Resisting the Homeschool Stereotypes (with Gina Munsey)

Resisting Homeschool Stererotypes Gina Munsey Homeschool Conversations podcast interview 2nd-generation 3rd culture asynchronous learners

This might be the spiciest Homeschool Conversations podcast episode yet! Take a deep breath and dive into this fabulous conversation with Gina Munsey, 2nd-generation homeschooler, 3rd-culture kid, and Bringer-of-the-Truth-Bombs! Our conversation ranged from homeschooling behind the Iron Curtain to the dark underbelly of the homeschool subculture, from asynchronous learners to diversity in the homeschool curriculum, plus much more. I’ve been pestering Gina to be on this show since it first began, and I think you’ll see why when you listen to our chat!

Be sure to check out all the other interviews in our Homeschool Conversations series!

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Resisting Homeschool Stererotypes Gina Munsey Homeschool Conversations podcast interview 2nd-generation 3rd culture asynchronous learners

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Who is Gina Munsey?

Gina Munsey is a Mexico-born, Eastern Europe-raised missionary kid and second-generation homeschooler. A child of homeschool pioneers, Gina began her own education in the former Yugoslavia behind the Iron Curtain. She currently lives just outside Nashville, Tennessee with her artist husband and two kids, and writes about gifted education, homeschool subculture, theology, and books at oaxacaborn.com as well as on Instagram at @oaxacaborn.

Watch my interview with Gina Munsey

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Amy: Hello everyone. Today I am delighted to be here with Gina Munsey, who is a Mexico-born, Eastern Europe-raised missionary kid, and second-generation homeschooler. A child of homeschool pioneers, Gina began her own education in the former Yugoslavia behind the Iron Curtain. She currently lives just outside Nashville, Tennessee with her artist husband, and two kids, and writes about gifted education, homeschool subculture, theology, and books at oaxacaborn.com as well as on Instagram @oaxacaborn.

If you aren’t sure how to spell that, that is O-A-X-A-C-A-B-O-R-N. I will have links to those things in the show notes, but I’m really excited to have Gina here. I’ve been pestering her to be on the podcast for a while. I’m excited that you finally said yes!

[laughter]

Gina: This is true.

Homeschooling Behind the Iron Curtain

Amy: Gina, here at the beginning can you just tell us a little bit about your own experience being homeschooled, and then how that played into deciding to homeschool your own child?

Gina: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on the show, Amy. I know that you continued to ask, and I finally said yes. [laughs] I was homeschooled preschool through high school, all the way through. My parents though had an unusual reason to begin to homeschool. Unlike a lot of homeschool pioneers, Amy, I don’t know how your parents started homeschooling you, but for my parents, it wasn’t a result of going to a church conference or getting swept up in the counterculture movement. If you’ve ever read Eugene Yelchin’s book, Breaking Stalin’s Nose, you know about the young pioneers.

Amy: Yes, I love that book.

Gina: School children all lined up in uniform with their obligatory red scarf, all learning to be good communists. Well, when it came time for my parents to start thinking about the education of us kids, we were living in the former Yugoslavia. My parents walked past the schoolyard one day, the school that we were zoned for, that my brother and I would have gone to, and they saw Tito’s young pioneers, red scarfs and all, lined up in the schoolyard, and they said, “No, that’s not happening.”

Didn’t know anything about homeschooling. They didn’t even know if it was legal at the time, but they knew they weren’t going to send their kids to be indoctrinated into the young pioneers. Then in a way I think this is somewhat parallel to the postmodern culture we find ourselves in in America, but in a socialist republic, these things were not disguised. These things were just right out in the open.

In the former Yugoslavia, at seven years old, every schoolchild was initiated into the young pioneers. They were taught in military salute. They were given a scarf. I remember in Breaking Stalin’s Nose he’s taught to recite the pledge. “I will be a loyal and honest comrade and I will spread the principles Tito taught.” Well, Tito was the leader of Yugoslavia from after World War II, all the way up until his death in 1980. This is not ancient history. This is recent, and I grew up with Tito’s photo hanging up over the doorways in the stores and the shops and in people’s homes.

That’s how I started my own homeschool journey. We were in the former Yugoslavia behind the Iron Curtain. There was no internet, no library to speak of, no printer, no homeschool group, no co-op, and some people will think this is sacrilege, but it was behind the Iron Curtain, not even a church. My mom would homeschool my brother and I while my dad and a colleague would periodically leave on trips to smuggle Bibles behind the Iron Curtain into Romania and Russia.

That’s not your typical “how I discovered homeschooling” story, but then later on, when war broke out in the Balkans when the USSR dissolved and all of these countries started to declaring independence, it started to get really dangerous. Military helicopters and soldiers, and we were warned by the embassy that we should probably leave the country for a while. We packed a few suitcases and headed to Michigan for what we thought was a furlough, and as soon as we left, tanks rolled in and the airspace closed and nobody was flying back in anymore, and this was right before the bombing of Sarajevo. We were never able to go back home and we started over in the US with just those suitcases.

Amy: Wow.

Gina: America for me, it hasn’t always felt like home. America is the place I went when I was displaced. Having this experience, I feel often so much outside of the American homeschool experience. We lived in the Midwest when we first came to the States. It was clear that there was no going back to our home. The borders were closed, the war continued, and the whole landscape in Eastern Europe changed, the borders changed, countries’ names changed, everything changed, and we were never able to go back.

I was homeschooled in the Midwest for quite some time. My dad got a good job and my brothers and I were raised in the Midwest, and then when I was a teenager, we moved to California. That’s just a world apart, right?

Amy: Yes, it was like another country.

[laughter]

Gina: Right. I’ve already had this shift from Eastern Europe to the Midwest, and then when I’m 16, we pack up and we move to California. My husband is from California. He was also homeschooled, preschool through 12th grade, but what you have to know about Northern California is that it’s home to a lot of homeschoolers, but also a lot of fringe movements. A lot of those fringe movements, I would describe as an inch away from a cult.

Some people have said to me, “Gina, don’t you think that’s a bit much? Those are harsh words.” I say, well, when you leave a church and the leader who has a big name in homeschool subculture, and you leave a church and the pastor calls your home and says to your mom, “Gina and her brothers cannot leave this church,” then yes, I can say that we had brushes with cult experiences.

My years living in California I really saw the gritty underbelly of the homeschool subculture, and what I experienced in those years is what keeps me bold and speaking out against legalism, speaking out in ways that some people find obnoxious quite honestly, but it’s absolutely essential.

