10 Misconceptions of Homeschooling with Leslie Kitchen

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Tanisha Fulcher:
Welcome everyone to the Family Conference 2020 presented by Rhombus University. The topic in this presentation is 10 Misconceptions of Homeschooling, and our speaker is Leslie Kitchen. Leslie Kitchen has been married to her husband and best friend for nearly 29 years. Together, they have three grown children. Leslie and Dan adopted their younger two children at birth because Leslie was unable to give birth after having her first. Leslie has been a stay-at-home mom throughout her marriage, dabbling in a few entrepreneurial ventures and volunteering throughout. In her years as a stay-at-home mom, she was room mom countless times, on PTF, helped in women’s ministry, taught Sunday school, led Bible study groups, mentored marriages with Dan, helped run seminars for a local professional organization, started an online clothing business, started homeschooling her youngest at eighth grade, and is currently the founder and executive director of Homeschool Enrichment Centers in San Diego.

Tanisha Fulcher:
Dan and Leslie live in San Diego with their 16-year-old daughter. Their son is in his junior year of college, and their oldest daughter and son-in-law live in Los Angeles with Dan and Leslie’s first granddaughters. I am happy to welcome Leslie Kitchen, presenting on the 10 Misconceptions of Homeschooling. Welcome.

Leslie Kitchen:
Hi. Welcome, everyone. Thank you for coming to this breakout session. I wanted to share also my journey of how I come to homeschooling our daughter. I was not one that was going to be choosing that avenue. My kids were all in private Christian school, but our last daughter needed to have a change, and God was putting on my heart to homeschool her. I did not listen for a couple years. I think he was knocking on my heart to do that for a little bit, but I didn’t listen for a couple years, and finally, I started listening because it was not working in the traditional schooling for her. So, I finally listened, and we started homeschooling, and I realized that I needed some support and something different for her in addition to what I was giving her.

Leslie Kitchen:
So, I ended up starting Homeschool Enrichment Centers through different avenues of helping someone else do some center and then ended up opening mine just this past year in 2019, and we now have 500 students. So, it was obviously a need for a lot of homeschoolers. My center actually is like a college but for kids where you can come in and just choose one class or five classes, whatever you choose, whatever it is that you are needing to help you in your homeschool journey.

Leslie Kitchen:
So, let’s get on with the five misconceptions. The first one is which is one that I used to always think all the time that homeschooling is was for weird helicopter moms. I think my vision of that 20 years ago might have been true, but it’s no longer that way. There’s the growth, and it’s just booming here, especially in California. Homeschooling is huge all over the place. I know in San Diego where I’m from, there’s so many people. And again, like I said, it’s continuously growing. It’s not like what it was 20 years ago where you would never see those homeschoolers, and they would never come out of the house, and there was no one else for them to play with because they were the only one homeschooling.

Leslie Kitchen:
Many people homeschool for different reasons. So, that’s why you’re going to see that it’s not just the weird people. They’re homeschooling because of the laws, with the content of the curriculum that is being taught at a lot of the public schools. The parents are not wanting that. There’s recently a lot of the vaccination laws that the schools, any school that has a brick and mortar, they’re requiring certain vaccines, and some parents are not wanting that for their children. Their children are not learning in that environment. They’re getting bullied. They’re having social issues. Their parent wants more control of what their child is learning and how they’re learning it, or they want a Christian worldview, and they’re not able to get that in a public school, and a private school is just too expensive for them to pay.

Leslie Kitchen:
Number two is you need to be a credentialed teacher to homeschool. So, that is far from the truth. You do not need to be credentialed whatsoever. You actually know your child the best. You are the one that spends every day and every night with them since they were little. You know how they learn. You know their personality and their character. You know it much better than a teacher that has not known them and only knows them for nine months of the year. You don’t have to be perfect. A public school teacher or any traditional type of teacher, they’re not perfect either, and you have to let go of that, realizing that you don’t need to be perfect either.

Leslie Kitchen:
There are different curriculums and platforms. There’s hundred different kinds of curriculums to choose from and all different kinds of platforms. There’s online. There’s live, like the Zoom that we’re doing now. There’s even prerecorded online that you can actually rewind and rewind and rewind if you choose to keep watching that over and over again to get a concept. There’s textbooks just like in school, and there’s learning through literature which is actually a really awesome thing. I love learning history through literature or science through literature. There’s outside classes that there are actually people, even ex-teachers that now teach out of their school because they no longer teach in the public school system, and then there’s the learning centers like I own which is the Homeschool Enrichment Centers.

