In the middle of August, moms flooded social media with photos of their kids getting on the bus or posing with placards marking the first day of the new school year. But Nicole Machor, a Medina mom, posted photos of her sleeping children, illustrating “the good life of homeschooling where the schedules are based around your actual life and not what the government says.”
The number of students who are homeschooled in Ohio has increased by 54 percent, with a national increase of 51 percent since the 2017-2018 school year, according to an October report in the Washington Post.
Nicole and her husband pulled their three children out of their government schools during the pandemic. Along with educating her children at home, Nicole also tutors other homeschooled children and likes to help parents who are interested in pulling their kids out of government schools
When I reached Nicole on a Thursday afternoon to discuss her homeschooling experience she was with a group of kids visiting a kitten shelter—one of the “perks of homeschooling,” she said.
Our interview follows:
KEN:
When I think about local advocates for homeschooling, you’re the first person I think about. Let’s start by telling me about your family and why you chose to homeschool your children.
NICOLE:
My husband and I have three kids. My oldest is a senior this year. My middle child is technically an eighth grader, but we’re doing algebra and high school work with him, and my youngest is technically in fifth grade by school standards I guess, but she is doing middle school work and she’ll be starting pre-algebra this year.
KEN:
Okay, so they’re actually working more in advance compared to what they would be doing if they were in the government schools.
NICOLE:
Oh yeah. For most families that I come across, it’s really covid that changed it for everyone, where we started to really look at things. Luckily, at the end of the school year in 2020—in spring of 2020—all these families, we got to have our children at home [when schools closed during the pandemic]. All of a sudden they came home in March and we were able to really see what the teachers were teaching them and how advanced or behind our kids really were and where they were academically.
We had already been thinking about pulling our children from school because we were noticing things within the school system that we didn’t like, like the political views being pushed. Even though I am very active politically, my kids back then would never have known that. I’ve definitely become more vocal, but back then I remember my daughter came home in February [2020] and was crying, thinking that I was going to die because I was sick, and saying that I was going to die from covid and it was all Trump’s fault.
She was in first grade at the time. She had no idea—we didn’t even talk about Donald Trump. We didn’t talk about covid. I found out that they were watching these news channels with the children.
So me and my husband were already talking about pulling them from the schools. Then a month later they shut the schools down. I started doing academics with my children. My daughter especially, she was in the end of first grade, and she didn’t know how to add or subtract. So all I could think is, what have they been doing with you this whole time, and that they’re going to advance you into second grade and you don’t know basic addition and subtraction. I had already pushed back with the schools [earlier] when they tried bringing in the Common Core math and I would let their elementary teachers know that even though [Common Core] might be taught, that I would still be teaching my boys at home the correct way to do math, and if they had an issue with it then they needed to talk with me, not my children.
But like I said, covid for a lot of families was a deciding factor of wanting to homeschool. Me and my husband knew for sure we weren’t going to let our children wear masks to school. So when they started that in the fall, we were like, okay, they’re going to be home with us.
KEN:
Was it a difficult decision, because even with the reasons that you talked about, most people are just locked into that mindset of sending their kids off to the government schools. Did that cause any hesitation in your decision?
NICOLE:
Yes and no. So yes, when it comes to the fact that we were not going to let our children have masks on their face, there’s no way that we were going to allow that.
What also was a thing for us is how the school runs. I was very active within the school, being a room mom, being part of [Parent Teacher Organization] PTO, so you get to know how the school buildings are run themselves.
I would say the hardest part [of starting to homeschool] was comparing myself to what they would be doing in the schools, which is weird because of knowing that they aren’t really teaching the kids to certain standards. But you’re thinking, I need to make sure I’m doing literally the subjects that they’re doing. This is what I run into with other homeschooling families—we start to mimic what’s going on in the schools where we think our kids have to be sitting at a desk from nine to three or sitting at the table just doing a bunch of subjects. And you do that for a little while and you realize how actually insane that is to be making children just sitting doing that.
