I've never talked about this publicly until today I've never spent a day in an elementary or high school classroom I've never ridden a school bus I've never eaten in a lunchroom and I've never done a fire drill I've never had to ask to use the bathroom and I really have no idea how schools actually work the first test I ever took I was 16 it was the PSAT the first time I was ever in a classroom enrolled in the class was when I was 16 years old taking an intro to government class at our local Community College I was homeschooled from kindergarten through the end of high school and today I'm going to talk about it so my parents were both Elementary School teachers back in the '90s I have a sister who's 12 years older than me so right as I was starting kindergarten she was graduating high school and at that point my parents decided that they were going to homeschool me and my younger siblings let's get a couple things out of the way first my name is mhach that's from the Old Testament of the Bible if you're not aware I was homeschooled you start to connect the dots here and go oh okay I get the picture here hold on a second we weren't religious especially not in the sense that you think that we were if I grew up anything I grew up Buddhist going to Buddhist Retreats out on the East Coast my parents just happened to like the name meak which is why I have it so this wasn't some Ultra conservative homeschool upbringing if anything it was much more hippie we used to call it alternative homeschooling it wasn't because my parents didn't want me to learn about evolution in fact we spent a lot of time a lot of time talking about Evolution I just wanted to clear that up and get that out of the way before we moved on this wasn't a political or religious reason why they were homeschooling us it was because my parents wanted to try something they wanted to do something different and they thought they could create an experience for us growing up that would be productive and interesting and provide us with the necessary tools to become adults in the world so let's start with Elementary School the first chapter the beginning like I said my parents were both Elementary School teachers back in the 90s and so this was sort of the area where they were the strongest at least initially this was their professional focus and so it just sort of felt normal to some degree like I was somewhat aware that like oh other kids are going to school I'm not going to school like we're doing this homeschool thing but it wasn't like the craziest thing on the planet there were things that my parents focused on they wanted to make sure we learned math they wanted to make sure we learned how to read but they weren't overly concerned with the details or super concerned with like the specific progress it was a lot more of putting us in situations in which we could learn those things starting from a pretty early age my mom would focus more on the literature grammar history side of things and then my dad would Fus Fus more on the math side of things but with most of the things that we were doing it was sort of based on the unit so for instance my younger brother was born when I was in first grade like November of my first grade year so throughout kindergarten I just remember talking a lot about babies like that was sort of our theme we would go to the library and we would get Stacks and stacks of books about babies and we learned all about like what babies need and how babies grow and everything you could learn about babies to the point where I actually got so frustrated I I remember being angry at my mom that we like we read too many books on babies and I like wanted to read books about space so I think actually we we ended up going back to the library and checking out a bunch of books about space which was great there were very few curriculums that we actually had there were very few things that were like this is exactly what you need to do and at least in the state of Ohio and especially in elementary school there's not a lot of requirements it isn't like oh you need to do X Y and Z any given year like as you're growing if you're reading a lot of stuff if you're doing an appropriate amount of math you're going to progress and so it was all a very Hands-On approach I mean we would sometimes from math it was sitting down and doing something in a math workbook but sometimes it was like going to a park and learning how to measure the circumference of trees and at the same time like talk about how trees grow and the different parts of a tree and so like it ends up being like both a science and a math lesson and also like time to be outside in nature there were a lot of things that were kind of bundled together like that and my parents weren't overly concerned with like what are the number of hours that you're spending learning it was much more let's create environments in which learning can occur and so if that environment is we're out in nature if that environment is these are a this is a stack of books that I want you to like find what's most interesting in and tell me about if that environment was I need you to play with your siblings outside and maybe you're going to go make bows and arrows out of string and sticks and shoot them at the trees right there was a lot of like learning by doing we weren't being like evaluated on what we were doing but there was a certain amount of like rigor to it my parents weren't just letting us sit and watch TV all day in fact I I don't even remember if we had a TV until I was like 9 or 10 years old and my grandma moved in with us there was a lot of books and we read a lot and we talked a lot and we played a lot and most of our learning had to do with that so my sister was 2 years younger than me my brother was 6 