You can definitely see it. I have a lot of old textbooks over 100 years old. You look at the fourth grade level and it's about a ninth grade level today. this idea of the 30 or more person classroom in which the incentives are driven to have the teachers teach to the middle. I walked away from a really nice, cushy retirement and salary and started working with homeschool students because I realized I had to get them earlier in order to make the difference that I wanted to in education. They're willing to submit because they've delegated their independent thought. I thought I could fix the system from the inside. And I realized it's just too corrupt,

Welcome, Joel and Deanna to Bitcoin Homeschoolers. We're so excited to chat with you, especially about your expertise in teaching writing. I have so many questions for you. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. We're excited to be here.

So cool.

Yeah. So as

by way of introduction, Scott and I met Joel and Deanna in El Salvador a few months ago and we clicked right away because we can talk homeschooling all day long.

For the listeners, if you could give the elevator speech of your backgrounds, and just a glimpse, maybe an interesting story, if you want, on what inspired you to go down this route.

All right. I'll start with my background. So I'm a homeschool advocate by marriage. Deanna and I started a homeschool curriculum company several years ago. In Seattle and we both wrote a lot of the curriculum I come from a tech background and and we we both. Do share this passion for education. We've also seen that education has has taken a great turn for the worse. So I am following Deanna on this journey. I'm helping her write some of the curriculum and and helping her with with some of her latest writing projects. And I'm currently doing some teaching of my own. I'm currently teaching some music lessons to some of the kids here in El Salvador and and I have also taught from our, the curriculum that we developed. Okay I'm Deanna and so I have a long history in education. I was a college, a tenured professor of humanities. And I have a background in history and anthropology, so I taught history, humanities, and anthropology for years on the college level. In 2017, I walked away from a really nice, cushy retirement and salary and started working with homeschool students because I realized I had to get them earlier in order to make the difference that I wanted to in education. I was in California, and, I was teaching a class on ancient Greece and Rome, and I was going to get fired because I wasn't teaching about African Americans or people of color. I was getting complaints and this was in 2016, 2015. So this what's been going on in education has been there for a long time. I left and interestingly enough, I had gotten a doctorate of education a year before because I thought I could fix the system from the inside. And I realized it's just too corrupt, so I had to leave it in order to make the impact. So I became a homeschool advocate. We wrote the curriculum like what Joel said, and I started privately teaching and tutoring homeschool students. Also students that went to private and public school, and I continue to work with students from public and private school, but homeschool students are by far my favorite students to work with because they still are curious, they still are passionate, and they still want to learn. And Those are all things that I've felt my whole life, so I just try to stick with them as much as possible. And I've taught history, humanities, but I do teach a lot of writing, actually work with the Writing Center out in New York. Still, even though I live in El Salvador, and I do a lot with writing because writing helps you think better. And I try to explain that. So I teach everything from second grade to high school. And just another note about writing is that I think we both strongly believe that writing is not just nice to have, it's indispensable because that it is the application of thought. You can you can go through your lessons and you can learn knowledge, but until you attempt to articulate it by writing, then you don't really know it. So that's why writing is indispensable.

See, I

agree with that concept, but I really disagree with the way that it's being used in schools nowadays. Shall we go into that or should we stick

example? Bring it out, you started the, you're gonna

Oh yeah. Let's bring out all the frustration and pain.

So

here's a, here's an example I would like to, I would like to share. So When I was homeschooling the kids, I used IEW,

IEW.

and IEW was the first time that

was ever taught,

I was learning it with the kids that I was ever taught that you needed to use very descriptive verbs and the more descriptive the better picture you paint. So I thought that made a huge difference for me because when I went to college, What they told me was to use the simplest word possible. So if I used a verb they didn't like, like if I said dashed somewhere, they would say, Oh, that's too complicated. Cross it out. Say go like it was exactly the opposite of what I was trying to do. Dumb down every single word. Don't use 10 words. Use five words in a sentence. Every sentence was short. Every sentence was very simplified. So I agree with that part of writing like use Words that are descriptive paint a vivid picture and form well thought out sentences, right? It does everything doesn't have to be dumbed down to second grade level. However, the other part of writing that I really disagree with is what's happening at the college level right now with my kids. So my daughter sent me a copy of her writing that was for freshman writing requirement class. And she was supposed to have an opinion. She was supposed to write a two page opinion about A movie that she was assigned to watch, but she wasn't allowed to give her opinion about the movie directly. She had to state her opinion and find the sources from all kinds of other people who had the same opinion, cite them, and then at the very end of the paper, say, this is my opinion. I read her paper, honestly. and I had no idea what her opinion was because the whole thing was just citation. The whole paper was citation. So I don't understand what kind of thinking is being encouraged in that process. If it's an opinion piece,

write the opinion,

your own opinion, support it with thoughtful Statements or reasons and then concluded, but in her case, she was not allowed to stay her opinion unless it was supported by other people's opinions.