Resisting Homeschool Stererotypes Gina Munsey Homeschool Conversations podcast interview 2nd-generation 3rd culture asynchronous learners

A Surprising Choice to Homeschool Her Own Child

I think I’ll talk more about what I experienced there a little later in our conversation, but you might ask with that background and with the things I saw in Northern California, why in the world did I decide to homeschool?

Amy: Yes, exactly.

Gina: [laughs] Right?

Amy: How did you go from, okay, we’re behind Iron Curtain too, now I’m with crazy people, to I think we’re going to do this with my own kids?

Gina: The truth is, I wasn’t going to. I’m like, I’m done. I don’t need to be around homeschool subculture anymore. I need a break. We’re going to be normal. Well, those are famous last words. [laughs] I’m going to put my daughter in school and I’m just going to go to a coffee shop and I’m going to write a book. Well, I don’t have a book and I don’t have a school drop-off line either.

When I found myself with a daughter who, when she was three and a half, she asked for a math book, and then when she was four and a half, she told my husband and I, “I’m going to read you a bedtime story,” and we said, “That’s wonderful. Thank you.” She got a microscope encyclopedia and started reading the appendix, how to prepare a slide, and at that point, I shouldn’t say I was no longer in denial that a traditional brick and mortar school wasn’t going to work, but I still was in denial. [laughs]

I toured the local Christian school and I was going to put her in pre-K and we went on this tour and my daughter is asking questions, and she’s the extrovert, I’m the introvert. She basically took me on this tour and took the teachers on the tour of the school, and they all basically laughed at me, which at the time I thought was incredibly rude, but looking back, it was comedic. It was very funny, and at the end of the tour, they told me, “We can’t do anything for your daughter”. The truth is, she wouldn’t have fit in there anyway, and looking back, I wouldn’t have wanted to force her to. We decided we’re going to homeschool just for a year, which again, famous last words, right?

Amy: Right.

Gina: My daughter is wired differently. We’ve talked about this, Amy, in our Instagram DMs and stuff. She’s neurodiverse, to use clinical terms. She’s curious and tense. She’s working a couple of grade levels ahead of some same-age peers. It’s not just a grade-level thing. It’s not just you can do the next math book. She sees life completely differently, and right now as a rising fifth-grader, she would have a difficult time sitting in a classroom without getting distracted by classmate’s fuzzy sweaters and textures in the carpet and the flickering lights.

At lunch, she reads appliance owner’s manuals. When I said we were going to be normal, that was not in the cards for us. At this point, I really see homeschooling as the only option. It allows me to offer accommodations all day long. No IEP, no 504, no parent teacher conference, whatever accommodation our homeschool kids need, we can offer it immediately. I know you have experience with this as well, Amy, just customizing in tailoring and personalizing education to exactly what our kids need. The beauty of that is just unparalleled.

Amy: I agree 100%. As you’re describing stories with your own daughter when she was three and four, it’s bringing back some even hard memories from when some of my children were that same age. We’ll talk a little later about that experience about having these awesome quirky kids and all of the wonder and challenge that comes with that.

2nd-Generation Homeschooling Perspective

I want to go a million different directions right now. It’s such a fascinating story and so different from many people’s experience, even in the second generation homeschool world, but I want to dive a little bit into your experience as a second generation homeschooler being almost an unexpected, homeschooler yourself in a sense. How does your experience play into how you choose to homeschool your own children?

Gina: For one, it gives me a healthy dose of skepticism whenever anyone in homeschool land claims to have found the formula for anything.

[laughter]

Amy: “This is the only right way to do things,” I’m like, “ah-ah, no, no.”

Gina: We’ve heard these things before. Maybe homeschooling can fix human nature. Maybe homeschooling can create kids who turn out exactly the way we want them to. That sells a lot of tickets to homeschool conferences. Maybe the answer lies in reading the right kinds of really old books or wearing the right kinds of clothes or listening to only a certain kind music and using just this curriculum, this will produce Christians. Spoiler alert. Amy, you and I have talked about this so many times before, there is no substitute for the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Amy: Amen. Homeschooling is not a vending machine that you just push the right buttons and get out the product.

Gina: Exactly, exactly. And there’s no way to get a guaranteed outcome. This is the sobering terrifying reality of parenting. We can’t just character-train and virtue-train our kids to heaven. Morality culture that is sold so heavily in homeschool subculture, it doesn’t save the soul. Being a second generation homeschooler, I see all these claims with the healthy dose of skepticism. I really have to fight hard not to buy into morality culture or fear-based culture.

I do believe we’re living in a post-modern society. I believe the world is very wicked and the Devil is prowling all around like a lion seeking to devour, but homeschooling out of fear or out of the promise that you’ll be able to control your kids, that’s not the right way. I tell my friends who are new homeschoolers, I say, look, I’ve been this Guinea pig already. This is not the path to Jesus. Only the blood of Jesus can save.

Amy: I think that’s so important because as soon as we start putting our hope in a system or in a certain way we’re educating or the latest Christian homeschool guru that promises that if we just do things their way, our families will be happy and our children will never sin and will be perfectly saved and happy. As soon as we put our hope in those places, we’re going to be disappointed. It’s just idolatry dressed up in a different set of clothing. We’ve seen that fails, that so often it turns out that these are wolves disguised and it doesn’t end up working.

We still want and long for our children to love Jesus, and that’s a good desire, but when that desire becomes the idol that we seek it in our own strengths instead of relying on the gospel and the power of the Spirit in regeneration, we are going to be doomed to disappointment. Ultimately, that doesn’t give hope to our children either.

Gina: It doesn’t. You hit the nail on the head when you said these things become an idol because I think it’s easy to identify that homeschooling can become an idol. It’s maybe less easy to identify that family can become an idol and it’s a little bit harder, but still true that the desire for our children to walk with the Lord, that in itself can become an idol because we end up taking our eyes off Christ and we put our eyes on methods of how to get there.

The truth is, none of us even know how we got to where we are. It’s by the grace of God that we are even homeschooling, that we’re even taking this breath, that we’re able to speak any of these things. As soon as we take our eyes off Christ and we put our eyes on methods, it’s bound to fail. It’s bound to fail. It doesn’t end up with our kids doing their chores and growing up to be pastors. There’s a very dark end to a lot of these methods that you and I have seen as we were the Guinea pig generation.