And with most homeschooling families that may last a year maybe.
So actually when we first pulled them, my biggest thing was I felt like I couldn’t focus on actual education with the kids until we learned as a family how to interact with each other. Because you go so many years of honestly never hanging out with each other. You are in school all day and then most families—the kids are in sports starting even at the age of three and whether it’s dance or it’s soccer or something, you’re never really spending a lot of time as a family.
So all of a sudden all of us who don’t have real relationships with each other are now with each other 24/7. And so I actually encourage a lot of families when they first start homeschooling, I tell them, your children will catch up academically. Your first thing you need to do is make sure that you hang out as a family for a few months and get into your own rhythm of how you want your house to be run—how you guys want to be truly spending your time together.
My kids used to argue a lot more with each other and they don’t anymore. They get along so well, and it’s because they actually have relationships with each other where they didn’t before. They were basically strangers fighting with each other all the time.
So that’s what I encourage families to do. I tell them, I think some people recommend taking a month off of school for every year that you were in public school. If you have to take a whole year off of school, your children will not suffer.
If you think about the fact that my daughter just three years ago was going into second grade and didn’t know how to add or subtract, and now she’s technically a fifth grader who’s about to be doing pre-algebra middle school work, and we even took time off.
We took time off to spend just as a family, so children will catch up. There’s just a lot of fluff within the government school systems that kids don’t really need to be learning. And you learn when you homeschool what you really need to be focusing on academically for your kids.
KEN:
I want to ask you about that. You talked about the idea of [kids] going in and sitting at a desk all day, so what are your thoughts about why it is considered normal for kids to go into an institutional setting and sit at a desk for six to eight hours a day for 13 years and spending most of their childhood in that setting?
NICOLE:
I think part of it is because we don’t use real words and definitions. We don’t think about things of what they really are. So a child going into these schools for six or seven hours—if you think about it, they’re basically working a full-time job. They’re not getting to be kids. They’re working a full-time job where they have to do what they’re told by their boss, the teacher and principal, which would be a supervisor or manager. So they’re working a full-time job during the day and then a lot of them aren’t getting done what they really need to during the day, so then they’re also bringing their work home with them.
Most families, like I said, are in sports and stuff. So kids are never getting real downtime. I don’t know when this became the normal thing to do, but I think it’s because we don’t just put things down to basic levels. It’s like we’re overcomplicating things.
KEN:
So in contrast to that, how do you go about it? Is it a couple hours a day or is it just totally flexible?
NICOLE:
Right now, I started a tutoring program, which is kind of like a mini school in a way. It’s Monday through Thursday from 9:00 [a.m.] to 1:00. I started this with Ann Manzi, who ran for school board in Medina a couple years ago. So it’s basically families that want to homeschool their children but feel like they can’t handle the academics. Me and Ann handle the academics for them. The kids have tutoring from nine to noon and then from noon to one is when they get to eat lunch together and they get to play together. We have second grade through eighth grade in this program. So it’s kind of like the old schoolhouse theme. And it’s only four days a week.
With my family, because my family always comes first—biblically, you have to have your family in order before you can help anyone else out—so me and my two younger ones go Monday, Wednesday and Thursday to the program and I help with teaching math. Tuesdays we take off because it’s my husband’s day off from work and family comes first. So my kids technically only do school three days a week and they’re more advanced [compared to government schools]. And then we have Fridays off to go and hang out with other homeschoolers.
And then my oldest, who is a senior and isn’t going to college, he already has a job lined up for when he graduates. Within two years he’ll be making over six figures with a construction company. So we’re not doing school for him for his senior year. We are focusing on, like I said, Tuesdays we hang out as a family. Fridays are for me to be teaching him real world stuff, going to the grocery store, doing a Bible study.
