(gentle music) - Welcome, friends, to this episode of the Everyday Educator podcast. I'm your host, Lisa Bailey, and I am excited to spend some time today with you as we encourage one another, learn together, and ponder the delights and challenges that make homeschooling the adventure of a lifetime. Whether you're just considering this homeschooling possibility or deep into the daily delight of family learning, I believe you'll enjoy thinking along with us.

But don't forget, although this online community is awesome, you'll find even closer support in a local CC community. So go to classicalconversations.com and find a community near you today. Well, listeners, I'm excited to welcome you to another episode of the Everyday Educator podcast, and I am especially excited to welcome one of my dear friends to talk about something that has become increasingly dear to my heart.

We wanna talk today about educating yourself. We spend lots of weeks talking about how we can be better homeschool moms and dads to the children that the Lord has entrusted to us. But today, I wanna turn our attention to educating ourselves. What does God call us to do, and how would we go about that, even if we felt like we had the bandwidth to do it?

So I have invited a dear friend who, to me, is a wonderful example of what a lifelong learner can become, is and can become. So welcome, Heatherly Sylvia, to the podcast. Heatherly, thanks so much for joining me today. - Thank you for inviting me to come back, and thank you for allowing me to talk about one of my absolutely favorite topics.

- Well, I know that you are a lifelong learner. I know that it's a passion for you, and I really, really believe that you love it so much and have grown into it to such a degree that you're gonna be able to help all of us see, oh, I don't know, how we could get started, how we could keep going, and maybe what lies ahead if we press on.

So thank you for sharing. Let me ask you this. I just wanna start off with this. Did you like learning back when you were a student? When you were formerly a student, when that was your main job, did you like to learn? - I don't know how to answer this question.

So I was, back in my day, back in the olden times, we were split up in our classes by what the school gauged was our academic level. So I was always in the top level, the smart kids class, whatever. I read early, I was pretty quick, but I loved to read.

I don't know that I loved to learn, but I loved to read, and I have a really strong memory. So I was able to coast through school all the way through elementary school, all the way through seventh grade, and then I got to eighth grade, and my science teacher expected me to actually know how to study.

And the problem was that I was a smart kid with a good memory, and so I had never learned any kind of study skills. I had never learned how to summarize, review. No, I never had to. And so when Mr. Nickerson expected us to study our notes that we took in class and then pass quizzes and tests, I really, really struggled.

And that was my wall, was eighth grade science. And after that, even though I was in honors classes, I did very, very well in my humanities classes, but no one even then stopped and said, "Okay, let's get you some study skills." My parents were both teachers, and neither of them noticed that I needed study skills.

So I loved to read and I loved to learn, but I didn't like being a student. - Isn't that so interesting? Because I have done kind of an informal poll just of other homeschooling parents and friends that I have all over the country, and this comes up a lot, Heatherly.

There were lots of us who loved to read and who found memorizing things really easy, but whose teachers, and I will be perfectly honest, it is possible that I had teachers that tried to teach me how to learn and how to study, and I just don't remember it. But I do, I also recall thinking, "Wait, what is this study for a test that you mentioned?" I've never, I don't know what that is.

I can remember, I was in the fourth or fifth grade, and it had never occurred to me that there was a way to study for a test. I think it's interesting that your parents as teachers just kind of apparently thought that you would just grow naturally into these study skills.

- Absolutely, and it's just a reminder to me that as I'm coming alongside my kiddos, that I, when I'm working shoulder to shoulder with them, that there is a lot of value in stopping and making sure that not only do they know what it is that we're talking about, but they also understand how I got to the answers I did, how to find an answer in the book, how to study.

So I have, I didn't learn how to study until I was an education major in college, and when I had to learn how to teach kids study skills, that's when I learned. Now, obviously, the study skills that I learned in order to teach in a modern system are very different from the skills that I have gathered and added to my copiousness as a classical homeschooler and as a classical teacher.

But that at least started me on the path. I was starting to regain some ground and realizing, oh, I can learn how to learn things. So I would say becoming a student didn't actually kick in as a pleasurable thing until I was a junior in college. - Isn't that interesting?

And you know, it seems to me that maybe learning became more pleasurable for you when you had some of the skills that made it a pleasant thing. - That's absolutely true, yes. - Yeah, yeah. So just, this is kind of maybe an aside, but maybe this would be very helpful for us to delineate for our listeners.

What would you say are some of the basic skills of studying or the basic tools of learning that we need to be sure that our children acquire? - So it'd be, the first one I would say is if we start when they're really little with the skill of narration, which is a classical skill and it can be done orally and it can be done written, in the written form.

