Andrew Pudewa: 00:00:00.513
When you hit about 14, 15, you are tired of being bossed around, right? You’re tired of it. And this is exactly what I say to teenagers, “If you want to stop being bossed around, the solution is start bossing yourself around.” The only reason people tell you what to do is because you look like you don’t know what to do. But as soon as you figure out what you want to do and pursue that, people get out of your way. [music]

[music]

Gretchen Roe: 00:00:38.362
Good afternoon, everyone. This is Gretchen Roe, and I’d like to welcome you to this episode of The Demme Learning Show. And I am so excited today to get to spend an hour with my dear friend, Andrew Pudewa. Andrew and I have been ships passing in the night at homeschool conferences for 15 years. And probably 10 or 12 years ago, we had a conversation and realized we had a whole lot in common. And so we look forward to seeing each other on the convention circuit every year. And I backed him into a corner last September and said, “I want you to come talk about crafting a college experience while you’re still in high school.” Two of my kids did that, but that was back before the age of technology, the phones that are so ubiquitous today. And I wanted Andrew to come talk to you all. And now I’m going to let the master himself introduce himself, Andrew.
Andrew Pudewa: 00:01:36.257

Well, sure. Yeah, Andrew Pudewa. I’m the founder and director of the Institute for Excellence in Writing, or IEW, as many people know. I have been at this full-time for coming up on 25 years. And it’s been a phenomenal run. Of course, I’ve been very good friends with everyone at Demme Learning. Steve was one of my great early mentors in the game because his business was very similar in many ways. And he’s a few years ahead of us. And I learned so much. And then Ethan, I kind of saw him at the tail end of being a teenager and now he’s all in charge of everything. And in a similar way, it’s been a family business for the most part. And so I’ve gained a lot, a lot of valuable experience from my relationship with you and everyone at Demme Learning. We, of course, publish Arts of Language curriculum. We start with early reading and early writing, and we have a little bit of competition, not much. We have a spelling and a grammar program as you have acquired as well. And my kids grew up doing Math-U-See.

Gretchen Roe: 00:02:53.317
Well, my kids grew up doing IEW, so.

Andrew Pudewa: 00:02:55.705
Yeah, I mean, it’s all one big family as far as I can tell. What’s important about me? I have 16 grandchildren with number 17 on the way. All of my children who have school-aged children do homeschool their children. So I’m starting to see this big exponential expansion, at least within the clan. I live in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And we’ve seen tremendous growth as almost everyone in homeschooling because with the schools being the way they are, with COVID, with so many great options now. It’s more and more accessible, communities, co-ops, online groups, more and more webinars and ways to get helpful information. I think the typical homeschooler today just has so much more support opportunity. And of course, hybrid schools have grown a great deal. And what we’re going to talk about today, dual enrollment options. So that’s where we’ve found great growth, great success. I still travel quite a bit and do conventions, as you mentioned. I don’t do as many student classes. I used to run around the country and do student classes. But now we have such a phenomenally excellent set of video materials, it really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for me to spend time doing that. Although I had a lot of fun meeting lots and lots of kids out in the field. But the videos have proven to be profoundly effective.

Andrew Pudewa: 00:04:33.526
And one of the fun things, Gretchen, is I am now – almost everywhere I go – meeting one or two or half a dozen young ladies will come up to me and they’ve got an eight-year-old and a five-year-old and one in the belly, maybe, and saying, “Well, you don’t remember me, but I was in your class when you came to Columbus, Ohio, 15 years ago.” So that’s kind of fun to see that second generation rolling and that homeschooled kids are really embracing that as a heritage, as a family way of doing things. And you meet two homeschooled kids who met in homeschool speech and debate and all their siblings are homeschooling. And so they have these growing networks, so.

Gretchen Roe: 00:05:30.151
That’s my eldest son. That’s how he met his wife, so. [laughter] And one of the things that I think is so remarkable is homeschooling is no longer a marginal experience. When my kids were homeschooling back in the 90s, if we were all out together, people would say, “Why aren’t you in school today?” And my kids were taught to say, “Field trip.” [laughter] Because–

Andrew Pudewa: 00:05:55.361
Yeah, the safe answer.

Gretchen Roe: 00:05:56.602
–it was so different from the norm. And I had the privilege of homeschooling through the evolution of watching people say, “Oh, you homeschool”, instead of, “Oh, you homeschool?” And that change was remarkable. And, your influence was part of that.