So That's horrifying. It is horrifying, but it's not surprising and I've actually heard things like this, particularly in some of the social science departments that, at the college that I taught at. And what's The issue there is that they're not being asked to think anymore. They are actually encouraged not to think independently on the college level. And that is universal, which is why I'm not a fan of college anymore. I tell parents, before you spend the money on college, you really need to think about what your child wants to do for a living. And if there's any other way for them to navigate a course into that, then go that route. Whether it's apprenticeships or internships. Or whatever the case may be taking, free MOOC classes on Udemy or whatever. Or the trades. Or go into the trades, yeah. Who are so starving for labor that they have an endless number of training programs, whether it's through private organizations or through the unions. There are so many different avenues. Yeah. And so in terms of writing, I'm a registered. IEW teacher and I use it with the writing center. So I've gone through their training. I know their program. I have my own opinion on it. I've written my own writing program. And it's, I think great for younger kids. I don't think they hit grammar correctly. And so I do a lot of integration of my own stuff on teaching grammar with them. But it's a great start, and it's a good foundation for younger kids, particularly with some of the theme based books. I think what's going on in colleges is that, one, everybody who's teaching college came out of college. The decline in education over the last hundred and fifty years, really particularly in the last hundred years, You can definitely see it. I'm a book collector. I have a lot of old textbooks over 100 years old. You look at the fourth grade level and it's about a ninth grade level today. There's a decline in education, there's a decline in thought, and those people that are now teaching college came out of the college system on this decline. They don't know how to write, they don't know how to think, and they don't know how to teach. And I'm just going to say it out there, and that is a general statement, and there are a few good ones out there, but those good ones, like myself, are leaving the system because it is so corrupt. So their students aren't encouraged to think independently. They're not encouraged to write. Basically, what they're doing is check boxing, and all of that stuff from No Child Left Behind way back in the day that turned into Common Core, that is all trickled up to the college level. And it's really vile, can I just add something to the the point about about independent thinking? This particular style of writing pedagogy, where you're restricting the student from expressing independent thought. on their own, and you, and instead of developing independent thought, you're requiring them to delegate that thought to other sources. So what you're really doing is teaching second handedness. You're teaching, not you're not just ignoring independent thought. You are restricting Independent thought you're banning independent thought so if that is the direction if that is the main writing pedagogy day then you're teaching generations. Of willful or willing to comply budding authoritarians, they're willing to submit because they've delegated their independent thought. And these are the generations that we're training for the workforce. Our culture.

yeah. And I just want to add two. I want to throw two other questions at you. One is the notion that writing can be taught because when I went to my freshman writing class. The first day of class, the professor went up to the front of the room and said, Some of you are born to write. Some of you are not. Only a few of you will get an A. And writing is a natural ability you have or you don't. And I sat there looking at him

why is this guy getting paid then? That's the

Yeah, why is

teach it, then what's his purpose for being there?

exactly. And why am I there? Why am I required to sit through a writing class if I'm doomed? If I'm not born with writing ability. So how would you answer that question?

I am a big fan of Carol Dweck and the idea of broke mindset. So I think most things can be learned. It's just how easy it comes to you. For instance, Joel's now teaching me guitar. I've had one lesson. It was hard and I haven't gone back. I don't normally do things that are come difficult for me because I just. Most people like to just do what comes naturally, but I'm going to stick with it because it's something I want to do. It's the same with writing. It's the same with reading. I was teaching reading skills on the college level. Reading and writing are fundamental skills, right? Can I just underline this point? Deanna was teaching students how to read in college, okay? So that's where we are with the level of education. She's teaching college level kids to read. Yeah, and using the school, using a program that was designed for middle school, where they started doing it for college, and I went through several trainings to learn this process, which I now use with second graders. Anyway the fact that he says that you either can or can't, I think is an abomination and is all academic ego on his part. He's lazy. He doesn't want to do, put in the hard work and he's not going to demand it from his students. And so he's just written off what he's actually there as a responsible teacher should be doing, in my opinion. And furthermore writing is a skill. It's a skill because there's a process. There are steps that you can undertake in order to communicate ideas and articulate them. And if it weren't a process, if it weren't a skill that could be developed, we wouldn't have School, like we would not have a tradition of defining what these principles of writings are. This is patently ridiculous that anyone could say that writing can't be taught. Just like any other skill, there are steps, and the steps can be defined and communicated.

Yeah, it just depends on the skill of the teacher, I think. That's why I don't agree with kids that say, I'm just really bad at math. And then just resign to being bad at math. I think that has to do with how they were taught and their expectations. But anyway going down the path of writing, here's another question for you. What do you think about these hyper, in my mind, hyper labeling of reading skills by grade level? Because when I was homeschooling the kids, we did living books and I was a huge Charlotte Mason fan and I absolutely believe in original works. And so we, everything that I got for the kids to read and listen to were all original works because I don't care what level they are. They're just beautiful works of expression. But when you get to this hyper level, like labeling of my son can read at the fifth grade level, but he's only five or my son is in high school, but he's only reading at the sixth grade level. Like that kind of label

labeling

make any sense to me at all. It's not applicable to real life whatsoever. What do you think?

The question really is, what is the purpose, what is, what purpose does labeling serve for parents? If you are predisposed and gravitate to labeling, what are you doing it for? Are you doing it so you can show off to other families that your kid reads in an 8th grade level when he's only in 5th grade? What is the purpose? If you value your child's education more than you value the label, then it doesn't matter what the labels are. I see, and, from the teacher's end, What does the labeling what is the purpose of the labeling? Again it's just as we saw in our example of the professor who didn't think that teaching writing was possible. It's laziness. If you label a child as incapable of reading the material on the curriculum, then you have an easy way out. You can just walk away and say, Oh, they have to be put into a special needs class.