Amy: It is certainly my prayer. I tell my kids all the time. I’m like, “I know that I’m screwing things up in my own way. I am sorry. I have to repent to you of all the things I’ve done wrong as a parent. Your hope does not lie in me being a good mom, but in the grace of God.”

Gina: Yes, and there’ll be another round of these, too, with third-generation homeschoolers discussing what we did.

Amy Sloan: Exactly. I am under no illusion or delusion that I have figured it out for sure.

Resisting Homeschool Stererotypes Gina Munsey Homeschool Conversations podcast interview 2nd-generation 3rd culture asynchronous learners

Gina’s Experience as a Third Culture Kid and Its Impact on Her Homeschool

Gina, I want to ask about your experience as being this third culture kid. You were born in Mexico, you were raised in Eastern Europe, then you moved to the Midwest and then California. That’s at least four, if not more.

Gina: Seven years in Florida in there too.

Amy: Oh my goodness. You have this experience always being a bit outside of the culture. How do you think that impacts your goals as a parent or the way you homeschool?

Gina: That’s a great question because there’s no way for it not to affect absolutely everything. When you’re a third-culture kid, and maybe some listeners aren’t familiar with that term, so I’ll define it quickly. A third culture kid is someone who was raised in a country which is not their passport country. They’re born in one country, raised in another.

As an adult, third culture kids may never feel at home in their passport culture, which makes sense because they weren’t raised there entirely, but they are still considered an outsider in the culture in which they were raised. They’re a product of a third-culture and we, third-culture kids, we really hold conflicting ideas about the concept of home. This affects the way I teach history obviously and it even affects theology. I’ll explain, because sounds a little bit heretical.

It affects me as a classical homeschooler because Western heritage has given us such riches, but we can’t neglect the East. We can’t neglect the rest of the world. I’m a classical homeschooler who says, we can learn so much from the east as well. Then I get into church history and I say, “Okay, well this is so much more than even post reformation Western Europe.” Christianity’s roots are middle Eastern. We have Western Europe and then you have the Middle East and North Africa, India and China, Russia.

It affects theology because I see certain practices in the church and I ask, “Is this an American idea or is this in the gospel? Is this cultural way to worship or is this a doctrinally accurate way to worship? Is this idea wrong or is it just unfamiliar?” You go attend a Sunday morning service in Sudan or in Moscow or in Mumbai, you’re going to have completely different experiences. Which of those experiences are doctrinally incorrect and which of them are just culturally unfamiliar?

That question, I think, comes up a lot for me in a lot of my experiences throughout life. It’s differing ideas about home and different ideas about what is normal are not always in with the truth. That’s something that comes up a lot in our homeschool and in our discussions.

The third culture perspective affects literature because we’re constantly going to be adding to the typical homeschool book lists and adding modern literature and adding literature with diverse characters.

It affects music because we’re going to be listening to the way Mahalia Jackson, how did she sing this hymn? We’re going to be listening to world music and we’re going to be asking questions like, what does worship look like in the worldwide church?

Then in a way that’s directly relevant to the United States, it affects the way I review religious Liberty and freedoms, like the freedom of assembly and the freedom of speech.

We talked about my upbringing in Eastern Europe and behind the Iron Curtain when I was young and I lived in a country which didn’t have religious liberty and freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. I grew up knowing that people got hauled away for not having the right papers. I was aware of Checkpoint Charlie. I knew that the government could tape microphones to the walls of your hotel room. I knew that someone with the wrong things in their luggage could be imprisoned without question.

Growing up knowing all of these things really gives you a sense of the impermanence of life on earth and the fact that we have to live all of life in view of eternity. I also think it’s really valuable to feel like an outsider. I think it’s valuable to be uncomfortable not just for the sake of being uncomfortable.

My daughter has been learning Chinese for years now, just to throw another plot twist in all of this. She’s been learning Chinese and none of us are ethnically or culturally Chinese. All of these things that I’ve talked about and the different places I’ve lived and the cultures I’ve interacted with, none of them were Chinese. My daughter speaks Chinese and occasionally a blog reader will email me and they’ll say that they’re considering some a cultural exchange class or a foreign language class.

Their biggest concern is that their child might feel like an outsider. I say, good, I think we should all experience that. If you haven’t yet, you should. Your life will be enriched in so many ways if you can push outside of that. That’s life-changing and on a very fundamental spiritual level, if you’re living as a Christian, you’ve never felt like an outsider, that’s really hard for me to understand.

Amy: Right. There’s probably a deeper issue there because as you were talking, I was thinking what a gift. You have a very unique way where you have tasted in a different way or in a deeper way, potentially, what really ought to be the universal Christian experience because we are outsiders, we are not at home. Our citizenship is in another city and so to be able to take a step back from our culturally-centric ways of thinking and our traditions, none of which is not necessarily– traditions are not necessarily bad things inherently.

To be able to take that step back from them, to be able to see them with the eyes of saying, this is a tradition, this is the way we do things and our family or our culture. That’s good. Being connected to that is a good thing, but that’s not the same thing as saying, this is ultimate truth. To be able to distinguish between those things, is really important.

Gina: Yes. Exactly like you said, traditions in themselves are not bad things. You have a lot of progressive ideas where you’re supposed to reject your entire heritage and everything you came from. As they said in the cultural revolution under Mao, reject the four olds, the old ways of thinking and dressing and speaking. This is not that at all, it’s just looking at our God is a global God and we seek a lasting city, one that is to come. None of these things that tie us to earth, none of these things are what’s going to last in the end.

Yet when we look at Revelation, we see that in heaven praising God are people from every tribe and nation and people in tongue. There’s something really at its core about diversity, cultural diversity that is near to the heart of God. We’re all image bearers and so to be able to homeschool our kids and introduce our kids to all of these different cultures and people groups that God has created and ask, how do these people worship God? How is it different than the way that we worship God? I think that there’s something we can learn there about Christ since we are all His image bearers.

Amy: Oh, I love this and I just think anyone who’s listening is like, well, no wonder Amy has wanted Gina on her podcast for so long.

Gina: You’re too kind.

Amy: I love your perspective and I love your passion for sharing this in your work online. I think it’s such an important part of the way we educate our kids, for sure. I think as a fellow classical homeschooler, it’s one of the reasons why it’s so important to me that we not take some of the ideas that are spoken about classical education and treat them as if they’re just these ideas that exist in and of themselves.

When you see truth and goodness and beauty, the buzzwords in the classical world, when you see those as really being defined by the character of God Himself, when you see that we’re really talking about a Creator and the people made in His image, when we see a world and a history that is Him outworking His providence over time, then you’re able to see past just your own perspective. Like you want to see how has God been working in this other place in different ways than He’s worked in my life or in my family or in my culture?