Then on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, while I’m at tutoring with the younger two, right now he’s working with a friend who is an electrician who owns his own business, because for our family, we want our boys to know basic things like electrical and basic carpentry so they can take care of their own house one day and not have to hire someone. So for our oldest, he’s gotten to do landscaping. He’s gotten to work for, right now it’s for an electrician. He’s gotten to work for Depew [Drilling Inc.], which does water wells out in the country. So it’s more like apprenticeship stuff that he focused on last year and this year. So that way he’ll be able to take care of his own household one day when he’s married and has his own house.
KEN:
On the academic side, do you follow a particular curriculum?
NICOLE:
For curriculum, we actually pull from a couple different things. For math that we are doing within the tutoring program—and that’s what my kids do too—is called Learn Math Fast. It’s seven volumes of math ranging from kindergarten all the way through graduation. So the last book is high school geometry, which also has trigonometry in it. It only has real math. No Common Core is built into this system. The two subjects we mainly focus on are math and reading because you learn so much with reading as it is right now in the tutoring program, depending on the level that each child is at, they’re doing reading in groups of people and then after every chapter they read they write a summary of what they’ve read.
And when the book is done, we do a bigger writing project for them.
For history right now we are studying basically this year from when the pilgrims came over all the way to the early 1800s. For science we’re doing a lot of earth science things, and we try and pick earth science where we can even come up with fun activities. Science should be fun. It should get your mind thinking on things and be more hands-on. So we do more of that with science.
We also do handwriting and cursive with our children. Handwriting is a form of communication and within the tutoring program what me and Ann have learned is that the public school systems don’t teach the children proper handwriting. All of their handwriting is atrocious. You can’t read anything. So we’ve had to retrain all of these kids that come into the program and get them to where they’re writing neatly. We’re teaching them how to write cursive because our founding documents are in cursive. We need to be able to read those to be able to keep the liberties that we have in this country. So that’s why we focus on things like that.
KEN:
What are your expectations with regards to reading, because the government schools make this big thing about reading by third grade and it seems to me that people should know how to read before third grade. Do you agree, and what are your standards?
NICOLE:
A hundred percent. You should technically—by first grade you should be able to read, at least—I think the problem is they got rid of phonics and instead they were doing things like sight words. Phonics is the way that they did it for forever, learning how to read. And now they’re starting to bring it back because they realize that’s been something that’s been hindering children.
Our curriculum that we have within the tutoring program is more heavily reading based—reading and discussion. So in our history, what we do with the children is we read through a history lesson. We have each of the kids read a paragraph so we can see what their fluency is with reading. And then we do discussion.
It’s another form of communication. We want to see that you’re understanding and comprehending what you’re reading.
In the schools, a lot of times you go and read [something] and then you have to do a reading comprehension sheet. The teachers would be able to see if their kids understood things if they just read with them and asked them questions. So we’re really big on bringing back communication and discussion. Like my children—a lot of times people can tell right away that they’re homeschooled because my kids are not just around kids their age. And so they’ll walk up to an adult and just start having a conversation with them, and not just like, “Hi Sir, it’s nice to meet you.” They will legitimately start asking questions and try to converse with the adults—not in a rude way. My children are still very respectful when they’re talking to adults. So me and my husband personally are really big on that.
KEN:
It sounds like you have certain values that you instill in your children. How about parents who don’t want to be in the government schools, but they’re not confident to homeschool? Maybe they will think, well, I can’t do it as well as Nicole is doing it, that sort of a thing. What advice do you have for them?
NICOLE:
What I usually tell parents, first off, do an assessment with your children. See where their math is at and see where their reading is at compared to where they should be.
First off, you have to see that the schools are failing our children. So you honestly can’t do any worse than what the schools—and I’m not kidding—you can’t do any worse.
Last year I had some eighth graders that I was doing fourth grade math with. So in the school systems they are pushing these children further and saying, yes, you can graduate into the next grade without really mastering math skills. And I still have it this year. I have three sixth graders that I’m focusing on second grade math with them right now. No joke. They aren’t fluid in addition.