years younger than me and so over the course of elementary school we were often doing things could kind of accommodate across multiple levels and that's the nice thing about those projects if we're going like for a hike to go identify birds like there's a level at which I can understand that there's a level at which my sister can understand that and there's a level at which like my brother who is 2 years old at the time is just understanding like how to walk so there were kind of multiple levels to everything that we're doing and that continued throughout most of my education now there were instances in which we would do things with other people so the first thing that I remember was something called homeschooled gym and homeschooled gym was started by a guy named Chris quicker he still does it and Chris would travel around the city and he would do these classes for homeschool groups and we would meet at the rec center on Thursdays and we would pack a lunch and there would be classes for you know five and sixy olds seven and 8y olds N9 and 10 year olds 11 and 12y olds and we would go and play with dodgeballs and scooter boards and parachutes in the gym and have an absolute blast and depending on the year there would be somewhere between 10 and 50 other homeschool families and some of these were homeschool families like like ours some of them were homeschool families that had like a dozen kids so the local Rec Center would get taken over every Thursday by all of these homeschool families and that was an opportunity to socialize right that was an opportunity to interact with other kids that was a time when like it felt a little bit more like what I might think school would feel like where like you're around other people and you're having to interact with them and maybe you don't know them that well but Thursdays were always like the best day also because the library was right next to the rec center so we would often like get a bunch of books get to go to homeschool gym see a bunch of people socialize Thursdays for great once I got to second or third grade there were a number of other families sort of in our local community that started homeschooling as well and they had kids that were around my age so some a little bit older some a little bit younger than me and so we started doing what we called science club and Science Club met on Mondays there was one parent who was a marine biologist there was another parent who had gone through med school eventually there was another parent who was an archaeologist and so we had these like parents in our community who were super educated about science each year they would put together sort of a theme for the year this year it's going to be all about biology or the next year it's going to be all about chemistry or the next year it's going to be all about space and we would meet on Mondays and we would get together as a group and there would be people ranging from like 6 years younger than me like my brother's age all the way up to like a year or two older than me and we would spend the morning doing science experiments and listening to somebody talk about science maybe we would like watch a documentary and talk about about it this was another opportunity where we were like really doing things as a group we were really doing things together and much of my homeschooling kind of followed this theme where there was this really wide range in terms of the ages of everyone involved but everyone was still able to get something out of it I'm still friends with almost all those people I spent New Years with a bunch of them this last year and then my dad also started doing writing workshops basically a weekly writing session and so he's a he does a lot of creative writing and so he would bring us in and do these workshops where we would spend an hour doing creative writing as a group and there would be again sort of a similar age range down to about my brother's age up to like a year or two older than me and we would spend you know 45 minutes doing a writing session and then like 20 to 30 minutes sharing about what we wrote and talking about how that writing went again this was a great opportunity to learn about writing it was a great opportunity to get excited about learning which I think a lot of this was but it was also a time where we were socializing where we were getting together where we were hanging out and I think a lot of the criticism around homeschooling comes down to like you were never socialized and it was definitely less socialization than someone who spends six or 7even hours a day in an elementary school but you're around your siblings all the time so you're having to navigate family Dynamics and then there's also lots of situations where you are around other people I think it isn't socialized in the same way that like you're just kind of forced into it it's socialized in the sense that you have to create the environments in which that social interaction can occur and as I was getting into the the older ages of elementary school I wanted to start doing more projects I had these ideas wild Ambitions about things that I wanted to do and the two big ones were I wanted to make a movie and I wanted to start a restaurant you go okay you're a 9-year-old 10-year-old kid how are you going to do these things so the movie first I wanted to make an adaptation of the book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory into a movie I loved R doll I loved his work and I was just adamant that I wanted to make this into a movie I knew that I was going to Play Willy Wonka and so I started asking my friends to like be a part of this and it was all those people in that homeschooling group that we were in and I wrote a script when I was I want to say 9 or 10 years old I like