But if you just ask a student to tell you back what they just heard, that is one of the first skills, just being able to mimic back, making sure they're actually hearing you and that they're understanding what it is that they just read or what they just heard. So narration is an amazing skill.

As adults, we can do this simply by writing a quick couple of sentences about what we just read or our sermon notes, writing down, like this is what I think the main idea of this sermon was or the main idea of this Bible passage were. - Or this paragraph that I just read.

- Absolutely, so the second skill I would say is when we enter the Essentials Program, which is ages nine to 11 typically in classical conversations, you learn through the IEW or Institute for Excellence in Writing, you learn through that program how to create a K-W-O, which is how to take words and ideas and kind of minimize them and then expand them in your own words.

That is an amazing study skill. And outlining, which you learn in IEW and then you learn again as you go through the challenge years. Summarizing, being able to take a lot of information and put it down to a small sentence or a small paragraph and then being able to memorize information.

So whether you're memorizing vocabulary words or catechism, which is how we do our foundations memory work, where we ask a question and get an answer. All of those are amazing study skills and they're all things that our students have by the time that they're 12 years old. And many of us moms and dads are trying to recapture.

- Yes, yes. I can remember when my older daughter went to college in one of the upper level political science classes she had to take. She came home for a break and was telling me all of this information that she had to remember. She was taking about the Middle East.

It was about countries of the Middle East and she had to know the population and the gross national product and all of these different figures for about 10 or 12 different countries. And it was daunting to me. And I said, how are you able to do this? This was just one class she was taking one test.

And she said, oh, it is so great because of all the memorizing that we did when we were little in foundations. She said, I have figured out what it takes my brain to memorize material quickly and hold on to it. And I thought, wow, what a gift we are giving our children when we teach them to memorize.

- And it's wonderful because that's not a skill that ends in foundations. - Yes, you keep going. - All through challenge. In fact, I am this year tutoring challenge four which is our capstone year. And my students have a memorized exposition speech that they'll be presenting this coming week.

So we continue to practice, like your daughter said, figuring out how do you memorize so that you can have that large amount of information at your fingertips. - Yeah, it's great. And that's just one of the skills that we will give our children as adults. 'Cause that's what I wanted to ask you about.

How do you feel now about learning as an adult? And does this seem like necessary? Does it seem necessary to you to keep on learning as a grownup? And what helps you to be a grownup learner? - I started reclaiming my education after I became a homeschooler. So by the time I became a classical homeschooler in 2014, I was just so hungry to know everything.

And so the things that have... First of all, yes, I see it as necessary. It's not just my job as a challenge for a director to make sure that I am continuing to learn and that I'm helping the parents know how to teach their kiddos. But it's also my job.

I started an organization with my friends, Tim and Sarah. And our whole purpose is to encourage and equip lifelong learners. So even when you're done homeschooling, or even if you aren't a homeschooler, how do you become a lifelong learner? So I see it as necessary. It's actually my passion.

So how do I feel about it? I love it. It's my favorite thing in the world to learn new things, to talk about them with my friends, to have discussions, to be able to help somebody else learn something new. These are all things that I am just passionate about.

I think that part of the reason I'm so passionate about it is because I left high school, having been told by my physics teacher that I was the dumb kid in the smart class. And then I really struggled my first few years of college. So I really feel like I'm making up ground.

And I know lots of other homeschool moms and dads that feel the same way. We feel like we're making ground. So I do think it's necessary. The first homeschool mentor icon that I met was Charlotte Mason through her writings. And she talks about the mother culture and the idea that a part of the mother culture is always being a little bit ahead of your students so that you could teach them well.

And I took that very seriously. And that lacking, that not knowing how to be a couple of steps ahead in certain areas is actually what directly led to me joining a classical conversations community. I was really struggling with helping my students to memorize because at that point, I hadn't learned how to memorize.

I just knew, I just have such a good memory I didn't have to. So teaching my kids how to, that led to me joining CC, which led to me learning about the great books movement, which led to me learning about Plato and Socrates and Aristotle, which led to me learning about all of these different works of literature that even in my time as an English major and as a theater major, I had never encountered.

So I had a passion for Shakespeare, but all of the other greats somehow missed. So I do think it's necessary. I don't think it's always necessary to do all the things, but I do think it's always necessary for us to have something that we're learning. And I don't think it necessarily has to be strictly academic.

I think that those mamas that are learning to cook and really exploring baking, or if there's a dad that has a hobby that they're really spending a lot of time learning about and pouring their time into, I think that that is just as important as reading the greats. - Yep.