Leslie Kitchen:
There’s also what it is called co-ops where there’s parents that are getting together and teaching together, and they’re using their gifts and their professions to teach. So, if you had someone that was a bookkeeper before, they are really good at numbers, and they can teach math, or someone that has a love of arts, they can be teaching art. So, whatever you choose in those co-ops, there’s all those different avenues to take advantage of those gifts and professions of the other parents if you are just weak in one area yourself.

Leslie Kitchen:
The third one is homeschooling is replicating school but at home, and that can’t be farther from the truth. I see a lot of parents that will show on some Face groups that I’m with. They will show that they just made a schoolroom, and they have desks lined up for all their kids, and they have a chalkboard or whatnot. Excuse me. If you’re taking your child out of a school, you’re not wanting to replicate exactly what they were going to be getting at a regular school. You want to change it up because obviously, it was not working for you there.

Leslie Kitchen:
I wanted to actually address the whole issue of the COVID-19 right now because a lot of parents are saying they can never homeschool because it’s not working what they’re doing right now. So, I will say it and I can’t say it enough that the COVID-19 distance learning is not what homeschooling is. What the schools did, what many of the public schools did is they hurried up and tried to find something to give the children to get them through the end of the year, and they were scrambling because they didn’t have the help or whatever they needed in order to do so. So, what they were given was a lot of busywork. A lot of the students were given busywork. They’re also not getting the support and the encouragement and the lecturing on and the teaching of the subject. So, COVID-19 distance learning is not at all what homeschooling is.

Leslie Kitchen:
Homeschooling is not sitting at your desk for six to seven hours a day. If you know at a public school, the teachers have 30 or more students in each class most of the time. They have to divide their attention between all of those students. So, you can imagine that if you only having 1, 3, 2, 3 students in your home, you’re not having to divide your attention that much. So, you don’t need to spend as nearly as much time as a traditional school day is. Homeschooling can be shorter. So, you can think of kindergarten through second grade is probably the most is spending about two hours with them on their core subjects, and then making sure to do a lot of hands-on stuff up and everything.

Leslie Kitchen:
So, a lot of public schools, they have a lot of interruptions during the day, and they have to learn based on what the lowest in the class is learning. They also have a lot of additional fillers that they fill the day with that are unnecessary, that you don’t have to do at school so your homeschool day can be a lot shorter. You actually have the control of that pace, the pace of your child. If your child is stuck in a math conception, you can spend an extra week or days or two weeks, whatever that takes for your child to learn that conception. If your child gets a conception, then you can skip over that and not even do it. Okay, you learned it. Okay, let’s move on. Five minutes on it. Let’s go on. So, that’s the great thing about homeschooling is you can go at your own pace.

Leslie Kitchen:
You have more creativity. You can think out of the box. There are so much fun things to do with homeschooling that doesn’t need to be a lot of paperwork. You can do all hands-on for science. You can do all hands-on experiments, and then you can have them have a lab journal and just journal everything, and that journal can actually even be part of their language arts. So, there’s so many different options and that which is pretty cool to think of that is not the model, traditional school that you would think of. And again, like I said, it’s just not busywork. You’re not just giving them a whole bunch of paperwork to keep them busy. So, so many more options.

Leslie Kitchen:
Number four is homeschoolers do not get any socialization. It’s funny because that is the number one thing that I’m asked about my daughter when I tell them that I’m homeschooling. Oh, what about her socializing? Oh, it’s probably terrible. She doesn’t get any. What do you do? And I mean, that’s the number one I get which is really funny because it’s not an issue. You actually get to control that yourself. So, when they’re in a regular school, you can’t control who they’re socializing with, but you can get that control. There are the co-ops, like I had talked about before, where you get together with families. Co-ops can be of different sizes. There’s co-ops of five families. There’s co-ops of a hundred families. So, there is a lot of socializing, and you get to be a part of that and watch your child socialize, and teach your child about socialization and how to do it correctly, and use those as teaching moments.

Leslie Kitchen:
There’s field trips. I know of a lot of homeschooling families that Fridays are their day for field trips, and they go with a lot of people, and their field trips are all learning. They’re going to museums, and zoos, and they study certain animals, and they’re going on nature hikes, and there’s Discovery Center. There’s so much you can do and learn with the visual learning, all senses of your eyes, your ears, your touch. There’s even learning through taste with cooking and so forth. So many different socialization types of things that you can do. There’s nature groups, outside groups. You can swap with just a family. You can have your neighbor or friend teach math on Mondays because they’re good at it, and then you can teach art on Tuesdays, and actually, you get a little break while you’re at it too.