So I tell parents, you honestly cannot do worse than what the schools are doing.
The schools are too worried about political things and they’re worried about pushing your children onto the next grade and not making sure that they actually master things.
And then I also tell them school systems only do standardized testing for math and reading. So even if you do only math and reading with your children, you would still be fine. You would still be competing with what the government schools do. And actually, so when parents first pull [their children from government schools], I tell them, spend a few months just as a family without academics, just getting used to each other and coming up with how you want to do things. The next thing I tell them is, once you’ve done that, only focus on math and reading. Because even with reading, you’re going to learn a ton of things. It’s just such an amazing subject—we don’t realize that we’re always using reading. And what they can do is tie those subjects with other things. If you want your kid learning about something in history, well, if they’re reading a book on something in history, you’re getting two subjects out of that. So that those are the two subjects I mainly tell parents to be focusing on. Focus on your reading and your math and your children will be fine in this world.
KEN:
What happens with homeschoolers once they’re 17, 18 years old? In a government school they graduate; they get their diploma. What do the homeschoolers get, say to apply for college? How do they prepare in terms of college admission tests?
NICOLE:
Actually homeschoolers get a diploma too. Most people aren’t aware of this. You basically, as a homeschooling family, will get a diploma from Machor Academy, for example. You basically just write your own diploma and it’s accepted by colleges. Actually a lot of homeschoolers do [College Credit Plus] CCP, which are college credit courses. It’s actually where they’ll let you start in the public schools, in your freshman year. So you can do CCP courses and basically do college courses instead of your high school courses. And most homeschool kids do that for high school. A lot of them don’t waste their time taking high school history. They’ll take college history so they can get college credits. My 13 year old—that’s technically eighth grade—next year all of his classes will be college credits. And actually colleges, they tend to prefer homeschoolers, at least this is what I’m mainly hearing. They tend to prefer homeschoolers because they already know how to manage their time because they haven’t been just instructed to follow the way that the government schools are. Homeschoolers have to manage their time with their schoolwork. So yeah, colleges actually seek them. They like homeschoolers.
KEN:
How about parents who, both parents are working or don’t have time for whatever reason. There are a lot of different reasons why people might not be able to homeschool. Do you have any advice for them and what alternatives they might look into?
NICOLE:
Anyone can homeschool. I know single moms that homeschool. I know parents where both parents work and they homeschool. So here’s the nice thing about homeschool: Say both parents work—if both of them work during the daytime. Homeschooling doesn’t have to be from nine to noon. You can get your schooling done depending on the age of the child. Say both parents work and their child goes to a daycare during the day or they’re with Grandma during the day while both of them are working. Either the child can be doing [studies] with grandma or the parents can do that with them when they’re done with work for the day.
I know parents that do that even though it might not be the most convenient thing. We have to start putting our children first with this. We can’t keep coming up with excuses as to why we can’t do this. A lot of people, and some of this is going to sound harsh, but there are a lot of people who think that both people have to work, but they don’t genuinely have to work. This idea in our society that we have to have two cars and we have to have the nicest house and our kids have to have name brand stuff—that is putting luxuries ahead of necessities.
And I know that yes, there are some people who maybe don’t make—both parents are working and making minimum wage, but that’s generally not the case. If you look at our society, it is about luxuries, and you have to weigh what is better for our child if we cut back on the types of clothes we wear, if we downsize our house. Not every child has to have their own bedroom. I grew up with six siblings. I never had my own bedroom. So what are we really weighing in this life and what order are our priorities in.
So that’s what I would say is first off, make sure, do you really have to work? Do both parents really have to work? When it comes to single moms in this society, I think churches should be helping out single moms right now and helping them in that aspect of trying to—I start to think about the churches and the ways that they could genuinely be helping out with this area too, but they don’t want to. It’s very frustrating.