had a copy of the book that I like went through and highlighted the sections like I wanted to use the actual dialogue from the book and eventually I convinced my parents I said I want these people to come over and we're going to film these scenes at our house and I'm going to make this into a movie and I think it took about 2 years and there were a lot of different scenes that we had to film and there were a lot of costumes we had to get together and there were a lot of people we had to find to play all the different roles but over the course of those two years we managed to meet enough times to shoot every single scene that we needed to make it into an actual movie I learned how to edit we had a family friend who gave me a copy of Final Cut Pro three that I edited on a 1997 iMac I was shooting it on a JVC do I have the camera I might even have do I have a camera in here yes this is the actual video camera we shot it on this is a JVC super VHS camera the only way to offload footage on this is you had to plug it in to a computer and just take you would press play on the camera it would feed it into the computer and then you had to manually set in points and out points as the footage was loading in which I learned how to do it like age 10 or 11 God I can't believe I have that thing in that project even though it wasn't like some curriculum it provides so many life skills right because like you have to put together a project that other people want to be involved in you have to coordinate the actual event bring people together and schedule them you have to figure out how how to actually make it happen Okay the logistics of we want to shoot something that's going to take place in an entirely White Room how do we make that happen oh wait we have a friend and they have all of this white paper that they'd be willing to give us if we tape that white paper up across our whole living room we can make an entirely White Room the amount of problem solving and then even once the footage was complete I didn't know how to edit until after we'd shot everything so after the fact I was like learning how to edit and actually like put this thing together and so doing a project like that you learn a ton of things that wouldn't be a part of a curriculum necessarily but are still very valuable the restaurant I wanted to make a restaurant I don't know why I was obsessed with making a restaurant and I wanted to make a pizzeria out of our house I was 10 years old I cannot believe my mom allowed us to do this I brought together a group of four people so it was me and my sister and it was two other friends one was a year younger than me one was a year older than me and we designed a menu together we tested out dough recipes for the pizza we went to the grocery store and priced out everything that we would need we learned how to do profit margins we weren't very profitable we like understood the concept of like okay if this is how much it costs this is how much you have to price it for to actually like make money off of it we emailed friends and family and we had to have them set up reservations in that first year we ran it for one night we cleared out my parents living room and put up tables and chairs printed out menus and we had like a legit pizza restaurant there for a night I think there was like 30 or 40 people that came that first night which was a lot like feeding 30 or 40 people if you're 10 years old over the course of a 6-hour night is hard like that's not an easy thing to do and one it was exhausting my mom helped an extraordinary amount but again this was another opportunity where we just learned a bunch of stuff where we just did things and learned about them by doing the thing again I was 10 years old I can't believe I did that at 10 years old there was a certain amount of like Independence that we were given with this and a certain amount of like if we pushed hard enough we can make something happen and so but it wasn't like the things we wanted to happen were like watching a bunch of TV or playing video games it was like I want to make a pizza restaurant out of my house and so we're going to do that and I think that is sort of a snapshot of what my childhood was was it was these projects that we wanted to do and we would just kind of like do them we just like go ahead and do them let's move on to Middle School what was Middle School actually like being homeschooled I think the delineation between like elementary school and middle school is not extraordinarily clear to me over the years we got more curriculums at some point you need to like understand algebraic equations at some point you need to know the basics of physics and at some point you need to like know the periodic table of elements like the the basic things you know maybe wouldn't come across if you're counting tree rings or doing projects my dad would teach each of us math individually for years we did Singapore Math which was math out of Singapore like I guess this is what they use in the country Singapore math is all about mental math for most of the equations you weren't writing anything down so you were learning how to do the math mentally in your head at one point there was this game where my dad had two die and each of the die instead of having a DOT on it had a number on it and he would roll the die out and like let's say it's a five and a three you have to say what the difference is between that and 100 so you know he would roll it out it would be you know 36 and you you'd have to go 64 right as fast as you could say like how much you'd have to add to that to get to 100 but this was an area where like we were taking some evaluations we were taking some tests we continue to do all of the groups that we had so at this point we had our science club