Gina: Absolutely. I think it frees us up just from a practical curricular level, we’re supposed to this term, we’re supposed to learn about this artist. If you find an artist, I think you should go out and find artists from other continents and other cultures and use those artists in your picture study as well. It doesn’t mean that you have done something wrong if you haven’t gone through all the ones that some classical educator said that you should go through, because like you said, if we’re looking for truth and goodness and beauty, it doesn’t come from a curriculum list.

These things are at the heart of God and so we’re not limited in where we find these things really. The whole world is under the reign of Christ. Looking at the world in this way, I think there’s a lot of freedom in it,

Amy: Oh yes and that’s why I like to do my own thing. I don’t want anybody to boss me around with my curriculum. I guess that is a second-generation thing. Like no, I love my freedom. I’m going to be a rebel.

Gina: Also, a lot of those things we’ve already done and just at a very human level, I get bored, I don’t want to do it again. That’s like not a very philosophical answer, but I read this book when I was a kid, let’s read a different one.

Amy: Yes. It’s even worse now that I have five kids because I’m like, oh my goodness, I’ve already done this like four times. Sorry, we’re doing something totally different now.

Gina: I totally understand that too because I have a 10-year-old and a one-year-old that I’m like, Lochlan, you’re getting something different because I can.

Resisting Homeschool Stererotypes Gina Munsey Homeschool Conversations podcast interview 2nd-generation 3rd culture asynchronous learners

Pushing Back Against Homeschool Legalism

Amy: This being able to customize and maybe my rebel streak, those are some homeschool stereotypes that maybe have their basis and a little bit of reality. Do you think there are any assumptions that people make about homeschooling that maybe aren’t as accurate and maybe even some faulty assumptions we homeschoolers have about ourselves?

Gina: Yes. I write about pushing back against the homeschool stereotypes and what I really mean by that is pushing back against homeschool legalism. General homeschool weirdness carried out in the name of religion, we’re being in bondage to the law and not allowing Jesus to set us free if we’re selling people there’s only one way to homeschool and if you don’t do it this way, your children aren’t going to walk with Christ.

I’m a second generation homeschooler, I married a second generation homeschooler. My husband and I, all of our siblings were homeschooled all the way through. Between us, we have a whole lot of adult friends who were a part of this guinea pig generation raised in these really legalistic circles, where a lot of these homeschool stereotypes come from. Legalism will be around as long as there are people. I’m talking about my experience as a homeschool kid, but the reason it’s still relevant to talk about is because I get into conversations every week with people and these same legalistic ideas are still coming up and people are still thinking they’re the best thing since sliced bread.

Still thinking about morality and character education. If you put them on a higher pedestal than Jesus Christ crucified, you’re going to end up in bondage. Mimicking virtues doesn’t save. Legalism does not draw people to Jesus. My peers growing up, they were told over and over that reading a wholesome character training book was safer than reading a biography that had some sketchy parts. A whole lot of those friends are not walking with Jesus today.

Amy: Elsie Densmore will not save your children.

Gina: Elsie Densmore will not save your child. I go even further and I say that a steady diet of that actually has the potential to harm your child’s faith. Because when you’re reading just these books about Perfect Paula and Sinless Susan, the kids growing up reading only these kinds of books, they don’t see that God has anything to do with the nitty-gritty everyday struggles that we all face. They don’t grow up learning that God reigns over the gray areas as well as the Black and white.

The first time kids who only read Elsie Densmore encounter some struggle or doubt in their faith, sadly, the conclusion a lot of times is, I must not be good enough to be a Christian or I must not be saved because none of the people I read about in my homeschool books ever faced any struggles, they always made the right choices. They never made any mistakes.

To be really direct, an assumption people make about homeschoolers that is often accurate is that Christian homeschoolers can sometimes hyper spiritualize education. They can make everything so out of touch that it really drives their children away. I’ve seen this over and over again.

You know, we read the 10 commandments, and we see, “Don’t take the name of the Lord in vain”, right? I think a lot of times we think, “Oh, don’t swear,” okay, I’ve got that covered, but there’s a lot of other ways to take the name of the Lord in vain.

For instance, educating your kids and not actually educating them and saying it’s okay to not do any hard work and just slide through life because you’re Christians. That’s taking the name of the Lord in vain. Not being good stewards of the children God has placed in our care and saying it’s okay because you worship God, that’s taking the name of the Lord in vain. A lot of people don’t like when I say these kinds of things. Amy, thank you [laughs] for having me on your show and being willing to have these conversations.

Amy: Yes.

Gina: I sometimes feel the need to just stop and say, “I 100% support homeschooling and I 100% love Jesus”. If you’re listening and you have any questions about what I’m saying, just contact me and I’m happy to clarify. I believe in Jesus and I believe in homeschooling, but I’m not going to sit here and act like using one of those things to mess up the other is okay. Does that make sense?

Amy: Oh, that does make sense. Yes.

Gina: You have to understand, sometimes I can come across as really aggressive when I talk about these things but maybe we should go back to where I lived in Northern California. I mentioned that it was a really bizarre world that I landed in and some really good people came out of my time there like my husband, so we can be weird together now and raise our kids. I met some lifelong friends in those circles. Not everything that came out of that was bizarre and strange, but a lot of it was.

You read stories in the news about homeschooling scandals, and you’re like, “Is that real, how could that possibly happen?” Well, those scandals aren’t always about strangers. You read about a homeschool scandal and there’s a very high probability that my husband and I know the people named in the scandal. I’ve seen the closed doors behind the big names of the homeschool world, and it’s not always the same as what’s presented in homeschool conventions.

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For me, pushing back against homeschool stereotypes doesn’t mean having a nice answer to “What about socialization?” Right? Or pointing out that homeschool graduates actually do profoundly well in the real world and they’re sought after by colleges and they’re successful disciplined self-starters.

All those things are true and I do say them, but pushing back against homeschool stereotypes can also mean addressing head-on the idea that yes, sometimes Christians do homeschool because their goal is to shelter to the extreme. Sometimes Christians do homeschool because their view of God is legalistic. Sometimes Christians do homeschool because they think they can control their kids through homeschooling.

With these reasons, they end up homeschooling very poorly. These things need to be said, and this is not bitterness speaking. My own parents homeschooled my brothers and I exceptionally well. They cared about our souls and our brains. You can care about both.