Yeah, labels. I agree with you guys. Yeah. The whole identity politics can be extrapolated in a lot of different ways. If, I'm thinking about like a number of things here to go down. So one of them is, what Tali did with our kids is she would get the unabridged books on audio. And every place they drove, they would listen to the correct pronunciation with different accents. So imagine. You're like you're reading to your kid every night, but now you've got you know, world class leaders and so for the price of a few library fines Because she may have checked everything out and not brought it back on time. But like I all of our kids Do really well with reading and I think there's a correlation between reading and writing and thinking I Was always drawn to the math and the science thing. So I was, I watched as our kids all developed this strength. And I think that's a huge part of it and it's testament that anybody can learn anything, right? They don't have to be able to pay huge expat types of fees for homeschooling consultants. But I am curious though, because you have been paid at like that, right? To help teach. The people who come and find you, are they already aware of these things that we're talking about and say I'm seeking you out because you do this, or are you convincing them, or is it, I just want them to have education and they happen to get someone who cares? I'm curious of your experience on, what you've seen with that.

I'm usually chosen because of my background in classics and my robust approach to integrated subjects. I integrate literature, philosophy, history. And so if I'm going to be and a lot of parents, particularly when they get up into the high school level, which you may know, they're intimidated. They think, Oh, I'm not smart enough anymore. And I have someone who's more expert. So most of my teaching has for homeschool has been middle and high school. I am a private tutor in writing and reading. And that is primarily the younger grades are private and public school whose families expect high achievement levels from the children and they're not getting the education that they need to in class. Some of these children go to schools that are 50 grand a year, private schools, and they're still hiring out private tutors for writing. So that's how bad the education is. But if kids can't read, and if kids don't read, if parents don't encourage kids to read, then they're, they will not be as good at writing. Because that, and reading what I think are the best books, the living books excuse me the living books, the classics, those, that wonderful corpus of literature, that wonderful corpus of primary sources. Those are the things that kids should be reading and the reading level is, it's like labeling, oh, I'm a, I'm a kinetic learner or I'm an auditory learner. I don't buy into those either. I think we may favor different things. If I'm going to listen to a podcast, I need to be sitting at my desk and writing notes because I'm that student. I'm Hermione Granger, right? So that's how I learn and that's what I do. And I would rather read a book than listen to a podcast, but that's because I've been a massive reader my entire life. And it's my comfort level, right? That's where I'm comfortable. I don't want people yammering at me. It actually causes me a little stress sometimes. I'm like, oh my God, stop talking. But I like quiet. I'm just that person. Joel's complete opposite. Completely opposite. Yeah, they say opposites attract. Here we go. But I think the reading level is ridiculous, and it is laziness. It's when I'm teaching eighth grade, I just look at the back of the book at the bookstore, or in the Scholastic catalog, and reading level eight, here's what I get a pick from. And I think that's crap. I teach eighth grade reading level in my reading classes. It's a writing reading center now, because I'm there, but I'm teaching eighth grade levels. I'm teaching primary sources. I had a fifth grader reading translations of Copernicus. And he did amazing with that. I don't believe in those things. I think you should find something a little more difficult where they have words that they need to look up and words that they don't know. That's the reading level. Figure that out. And if you're, homeschoolers know their kids better than any other parents. You know what level to get that for your kid. And moreover, you know the level and you know the interest. The interest drives the level, the interest drives the passion, and the ability to stick with it when it gets more complex and and difficult.

What I

hear. I don't think it's laziness. I would challenge that. I think it has to do with incentives. If parents, the parents are motivated more than anyone for the well being and the future of their kid. I would argue. There's probably some bad parents. I get that. But in general a teacher is going to have different kind of pressures. You need to have students present because that's how the pay is going to work. Or the union has pushed on something. Or There's a woke ideology, something other push that has to be integrated and it's a matter of what is their incentive. And so if they don't have an incentive to teach these kids these things, because it's almost like we are assuming that they understand that these things are valuable. If they don't value it, they don't have an incentive to teach that way. And I agree with you. I do think there's teachers are good teachers out there. There are good teachers, but there's also. A lot of people have been attracted to this industry that are not doing it for those reasons.

a lot of what you're driving at is structural and has been built into the what we might call the education industrial complex since its inception. Exception, at least in America, Indiana has a lot to say about why we arrived at this idea of the 30 or more person classroom in which the incentives are driven to have the teachers teach to the middle. So any exceptions. Can't be addressed. You you're mass producing the or creating an assembly line of students. There are reasons why we came to this point and and it's something we can explore if you, if that's something you want to talk about. We might have to do that another time. That's a, that's conversation if you're

is a big conversation. I was going to just mention really quickly that we also have really externalized the reward of reading. So one memory I have that. That just really stands out when from the time when I was homeschooling the kids was every summer if you go to the public library, and we use the public library a lot, like I walk in, and I know all the librarians and they know my name, they like, here's your stuff, we know them really well, we're there all the time. And every summer, they would have these summer reading programs where they start to have this chart, and they have all these incentives, rewards and stuff. And if you read this many books and you write them down, then you can submit it for a little trinket. And at the end you'll have a drawing and sometimes you get an iPad. Sometimes you get a, like a big screen TV. We're talking serious. Incentives to get these kids to read so I would go in and we always check out at least 50 to 100 books at a time And we would be leaving and the librarians would be flagging me down go Have you signed your kids up for the summer reading program every summer same question and I would say no I'm not participating in that and they would say well why? And I said, because the reward is the story itself. The reward is not the trinket you give them. The reward is not the sticker I put on their chart. The reward is the enjoyment of the story. And they were so mad at me. I heard them actually talking after they thought I left with each other. And they were like, I can't believe that mother won't reward her kids for reading. They are rewarded. I don't need to reward them. The reward is the story. And that's why they come back. And that's why they pick out 10 more books in that series. What do you think about that? The summer reading program?