that met on Mondays we had our homeschool gym which met on Thursdays we would do our writing Workshop which I think at this point was meeting after gym on Thursdays it's hard for me to remember these dates around this time my mom added a literature club and so the literature Club sometimes it was just like me and my sister and like one or two other people at one point there were like 10 or 12 of us in it we would be reading a book for a certain period of time and then doing analysis of that book so we read a lot of Classics I mean we read Great Gatsby we read The Grapes of Wrath we we read Sense and Sensibility like we read a lot of the books that one would read kind of in a more traditional environment we also read a lot of books that you wouldn't read and we would have to do analysis and like write papers about those books and then the writing of the papers was like both an exercising like how do you understand and analyze text but also can you put together ideas in a cohesive way can you say things with proper grammar and spelling and punctuation and so I think at this point it was like looking a little bit more traditional to what you might see in a school environment again I don't know I've never been in a school I don't I honestly only know from like other people's perspectives about what schools are even like so there were like four times a week that we were me meeting with other people sometimes more but the difference was not great between elementary and middle it was like a little bit more structure a little bit more curriculum focus and just making sure that we were like learning the things that were important for us to know I think for you know kindergarten through third grade you can kind of get away with like if you're in the world and reading a bunch of books and like doing some basic math flashcards you're going to be fine like you're going to get it especially if your parents are like paying very close attention and reading to you every day and like you know very focused on your education and having educational conversations with you but as time went on we definitely added a little bit more structure into what we were doing but we also added more projects in so let me think about this I was 12 so I would have been in sixth grade when we did the second Popeyes pizza so the first that was the first restaurant the first popey pizza the second pizza restaurant we did was way bigger than the first so the first one there were four of us the second one there might have been 10 of us that came together to do it like it was big it was a big Endeavor and this time we were going to do for two nights we were going to take a different approach one we were going to Source our Tomatoes by growing them which is crazy there was a woman in our community was excited and willing for us to use her backyard to grow our tomatoes and so she had these like garden beds back there that were perfect and so somebody would have to go every couple of days to like tend the tomatoes and weed them and then actually like harvest the tomatoes when they got ready and like that was how we had the sauce for the restaurant we grew our own tomatoes so we're going to do the rest on for two nights this time which means we're going to need a lot more ingredients and we're going to have a lot more people involved so we wanted to Source flour that was going to be organic but that was also going to be like cost effective so there was this local grocery store near us this like little Coop we met with the manager and talked to her about how to get like bulk discounts on things we bought flower basically straight from the we I was 12 years old this is crazy to think back like I was 12 years old and I'm sitting in meetings with a clipboard and a pen talking to like a grocery store manager and getting like bulk Freight prices on Flow and like learning how to negotiate those prices and saying like Okay you know they can get down to like a 10% profit margin but below that they can't actually do they're willing to make these cuts on these things not on these things like and it was great it was it was so cool and that's how we sourced our flower for the restaurant so this time it was a lot more of like my mom I think wanted to make it in even more educational experience and we could take all of the learnings that we had from the first time that we did it so we paired back the menu we learned about if we do the dough in this way ahead of time and we package it then we can have dough that we can pull out and we can do it we learned more about like food prep and food safety the second time we did popey's pizza it was like a it felt like a really legit restaurant like we did two nights our living room looked even more like a pizza restaurant that time around like it was it was really cool there's so much stuff in here now like thinking back on it we were just doing so many projects for one I really wanted to do a summer camp like I thought let's do a summer camp Bas it out of our house we have this beautiful backyard we could have kids come over we could do half days for a week and it could be like a really fun outdoor camp where we like play Camp games and like have balloon water balloon fights and just like have it be a great time I'm 12 at this point 11 or 12 and so I pitched this idea to my mom and she's actually on board she thinks it's a good idea I end up doing it with my sister someone else we homeschooled with who was like a year between us and the initials of our names filled am and so it was Camp aim Amy and we did it for a week we didn't charge for it we just sort of like took donations as people wanted to it was really an experiment and again this was something we had to like okay you want to do a camp for a week how do you advertise