Yes, I think it's necessary for everybody who's alive to learn. Because for me, it's a way to participate in life, to move through life and be curious and ask questions and not know the answer and figure out how to find the answer. And I love that you said it doesn't have to just be academics because some of the things that I'm learning now are not academic.

I'm gonna tell you this, I have not told many people this. I am learning to play the drums. - Oh, that's so fun. - That is not the most hilarious thing you've ever heard. I can remember when I was in the fifth grade, I really wanted to learn to play the drums and my fifth grade band teacher said, I promise you he said this, "The drums are just for the boys." - I feel like your band teacher and my physics teacher need to go hang out.

- I think they need to not be in education anymore. - Time out. (laughs) - And so I have started learning that. Now I will tell you at the ripe old age that I am, my muscles are gonna have to get a lot of memory before I can be good at this.

But I'm curious and I am eager and I'm determined and I'm interested. And so those are all the things that are necessary to be a learner. You just have to be curious. You just have to ask a question and you have to be willing to be really bad at it before you can be good at it.

So I feel like learning is necessary for grownups because that's how you know you're alive. You're still asking questions. - We talk about in the challenge program that everything that we're doing is pointing towards virtue. It's pointing towards becoming a more complete Imago Dei. So if we want to become more like the God that we love and are knowing and making known, we need to be curious about his creation.

And his creation is not just the trees and the birds. His creation is also rhythm and order and the science of baking and cooking and just all of the things that make us a more complete human being in the image of God. And I think that there's, we just, especially in classical circles, I think that when people are new to it, they are intimidated because they think, oh, I could never read Shakespeare.

I hate Shakespeare. I could never read Plato. I'm too intimidated by these things. And that that's not what we're talking about necessarily when we're talking about becoming a lifelong learner. We're talking about baby steps. We're talking about just being curious about something and learning about it and allowing that to make you a more complete human being.

And I tell my challenge students all the time, I don't just want you to be bright. I want you to be wise and I want you to be interesting. So I think it's really important that we all just stay on that journey. We stay on that path. And we get to do that as homeschoolers.

We have that opportunity built in, right? Because we're sitting shoulder to shoulder. I was sharing that I'm reading "The Scarlet Letter" right now with my daughter who's in challenge one. And we're reading it aloud together. We're reading three chapters a day and we're just sitting next to each other and reading the book and discussing it and thinking about it and kind of laughing a little bit because it's a very funny book if you actually take the time to read the language.

And thank you, Stephanie, for those lovely footnotes that are helpful to reading it. But I had never read "The Scarlet Letter" until I started homeschooling my kids and needed to read it in order to teach them. So what a beautiful way to fill in the things that I see as gaps in my education.

- I think that's so good. And I was gonna say, talk a little bit about the benefits of learning alongside our children. And you've just mentioned it. We do get to fill in the gaps of things that we missed or we skipped over or we skirted around in many cases.

We get to revisit those or be introduced to it when we learn with our kids. - I got to sit with my son this morning who is 17 and if he was in the school, we would call him a senior in high school. And we're reading a book about the ancients because we're about to start studying the Iliad.

And he had an absolutely earth-shattering, paradigm-shifting moment when we were reading today where he had to stop and put down the book and he just silently had to think. And I could just see the wheels turning and I started laughing and I said, "Buddy, are you okay?" And he's like, "I have so many thoughts right now." - Don't you love that?

- It was amazing. And if I had just, and please don't misunderstand me, I am not saying that every parent needs to read everything with their children. I only have two children. We enjoy reading together. It's great for them, it's great for me, it's great quality time. I understand that not every homeschool can function that way.

But if I wasn't learning alongside of him, I would have missed that moment. And it was such a delightful, delicious moment to just watch his little brain explode, realizing a couple of things about the way that the ancients and biblical literature connect to our current political state. - Wow, seeing those insights come across their face is one of the true blessings of homeschooling.

And you know, I did some of that too, Heather Lee. I didn't read every book along with both of my kids and I didn't do every subject. We picked things, I did all of chemistry with Sarah and man, we both were sanctified by that. That is work chemistry and I remember from high school, I learned many lessons and taught many lessons about humility while we did that together.

But there were times when I would be reading something with one or the other of them and they would have such a profound insight that my mouth would hang open. And I would frequently say to them, would you wait while I write that down? Because that is a thought I've never had and now I'm gonna need to think about that.

Or we might stop right there and I would say, okay, help me see that, how did you get that and what does that mean to you? And there's just such a benefit of being able to enter into a great conversation, it is a great benefit. I love it. - I will never be able to pass on my Challenge Four books to future Challenge Four tutors in my community, sorry guys, because they are littered with annotations and marginalia of things that Luke has said.