Do I agree that yes, for some people it might be impossible? Not everyone is going to be able to do this, but the majority of people can. It just requires you rearranging your life to make sure that we are putting our children first with this.
We’re literally sending [children] off with abusers. We sent the people who sent their children during covid into school systems where teachers didn’t stand up for the kids and instead made them wear masks where they couldn’t breathe. So parents are sending them off with teachers who were okay with that abuse.
KEN:
So related to putting children first, here’s a three part question. The first part is the ways that homeschooling directly benefits the children. The second part is how its benefits the family. Then, with the “children first” thing, what are some of the benefits that homeschooling will provide to the community or to society?
NICOLE:
Right now, if you look at the kids that are in the public school systems, they are learning a lot of things that are detrimental to their mental health. It’s not normal for children to learn to be sexualized by sex-ed, for children to learn to be so anxious because they’re always putting a ton of work on the children, being like, let’s get this done, let’s get this done, let’s get this done. So anxiety is an issue within the school system.
So people like to say, oh, children are resilient, but that’s not true. Maybe they’re resilient if they break a bone, but look at our society. It’s obviously not resilient for a child to grow up with emotional and mental issues. So if we’re homeschooling, our children aren’t being indoctrinated with sexualization, so they’re not going to have those types of mental issues or emotional issues. Our children that are homeschooled are learning to actually master things and not have to rush through them. And in the whole rushing to get up in the morning and get out of bed and mom’s yelling at you, why don’t you have your coat on? All these things that build anxiety, homeschoolers aren’t having that. They genuinely get to be kids longer. And how you build resilient societies is if you build a firm foundation when they’re younger, where you’re not putting inappropriate things in their minds where you’re not teaching them to be anxious and you’re genuinely letting them learn to be kids and learn to work through things. Those firm foundations being built and having a good relationship with God, that’s how we’re going to change society.
KEN:
That leads into my next question because it seems like a lot of homeschooling parents, the ones that I know anyhow, tend to be Christians who have issues with the religious aspects of the government schools. Do you think that the religious aspect is the main driver or are there other drivers for homeschooling?
NICOLE:
There are other drivers. Not everyone who pulls their children are religious. Here’s the thing—even parents who aren’t religious, just on a parent level, you don’t want other adults teaching your children things that you don’t want taught to them. So even though someone might not have a relationship with God, no parent wants their child sexualized at a young age. So they’re allowing this within the school system. So whether you’re religious or not, even though we might see more along the lines of the far leftists being okay with the trans movement and stuff, most families in general, the majority of families are not okay with that happening with their children.
And not only that, the fact that a lot of families are realizing how much the academics are suffering for their children, you don’t have to be a Christian to see that. And parents wanting the best for their child, for them to have knowledge, they’re not going to want them to stay in a system that’s harming their knowledge. So I see that. I do see where it isn’t just Christian, but yes, the majority of homeschoolers are Christian.
KEN:
So we’re in a season—we have elections next Tuesday. A lot of people are running for school boards and a lot of them have really good intentions. They want to reform the government schools. They want to change things. Do you think it’s possible to change the government schools? Why or why not?
NICOLE:
I don’t. This is such a hard one because a lot of people are still on the fence with this. I don’t think that it’s possible to change it because of the way the systems were even set up. You start to read back in, I don’t know if it’s the late 1800s, early 1900s when the Rockefellers took over the education system. And so the education system was basically to form blind obedience.
And so if we’re going to keep the same system, if we’re trying to save the same system that was set up for that, no, there’s nothing to save.
I think what we really need to be focusing on to change our society is building strong families, not strong school systems. Strong families that fight for their children, that fight for their communities.
I have even heard somebody on the Ohio State Board of Education a few months back at an Ohio Freedom Fighters meeting, who said flat out that parents, you need to be pulling [your children] from these public schools. So someone who is on the state board of education is saying to pull the children from these schools because even if you change the school boards, the teachers unions are so powerful and they can’t control the teachers. So you’re having all of these teachers that are graduating from woke colleges. So if school boards could actually be really dictating what’s going on within the school systems that would make a difference. But I feel like it doesn’t really matter if we don’t build up strong families.