Leslie Kitchen:
There’s organized sports as you know. Sports is no longer just at school. Sports are all over and you can probably choose every type of sport there is that is not just at school. So, that’s a huge, huge thing. There’s church youth groups, making sure that they’re being a part of those groups when they into junior and high school. There’s even some home groups that they’re forming for the teens, and then camps that they can continuously be part of. There’s Girl Scouts, Awanas. There’s the Christian Heritage Girls, all sorts of some stuff.

Leslie Kitchen:
The fifth one is homeschooling can only be done through your school district. So, that is a huge misconception that I hear. A lot of people say that they have to go through their local school district and you don’t. Actually, if you go through your school district, from I understand, they’re just going to be giving you exactly what they would be giving you at school, and you’re just going to be coming home with a high, tall thing of textbooks, and you are going to be doing all the teaching yourself on a curriculum that you may not necessarily like. So, I don’t recommend going through your school district because there’s no choice or anything.

Leslie Kitchen:
There are several ways that you can go about it. One is called the Private School Affidavit, the PSA. That is where you go to your state, and you file an affidavit to homeschool on your own, and you can call your school The Leslie Kitchen Family School, whatever you want to call it. That doesn’t cost you anything, and you can file, and you’re not going to have anybody governing what you’re teaching and how you’re teaching. I mean, it’s pretty easy, nothing to it, and you have the freedom of choosing whatever you want. Here’s the website if you want, if you’re interested in doing that.

Leslie Kitchen:
There’s also something called the PSP. It’s the Private School Satellite Program. I don’t know why there’s two S’s in there, but not in the abbreviation. But that is kind of like you’re going to a private school, but it’s still just homeschooling where they’re just going to be going like the once a week. They’re going to be filing for you so you don’t have to file. They’re going to be keeping track of all the grades. They’re going to be doing everything for you, and they actually, usually also have a co-op, and these are usually large ones that there’s probably at least a hundred families or more, but those are actually additional fees that you would be paying on top of that. So, it does cost you money that you would have to be paying, and then if you want to participate in the classes that cost you extra money, but you are also a part of it. So, you will be teaching the classes too. So, everybody is teaching and taking a part in all the teaching or assistant teaching and so forth. And again, it does cost you money, but it’s not nearly as what a regular private school would be, and they usually, probably meet once a week. And then there is the independent study program, or which is also known as the homeschool charters.

Leslie Kitchen:
Number six is there’s no financial assistance or help. Well, yes, there is. In the homeschool charters, there is help and there is financial assistance. They will give you funding. Most, from what I understand around here, they’ll give you between 1,500 and $3,000 a student that they would put in an account, and you can use that money towards anything educational, any curriculum, textbooks, teaching, musical instruments, whatever, anything educational, art supplies, whatever you think, and that they would approve. You can use it towards outside classes and everything.

Leslie Kitchen:
Most of these type of charters, these independent study programs, they don’t have a brick and mortar, but they will have a library, not all of them but most of them do. It would probably be an online library, and they would deliver it to you or they have a one location. So, you can actually check out curriculum too there. They give you an assigned teacher, and that teacher will help guide you and that meets with you regularly once a month. If you need help, they’ll support you, and then you turn in samples of schoolwork that you finish to them. Some of them offer tutoring, and again, you have the opportunity to use those funds towards outside classes like at learning centers such as the center that I run.

Leslie Kitchen:
Number seven misconception is that you have no choice in what you teach in the charter schools. So, that is one thing that I know that a lot of the people that do the PSPs and the PSAs say that you don’t have a choice, and the reason why they said that is because most of them are Christian and they want Christian curriculum. You still do have a choice of curriculum. So, they’re not going to be handing you curriculum and say, “Here, this is what you need to teach.” You have the opportunity to teach any curriculum you want, but yes, it does have to be secular. Whatever you use your funds towards, you can only buy secular curriculum. I am finding a lot of secular curriculum that is actually pretty neutral. It’s been nice about that.

Leslie Kitchen:
But if you still want to use Christian curriculum, so for such as myself with my child, I wanted to use a Christian curriculum for science. So, I am able to still do that as long as I’m not using the funds for it, and as long as I not turning in those samples. I needed to use that Christian curriculum on my own and not have it be a part of any of the funding or turning in of the work or anything. So, that’s the good thing about that is that I still have that choice and that you can purchase curriculum anywhere. There’s a few examples. One’s called Rainbow Resource, christianbook.com. Even in the charter schools, you can still purchase at a christianbook.com as long as it’s not Christian, and christianbook.com does have even secular curriculum, and Amazon is a huge one.