the camp that you're doing how do you find people that want to do it how do you break up the workload of like what the camp is actually going to be how do you provide cool and interesting things for the kids coming to the camp there was so much learning that was taking place in like practically doing something like that I only did the camp I think we did it that year and then the following year my sister ended up continuing to do that camp through the end of high school she ran a version of that camp for years and years after that eventually getting featured on like the local news about the camp that she was doing and like a legit business that she had yeah it was amazing at this point we also did robotics like we were in a we had a homes School group that did like a robotics competition and so as a group we would meet I think we're meeting like twice a week and we had to design like a Lego robot that could complete this obstacle course and we had to Designed like projects based on it that was called first Lego League we did that for 2 years at one point in here we got the opportunity somebody had a radio station a sort of a friend of a friend Connection and he had like a radio station it was a local radio station and he had a show and it was like on for whatever 3 hours every week so he let us take 30 minutes out of his show to do our own radio show and so it was called kids speak Columbus and so we had an actual radio program and we would like prep what we were going to do on the radio and we did it live we brought people in I remember one time we did like an interview with another kid who had like written a novel that had come out and so we like had her on the show and we like talked to her about her novel and then we had like other segments that we presented and prepared topics that we researched and then talked about on air it was really fun and but all of these projects like they weren't specifically based on any one single curriculum but the number of skills that are sort of clustered around how to put together a radio show or how to design a robot to complete a course or how to put together a summer camp or how to make a pizza restaurant like all of these required so many skills to be developed and I think that was the strength of a lot of what we were doing was like there was so so many instances in which we could just like develop skills and work on things at some point in here as a family we started volunteering so the metrop park in Columbus called Slate Run they have a historical farm that functions in the way a farm from the 1880s wood this is my sister's idea you could volunteer on that farm as basically one of the people in costume it wasn't an acting gig this was something where you were actually going out and you were actually doing the farm duties that someone from the 1880s would you just happened to be in costume so like I learned how to brush horses and clean stalls and you know collect eggs learned how to blacksmith at one point like that was cool but a lot of it was like really mundane tasks like I hadn't shucked sorghum before I don't know if many people do shuck sorghum but a sorghum stock grows and you have a little wooden sword basically and you have to cut the leaves off the bottom so the stock grows up you stand out in the middle of a field with a straw hat on for like 4 hours but it was again it was like one of these experiences that like at the time I remember being kind of annoyed like it was was frustrated like I didn't want to dress up in I was 11 years old 12 years old 13 years old I didn't want to like dress up in costume and go be on a historical farm and like learn how to bail hay but in retrospect what a cool experience like I got to do that that was awesome as I was going through this I was also getting way more into film making so around sixth grade I finally finished the Willy Wonka movie and then I started working on another movie and this was an adaptation of the book Lunch Money by Andrew Clemens if you haven't read it it's a fantastic book highly recommend it but I I took this book and I was like this needs to be a movie I feel like I can make this into a movie b copy of the book and I wrote a script using the actual dialogue from the book once again and turned this into a screenplay so I was also playing the main character but this one took place in a school like most of the book takes place in a school and so in order to get a school cuz we didn't have access to a school there was a library and I learned you could rent a meeting room in the library and you could basically set it up to make it look like a classroom or a lunchroom and so we rented this space in the library and I sent out an email cuz I wanted actual adults to play the adults in the movie like in the Willy Wonka movie it was adult kids so I wanted actual adults to play the adults and I sent out an email to like family and friends and a bunch of people were like yeah we'd love to be in your movie we actually made a movie with adults in it we had a real script for it and I at this point knew how to edit so I was like on top of the editing for it this one we premiered we got someone who had like a local Art Studio we charged people like $3 to come and sit in a chair it was like 40 minutes long played the film for them and I the movie is up on YouTube I'll I'll link to it if you want to watch it like it still exists but you know it's made by a 12-year-old so take it with a gra of salt it was like a real project that I felt like was like like an actual movie we shot sections of it like at the rec center while we were at homeschool gym that was what I felt like okay now I can do this like now I can actually make movies it was a slightly better camera not a great camera yet but it was a slightly