It's almost like whatever the senior year version of a baby book is, just looking at his thoughts developing, looking at his ideas and it's been great because I have always loved literature and I've always loved reading and he has not. So is he going to walk away from this experience loving reading books?

I don't know, but I do know that we have learned together and we are closer because we're having these experiences. So I would say that's a definite benefit to learning alongside of our children. I also think there's a real benefit to us learning differently or learning different things than our students are learning.

- Yes, talk about that. - So I think the best example of this is actually advice that I have heard my friend Tim give to someone else and it was shared with me anecdotally. And he said that one of the best things we can do for our students is to sit and read something for ourself that has nothing to do with school and nothing to do with work for 10 to 15 minutes a day.

That if they see us reading and it doesn't have to be high-brow literature. It could just be something that you enjoy. It will change the dynamic of our home. It will make our learning environment more hospitable. So I don't think that every parent needs to read every book alongside their student.

They don't have to learn everything but we do need to learn enough that we can at least ask them the questions to get them in the right direction if they get lost. And they would benefit from us modeling for them what it looks like to be a lifelong learner.

And even if that means, "Hey guys, I'm going to a class tonight "so that I can learn more about different sourdough starters "then that will benefit them." They can see that learning is not just for school but it is for life. - Yeah, one of the best compliments our kids ever paid us was explaining to one of their friends that, "Oh yeah," 'cause they saw my husband had his Greek New Testament out and he took Greek as a seminary student but hadn't really kept current on his studies.

And so he had it out brushing up on something and so for my daughter just to say, "Oh yeah, my dad is working on that." Or, "Oh yeah, my mom is learning "about medicinal uses of flowers." We learn, that's just what we do. Our family just learns. And to realize that they had internalized that idea that learning is what we do not because we're in school but because we're alive and because we're curious and because we want to keep knowing and growing.

That's really cool. So here's what, 'cause I think we've answered the question, should we keep learning even though we're not in school anymore? But look, would you encourage people, and I think I know the answer to this already, do you think that we need to keep learning even after our kids leave home?

I mean, I understand setting the example of reading some every day or working on some new skill so that we are modeling for them and learning with them so that we can be their mentor. But what about after they're gone and we're finally empty nesters? - And you finally have time to read.

- Yes, so how important is it to keep learning when the kids aren't watching anymore? - I think that as humans in the image of God, we need to keep learning about God, about his creation, and about our fellow man. And so I think that it is incredibly important that we keep learning because it's not just about being a model and a mentor for our children.

We are called, all Christian men and women are called to be Titus II men and women. And we are called to mentor. And even though it may not be the season where we have children in our home, God is always gonna put someone in your path that you are a step ahead of them and where you can be someone that fills in a gap for them and mentors them.

And again, it may not be Shakespeare or Plato. It may be the best ways to get a stain out of a shirt. And it may be the best ways to manage your time when you're just starting homeschooling. There's so many things that we have the opportunity to teach. And I think as Christians, we also always have the responsibility of being students of the word and being in the Bible on a regular basis.

And I have found, I'm someone that fell in love with the word early. My early mentors as a young Christian in my teens were passionate about the Bible and Bible study. And then my favorite college professors were just so excited about scripture. I have found the greatest growth in my study of scripture and my enjoyment of scripture has come as a result of my classical studies.

I enjoy scripture more because now I understand analogies. I under scripture more because now I have a very different understanding of not just genre, which I learned in high school English, but ancient genres. So I think as believers, I think we always have to keep learning, always. - Yeah, I love that, I love that.

And you've mentioned, we've talked about scripture and we've talked about a lot of ways that we can, as grownups, educate ourselves. We can read along with our students. We can read academic things and non-academic things. We can chase our interests. We can pursue a hobby. We can find a mentor.

What are other ways that you have found to educate yourself? - I have surrounded myself with other lifelong learners. I have collected a group of friends who love nothing more than to talk about what we are learning. And again, it's not always highbrow literature or the classics. Sometimes it's, look at this cool tip or trick I learned.

But almost everyone that I've talked to but almost everyone that I spend any amount of my extracurricular time, which is very limited, almost all of it is spent with people that love to learn. And whether they love to learn scripture or they love to travel or they love to just talk about books, they are the people that have educated me.

We are educating each other. So I think that one of the best things you can do is find people to learn alongside. You can do that in CC by finding a couple of other moms or dads that maybe just wanna read a book together. No pressure. - Right, read together.

Absolutely. - Just read together and be humble enough to say, I have no idea what he just said. I don't get it. Can you please tell me what you think this means or how can we figure out what he was saying to his original audience? - There are also lots of classical resources where you can continue to educate yourself in a more formal way.