Those librarians, they have their own reward, they're rewarded by their their organization, their bureaucracy, basically, because that's what librarians are in major city public library systems they're bureaucrats. who are rewarded for getting their their patrons through this this assembly line of readers. So there's also national contest by the library association and stuff, things that the individual library, or if they have grant funding, they would need. the metrics and stuff. So there's, it's like a multi layer reward system. So my sister and I, we used to sign up, and I lived in a small town in California, a very rural small town, and we would go to the library and we'd sign up for the summer reading program, but we didn't get any reward. We just would write down our, the titles of the books. It just was a tracker, and my sister and I were super competitive. We actually still are, and We would figure out who could read more books and then she was three years older so she would say my books were easier because they were shorter or more pictures and so like it was, but that was. It's just fun sibling competitiveness, but there was no prize per se. And I know it's like kind of big business now but I agree. I think that the reward is in the reading. When I teach, even when I'm teaching IEW for the Writing Center, I don't have any grades on my papers. I don't do grades because I want them to learn and I don't want them to be so worried. And a lot of the kids that I work with have parents that are only worried about the end of the grade. It's not, they're not really necessarily, I'm sure they want their children to learn, but it's that grade. They're like, Oh, he only has a 91 in ELA. Can you help him? So he can pull that up. And I'm like, but what is he learning? And That's the value. I don't give grades and just to tie the two ideas together of assigning a reward to to the activity that is outside the internal necessity of the activity like reading, when you place the reward to be something other than the activity itself. or if you if you make the grade more important than the learning, the lesson that you're actually transmitting is is that the actual activity itself is not as valuable as what other people think about what you've accomplished. So again, it's another second handed system that that diminishes the the importance of the activity itself.

Yeah, I absolutely agree when our kids were being homeschooled I also didn't give grades because people always would say have you graded their paper yet? And I said no I made marks on it I circled things that needed some improvement or adjustment But that's all the feedback they need because life doesn't operate on grades only schools do it's you're not teaching them what

What happens when they, what happens when they leave school or what happens when the summer's over? Are they going to come back and read the books again? Are they going to try to find books on their own that they can enjoy? Are they going to try to improve their writing once they're not being graded for it? These incentives are really perverse. Yeah, and back to the grade thing, I remember I spent hours and hours grading essays in college. All my exams had a little bit of the sort of multiple choice questions, but I hate writing them, and you can judge a lot more about learning if you have short answers and essays. So most of my Okay. Exams were written. They were, I created new ones to every class. And so I would spend hours and hours grading essays and essay exams, giving comments. And the students would only look at the top of the grade and that was it. And I had to give grades, right? It's college, it was enforced. But they would never look at the comments. Two semesters before I stopped teaching, I finally said, if you want comments and a lot of feedback, please let me know. Otherwise, I'm going to just give you proofreading marks on your papers. But if you want substantive comments about the content about grammar rules. Let me know. I only had a few students over those 2 semesters come up to me and say, can you give me a lot of comments? Because I want to improve my writing.

Yeah.

When you ask the question of why that, that is the case. You have to look back on how these students were taught and what the demands were of them as they matriculated through their education system. Comments improvements were never as important as the grade. And and then they get to the college level, and they're not even looking at ways to improve themselves. You know what that also does? It it changes the incentives for the teacher. Why would the teacher spend all that time pouring over all those essays to, to make informed comments? the truth is that a lot of a lot of teachers, whatever level, because of the incentives that we have in the system today, have given up. And they're not even as, as diligent as to offer students a choice as to whether they, to get intense comments or not. They'll just make multiple choice tests that go through a Scantron, and they'll, the tests will be the same every year, and they're, they'll just mail in.

I don't think people like everybody knows what Scantron is.

Oh, okay. Those are those little forms where you fill in the bubbles. So you write an exam and it's either a true false, so one or two, or A or B, or it's A, B, C, D for the multiple choice answers, and you fill in the bubbles and you put it in a machine. Number two pencil. In the department I worked at, which is the history department at the college, I had colleagues 20 years using the same exams. They never changed them. Same text, same exam. Same, test bank from the publisher and They would just do Scantron and I'm like, I'm rewriting my exams every semester. I'm changing my books I'm doing all of this stuff and there's they're actually getting paid longer or more than I am because they've been there longer It was never about pay for me. It was about I love learning and I loved teaching and I love sharing knowledge But towards the end, there was quite a bit of resentment there, because I'm like, do better. But talking about incentives, those are the incentives that reward the lazy teacher and drive teachers like Deanna out of the system.

Yeah.

I'm just going to keep throwing questions at you because I, there are some things that I've been really frustrated about that. I just want to discuss in more in the open. So another thing that has been really frustrating me based on what I'm hearing from my college age kids is this concept of being graded by your peers rather than the professor. Yeah, so I said to them it's like blind leading the blind you don't know what you're talking about But you're supposed to give meaningful feedback to five other students So that you can get your full mark and then your grade depends on Other people's opinion of you who also don't know anything. What the heck is that about? Especially in a writing class.