Andrew Pudewa: 00:06:17.303
Well, we were all out there stumping and working hard. All of the companies that were serving that market 25 years ago have kind of grown up with it. And of course we’ve expanded a lot into schools, particularly charter schools and classical education schools and hybrid schools. But you’re right, now it’s pretty much if you talk to any random person and you say, “Homeschooling”, they will almost always say, “Oh, I know somebody who homeschools, or my neighbor homeschools, or my brother-in-law, their family homeschools.” And so it’s kind of as though everybody knows somebody who homeschools now. So to that degree it is much more mainstream. And I think for so many, it’s such a great option and we want to continue to serve that and grow the options. And I think that’s part of why we’re doing what we’re doing today and why you keep bringing more and better and consistently great information to all those parents who want to figure out the best way for them in their situations.

Gretchen Roe: 00:07:24.629
Absolutely. And my only goal when we started this during the pandemic was to keep parents in the game a little bit longer. And that’s what we have really sought to do here. And I think we’ve done a pretty good job. I have a wonderful team and I get to have terrific conversations with people like you. So before we really climb into this, Andrew – because we had a million questions and a lot of people had a lot of similar questions – I would love to give people a little bit of background into how IEW came to be. What is your background? And I know this story, but I would love for our audience to know a little bit of how Andrew became the face of IEW.

Andrew Pudewa: 00:08:07.648
Well, the very, very short version of what could be a painfully long story is my training is in music. So I lived in Japan for three years. I studied with Dr. Shinichi Suzuki and the Suzuki Music School there. I came back and was teaching music, and also I did a few years at a place called the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, which was a place in Philadelphia where we taught programs of treatment to families with brain injured children. So I learned a great deal about child brain development. My pedagogy was in music instruction. And I happened to get a job at a small school in Montana, kind of just a fill-in private school. I had never worked in a school before, but I was ending up teaching fifth grade and then the next year, seventh and eighth grade. And one of the teachers there was a Canadian who said, “We need to go to Canada and learn this thing called the Blended Sound-Sight Program of Learning.” And she was very persuasive. So this is a very small school. I think there was only 8, 10 faculty total. But we all went up to Northern Alberta. This was the summer of 1990. And there I learned the program of phonics-based reading and writing instruction, as well as the structure and style in composition system for teaching writing.

Andrew Pudewa: 00:09:38.367
And I came back, and I used that in the school where I was working, and it got phenomenally good results. I mean, it was different than anything I had ever learned. I think the thing that was most remarkable to me is when I saw it, I thought, “Whoa, this is very much like a Suzuki method approach to teaching the skill of English composition,” in that it used modeling, it used graded gradual increase of complexity. It used a very tight teacher-student feedback loop. It was a pathway. Anyone could step on the pathway and make progress. And so I decided the next summer to go to Canada and take that same 10-day teacher training course again because I thought, “I understand this a little, but there’s so much more.” So I came back, taught another year. Then we moved out of that city. I stopped working for that school. And I started teaching a little class on the side for my two oldest children who were 10 and 8 at the time. And we had started to homeschool them. So I had this little group of 8, 9, 10, 11-year-old girls. It was just my kids and their friends.

Andrew Pudewa: 00:10:52.116
And so I taught then kind of in a twice a week, I think, situation, and it was working so well. I decided to go back a third year and take that same course again. And they said, “Well, if you’re going to keep coming back, you might as well join our team and help us teach this thing. So I joined the staff of the Blended Sound-Sight Program people in Canada and started then to kind of think maybe I could do more with this. I always kind of had a side gig going because quite honestly, teaching violin doesn’t make a lot of money. And I had a growing family keeping my wife at home. So I always kind of had some little side gig, side business. And most of them didn’t make much more. But when I kind of stumbled into this idea of I could teach a seminar to homeschool moms on how to do this writing program, maybe they would pay for that. And this was pre-internet days, but I made a little paper flyer and I printed up 500 copies and I stamped them up. And I got a homeschool group in Seattle to agree to put labels on them, send them out. And I got 20 people to pay me 40 bucks to listen to me talk for a day and teach them this writing system. That’s more than I make a whole week teaching violin as hard as I can. This has potential. So I kind of continued then to teach some seminars. We made a set of videotapes. It wasn’t very good. I made a better set of videotapes, and I mean tapes. This was VHS days, ’98, ’99. And then I had kind of a breakthrough. It’s a very large international homeschool organization, probably the largest homeschool group in existence at the time in 2000 invited me to come and help them with some curriculum. And they made a very high quality set of videos of the seminar. I went back the next year and made some more videos.