There are webinars that are done by our friends at CRC and at Classical Academic Press. I help run an organization called the New England Consortium of Classical Educators. There's lots of groups out there where very low cost and very low impact, meaning you don't have to put yourself out there necessarily and be super vulnerable where you can learn.

So right before we finished, right before we started recording this podcast, I was taking a Latin class with lifelong learners just learning Latin a little bit differently, getting a different layer than what I've had so far as a challenge tutor and challenge parent. So I think there's a lot of different ways to educate yourself.

If you are more of an introvert and you just wanna learn on your own, there are kind of self-directed classes that you can take through many different organizations and you can take them, some of them are for free and some of them are very low cost. So finding something you're interested in and finding other people, whether they're online or in person that are also interested that will walk alongside you.

It's so much easier to do when you have friends because when you get discouraged, they are there to help translate Shakespeare for you or they're there to encourage you or to give you a different recommendation. - I always think thoughts when I am in community that I'm pretty sure I would not think on my own because somebody says something that spurs me on to think about something in a way that I've never thought of it.

From an angle I've never considered it before and it stretches me and every time I'm stretched, I learn a little bit. I love the emphasis that you placed on community and how community really does encourage lifelong learners. One of the easiest ways to learn things that you never were really interested in before is to surround yourself with people who aren't exactly like you.

Surround yourself with people who are interested in different things, who've had different experiences and that way you learn together to appreciate things that you yourself never came in contact with. - And if we are as classical students ourselves, if we're learning how to ask questions well and how to listen well, we are gonna learn so much from those community members because it's no longer about let me ask you this question so I can tell you what I think.

It's just humbly saying, tell me what you know about this, tell me about what you do for a job, tell me about your hobby, tell me about your trip and just listening and learning from them. That is gonna educate you because you're gonna end up with a list of things you've never thought about before, never experienced.

In our home, in my challenge classes, we call it our wonder list. They're things that we're curious about learning about or doing someday and we just write them down so that we don't forget and sometimes I'll talk to someone and they'll be like, oh yeah, I did this thing in this place and I've never done that thing and I've never been to that place and so I put them on my list and I just, I read a book about them or I listen to a podcast about it.

- That is so great. That is really great. I love that that also is a great way to love our neighbor well. To be interested in what our neighbor is passionate about is a way to love our neighbor well and to celebrate what God has made of them and what God has placed in their heart.

And when we can participate with them in that curiosity and in that wonder, we love them well and I love that. I love that. This has been great, Heatherly. I've enjoyed picking your brain about how we can educate ourselves, not just why should we do this, but how and what the pleasures and the benefits are.

This has been great. I have one final question for you and it's not a hard one. It is a very personal one that I've started asking all my guests. I want to know what makes you an everyday educator? - I am an everyday educator because I love to learn and I love to share what I've learned and I am constantly asking questions about things so that I can get that next layer.

I'm constantly looking for the next book to read or the next person to talk to or the next class to take. And so, because I am, as you said, a curious student, I'm constantly adding to my own copiousness and my own body of knowledge. I then become a more interesting teacher and a more interesting teacher to my students, a more interesting teacher to my friends.

I have a varied experience so I can mentor the people that God has brought into my path. - I love that. I love that, my friend. And I look forward to being able to sit down, maybe someday soon, face to face with you. I know, that'd be so awesome for us to be able to learn something together or just to talk about what each of us has learned most recently.

That would be awesome. Listeners, I hope that you have enjoyed this as much as I have. I want to tell you about one thing that you might want to pursue as you are looking for something to talk about with your whole family together. I want to tell you about a movie that's coming out at the end of October called Miracle in East Texas.

It is a very encouraging, heartwarming movie. It's about doing what's right and it is a movie that your whole family can enjoy together. It's directed by Kevin Sorbo and it tells the true story. So this is a true story, a traumatized version of a true story about the biggest oil strike in the history of the world.

All right, did that get your interest? That happened right at the dawn of the Great Depression and it actually follows the story of two con men who convince investors to invest in what they believe is worthless oil rigs which turn out to not be so worthless after all. Anyhow, it's coming to a theater near you on October 29th and if you want to find out where or even get tickets now and start looking forward to it with your family, you can visit sorbostudios.com.

That's S-O-R-B-O studios.com and find out more about Miracle in East Texas. Maybe you would be motivated to learn about oil rigs or the Great Depression or about doing what's right, something you can talk about with your whole family. So Heatherly, thank you one more time for being with me today and listeners, go and be lifelong learners.

(gentle music) you