Yeah, it's a couple things that are driving that one is egalitarianism. We are no longer living in a meritocracy. And although I'm not the biggest fan of putting rates for the reasons we've already discussed, I do believe in, you need to have a meritocracy, those people that are better at certain things should be doing those things like particularly a doctor, right? A pilot that's come up in the recent news, I want pilots that are actually good, not Based on some woke metric. And what teachers are doing, this idea of peer review and sharing paper. So there used to be a time when you would Exchange papers and use the honor system where you would have maybe a multiple choice test and the teacher would have students exchange and then they would grade it and then the teacher could collect them and then spot check them or whatever. So that used to be a thing. And again, that I think was teachers just trying to get the kids to do their work, even though I don't think that could have been used in class time, but whatever. Now it's this peer review because everything has to be kumbaya and everybody's holding hands and we all love each other and no. It shouldn't be that. I'm sorry, in a freshman writing class in college, I know what they're, I knew what come, what was coming out of high school. I taught college, they were under or unprepared for writing and reading. Don't even get me started on math, it's worse. And so To let those freshmen take papers in grade and try to give comments when they've never even really learned the fundamentals of grammar and writing and how to structure things. And again, I go back to laziness. I was in the system. There are good teachers. But this is laziness. And that's why I always say, do better, be better. I say it on Twitter all the time, too. For, people trying to encourage people to learn about Bitcoin. I'm like, you can't be angry about it. You can't do it this way. Kindness. Do better. So these teachers need to be doing better. They need to teach how to write. I teach kids how to edit. I spent 45 minutes online on a Zoom class last night teaching a 4th grader how to do a line edit of his own work. We learned he needs help on prepositions. That was great information for me. So I'm teach, so they should be, instead of using that class for peer review, that teacher should be going through and asking someone to volunteer their paper so we can do a line edit so I can show you how to edit your own work on a rough draft before you turn it in.

I'm sure, yeah, I'm sure they're not allowed to do that now because that would be like targeting people. But anyway, it drives me nuts. And actually one of our kids, we have four kids, right? One of them actually came to me after one year of being in school in college. And he said, I'm literally learning nothing. And one year, and he said, I refuse to pay for an education I'm giving to myself. And I said, why is that? And he said in all his classes, everything was peer reviewed. He never heard from the professor one time in one year, never one time. And the professor assigns some kind of project, you're supposed to go figure it out yourself and then turn it in and then your others, the fellow students graded and he said, I'm not going to pay for that. It's not an education. I said, okay. So he dropped out. I, we still have other two kids. We have two, two dropped out to state

the two

that stay when they tell me what Garbage, they're required to do that's a complete time waster makes me so angry,

So why do they want to stay in?

they want to stay in for the social reasons because they,

join a book I'm sorry. Okay.

Are no book clubs here, Deanna, that you can join with people your own age. Yeah but it's like they want, they were coming out of COVID. And they really wanted interaction.

And

the first year they were in there, everybody was behind masks, and then they realized what was going on in college. But then the masks, the mandate was removed. So they were able to see each other's faces now. So they wanted to go back and try to build a relationship in person, face to face.

face, and,

Learn that side of college so they're there for that but academically I always told them don't you Bend your principles just to get an A from some a professor for some dumb assignment

Can I just add that the laziness? Reason the justification or the explanation for professor actions for simply being laziness is actually the the most generous explanation for this behavior and the real, like the driving reason, the reason that it is it's not just an accident here or there with a few bad apples, but it is. Uniform across all disciplines and all professors is that there is a driving ideology behind it and college professors now are almost entirely uniformly Marxist egalitarian and and they do this not out of of a dereliction of duty. Or some need to get, pull one over on the system. They do this because they're ideologically motivated to do this. So any independent thinking person is an oppressor in the Marxist worldview. Anyone who rises above the, the social norm, anyone who thinks independently is an oppressor. So these peer review groups are really devious ways of of weeding out independent thinkers, knocking them down, making them irrelevant. and doing it on on this really behind the scenes way where you can make it seem like it's a nice kumbaya everyone's in it together. Social get together thing, when it's in fact a real Marxist agenda that they've been inculcated with, meaning the teachers, have been driven through the, their entire academic life. And there's also a push in academia, and this has been going on for about 10, maybe 15, probably 10, 12 years, and that's project based learning. I don't know if you've heard that term before, but basically where you take a classroom and you do a lot of group work, you do a lot of pair sharing, you do a lot of these things on a group level, and you empower the students. To be the keepers of the knowledge and the idea that you have a teacher at the front who is expert, who is imparting wisdom upon those people in front of them, the students, that is now Marxist, and that has been coming and becoming more and more where you don't do that. You are no longer the expert in the room, but you share knowledge and everybody can share appropriately. But only certain kinds of knowledge. Yeah. You can't you can't do anything that comes from an oppressor group. Anything Western is is completely out. Yeah. Only oppressed groups the knowledge of oppressed groups can apply. I'm a fan of Montessori education, but I also have some ideas about it, where I think with little kids, you should just let them explore things that they're really interested in, and give them some information and just let them go, right? I love that approach. And in the Montessori system, you have guides, where they guide the children through knowledge. When you get up to the college level, the knowledge that the students have should be pretty a lot more and vast and they need those experts. They need that separation. Otherwise, why are you there? You can just go, particularly in the modern world, you can find out any information. It's all in our fingertips on a little piece of glass in our hand every day.

Yep.