Leslie Kitchen:
You still have the control over the pace of your child too. So, that’s another misconception about charters is that you don’t have that pace. Because you are the teacher and you’re homeschooling them, and you see where your child is having a hard time, is struggling, or where your child is excelling, you still have that control. So, you can still take the time that they need. You do need to make state standards, pretty easy to do as long as you’re not buying first-grade curriculum for a fifth-grader. Usually, all curriculum if it says it’s for fifth grade, then it’s going to pretty much meet the standards. High school could be a little bit different, but we’ll get to that soon.

Leslie Kitchen:
There’s testing. A lot of people don’t like that there’s testing, but you have to take into consideration that when you are with a public-funded school, they need to do testing in order to continue to get the funding to keep their charter. If they do not provide a good amount of testing, then they can lose their charter, and then their charter will be gone, and that won’t be available for them anymore. And yes, if your child does have an IEP at a regular public school, then charters do still carry over IEPs.

Leslie Kitchen:
Number eight is my kids will miss out on regular school experience. In my opinion, there are better alternatives. There’s the outside sports like we talked about. There’s better socialization because you get to kind of choose and be a part of it. Your kids get to start school later. They can start at 11:00 AM. You can sleep in or you can do school at night or on the weekends. You can take breaks and you can take breaks as often as you want. You can school anywhere. If you want to go on vacation, you can school. I know of two families that are traveling the United States in a motorhome and they’re homeschooling. You can school with your friends and it’s whatever you make of it. The parents can get together. The co-ops can get together. They can do all kinds of stuff. You can still have graduations. Charters do have graduations and they still have proms and dances. You can do any type of school activity that you want. It’s really cool. All the opportunities that whatever it is that you make of it as a homeschooler.

Leslie Kitchen:
Number eight still continuing is that my kids will miss out on regular school experience. Yes, they will. They will miss out on peer pressure, anxiety, bad examples, bullying, bad teaching, hours of homework, they want to have that homework, sitting for hours on end. So, that’s the good stuff they’re going to miss out on.

Leslie Kitchen:
Number nine is that you cannot homeschool high school and can’t go to college. I have a 10th grader, so I can attest that, yes, you can homeschool high school. To me, it’s really not much different. The one thing that you need to take into consideration for high school is to making sure they’re getting the credits they need is they probably should be spending about five hours per subject for the week. So, five hours per week per core subject in order to be getting the full credit that they should be having. So, math, five hours at least per week. They still get a diploma. There’s just so many different platforms if you’re not feeling comfortable with doing high school. There’s the online, the outside classes, the learning centers, so much more. So if you’re not feeling comfortable teaching Algebra 2, then you can choose those other platforms.

Leslie Kitchen:
More and more colleges are accepting without any issues at all. So, that’s awesome. There are so many private universities that are accepting homeschoolers, and they’re also giving homeschool scholarships which is wonderful. A lot of colleges are for homeschoolers too, will also just look at their SAT or their ACT scores if, for some reason, you’re not able to provide the grades.

Leslie Kitchen:
The one powerful thing about also doing high school is that you can do dual enrollment. So, if your child is wanting to experience that junior college a little bit, or you’re just wanting to get done faster or whatnot, you have the opportunity to have your child go to a junior college while they’re in high school. Now, all districts are different. So, San Diego, they have to wait until they finish their sophomore year, but I hear LA is they can start in their freshman year. If your child is taking algebra and you want them to take it at junior college, then they can, and it’s free. It’s something that the junior colleges do. They give you a certain amount of units that you can take, and they’re finishing it for high school and college at the same time. So, they’re getting through some college without you having to spend the money, and you get to save a little bit of money.

Leslie Kitchen:
And another awesome thing is that one semester of college of like algebra is equivalent to one year in high school so they can get done with it faster. So, that’s another really cool benefit to have one year homeschooling. And again, like I mentioned, a lot of colleges are giving homeschool scholarships, a lot of the private universities.