better camera and I was like learning the basics of like okay this is how you edit this is how you put these things together again it was all of these projects like yes there was like math and history and kind of the basics were being learned as well but so much of my education was like these projects that we were sinking our teeth into and actually doing so moving on to high school again these transitions were smooth it wasn't like okay now you're in nth grade it's going to be totally different like it was still very similar right maybe the rigor was turned up a little bit at the beginning of each year my parents and I we'd often like sit down and decide like okay what are the things you want to do this year like what are the what are the actual projects you want to get done what are the things you want to focus on so I think at some point in high school it was like well you need to do these math classes you need to have a little bit more rigorous science and so you're going to take this biology class which is like a DVD series or you're going to like read this physics textbook and take these quizzes to like make sure you're understanding the material but again it was a lot of projects it was a lot of like learning by doing at this point my parents were much more hands-off so instead of being like the ones teaching me how to do the things they were like the ones monitoring like okay you need to read like five chapters of this history book this week and then maybe like write me a couple of paragraphs about it that I can read by the end of the week to like make sure that you're doing it actually even have a bunch of the stuff from high school so this is like a project I did on the garbanzo bean I guess I was I was really excited about garbanzo beans at the time algebra for 5 hours a week American history for 2 hours and 45 minutes a week uh language arts spelling vocab Latin for 4 hours a week writing club and writing with skill for 3 hours a week uh biology four plus hours a week uh Reading literature 5 plus hours a week the bottom times and dates are flexible look at totals for the week the goal was like put together systems where you can do things where you can just like learn things and then just go and do them that would be like a good example of like that was what my weeks looked like at some point in all of this I realized if I got up and immediately started working at like 5:00 a.m. I could be done by 11: or 12 and so I did that for most of high school I would get up at 5:00 a.m. and I would like knock things out all morning and then I would be good in the afternoon and that was the way I was also able to do lots of other film projects so like around this point I started making my feature film uh the red Crystal also available on YouTube if you have any interest in watching it it is out there but that film was like a proper feature film I wrote the entire script original I cast a bunch of people to be in it we had to like build sets for it I learned how to use green screens for it we got like a proper digital camera for it to shoot it that was like a legit movie and I was that was the summer right before I started high school that we shot it but then it kind of continued into high school that I was actually making that film and and actually making it into like a real a real movie and by the time it was properly done I was like 16 we ended up renting out a local theater and premiering it there which was just like a crazy experience to have your movie that you shot like in a theater we had like 150 people come there were like a number of like articles written about it it was really cool it was like a really cool experience but again it was like one of those projects where like how did you negotiate with a theater like that that's a skill that you're not going to learn in a classroom but you're going to learn by actually doing and so throughout High School I was also making more films so I tried to make the following summer I tried to make a sequel to that first movie ended up going way overboard on it we only shot about a third of the movie and had to scrap it because actors dropped out and like but that one was I mean we were building I built tunnels in my basement out of chicken wire papier-mâché and wood structures to build like underground tunnels we had a full jail that we built for it to like shoot this like jail sequence in I had all of these people involved in I just like went way overboard and it like was never something that could ever be completed but man it was a massive massive undertaking ended up making a doctor who show also on YouTube still I was a huge Doctor Who fan at the time and so put up those episodes on there but my parents let me use their garage as my Production Studio and so I would spend the mornings doing more traditional schoolwork and then I would spend the afternoons like creating videos or working on a script or editing the movie that I was making toward the end of high school I got a group of people together I really wanted to make a sitcom I was so obsessed with like friends and Frasier and you know all of those How I Met Your Mother all those classic sitcoms and so my buddy Marco and I wrote a five episodes sitcom and we got a group of people together to shoot it and we met three times a week for like 6 weeks in our garage and shot every single episode of that sitcom ended up never releasing it for a myriad of reasons that's a whole another video it was a lot of like making things it was actually doing things it was going out and creating things and throughout this I had the opportunity I could have gone to high school like by the time I got to this age it was sort of like if you want to go to high school great like go to high school I was I had so much freedom