KEN:
Now I think you touched on something that we’re on the same wavelength about when you mentioned the Rockefeller Foundation, and I know the Ford and the Carnegie foundations also were involved in the design of public education. And when people say the government schools are incompetent, I think that they’re not incompetent. I think they’re doing exactly what they were designed to do.
NICOLE:
Correct. They’re doing what they were designed and made for. So now that we know what they were designed and made for, if you know that it was set up for blind obedience, why would anyone want to send their kids to that? Honestly, I don’t know.
This is another thing that someone had pointed out to me that I point out to other families. So the Bible tells us as parents that we are to bring up our children in God’s ways and they will not depart from it. If we are sending our children off with perfect strangers for eight hours a day, five days a week, how is that bringing them up in God’s way?
You have to realize if your children are with someone else more than they are with you, they’re going to learn from who they’re with more. And I don’t think that we realize that we’re sending our kids off with perfect strangers.
Years ago when they had the old schoolhouse way of teaching, similar to what me and Ann are doing right now, the parents knew the teachers. The teacher would literally stay with families in their houses. So you knew who was actually teaching your children. No parents today really know who they’re sending their children off with, and we’re doing it as young as three years old if not younger if you think about the day cares too. So that just gets back down how I said we need to start calling things what they really are and putting them back into layman’s terms. You’re sending your children off to be with a stranger for basically the amount of time of a full-time job during the day.
KEN:
Do you get any pushback on that? Have you been in discussions with teachers—because sometimes they feel that they are under attack. When we have discussions like these teachers might feel like they’re being blamed. So what kind of feedback do you get from teachers?
NICOLE:
I have compassion—like Ann in our tutoring program is a certified teacher. I don’t think that all teachers are bad. My issue is though, take covid for example. All these teachers that blindly followed when they knew it was wrong. I don’t have any sympathy for teachers who say that they care about children and they just want to do right by them, but they don’t actually do right by them.
The amount of teachers that know that the school systems are failing the children and they’re still just going along with what the schools say instead of teaching them the right way. That’s irritated me.
When Common Core came in and all these teachers knew that it was not good for students and none of them pushed back against it. If all the teachers, with how powerful the teachers union are, if all of them said, no, this is harming children, we’re not doing it, I would have more compassion for teachers. I don’t have any sympathy for any adult who doesn’t stand up for children. That’s where I leave that. None whatsoever.
KEN:
The last question that I want to address—people are locked into state standards and school report cards and say “this government school system is better than that government school system.” The two-part question is, is there such a thing as a good government school system and what is your opinion of these government developed scorecards with which they are grading themselves?
NICOLE:
So I don’t think that there are any government schools that are redeemable, because they’re all taking not only state funds, but federal funds. So if we know that our government is corrupt right now, and it is, whether you’re republican or democrat we know that it’s corrupt, that they’re all working for their own pockets and not for the benefit of our children. No, there’s no redeeming. There might be redeeming it if we got rid of taking state and federal funds and made it to where we were only taking from local. Because then people can genuinely have more of an impact locally. I one hundred percent believe that they keep us so focused on the scary things that are happening at a federal level when actually if everyone at a local level fixed things, it wouldn’t matter what they are doing at a federal level. So yeah, I don’t think that any public school is safe for children because they all take federal and state dollars.
KEN:
As a homeschool mom, since people seem to be locked in on standards and who is validating who and which “expert” is deciding what is good and what is bad, how do you measure success with your children as far as their homeschool education goes?