The wealth of knowledge from human history all the way back, right? And we don't just need guides in the classroom like we do for little kids in a Montessori education. We need those experts that impart the wisdom and help students. Level up in their knowledge, and that's not the goal anymore, and that's why this is happening.

Yeah, and I think our girls have been particularly frustrated with those so called Socratic discussions where it's a bunch of students all talking out of their backside because none of them know what the heck they're talking about. And they haven't, most of them even read the reading material that they're supposed to be discussing, but they're being graded for participation. So they just say a bunch of. Garbage, so that they can get the participation grade and it's very frustrating for the people who do the work and actually want to have a meaningful discussion, but it's just a bunch of extroverted people who didn't do the work talking garbage.

Yeah.

It's true, and feelings are more important than the actual knowledge, than the, that stuff to back up what you're saying. So you can say, yeah, I loved Pride and Prejudice, it was a good book, it made me happy. That is as valid as saying, was it pride or was it prejudice? Maybe Mr. Darcy was more prideful, but was Elizabeth really prejudiced? Let's examine this on page 400 and blah, blah, blah, right? That doesn't matter anymore. It's that warm feeling. And I felt this and feelings are more important than facts today in education. And that goes all the way down to kindergarten.

Yeah. Let's jump into your specific

I have one more question. Oh, no, go ahead. I had one question I wanted to get in. Tali's very passionate about this, so I get I get one question. So I, I believe in what Jeff Booth has laid out that technology is deflationary. And at this point, our education system should be getting better and cheaper. Instead, it's getting more expensive. And like we just covered the last few minutes it's getting worse. And with every technology, it can be used for good or bad. I wanted to get your point of view. We don't have to go too deep on it, but where do you fit AI into your curriculum or when a parent is asking, Tali and I literally we talked for hours on this, so this is not a, this is, again, this is not meant to take hours. I just want to get high level. We've talked about ideas. We've talked about incentives. But we haven't talked about technology and I want to get your point of view on technology and education

We now have an informed opinion about this, which we didn't have, say, six months ago, right? Yeah. Okay, so go ahead and tell your story. The minute you mentioned AI, we both just smiled and looked at each other because Joel is, I loved technology and I loved it as a tool. I was against AI because as a teacher, I already have to filter through so much plagiarism and Pardon the expression, crap, in order to grade. And I was really like, oh my gosh, no, I can't deal with this. But, I, and I wasn't going to use it, I'm a classicist in my study of history, I like classic literature, don't get me anything modern in terms of painting or literature, anything like, I'm old fashioned. You like the physical pages and, of books and how old books smell. Yes, and now living in El Salvador, I'm relegated to a Kindle, but it is what it is, I'm still happy to read. Okay, I started using AI and I started seeing, Oh this is just like a search engine on steroids or a brainstorming partner or a brainstorming. I'm writing a book right now, and it's a brainstorming partner, and so I'm going to start offering classes for homeschool parents or actually workshops, not classes, but workshops for homeschool parents on how to integrate AI In a very useful way for your children, because we're not getting away from this. It's the same thing. I don't like video games. I really have a hard time working with students that are addicted to games. I, a lot of times, won't even work with a student who's addicted to gaming anymore. I can't break, I can't compete and I can't break through that. And it's going to be the same thing with AI. But, just like there are some really good educational games, this can be a really good educational tool. It just, like anything, it has to be taught appropriately. How to use it. I was working with a kid in class and I knew he was on chat GPT trying to answer my reading comprehension questions and I could see the frustration because I write my own questions and he couldn't find them. And he couldn't get the right answers. And to me, I was like, ah, I went again. I'm so excited because, I can use chat GPT to give me some ideas, but then I take those ideas and I run with it using my own human brain. And I think that is brilliant. And I'm really excited to have that tool now. But it took me a long time to

we I agree with you. It can be used for good. They're going to be people who use it for poor reasons as well But if you don't teach them how to use it the rest of the world is going to use it and I

what's more important than that is to teach them, and I'm going to use this phrase advisedly, teach them how to think. Okay, we all talk about it. Everyone in education says the worst thing about education is the lack of critical thinking, right? But where does that come from? You can't teach a class on critical thinking. You can't teach okay, let's talk about logical fallacies today, or let's talk about how to structure your thoughts. No, that's not how it works. You can't just turn on a switch and have a class about critical thinking. But what you can do, and that's the approach that we took in our the curriculum that we wrote. is to have a survey of all the great works of history and literature and philosophy. You, that gives you the broad spectrum of human behavior, and example after example of people thinking. Rather than having a class in critical thinking, you model critical thinking. You model it as a teacher, demonstrating how to work through problems using thought, using critical analysis. But you also show how Aristotle thought, you walk through the metaphysics or you walk through the politics and oh, look, Aristotle walked the beach. And and all these different critters and catalog them and drew inferences from them or he went to he saw human behavior and made a catalog of how the different ways people behaved and he said, Oh this is clearly better than that. And so you walk through all these great. Ideas, examples through history and also literature, if you have my favorite example is that if you are if you have a student who's having trouble with a deceitful friend, but they've read Othello. They already know that guy's in IAGO so you model that through all these great examples and at the end, and there is no end because we are always in a process of learning, but you become a better critical thinker, and when you're that, Then you can tackle AI and use it for you for your the best purpose that you can use it for. Well,

Yeah, I feel like that we need to do a whole nother episode on just using AI appropriately because Scott and I are very interested in that as well. In the beginning, I was very against it. But now I use chat GPT every single day. And like Deanna said, you can't use it. It's not a brain. It's not actually the what's his name? The Iron Man's computer.