Amy: Yes, 100%.

Gina: We were taught to write papers and to take tests. We were taught to tinker and to work with our hands. We were given time to pursue our own individual interests. We were required to do our structured academics, but we were given time for free play. Our homeschool days had two tiers. First, get your schoolwork done. Second, enjoy your free time to pursue writing or soldering or building or reading or whatever individual gifts were.

I was raised in this home with incredible balance, academic things and spiritual things. We learned to fill in the bubble on a Scantron sheet and read our Bibles. The two are not mutually exclusive. You can and you should feed your children’s souls as well as their intellect. You can meet their spiritual needs as well as their academic needs. I don’t know why in homeschool subculture these things are so often viewed as though they’re at odds because God created the whole person. He created us with brains and emotions and hearts and souls.

If we’re talking about homeschool assumptions, another false assumption is that you can either meet your child’s spiritual needs or you can meet their academic needs, but you can’t do both. That’s a false dichotomy. Academics and spiritual needs are not at war. Now, lies and the truth can be at war. Pride and humility can be at war, but academic education in the home is not inherently at its face at war with our spiritual lives. It’s all under the dominion of Christ. Maybe it seems like an odd bone to pick but it all goes along with my experience being a homeschooled kid.

The truth is that my parents as well as my brothers and I as homeschool kids received a lot of unhealthy criticism and negative comments for our achievements in the academic realm or even just for pursuing academic goals in a solid orderly manner. Among the families in which my homeschooled peers were raised, there was a soul-destroying legalism that created a false dichotomy between the sacred and the secular.

A lot of times, the secular was feebly defined as anything that was “too academic”. I hear this still in homeschool circles, and it never settled well with my spirit. God invented chemistry. He’s the author of at all, but in a lot of the legalist homeschool circles that I had brushes with during my time as a homeschooled kid, someone who was gifted with an utter fascination, let’s say, with atoms and formulas and bonds and the makeup of the universe, they were seen as too secular. Someone like that would be picked on and pressured and told they needed to change or care more about the spiritual realm. This is just so fundamentally wrong.

Wendell Berry, we love Wendell Berry, right? He wrote, “There were no unsacred places. There were only sacred places and desecrated places.” I think about that a lot in light of creation and the fall. It ties all into homeschooling. A. W. Tozer in his book, The Pursuit of God, he quotes 1 Corinthians 10:31, “Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” He says, “One of the greatest hindrances to internal peace which the Christian encounters, is the common habit of dividing our lives into two areas, the sacred and the secular.

I received a phenomenal education, thanks to my parents, Amy, and I know you talk about your own homeschool experience, and you were homeschooled classically, before your parents knew it was a thing, right?

Amy: Yes, that’s why it was cool.

Gina: Yes, exactly. My parents have never been ones to float along with the status quo. Even though everyone around them was like, “You don’t need to do school, you can just love God.” They understood that you can love God by working with your hands or by reading books. Many of my peers, Amy, it’s very sad, many of my peers did not receive an education. They were victims of radical unschooling. That wasn’t even unschooling, it was educational neglect. It was fueled on the false doctrine of the secular sacred divide.

The flushing out of this theology left my peers at age 18 functionally illiterate and angry at their parents for squandering their years. This is why it matters because the parents used God as an excuse for not buckling down and doing the hard work of schooling. My peers use this as a reason to turn their backs on God. I have friends who realized later in life that they were, for example, incredibly gifted in mathematics or in engineering, but they had never received a proper education, and it took them years into adulthood to catch up.

I’m not talking about alternative hands-on education, I’m talking about hyper spiritualizing life to the point where you say, “It’s more important to keep our kids at home than to school them.” It’s easy to understand why this would bring about a deep, deep hurt in children’s hearts.

I’ve seen friends grow up where their parents had always said that God mattered more than academics and that the ethereal spiritual realm was more holy than the physical earth we walk around on in physical bodies, but these friends ended up functionally illiterate and angry at their parents, and most tragically of all, they were angry and bitter against God because God had always been presented to them as against the things they were interested in or naturally gifted in. They weren’t allowed to pursue the gifts and purposes for which God had created them. This was done in the name of God. It’s a heavy word and I don’t say any of these things lightly, I say these things as a warning to myself and to others listening, don’t do this to your children. Don’t tell your children that the gifts God has woven into their very being, those interests and talents and skills that God has let into them, don’t tell them that their drive to write, or to fix cars or whatever, understand nuclear energy. Don’t tell them those actions are unworthy. God created our intellects and our soul. He created our hearts and our minds. He created us with this ability to think and to feel and to work and to rest. He gave us all different callings.

Amy, you have five children. They’re all different. We see this all throughout the Old and New Testaments. Genesis 49 and Deuteronomy 35, they’re prime examples. Some of the tribes of Israel were called to give beautiful words. Some were called to cook rich delicacies. When God is creating the temple, there were people talented for different artistic works. It doesn’t mean that one of them was more valuable in the eyes of God than the other.

A.W. Tozer, I quoted him earlier, and I want to read from him again. He says, “Paul’s sowing of tents was not equal to his writings of an epistle to the Romans but both were accepted of God and both were true acts of worship. Certainly, it is more important to lead a soul to Christ than to plant a garden but the planting of a garden can be as holy an act as the winning of a soul. It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular. It is why he does it. The motive is everything. Let a man sanctify the Lord God in his heart, and he can thereafter do no common act.

This absolutely 1,000% unequivocally includes homeschooling. God is God over our morning Bible devotion time, and the time we spend working on math. He’s God over the academic realm and the spiritual realm. To Him, they’re the same because He created the whole person and He created spirit and flesh. The incarnation shows us that so powerfully. Homeschooling and God’s Dominion includes every bit of the quotidian details of life, there’s holy ground everywhere, and we do no one a service if we’re breaking up life into worthy and unworthy, and sacred and secular, and spiritual and academic, and Bible and math.

I believe that it’s possible to live a holistic life, where everything we touch is holy if it’s all under the dominion of Christ. This isn’t a license to sin. This is the idea that our work is worship if we offer it up to the Lord.

Resisting Homeschool Stererotypes Gina Munsey Homeschool Conversations podcast interview 2nd-generation 3rd culture asynchronous learners

Amy: Having that right theology, then at the core of what we’re doing, understanding God, seeking for all that we do and think, to be geared towards worship trickles down, then when he is our chief end and our chief delight, when we are filled with praise and humility, humility, doxology. I picked those words because when those things rule our entire life, then that is going to have a profound impact on the way we approach education.