Andrew Pudewa: 00:13:04.527
And by that time, I was actually making more money teaching, writing seminars and selling videos than I was teaching music. So in ’99, I moved from Idaho to California, went full-time in IEW, year after, got our first employee, and it’s just been growing steadily since then. We now have somewhere around 60 employees, and we’ve done business in, I don’t know, every state, 38 different countries. It’s pretty amazing. And to be quite honest, I would attribute our success entirely to God’s grace and God’s providence, and not my personal brilliance or ingenuity or entrepreneurship skills. If anything, I lack all of that. I’ve just been super blessed by the circumstances, God bringing me all the right people at the right time and making really good, helpful connections and friendships, like meeting Steve Demme early on.

Gretchen Roe: 00:14:07.139
Well, I appreciate your humility, but I also think that what you have done is you have created an atmosphere where creative thinkers can find outlet. And that reason I wanted you to tell that part of the story is because what that has given you the opportunity to do is to hone this experience of crafting a college experience while you’re still in high school. And I think that makes this valuable. So I can’t imagine that there would be someone in our audience who doesn’t know who you are.

Andrew Pudewa: 00:14:43.938
We’ll hope at least someone now they know a little bit about me. But–

Gretchen Roe: 00:14:48.664
If that were the case, at least they understand the evolution in the background of why IEW is such a rich and wonderful program.
v Andrew Pudewa: 00:14:56.104
Yeah. Well, and I have seven children, and almost all of them were homeschooled for almost all of their years. And I think God gave me these particular children in part so I could learn all sorts of interesting things that I can then pass on to other families. And so I think it’s part of the big scheme that I think it’s a divine plan to help more and more families find the best possible situation for their children who are all individuals and all kids are different. And the kind of industrial model of schooling where everybody goes there and does the same thing in the same way, according to the same schedule, for the same amount of time to get the same predictable, controllable result, it’s just collapsing. And more and more people are aware of that. And so we get to help people navigate, well, what’s the best approach for this particular child. And I know that people will come into homeschooling and sometimes they’ll say, “Well, I have to kind of do school at home, and just replicate the very system I’m trying to not be in.” But then after a year or two or three, they make friends and they find out about, “Oh, here’s this other way of teaching math. Here’s a different approach to kids who need a different way of seeing things and hearing things and practicing things. But at the same time, I also feel like, well, like Math-U-See, we have extremely broad, extremely broad application. So the system works for everyone, but then the application can be customized. And that’s one of the things we do is we focus on parent training, teaching the parent our system so they can then go teach children of all different ages and aptitudes and creating additional materials to support them in doing that.

Gretchen Roe: 00:17:06.049
And I know that in my personal experience, that’s what I found an IEW experience to be, is you taught me how to be successful in teaching my children because of my own volition. I was not a teacher. And being an only child, I was born a tiny adult. So I put expectations on my children that were adults expectations. And you helped me realize that there’s a balance there and a difference. And so now what I want to do is I want to step forward into the conversation we had in the mountains of North Carolina last September when we were talking about crafting a college experience while your students are still in high school. So what’s the genesis of this? And I know a little bit of that, but I want you to tell our audience what the genesis is of this idea and why it’s so valuable and important.

Andrew Pudewa: 00:18:03.049
Well, the idea that some kids could attend college classes at an age younger than the traditional, 18, 19-year-old, quote, “high school graduate,” that’s been around for some time. But it’s been kind of limited in people’s thinking to, well, you’d have to have a genius and an extraordinary circumstance. And you’d have to finish high school fast and finish four years of high school in two years in order to do that. But I had a very different experience with my daughter, Genevieve. She was the second of my seven children, and she was homeschooled for many years, and then she wanted to go to a rigorous high school. So we actually moved to Moscow, Idaho, so that she could go to a rigorous classical Christian high school. And she started that ninth grade. She was 13, so she was already a little on the young side for high school. And she did ninth grade and 10th grade. And then she came home after a few months of 11th grade and said, “I don’t think I need to go to this school anymore.” And I said, “Well, we moved here so you could go to this school. You’re 15 years old. What are you thinking?” And I guess she had researched it and she said, “Well, I think that I could just get into the University of Idaho and I could just be a college student because if your SAT score is high enough, then you don’t have to have a high school transcript to go to college.” And I didn’t know anything about this. I said, “Well, all right. I mean, I guess. Are you sure?” She goes, “Yeah, the only reason I go to school is to be with my friends. And that’s not a really great reason to to go to school. And I’m going to take chemistry in high school. I could just take chemistry in college. It’s kind of the same thing. So I didn’t know about this, but she did it. She pulled it off. She came out of school. She got one of those big thick How to Study for the SAT thing. And this would have been back in ’98. So I was just infancy doing– ’97, I think, just in my infancy starting IEW. And so she did. She got a – I don’t know – high enough score. She was admitted to the University of Idaho with a full scholarship at 15 years old. So that kind of broke my whole paradigm about what was possible.