It's not like that, Jarvis,

You it's spitting you back probability of a simulation of information and then you still have to discern it and you take from it what works for you and then change it accordingly if you copy and paste. That's not appropriate. So you, what are you going to say?

you have to treat it, you have to treat ChatGBT or any other AI in exactly the same way to an even stricter sense than the way you treat Wikipedia. You have to have the same amount of skepticism. With your chat GBT output as you do when you are looking up a factoid on Wikipedia. And if you try to copy paste your Wikipedia entries and submit that in the paper someone like Deanna is going to find that out and know that you've plagiarized because you probably left the links in when you did your copy

But

Well, there's that. And you also said Fact and Wikipedia, and that's for me oxymoronic. That's true. But anyway. Yeah.

but I do think that we shouldn't shy away from it because some schools are taking a very strict approach in that if they track your IP address or something on your laptop, I'm talking specifically about one school, they track your IP address. And if you land on Chad, GBT at all.

you

get a visit from the administrative office,

Really?

yeah, but I feel like that's Saying you can't use a knife because it might hurt you So therefore you can't use any knife at all. You need to use it Like a tool and it's a tool You don't just prohibit them from using the tool because you're afraid they're gonna use it for something That's not gonna be helpful to them So we do encourage like we absolutely agree with you Deanna that we need to teach people how to incorporate chat GPT in Homeschooling

They should not be afraid

of it They should not be like I'm not gonna get involved with it because they are going to be left behind Because no matter what chat GPT helps you with your productivity

But teach them how to think first, and then they'll be able to use the AI. It's the same thing like 50 years ago, or 70 now, I'm getting old, but 70, I'm not that old, I'm not 70, but 70 years ago, the idea of an encyclopedia, right? Oh, we can't have that, because you should just go look at all those big books, or go to that original source. But encyclopedias in their day would have been scary, because now you have this The set of books where there's all of this information, and it's so condensed, and it's just someone else did that for you no, you should go look, yeah, you should go always back to the original source, but the encyclopedia is a tool, and then you take that, and you go exploit the bibliography, or you find a book that's a secondary source, and you exploit the bibliography, and then you go, and you find those original sources, and then you know the source, and chat GPT is the same thing It's, I'm writing a Bitcoin book and I'm going to be starting writing Bitcoin curriculum for different levels. And it is my writing partner. But here's a trick that that all students should be directed to to act upon when they use any kind of AI. And that is, to ask the AI for its sources. So if you are asking for a quote about a particular subject, and and it gives you the perfect quote for what you need for your academic project, ask what the source of that quote was. And you will often find that the AI made it up. Ask for the source, and then explore the source. And then call the AI on the source. If you suspect that they're making it up and you will be led down this this very entertaining path of AI hallucination, which is the technical term for it. They literally make stuff up. So again, just ask for the source and and at least use that to validate the output from the AI. Yeah, I try to get an apology for AI lying to me at least once a day. It's now a game that I play.

I, that is so funny that you said that's a great tip, by the way, I'm going to use it. But I was I was writing a blog and chat GPT was my writing partner, like Deanna was saying about her book. And I said, give me 1000 words. And it gives me it spits out this thing. And I said, how many words is that 376? I said, that's not 1000 words, I asked for 1000 words, do it again. And so I'll do it again. And I'll say how many words is that 454.

454,

That's not a thousand words. Go back and do it again. And I will just go into this loop and it start, like you were saying, Joel, it start just making stuff up. Literally, it's so funny. Once you get there, you realize that this is nothing more than a tool that is dumber than yourself. Because I think a lot of people are like, oh my god, AI is gonna take over the world. It is not. It is just, like you said, it's a search engine that sometimes makes up stuff. Or

not a search engine. It's a series of vectors and probabilities and 100 percent of everything it spits out is made up 100%. Oh, okay. It just might sound real. So it doesn't, it's not actually thinking in any way whatsoever. And I think the, like the stupid Biden. Executive order where they're the big tech companies are trying to build a legal moat around themselves. You can't put the genie back in the bottle with this AI thing. It's out there and it's amazingly powerful. But it's not thinking like the idea that this thing is thinking and whatever else I mean it doesn't yeah, what do you guys what's your current what are you guys currently working on do you have some personal goals for the year or I mean you've mentioned the book you're obviously working on a book