NICOLE:
So it might be a little deeper. I think about things like my kids have common sense. So my biggest thing as a Christian mom is that my children have a relationship with God ahead of everything else. I mean even ahead of academics. My husband, when we first started homeschooling our 14 year old when we pulled them from the schools, my husband was so worried about homeschooling that he went and he asked [my son] who Christopher Columbus was. And at first he couldn’t remember who Christopher Columbus was, and I had to jog his memory of it. And my husband was so worried about that. I said to my husband though, I was like, go ask him who Paul in the Bible is. And he asked him. And our middle child starts naming off different things about Paul in the Bible. It’s more important for me that my children can actively apply the Bible to real life. If we really want to focus on changing this world, do I want my kids to know about certain [people in history]? Yeah. But would I prefer them to know about the people in the Bible and be able to apply that to help change this world? Absolutely. That’s my main thing for my children.
Yes, we still focus on math and reading because if your child can read, they can teach themselves anything. And if you use math every single day of your life, whether it’s measuring something or figuring out how many eggs I’m going to use to make my omelet today, you do use so math and reading. So in that order of God, math and reading is how I would prefer it for our children.
KEN:
I forgot an important question about the socialization aspect. Kids in the schools are in clubs and they’re on the football team and all that. So how do you deal with that aspect of homeschooling?
NICOLE:
Our kids are so busy, actually, especially with homeschooling growing, I have to tell people, sorry, no, we don’t have time to hang out. I think that’s weird for me that they say that homeschoolers don’t socialize because in government schools, kids really only socialize with other children their own age. But think about this, during covid, they weren’t allowed to socialize even with the kids their age in the real world. How often are you working with [people of different ages]? That’s the real world socialization. My children and most homeschoolers, they socialize with people of all ages. That’s more like the real world to me.
And also homeschoolers join all those sports and those clubs too. The extracurriculars that the schools have in Ohio at least have to be allowed to homeschoolers. So if my kids want to join the debate club at the high school, if they want to join any of the clubs, if they want to join basketball or football homeschoolers are allowed to join any of the sports. By law, the schools have to allow them.
So we stay pretty socialized. And actually, in school, if you think about it, you’re mainly at your desk all day long doing a bunch of worksheets. My kids get to play with friends almost on a daily basis. We’re meeting someone at the park or we’re going on a field trip somewhere during the day while [government school] kids are sitting at their desks and not allowed to socialize with other children.
I think this would be a good example too. I took the kids, not this past summer, but the summer before, Medina had a conservative party out at Destiny Farm. If a child doesn’t know how to—isn’t socialized—they don’t know how to talk to other people. It’s not just a shy thing. If they’re not socialized, they don’t know how to make conversation and stuff like that. So my children, I told them to go get their plates of food and just go find somewhere to sit and eat while I was talking with other people. And 20 minutes later I go and I find them, they’re sitting and they’re eating, and they were actually talking with some random people across the table from them. Turns out the one person they were talking with was a city council chairman. And he was shocked. He said to me, your kids are so polite. And they not only said hello, they encouraged conversation. And I was like, oh yeah, they’re homeschooled. So they tend to talk more with people and he was like, oh, that makes complete sense now. So yeah, the socialization thing isn’t, that’s not true. We’re busy all the time.
KEN:
Is there anything else that you would want to express regarding the homeschool experience?
NICOLE:
Yes. Every family that I have helped pull from the schools has said it’s been a blessing for their family and they wish they would’ve done it sooner. And I want to add too, if anyone wants to homeschool and they’re having doubts about it, they can contact me. I will literally help. I do this on a regular basis. I will help anyone. And even if I help a family now and they don’t need any help from me for three years, if they call me in three years, I will still help them with figuring out what they need to figure out. I want to help because if we’re going to change society for the better, we have to help build stronger families. And this is a way to help build stronger families.
One of my favorite sayings is “we are to glorify and worship God in all that we do.” So when sending our children off with strangers in the government schools, is that glorifying and worshiping God? I help these families because it’s all for His glory in the end.
Nicole can be reached at 330-591-7861.
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