Happy Wednesday!
Jeremy Cioara homeschools seven kids, yet has never written a lesson plan.
The day before we recorded, in the middle of the Arizona summer, his mom left him a note at her cabin a couple of hours north of Phoenix, where the desert gives way to forest. She asked him to change a light switch and the plug.
"They're ugly brown," she wrote, "I repainted."
That note turned out to be the day's lesson plan in disguise.
No sooner had Jeremy’s son turned up wanting to ride the ATV that Jeremy recruited him into hunting for the breaker instead.
It turned out the wires were too short, so both of them ended up sweating over a job that should have taken ten minutes. But when it was done, Jeremy was able to tell his son in earnest that he was now an electrician.
“Pretty cool,” his son replied, “Now can we ride the ATV?”
Jeremy sums up the quintessential "dad" approach to homeschooling in seven words: "Just bring your kids along with you."
That, he says, is what dads do.
But he's also honest that this approach comes with a cost. It takes longer to show his son how to change a plug than to change it himself.
I hope you'll listen, or send this to a homeschool dad in your life, to learn why he pays that price, and what it's bought him with seven kids.
In the episode:
What Jeremy and his wife believed about homeschoolers before they had kids, and the lunch that changed it
How a haircut errand ended with Jeremy owning a cookie shop, and what his daughter runs there now
The three-word test he runs on every hire (and what he does with a college degree when he sees one)
What his youngest son said when the family went around the Father's Day table
Why he moved his most athletically gifted son onto a team that could not push him
Jeremy has trained IT professionals at CBT Nuggets since 2003 and founded Veeya, a technology firm in Tempe. He and his wife homeschool their seven kids in Arizona.
Prefer to read? The full write-up is on the blog.
That's all for now.
- Ela
P.S. We've done a bit of an overhaul on our podcast page and added playlists by topic. Check them out and let us know what you think.
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