I just think getting that out of order, starting with our ideas about education, first, is always going to disorder the way we approach things, but starting with who God is and what He has done, who He’s made us to be, if we start with that first and let then that flow down into the way we educate or parent or work or play or any of these things, that is going to keep our eyes fixed on Christ.

Gina: Yes, I completely agree. I also think a big part of this is acknowledging the uniqueness of our individual children. When we fail to do that, we can really miss the mark and we can fall into legalism again. That’s just a practical example. Gazing at Monet’s lilies will do nothing for my daughter. She can look at that and she’s not going to get some sense of awe of the creation of God and creativity and any epiphany from that, but if she spent some time with a math equation, she can come out in awe at the orderliness of the universe and that God created all these things, and that math is under the dominion of Christ. She can glorify and worship through being in awe of a mathematical problem.

That would do nothing for me, but that speaks to her soul. Letting God be as big as God is, and not making him into a man-sized idea, I think is really important as well. If I were to say to my daughter that literature and art is so much more holy and under the dominion of Christ than mathematics and science, I would be teaching her something false about God and hurting her soul in the process. I don’t understand how she can see Christ in that but God speaks to her through the orderliness of His universe.

For her, it is better time spent less time on the art and more time on the math. We start our day with math because after devotions, the first subject that we do is math and that is what works for her soul. I think a lot of parents really miss the individualness of each child and forget that God puts callings on individual children in the same way he does on adults.

Amy: He’s made them all different. Now I’m wanting to go on a rabbit trail, I’m going to rein myself back in. That’s like a whole another thing where I just, I love math. I love literature. I don’t see them as being opposed to another. One of the things that breaks my heart a lot of times in the homeschool world is this idea of let’s make sure we read our kids all these great stories and do all this wonderful poetry and the arts. Granted, which are all things I emphasize, and I love and then are like, “We don’t have to really worry about the math and the science. That’s not really beautiful, that’s just facts or whatever.” It’s like, “No.” This is crazy. God made this, God invented this. This is another language that he created, so anyway.

Gina: Yes. I was at a homeschool conference one time, years ago, and the keynote says that you don’t have to finish your math book and everybody was cheering and stuff. My daughter looked at me heartbroken. I was like, “Honey, we’re going to keep doing the math book.” She was like, maybe kindergarten or something at the time. This is about five years ago. I was like, “Wow, this is such a powerful reminder to me that everyone is not created the same.” If I were to follow the homeschool zeitgeist and say, “You don’t have to do your math, let’s spend more time on this,” what a disservice to her that would be. It would be disrespectful to God who created her that way.

Who am I to say that I need to change the child that she is? Math and science weren’t my favorite subjects growing up, but I’ve become really passionate about talking about them in the homeschool community because like you said, I feel like they get shortchanged so often.

Homeschooling Twice-Exceptional, Asynchronous Kids

Amy: When we have these unique children that God has given us, which perfectly transitions and segues to my next question because you and I both share this, not only our second generation experience, but this opportunity to have really unique, some twice-exceptional asynchronous kids. Back at the beginning, when you were telling the story about your daughter when she was very young, it made me think about, I think my son was probably four years old, and we were coming back late at night from a friend’s house.

It was a bunch of families together. He had just been really overstimulated. We’re in the car driving home and he just starts reciting these crazy math facts.

[laughter]

Amy: He would just be like, “5 times 2 is 10” or whatever. He’s back there self-soothing with addition and multiplication. [laughs] Ordinary kids don’t self-soothe with math facts, but some kids do.

Gina: It’s true. In my family, we call it math therapy.

Amy: Oh, I love that.

Gina: There’s too many people around. It’s Christmas. You know what you need. You can go in the back bedroom. No one is back there. We had one Christmas a few years ago, it was loud and we were at a relative’s house and everyone’s kids are crying and there’s music playing and there’s Christmas lights flashing and it’s late at night. My sister in law she completely gets this, she just knelt down in front of Aveline and she’s like, “Aveline, would you like to sit in the back room with uncle’s chemistry book?” She was like, “Yes.” My sister in law took her back there and pulled an old college textbook off the shelf and Aveline just sat there and she just came out an hour later completely calm.

That is seeing the uniqueness that God has placed in someone and ministering to them in the way that God created them.

Amy: What a beautiful expression of love! That’s amazing.

Gina: Isn’t it? That to me, when somebody is saying, “Aveline, you don’t have to finish your math book,” and then somebody else is kneeling down and saying, “Would you like to calm down with a chemistry book?” That is just so the ability to see beyond ourselves and to see what someone else’s needs. That is an example right there that encapsulates homeschooling to me. Just the ability to say, what does the child need? Like your son reciting math facts to calm down, that is absolutely something that would happen in our home. It’s also something that I feel like if you told this story at a keynote, people would probably walk out.

[laughter]

Amy: They just wouldn’t understand. I think that it’s one of those things if it’s been your experience and someone tells a story like that, you’re like, oh girl, yes, I’ve got five more stories just like that and you start comparing notes. For a lot of families, it’s really hard to understand. You come into a homeschool group or a homeschool party or the church function and your kid just doesn’t seem to act the way other people expect them to act, especially when their ability to communicate or understand is so obviously advanced and yet a lot of times they may be acting several years younger than their peers.

That can be a hard place to be. If we’re talking to someone who’s like, “I just don’t understand what you guys are talking about”. What do you think, or what do you wish people understood about homeschooling these unique asynchronously developing children, and then what encouragement, I guess, would you have for a mama who’s listening and is like, “Oh, I’m not alone. You mean my kid isn’t crazy?” Because I didn’t know. For a long time, I thought my kid was crazy. [laughs]

Gina: Exactly. You read a parenting book and you’re like “just firmly say no and they’ll do it.” Then what? [laughs] Maybe we should back up a little bit and define these terms like twice-exceptional kids or asynchronous development. In case you’re listening and you’re like, what? You just lost me with all of these terms. We know children in general, they don’t progress at the same rate across all areas of development. You have emotional development, physical, academic development. Even academically, across subjects, kids don’t progress linearly the way that the curriculum developers say that they should and we understand that as homeschool parents.

When the gap between your emotional development and your academic development is really wide, when there’s really a disparity between the development in one area and the development in another area, we call that asynchronous development. In gifted kids, that gap can be absolutely massive. Like you said, the ability to communicate might not be there but an understanding of what’s going on around them will be there and in a asynchronous child as many ages at once. You can use Aveline as an example. She will be in fifth grade, so eighth year learning Chinese.

