institutional machinery (not yours to carry)
The one question to answer in writing today:
- what problem are we actually solving?
- Why you give yourself a one-year trial with a date on the calendar — and why week three is when everybody wants to quit
Timestamps
- 00:54 — Felice Gerwitz, August 2013, on the first episode of this show
- 01:50 — The three weeks in September 2013 when the network actually launched
- 02:14 — Why thirteen short episodes instead of a retrospective
- 02:47 — The mistake: building a school in the dining room
- 03:26 — A word from Eden’s Table
- 04:21 — A school is an answer to a problem you don’t have
- 05:30 — Structure is good. It just comes from your family.
- 06:06 — Write down the problem you’re actually solving
- 06:49 — Give yourself one year, then judge it
- 07:11 — Why week three is the worst of it
- 07:59 — Next time: the day is shorter than you think
Go deeper on the network
Before you commit to a year, listen to Should You Consider Homeschooling? — it walks through the decision honestly, including the reasons not to.
It’s our 13th birthday
More than $1,500 in prizes across four October drawings, and a free Sweet Treats resource bundle for everyone who enters. One entry puts you in all four.
Our Sweet 13 sponsors
This series is sponsored by Eden’s Table, CTCMath, True North Academy, and the podcasters of the Ultimate Homeschool Podcast Network.
This episode’s sponsor is Eden’s Table — Biblical herbalism for the elementary grades. One plant a week, with science, history, art, reading and handwriting running through it as a single unit study. Open and go, no prep the night before. The first nine weeks are $39 at edeninstitute.health/homeschool.
This episode is sponsored. We only take sponsors we’d point our own families to.