We have we each have our own writing projects. Yeah, we're both writing right now. And if you met us, you would think Joel would be the nonfiction writer and I would be the fiction writer. I'm writing a book and I have a working title, Shells to Satoshi, the Story of Money. And it is a historical look at money over time and how we ended up where we got, where we are. And then it's an instruction manual, a very introductory level instruction manual on Bitcoin. Why we need Bitcoin, what Bitcoin is, and how to start using it. I hope it it should end up being the kind of book that if your friend who doesn't know anything about Bitcoin is interested in getting into it, it's for the layperson, so it's the kind of book that you want to hand them to get them started on their journey. Yeah, and it really answers the question why. Why we need money. Why it's changed so much over time. Why we are where we are and why we need Bitcoin and that Bitcoin is the culmination of these thousands of years of history of human history and in terms of economics, and you're about 80 to 90 percent done with it. Yeah, it'll be released this spring. And and then I'm taking that and I'm going to be doing high school curriculum, middle school curriculum, upper elementary, lower elementary, and then writing children's books based on the concepts in this book. So moving it down a different level, the story of money. And it's a narrative. It's it doesn't. For the laid book for adults, it doesn't start once upon a time, but there will be versions in the curriculum once upon a time. And it'll go into these different civilizations, and it'll start at the beginning, and then it'll go all the way through. So I'm really excited. By the end of the year, like I, I'm always overachiever type A personality, I would love to have. Most of the levels completed homeschool curriculum that includes teacher's guides, assignments, grading guides, all of those things have writing assignments. I would like to have all the levels for homeschool done by the end of the year. And and then I would like to start writing children's books. And I have a few people I'm dream about working with in terms of illustrations. If you've ever tried to do illustrations on chat, GPT, you know how bad they are. I went down a one hour rabbit hole arguing with it about what a Regency dress would like, and it looked like, and it kept on giving me Victorian hoop skirts and we just argued back and forth. Yeah, I and I thought, oh, okay, no, you must be prompting it badly. So I tried it on my own and. Nope, it's pretty bad at Regency, and it it gave me a couple dresses that looked like it came out of Ante the Antebellum South. Yeah, but so that's the writing that I'm doing. I'll let Joel talk about his, but then I also teach classes. We have Lyceum tutoring, where I will offer classes, history, humanities, economics, literature, art history. And those are on demand. So if somebody wants me to teach their homeschool child I only am dealing with the Bitcoin audience. So Bitcoin homeschoolers they can register for a class if they want to get a group class. And obviously it goes down per student in terms of the fees. So that's lyceumtutoring. com. And so we're pretty busy right now working on, I'm busy with all of those things. And we just got the domain shells to Satoshi. Dot com Shells, TO satoshi.com. So look for the book there. We're recording this in January of 2024. So to all your time travelers that are listening to us in the future check out that website.

We'll put that in the show notes. Yeah. Anything you want we'll just put in the show notes. So it just,

so talk about your book that you're working on. So I'm working on a romance novel set in El Salvador in and among the Bitcoin expats. In the beach areas and and in San Salvador. Yeah it's a a reversal of roles here because because Deanna is really the prime consumer of romance novels in the household. But But I am starting to find this genre so interesting, and and I love the idea of following a character who has come from a a place where she has no agency and no personal sovereignty of her own. And and comes to what I think and what I think we both experience here, just walking on the beach is a place of healing. A lot of people have come here to escape bad situations, whether they're fleeing a bad social setting or they're fleeing medical tyranny or any kind of tyranny at all. They come here and find a community that is so giving and optimistic. That I just felt like I wanted to write something that would capture that spirit that that we found moving here, and I'm sure Scott, you and Tali have done Felt that when you made your visit too?

yep. You said you have a, first of all, it sounds like you guys have enough projects going on for 10 people. You have so much stuff going on. That's a lot. That's a lot. You said you had a story about the

name Lycium. That you wanted to share.

Our, so our business Lyceum tutoring is named after the old school run by Aristotle called the Lyceum. And, And that's and we wanted to make it our own personal tribute to one of the greatest philosophers of all time and personal heroes to both of us. He. Encouraged observation and curiosity, and that's what we encourage. So that's why we named it that also. But if you've seen my Twitter, Aristotle fangirl on my little bio. So that Comes through as well.

Got it. Okay. So now you've covered your goals, you've covered what you're working on, how people should reach. No, I don't think so. I did put in the notes that if you guys had one resource that wasn't one of your own that you often recommend to homeschooling parents, I guess it could be students to take it as you will. So do you have a favorite recommendation?

Yeah, Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive. Primary source books that are available on free, like classic literature, history, philosophy, these books that are out of print, you can find them on Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg, use those to Kindle and a lot of places, and a lot of times, or download a PDF, but use those As your primary teaching tools, and they're all free. And those are the best things that you can teach from. I take excerpts and I teach reading comprehension. I take excerpts and I teach writing. So go back to the greatest minds of the West and that's Charlotte Mason, right? So and teach this classical approach to education. So there's a lot of free. Resources for that. One of the units that I worked on in our curriculum company involved an exploration of the great Greek hero Epaminondas and his battle against the Spartans summarized greatly by by Victor Davis Hanson, but. But I didn't want to just refer students to a secondary source. I went to his bibliography and found the Roman historian, Deiodorus Siculus, various other sources that were closer to the story, and all of these I could supply with links to Project Gutenberg. I, I created in excerpts. And put that in the text that I wrote, but in each excerpt, I had a link to the original source. So the text would say, okay, here's what Diodorus Siculus wrote. If you want to see the whole thing in context, here's the link. And here's how you should read it because it's a little dense to read. But here it is. So that's how you should really teach this stuff. Don't just filter it for them. Give them an ability to, if they're curious, find out the original source and get a much more broad scope.

Okay, listen, we are so grateful for your time. We're grateful we got to meet you in El Salvador and I am sure we're going to see you either at a homeschooling convention or Bitcoin conference. I'm sure we'll see you soon. Tali, anything else?

No, this is great. I feel like we can, there's so many things more that we can discuss going down the road. But yeah, definitely.

part two.

yeah,

that'd be part two. But for all the homeschooling families out there with middle school, high school kids who are interested in looking for really well rounded curriculum, check out their website. Lyceum tutoring. com and all other information we'll add to the show notes.

All right, until next week. Thanks everyone.

Awesome.

Thank you. Bye.

off.