Leslie Kitchen:
I know this might seem a little humorous, but a lot of people and especially now during the COVID are saying they’re going nuts. They’re going crazy. I don’t know how you guys homeschool. I will go crazy. My kids will drive me nuts. Well, you’re not going to go crazy. You might have days that you feel crazy. But I mean, I think I remember feeling crazy sometimes when my kids were in regular school. But you actually have so much more support, encouragement by all of the things that you can take advantage of, the other homeschoolers alike, the co-ops, and everything. There’s so much more support that you could have. You actually finish faster. Like I said, your days aren’t as longer. So, there’s more time for play for your kids.

Leslie Kitchen:
,So, there’s rewards, and you can use those with your rewards, kind of bribe them. Okay. We finish in three hours and you get to go play video games. So, they can whip those out if they have a goal. So, that’s really, really cool, and more time for you to do housework or whatnot. You actually will enjoy your child’s true qualities. You will start seeing your child’s qualities while you are spending more time with them, and you will want to see your child excel. You will invest in that and be so excited for them and want to see your child excel.

Leslie Kitchen:
You think that your kids or you need a break from your kids, but your kids are going to need a break from you. I’ve heard this time and time again, and even with my own child where I’m like, “Okay, I need a break,” and my daughter will say, “Well, that’s good, because I need a break from you too.” So I’m like, “Okay. Well, at least we got some common grounds here.” So, believe me, I’ve heard it from so many families that their kids are saying they need a break too. So, it’s pretty funny.

Leslie Kitchen:
Your kids will learn to play more independently. You homeschooling them, you are teaching them perseverance. You’re teaching them creativity. You are teaching them hands-on fun and how to think out of the box. Your kids are going to be learning that with you, and they’re going to want to take that to their independent playtime which is pretty cool, and you can actually kind of peek around the corner and watch them do their independent play from things that you have been teaching them during school time.

Leslie Kitchen:
Your kids actually can help you with chores around the house. So, when they’re done in three hours, chore time. So, you can get a lot more help with chore time. And it was very important, even with all of those things, for you to take time for yourself as a homeschooler without any guilt. Do not feel guilty that you need to have that time once a day to spend in God’s Word. That’s actually what you need to be starting basically with, or if you need to have that bath every day, or if you need to go once a week out with friends, or whatever that may be, don’t feel guilty, but you do need to make sure that you take that time too.

Leslie Kitchen:
So, it is now time for any questions or for anybody that may have them. Also, if you have any questions or want to look at my center, I’m at homeschoolenrichmentcenters.com or you can email me if you think of something later down the road. And I wanted to thank you also for listening.

Tanisha Fulcher:
We do have a question. Well, one participant said, “Thanks for putting on this session,” and they’re excited to meet you and hear your story. They posted that in the chatbox right when you got started, and they also have a question. I’ll read it to you. Are there any co-ops in San Diego, East County? I’d like to be involved, but also I have a lot of community, not just one or two, all school class days a week like they have in the private home school around here which I know about.

Leslie Kitchen:
So I think they’re asking if there’s just one or two days a week of co-ops. If they’re asking about if there’s every day co-ops, there’s no every day co-ops that I know of, but there are co-ops around. Like my center is not co-op. It’s just a learning center, and I just have classes like Tuesday, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and you can choose whatever days, your time, and anything that you want to be a part of those. There’s also co-ops called… There’s a lot of Christian ones. There’s CC, it’s Classical Conversations. That is ones that get together once a week. That is a little bit more costly for that one. I don’t even know if it’s called a co-op, but it’s someone else is teaching, but you stay there and you’re paying that person.

Leslie Kitchen:
There’s also Heritage Christian. That is a private PSP and they’re very well-known and they have several hundred people that are involved there. That one meets every other week, but I think there’s an option to do every week, but you just have to pay a little bit more fees for that one. There’s also Christian Family Schools where it’s called CFS. Those are all over. There’s ones in El Cajon, La Mesa, Poway, Mira Mesa, and some of them like the ones in La Mesa, El Cajon are very small, but the ones in Poway and Mira Mesa, they’re huge. I mean, I think there’s a few hundred people at those, and then you have to pay for the classes, and again, participate in those too.

Tanisha Fulcher:
I have a question. If you can provide a bit more information about your learning centers?

Leslie Kitchen:
Yeah. So, Homeschool Enrichment Centers, like I said, I had started it just this fall, and it is a secular learning center because we accept charter funding. But as for me starting this, this was a God thing. God led me to start this center and it was all God, and I felt like it was a lot of plant of seeds to start this, and I could have not have done this without his guidance. I actually never even foresaw me ever doing anything like this. It’s so much bigger than what I ever imagined. But I personally, because I’m in charge, I make sure that I have teachers and things there that are along the lines of what my beliefs are. Now, they can’t teach anything Christian per se because they are taking charter funds, but they are fabulous teachers. I love them.