Andrew Pudewa: 00:20:49.326
I will just update that story. After a semester at the University of Idaho, she came home one day and says, “Mom, Dad, I can’t go to this school anymore. I have to go to a school where I can actually learn something. This is just not– it’s it’s not challenging me. I don’t like it.” I’m thinking, “You’re 16 years old. Where am I going to send you? What’re you thinking?” So anyway, she did end up going to the Franciscan University in Steubenville at 16 as a sophomore. And she ended up graduating early and then taking a few years to do other things, so. But that was kind of my first thought.

Andrew Pudewa: 00:21:30.389
And then I met some kids in Washington state who were in what they called a dual enrollment or dual credit. And I guess this is something that the University of Washington had an agreement with the public schools that their hotshot students could be enrolled in the public school, go to the University of Washington or WSU, take college classes, and get credit both on the high school transcript and on the college transcript. And the high school paid the tuition for the university. And so that sounded like– that sounds like a pretty good deal.

Andrew Pudewa: 00:22:13.337
And I had one of my writing students. I was teaching a little writing class in Moscow at the time. And she was only 16, and she was doing this. And she said, “Yeah, I’m enrolled in the high school, but I never go to the high school. I only go to WSU, Washington State University.” And she took all her classes there. And she was talented and smart, but I thought, “Well, if she could do it, a lot of kids could do it.” And so that’s when I started to become aware that this was even possible. And then a couple of other kids. My two youngest ended up doing dual enrollment after we had moved to Oklahoma. And so they were taking classes at Tulsa Community College. It wasn’t hard to get in. All you had to do was go take basically a reading test. And if you can read apparently at a 10th, 12th grade level, which didn’t seem particularly hard, you can take classes at the community college, and it’s basically free. And that’s when I also noticed that a lot of these colleges were offering online classes for high school kids to do this dual credit, dual enrollment idea. And of course, if you’re doing that, they charge you a lot less money than if you are graduated from high school, you’re 18, 19 years old, and you’re going in as a full-time freshman. Your per credit hour cost is way higher, three to four times higher than it is because they give a really good deal to the high school students in the dual enrollment area. So I started meeting a lot of kids who were doing that. And then I started meeting kids who basically just didn’t do high school at all. They just started doing college classes at 14 or 15 and had completed an associate’s degree or even a bachelor’s degree by 18 or 19 years old. And I thought, okay, well, they must be geniuses. But then I realized, no, they’re just basically average, competent, hardworking high school kids who can read decently well, write decently well, can calculate, and know math facts pretty well. And then what I finally learned that I really never thought because I was always of the opinion that high school classes were somehow preparation for college classes. But then I realized, no, if you take a first-year English composition, grammar and composition class in college, it’s really about the same thing you would be taking in high school. If you take chemistry in college, and I experienced this because I took chemistry my first year in college. And it was the same chemistry. There was nothing particularly new. The only difference was in high school, they stretch it out for a whole year. And in the university, it’s a semester. But the content is the same. And then you talk to more and more people and it’s like, yeah, it’s the same stuff. Everybody knows that college is a review of high school because nobody learns anything in high school. They pretend to learn. They get letters to put on a transcript but they don’t necessarily remember anything. And so your first couple years of college are just a review of what you should have learned. And then right around that same time, an organization came into existence called CollegePlus. I don’t know if you remember. They used to go to homeschool conventions and all that. And they actually had a service that would help families enroll in their program. They would then bring you all the distance learning options and they would help you bank credits. And they had lots of kids who were getting their bachelor’s degree by 20 years old, 19, 18 years old. And so that was kind of the beginning, I think, of people becoming aware on a broader view that this dual enrollment, college while you’re in high school, distance learning is very, very possible for almost anyone who wants to do it.