She wakes up morning and works on math competition problems before breakfast. She can pretty much pick any classic off the shelf she wants to and read it and comprehend it but she also reads Elephant and Piggie books at bedtime and colors with crayons and watches preschool shows. This is one of the reasons I really love homeschooling because this is not a problem. These aren’t problems at all in homeschooling and she never has to know that they’re problems because nobody’s telling her that these things are designed for someone else.

On one hand, you have asynchronous development, and then you have giftedness, which is just a completely different neurological wiring, asynchronous development. Then we have twice-exceptional or 2E. You may have heard, listeners, the term 2E and wondered what in the world is this acronym. A twice-exceptional child might have dyslexia or sensory processing disorder or something like that alongside giftedness. One of the things that for me was most helpful in understanding my daughter is to think of students like this as high needs or extra needs learners. Giftedness is not just high academic achievement. It can be, right? It’s a completely different wiring.

Something that you may be listening and thinking, well, my child can’t be gifted because they have all these struggles, there are a lot of struggles that go along with being neurodiverse, whether that’s the focus or writing or executive functioning skills which go along with this unique wiring and as homeschool parents we’re in the perfect place to help these neurodiverse kids thrive. A lot of accommodations can be made. We can provide high texture environments for sensory seekers. We can do audiobooks. It’s not a bad word, homeschoolers, audiobooks. Does not mean you’re neglecting your child if you put on an audiobook.

Resisting Homeschool Stererotypes Gina Munsey Homeschool Conversations podcast interview 2nd-generation 3rd culture asynchronous learners

Amy: Yes, we just call it reading with your ears as opposed to reading with your eyeballs.

Gina: Exactly. You and I have talked about this too. You’re going to sit in your closet and listen to an audiobook, that’s amazing. Homeschool moms, you’re with your kids 25 hours a day, eight days a week. You do not have to read every book loud, you can use an audiobook. For some kids, Amy, reading with your ears is going to work so much better than reading with your eyes. We can do all of these things. They have very little to do with what we call academics and absolutely everything to do with helping a kid thrive. Something that we do is we don’t have to sit still when we do schoolwork. You can pace a rock or wiggle or stand.

Amy: We sit in a tree. Some of my kids sit in trees.

Gina: Sit in a tree, yes. [chuckles] Hang upside down. There’s all of these things that you can do, not everything has to be written, work can be done aloud. I remember my daughter was maybe five or six and we introduced her to chewing gum. She was like, “Mom, gum is the best thing ever. It’s so much better than chewing on the carpet or my shirt.”

[laughter]

Gina: I was like, “That is the best testimony for gum I’ve ever heard.”

[laughter]

Gina: After that point, I was like, “Oh, she’s been chewing holes of her shirts because she wants to chew on something. I got her one of those necklaces that’s chew on it. We did so much better at home school outings after wearing our chewy necklace and chewing gum. If your child is chewing on the carpet, try gum.

[laughter]

Amy: Words of wisdom from Gina.

[laughter]

Gina: A lot of these accommodations, you probably hear me talking and you’re like, oh, she only cares about academics. Well, really in my house, we’ve got wiggle seats my daughter’s wearing. My daughter’s really loud and she’s really sensitive to other people’s loudness, which doesn’t– I don’t even know how that works, but she has noise-canceling headphones. She’s like bouncing around on a yoga ball, which I didn’t even know that you could use them as locomotive devices, but she can.

She’s doing her schoolwork on a clipboard while she’s bouncing around with headphones on. Homeschooling a neurodiverse kid might look like that. All of these things would be problems in a traditional classroom. They’re not problems at all at home. If you’re finding yourself and I’m not saying don’t discipline your kids and teach them to sit still in appropriate situations, I’m just saying, consider when is it actually necessary to sit still?

You can sit in a tree and still do your schoolwork. Let’s choose our battles over heart issues and not like you have to have your two feet flat on the floor when you do your science. I don’t think that’s really a heart formation issue.

I think one thing I wish people knew about neurodiverse kids though, is that they struggle. Life is not automatically easier for them. In a lot of ways, it’s harder because they see everything differently and they’re misunderstood so often. I think I wish more people understood that neurodiverse kids just aren’t sailing through life on academic laurels, they struggle.

Amy: Yes. That’s a really important reminder I think for everyone who maybe has a kid in their life that they hopefully can love in better ways and their parents, you can love with their parents and pray for them in better ways. If anyone wants to know more about this topic in particular, last season I interviewed Colleen Kessler and we did a deep dive into this topic. If you are listening and your interest is sparked, definitely go back and check out that episode with Colleen.

Gina: Yes, absolutely. I think, just as far as encouragement for parents as they’re homeschooling their own quirky kids, I’ve already said some controversial things, so I might as well just go full on spicy.

Amy: Let’s do it.

Gina: Let’s do it. As Christian parents, we really need to fear God, maybe a little more than we do before we start butting into our children’s lives. Charlotte Mason says children are born persons and homeschoolers quote that all the time and then turn around and try to make their children into carbon copies of themselves with identical taste. You really need to let your kids be the individuals God created them to be.

I’m not talking about never having rules or never having discipline or letting your kids run all over you and chaos and disorder, I’m just talking about acknowledging the uniquely born persons our children actually are. One example that I can give, I think it’s a little bit sobering or scary the number of parents who come to me and say, “I love that your daughter learned Chinese and my child has been begging to learn, let’s say Japanese, but I said no because I think Spanish is so much more practical, so I’m making my child learn Spanish instead.”

I want to say are you God? Are you God? Do you know for certain what God has called your child to do? Can you see the future? A very hard word for type A parents and every parents to remember we’re not raising children to follow us, we’re raising children to follow God. We don’t want our children to grow up to be like us, we want our children to grow up to be like Christ. God gives our children’s gifts, He gives them leanings, He gives them desires and skills and interests and He’s even given them their own aesthetic taste. It may not mirror yours. That’s not a sin.

Our presumptuous audacity and pride, it really ought to sober us a little bit. If God has called your child to speak Japanese, maybe God is calling your child to reach Japanese-speaking people for Christ or to work in a corporation where Japanese is part of the daily work life. As parents, we need to let our children follow God in this tangible way. Even if you live in rural Oklahoma and this doesn’t make any practical sense to your mind at all, we need to fear God more and believe that God can lead our children.