I was able just to make things all of the time that I wanted to make and and I wasn't really lacking a ton of social connection I was still seeing people throughout the week and I considered it a couple of times I thought like I could go to high school like that might be a cool experience but ultimately it was like I I don't I don't want to do that because it would mean that I can't do all the stuff that I'm doing right now that I love that was the trade-off and that's why I made the decision ultimately never to go to high school when I was 16 I started taking classes at the local community college so there's a program called college credit plus where you can go in and actually take classes so that was the first time I was ever in a classroom was I took an American history class I also took Spanish classes there I took a business class there I tried to take a Latin class there it was so hard I ended up dropping out of it I took a film class there so that gave me a little bit of a sense of like this is what college is going to be like like you have to show up to classes and you have to like do the work it was just really positive like having that experience of like being in a classroom having someone who was actually going to like tell me what the assignment was and that I just had to do it was really refreshing I think a lot of like this whole homeschool thing is you have to be self motivated self prepared like there's a world in which I could have like woken up at noon every day and not really done anything but that wasn't the kind of homeschooling that we were doing we were doing active homeschooling we were out actually doing things maybe it's just my personality that I like to do things I like to create things I like to make things in the world for me homeschooling was like less about the education and more just about this overall mindset that like you can do anything you can make stuff you want to make a pizza restaurant in your house do it you want to make a movie do it you want to make a summer camp do it a lot of those mindsets have carried over into my my adulthood where I see people that kind of went through a little bit more of a traditional system and it feels like there's some limiting beliefs around like well like I could never do that and it's like really you couldn't like I I I think you could I I know that's like the homeschooling side of me coming out I just have this belief that I can do things so more than anything it allowed me to explore my passions it allowed me to like explore things that really excited me and make really cool stuff are there aspects I regret yeah of course I mean it wasn't perfect at all I'm painting a very Rosy picture in this video but by was it perfect I think especially once I started college I realized how different my childhood was compared to other people's and I remember for the first couple of weeks I really felt left out on like everyone had experienc this Collective trauma of school and I just hadn't like I was in love with learning I thought my classes in college were great I was just excited to be there and other people had a little bit more of this like pessimistic nihilistic view of things I just didn't have that I still don't have that and there are ways in which that's a huge advantage to me temporarily may have made it like harder to fit in when it came to college but I made friends I I like had great connections like ultimately it all ended up well and and now approaching 25 is you know I feel like a relatively well adjusted adult like I'm getting married this Summer I have I have my life in in pretty good order I could not have asked for a different childhood I I got a lot of good out of it but it's not for everyone either I think there are ways in which my younger siblings it wasn't quite as good of a fit for them like I was very self-propelled and I wanted to do these things and I think the theme of this whole story is like there are things that I wanted to actualize in the world there were things that I wanted to make I wanted to make them happen and I would bring a group of people together and I would say let's do it like let's actually make this thing happen and to their credit people would like get excited and actually do it but I could totally see if you don't have that mentality if you're maybe a little bit more introverted I just as easily could have spent a ton of time just watching TV and not actually creating stuff but but for whatever reason my personality I don't care about playing Minecraft I would much rather like dig an actual hole outside I like to do things in the real world and this was an opportunity for me to do those things I don't I don't want to prescribe homeschooling on anyone it was a wild ride and there and there are times now where I feel a little bit like the odd man out when everyone around me kind of went to school and they have all these experiences so there's a there's like a large part of the world that I feel like I missed out on but I also was able to get so much by missing out on it and you can't split test life like I don't know what my life would have been like had I not been homeschooled I don't if I would have been similar to who I am now or someone totally different like we'll never know the answer to that but I'm really happy with many of the ways that I turned out and I think that homeschooling was a big piece of that so I would love to hear any questions you have down in the comments below I imagine that there's a lot of them this was a wild long crazy video so if you made it to the end thank you so much for watching I hope that you found it entertaining and insightful and I love talking about this stuff it's like once I get going I can't stop so so that's my story I'll see you guys next time bye