Gretchen Roe: 00:26:49.088
The interesting part of our conversation thus far is the fact that your daughter came to you saying, “I want to do this.” And so in a way, she was teaching you. And so many of the questions that parents had who registered for this webinar was, “How can I do this for my student?” And I think I mean, I look back, two of my four kids did this and they figured it out themselves. Now, I’m not saying that I wasn’t a part of that process, but if you have a child who’s motivated, they’ll figure out a way. You just need to help them figure out what the options are. And it does vary state by state. You can do high school– I mean, you can do college classes in high school here in North Carolina, where I live, for free. In Maryland, we paid a percentage of the credit hour but it was a nominal percentage. And that’s where my kids did that. So one of the questions that was prevalent in the questions parents ask us is, how do we do this? Well, you start with figuring out what is available in your state, because it’s not the same in every state.

Andrew Pudewa: 00:28:12.255
No, but a lot of the schools that are offering distance learning are not necessarily in the state where you live.

Gretchen Roe: 00:28:20.403
True. This is very true.

Andrew Pudewa: 00:28:22.076
Liberty University, I believe, as far as I know, they have the largest online program of any university.

Gretchen Roe: 00:28:30.824
I heard that just about two weeks ago. So it must be confirmation that that is an accurate statement.
v Andrew Pudewa: 00:28:38.474
I heard that their online class numbers are about five times their residential numbers. And they had their system well in place even before COVID. A lot of other universities kind of got their online system in place because they had to retain students but shut down their buildings for a period of time. But I would like to make two observations based on what you said. Number one, something I have been saying to teenagers ever since I started teaching teenagers is, when you hit about 14, 15, you are tired of being bossed around, right? You just you’re tired of it. And this is exactly what I say to teenagers. If you want to stop being bossed around, the solution is start bossing yourself around. Right? The only reason people tell you what to do is because you look like you don’t know what to do. But as soon as you figure out what you want to do and pursue that, people get out of your way. And so, my daughter, other kids, “Hey, I don’t like this what’s going here. What are my options?” They’re going to have a lot more energy into figuring this out. The second thing I would do is I would quote John Taylor Gatto. And I know you know the underground history of American education, dumbing us down the hidden curriculum of compulsory education. Gatto taught eighth grade English in Brooklyn, New York for 16 years. And he made a statement I have found so absolutely true. He says what every 13-year-old in the world wants more than anything else is real, honest to God, meaningful life and death responsibility. They want to be adults. They want to grow up. And while 13-year-olds are still a lot closer to being 10 than they are being 18, when you get them on a path of being in a situation with increased responsibility, increased accountability, working more with older kids or even adults, whether it’s in an educational setting or a community service type of option, like a political campaign, or a missions trip, or getting a real job. I mean, what does every teenager look forward to more than anything? Driving a car and having a job. That’s way more important than going to high school. In fact, part of the reason to have a car and a job was to get out of high school. So when we can create that kind of context for, “Hey, you can take some action and you can make some decisions to be in charge of your own education.” That is so empowering to young people. But when we have the opposite thing, which is, “I’m going to boss you around for the next four years of your life until you’re 18.” That’s just basically depressing, as far as I can tell. So, I tell the kids, turn the tables on your parents, take responsibility for your own education, and you’ll have the freedom, at least a lot more freedom. And that’s what you want.

Gretchen Roe: 00:31:57.542
Right. Absolutely. I think it makes an enormous amount of difference. Now, this is an interesting question that Samantha has asked, and I don’t know the answer, and you may. She said, “This sounds great. I’d rather have my 15-year-old take biology and chemistry in someone else’s lab than in my kitchen,” which I might never have gotten the smell of formaldehyde out of my house. We’ll just set that aside. But her question is, do you know if there is financial aid for dual enrollment as a homeschooled student?

Andrew Pudewa: 00:32:32.005
I think that would be very much on a case-by-case basis. A school might offer. You might find some scholarship somewhere. I don’t know of any consistent availability, but I do know that the costs are so much lower when you’re dual enrolled that it’s probably better than most financial aid packages. I mean, when you think about it, unless you’re getting a full ride because you have super high test scores or connections or the school is desperate, I don’t know. But for most kids, if you go to a university or a private liberal arts college, they will offer pretty much everybody some scholarship money. They’ll offer everybody financial aid. But that’s only because they have such highly inflated tuition costs that if they didn’t offer a discount, it would look too expensive. It’s a Macy’s trick. Bump up all your prices and then put everything on 20% discount. The colleges do this all across the board. But if you are still in high school, technically, they always have a separate pricing system for dual enrollment. And like I said, it can be as much as one-fifth the cost per credit hour. And then depending on where you live and whether you want to get involved with community colleges or not, those are often free. At Tulsa Community College, my kids, all they had to pay was for the books because they were technically still in high school. If they had graduated high school, then there would have been some fees on top of that. So I think getting financial aid for dual enrollment is kind of a moot thing because it’s already one of the best deals you can get as is.