My dad likes to tell a story. He grew up in rural Michigan. Then after he got saved, he was a missionary in Mexico which is where my brother and I were born. He was in 10th grade in rural Michigan and he got a scheduled for the fall and he saw that he had a Spanish class. He marched to the high school counselor and he told her in no uncertain terms get me out of this class, I’m never going to use Spanish, get me out of this class. They took him out of the class. Just a few years later, my dad was living on a coffee plantation in Guatemala learning Spanish [laughs] because he wanted to be a missionary in Mexico and he needed to learn Spanish before he could, so he ended up going to immersion school in Guatemala.

Well, he likes to tell that story because God knew he was going to need Spanish. My parents speak Spanish. I took Spanish and Latin in high school, learned Spanish in college. It would make sense that my children should learn Spanish and Latin. My daughter’s learning Chinese and Greek. [laughs] I am not saying let your child run all over you. Our job is to let God lead our children as well because we have them for a limited amount of time and they’re accountable to God for their entire lives. We–

Amy: Are not the Holy Spirit.

Gina: We are not the Holy Spirit. Exactly. If the Holy Spirit is giving our children nudges and we tell them to ignore the Holy Spirit, that scares me. There’s a fine line between maintaining your order and discipline in your home sometimes and saying yes, these are the things we’re learning this year and you have to learn them. I have to do that every year when I plan my curriculum. Also if God has given your child a passion or an interest or something that doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t mean that it’s wrong.

Is it more difficult for me to have Chinese and Greek than Spanish and Latin? Yes, it is, but that’s okay. I think a lot of the parable in Matthew 25 the man was preparing to leave his estate and go on a journey. He called his servants to him and he says, “I’m going to give you each a different amount of gold.” If you look at the older translations it literally calls these a bag of talents. Some servants did wise things with these talents. As the talents increased they have more to report back to the master. Lord I redeemed the time I didn’t waste it.

The master says, “Well done, you’ve been faithful.” In the parable, what always stands out to me is that one servant was bound by fear and he was afraid and he buried that talent in the ground to keep it safe. When the master returned, the master wasn’t pleased at him for being safe and conservative, he was angry that the servant let fear get in the way of obedience. I keep that in my mind and it sobers me.

Our kids are the talents and our kids have talents to go away or to take big risks and let the Holy Spirit be the Holy Spirit. I’m reminding myself as much as I’m saying this to anyone else, we have to listen to the Holy Spirit and be led by God as we raise our children. We have to ask God that our children’s ears will always be open to the Holy Spirit’s nudges as well.

Amy: Such an important and helpful encouragement. Gina, this has been so much fun. I’m really excited that I got to talk to you in person and not just in our DMs because–

Gina: Wonderful. [laughs]

Resisting Homeschool Stererotypes Gina Munsey Homeschool Conversations podcast interview 2nd-generation 3rd culture asynchronous learners

What is Gina reading lately?

Amy: Thank you for taking the time to chat with me here at the end. I just want to ask you the final two questions I’m asking everyone this season and really it’s just because I like to add more books to my never-ending pile of books that I want to read. The first question is, what are you reading lately?

Gina: I read so many books at a time, Amy, it’s a problem.

Amy: I don’t think that’s a problem.

Gina: I rotate through the stack whatever I’m in the mood for, so I’m always reading so many books at once and I read a lot on Kindle these days because my toddler really likes to turn the pages for me and rip them out. We’re working on that. [laughs] Right now I’m reading Religion of the Apostles by Stephen De Young, that’s part theology and part 1st century history. It’s absolutely fascinating. I’ve also been working my way through Anne Applebaum’s massive book, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe. It is very, very large and I will be reading it for a long time. I’m reading Fahrenheit 451 which is a departure from my usual history, non-fiction, but it’s still very much on-brand for the type of apocalyptic history books that I like to read.

Then randomly I’m also reading Ken Ludwig’s How to Teach Your child Shakespeare.

Amy: Oh, that’s a good one.

Gina: I admit it’s my first time reading it. It’s not a new book. I have a weird thing where I really don’t like to read books that seem too popular. I refuse to read that book for years and then I got it from the library. I was like, “This book is amazing. I can’t believe I have been a snob about it for so long.” Finally, for poetry, I’m reading Li-Young Lee, The City in Which I Love You which I learned about from a Taiwanese American friend and she totally understands what it is to be a third culture kid. The City in Which I Love You by Li-young Lee. Very beautiful.

Amy: I’ll have to see if they have that at the library. That sounds really fascinating.

Gina’s Tips for Helping the Homeschool Day Run Smoothly

Gina, what is your best tip for helping the homeschool day run smoothly?

Gina: I think my first tip is that I have no tips.

[laughter]

Gina: It’s very individual to each family and to each individual kid. What I say to people is your homeschool has to work for you not for anyone else. I always hear the tip, don’t start your day with math. Quite honestly if I followed that tip, our homeschool days would be an utter fail. Math. We talked about math therapy and how math is grounding and self-soothing.

For my homeschool to run smoothly that’s what we need to do. It’s not what you need to do. Most of you listening, you’d have an insurrection if you tried that, math before breakfast. Maybe that’s my tip: fear God, listen, to the Holy Spirit. Honor the children God gave you and meet their needs. It’s okay if your homeschool doesn’t look like everyone, else’s, that’s the point. It’s okay if you stick out like a sore thumb because sometimes not fitting in is the best thing that you could ever do.

Amy: That’s part of what makes homeschooling so fantastic and worth it even when it’s hard.

Gina: Absolutely, yes.

Find Gina Munsey Online

Amy: Gina where can people find you all around the internet?

Gina: The easiest way to find me is to type ginamunsey.com into your browser, and that’ll redirect to oaxacaborn.com. I named my about 20 years ago before I knew that you shouldn’t name your blog ridiculous things. [laughs] If you just type ginamunsey.com, it’ll redirect to my website. You can also find me on Instagram at @oaxacaborn, O-A-X-A-C-A-B-O-R-N. I’m on Instagram often. You can probably reach me most easily there. I look forward to following some listeners and probably chatting in DMs about some of the things that we’ve talked about today, Amy.

Amy: Yes, definitely. I will have links to all of those things in the show notes for this episode at www.humilityanddoxology.com. I really encourage people to reach out and follow up and chat with you more. Thank you Gina so much. I look forward to chatting with again.

Gina: Thank you so much. Thank you.

Check out all the other interviews in my Homeschool Conversations series!

Homeschool Conversations Video Interviews Podcast HumilityandDoxology.com Amy Sloan
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