Leslie Kitchen:
I love my families. I have some families that just come to take biology and that’s all they do. Their kids take in high school biology, or they come and take archery or cooking, and some that come all day on Tuesdays and all day Thursdays. So, it’s like a college but for kids where you can come and just pick and choose what you want and leave when you want. So, that’s a great thing. And we’re located in El Cajon, and we use a church facility in El Cajon that we lease from.

Tanisha Fulcher:
Thank you.

Leslie Kitchen:
I don’t know if anybody had any other questions for me. If not, you are more than welcome to, again, email me if you want to email me privately at my email. It’s [email protected]. I’ve even walked a lot of people through the homeschool process, and I love to do that. It’s my heart to just really help people.

Tanisha Fulcher:
All right. Well, thank you so much.

Leslie Kitchen:
It looks like we have more question.

Tanisha Fulcher:
Oh, okay. Yes.

Leslie Kitchen:
Yeah. So, basically with homeschooling, you are the teacher, it’s on you to do the majority of the work, but it’s really what you make of it. I know a lot of families, and actually, I know some foster families that are homeschooling that actually come to my center and they do have a lot of… There’s some learning issues or behavioral issues for some of them. I will tell you that my two children, my last two children, my three, we adopted, and my last one that I’ve homeschooled, she has some attachment issue type things too that we’ve dealt with. She is older though. It is what you make of it. You can get together with a co-op or like my learning center, whatever you go which you can make it to where they just do the co-op once a week, and they do like a learning center once a week, and then there’s also field trip groups and nature groups. So you can be a part of a whole bunch of different groups.

Leslie Kitchen:
That one co-op may just be that once a week or once every other week, but there are so many other options that you can take advantage at the same time to be a part of so that they can continuously be in socializing. And then the great thing about it, I think compared to public school is that you get to be there with them and you get to learn yourself because you said that you’re not a parent. So, you can actually learn yourself by looking at the other parents and how they’re also teaching their children and learn from that. And then also your foster son or a child can learn too how to behave based on being around those children, and they’re learning with you being a part of that whole learning process which is, I think, really important for them to learn instead of you just there to the public school when they don’t have that ability, and they’re just getting into trouble because they don’t know how to do it on their own. So, lots of different groups.

Leslie Kitchen:
If you wanted to email me later, I can even give you some Facebook groups that I’m in that are field trip groups, nature groups, co-op groups, and everything that you can take advantage of. And like I said, in my center, I have one family in particular that I know, actually two families that foster, and one actually I think she just adopted that have been a part of it and they’re lovely, lovely families. And also if you ended up being with a charter, you can get the funding I think. I don’t know if you came in a little bit late to hear that you get funding, and if they have an IEP through a public school, you can bring that IEP into the charter school too, and you can use that, and they give you everything that you were getting in a regular public school. So, if they need speech therapy or occupational therapy, they give that to you also.

Tanisha Fulcher:
All right. Do we have any other questions? Leslie, did you have any last-minute, anything that you would like to share with us before ending today?

Leslie Kitchen:
No, I just wanted to thank you for listening in and listening to my journey and just to touch on what you is we adopted our last daughter. She’s always had some behavioral type of issues, but she’s a smart cookie, and I just knew that she needed a different type of learning, and God was calling me to do that for quite a long time, but I wasn’t listening. And when I finally listened, and yes, this is what she needed. She needed me to be spending more time with her and not by learning from outside influences, but by learning from my influences. So not good, but also me being just a part of that every day of teaching her. And yeah, sometimes I did feel like I was going nuts, but I had a lot of support and a lot of prayers from a lot of neat friends and a lot of support in the homeschool community which was awesome, and it’s helped her with that aspect.

Leslie Kitchen:
I mean, there’s still other stuff, but it’s helped with the aspect of her learning. When we first started in the eighth grade, I think she learned the most that she ever did in her eight years of schooling. I was enamored by how much she learned and actually how much I learned at the same time with school. I’m like, “Wow, I never knew this.” I was excited about it, but just sitting down with her and learning with her and seeing her light bulbs come on, and for many years, she was not able to learn that way because she could not sit still in a regular school. It was a blessing to see that when we first started. I mean, I’m not telling you it’s easy. It was hard, but it was a blessing.

Tanisha Fulcher:
Well, our time is now up, and so I would like to, again, thank you, Leslie, for such a wonderful presentation.

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