In this talk I share stories from my own homeschool upbringing and the indelible lessons I unknowingly learned through the experience. In a profound way they informed my own journey as a homeschool parent. I hope these lessons from the perspective of a homeschool graduate will encourage homeschoolers from all backgrounds and remind them that they are uniquely positioned and equipped by God to teach their children in ways that reach deeper than the pages of any textbook, lesson plan, routine, or test.

Can your students read between the lines? Decode advertisements? Interpret political cartoons? Make judgments about logic? Discern between inevitable biases and compromising agendas? Take counterarguments seriously? Pinpoint ideology? Contextualize events in history? Tease out nuance? Define subtlety? Take apart rhetoric? Account for psychology? Distinguish between intuition and reason? Assess the impact of the medium? Discuss images vs. text vs. video? Read laterally? Research reliably? Uncover original sources? Identify circumstantial evidence? Tolerate boredom? Frame and characterize charitably? Distinguish between facts, opinions, and value judgments? Distinguish between readily-available sources, well-financed sources, aesthetically-pleasing sources, and good sources? Breakdown satire? Unpack persuasiveness? Co-exist with misinformation, disinformation, and fake news? Literacy with today’s media requires a world of insights from history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and media studies. Come learn how to structure a course that targets all layers of a student’s needs in today’s information and media environment.