Gretchen Roe: 00:34:26.038
Absolutely. One of the things that I think is very important as parents is we don’t always teach our children that there is a financial cost for their desires. So this gives them the opportunity to do a little bit of research and find out, “Well, what would it cost you to do something like this?” And several of the parents in the question said, “Well, how do I motivate my student? And how do I get them to want to do this?” And you sort of hit the nail on the head by saying, “You don’t want to be bossed around. Here’s how you get out of that.”

Andrew Pudewa: 00:35:03.684
Well, and a lot of kids, I think especially boys, when they hit 14, 15 and mom is still trying to tell them what to do for school every day, there’s a real high potential for I’m just tired of mom telling me what to do all the time. And if you go and enroll in classes elsewhere, either online or a local community technical college or even just homeschool co-op classes, you get an external accountability. Sometimes that does a lot for the relationship because now, the mom, the parents can kind of be like, “Okay, I’m on your team. I’ll be here to help you be successful in this undertaking that you’ve got.” But I don’t think there’s a lot of kids who would say, “No. I’m not interested at all in growing up. Yeah. I want to be be in high school and do that forever. At least it seems like forever. Most kids, “Hey, you could graduate a year early.” “Really? How?” A lot of kids. Yeah, you could finish high school at 18 with two years of college credits.

Gretchen Roe: 00:36:18.978
My youngest daughter went to take college algebra because she finished through algebra two with Math-U-See. And she finished her semester. And her college instructor at the community college said, “Would you TA for me next semester?” And she said, “What does that mean?” And he said, “Well, you would be coming, and some of my classes you would be teaching.” And she said, “Well, I’ll ask my mom.” And he looked at her, and he said, “How old are you?” And she said, “Well, I’m 15. I don’t drive yet.” [laughter] And he said, “Wait, what?” And she said, “I’m going to stop you right there because you just asked me if I could TA for you, so obviously you think I have the math chops to do it. So my age is irrelevant.” [laughter]

Andrew Pudewa: 00:37:14.802
Yeah. One of the great things about doing college classes while you’re still the age to be living at home is if you’re in, let’s say, a Christian school or an online school and you’re pretty safe in terms of– you’re not going to get a lot of goofy stuff in the professors or the textbooks or the videos or whatever. But if you’re in a community college, you might get some professor’s got his kind of agenda. If you’re living at home and a professor has you read something or says something and you have some questions about that, who are you going to talk to? Mom and dad. If you have gone away and are living in a dormitory in a different city, and you got a professor who’s kind of pushing an agenda and you want to talk, well, who are you going to end up talking about? All the other 18-year-olds. So there’s actually a– I always say you’re safer being in college when you’re 16 or when you’re 20. The most dangerous time to go away to school is when you’re 18 and everybody else is 18 and you’re living in a whole building of 18-year-olds. What can 18-year-olds learn from each other, right, so.

Gretchen Roe: 00:38:34.266
Nothing good, nothing profitable. I’ll put it that way. In fact [crosstalk] 18-year-olds.

Andrew Pudewa: 00:38:37.636
In general. I mean there are exceptions, but. And, really, I mean, if you want to– I know a girl. She’s talented. I’ll give her that. I met her when she was 14, and she was a very good writer. When I met her, she’d been doing IW her whole life. She started taking college classes at 15. She got her bachelor’s degree at 17 and had her master’s degree at 19. And I said, “Well, was it hard?” She goes, “No, you just have to write stuff. Take tests and write stuff. That’s all I had to do.” She did it in education and then in curriculum development. So it wasn’t a hard science. I think if you’ve got someone who says, “No, I want to be in biochemistry, pre-med, engineering.” That’s a little bit different. You can still get a couple years of gen ed done, right, and then go into your upper division science, tech, math stuff. But if you’re interested in one of those more humanities, social sciences areas, the sky’s the limit what can be done. You just have to say, “Yeah. I’m willing to figure out how to do it, and I’m willing to do the work to make it possible.” But in my experience, if you’re– basically, read at an adult level, which most teenage homeschool kids do, and you write decently well, we can help with that the way, we have a new product. Don’t let me forget to tell you about that, Gretchen.

Gretchen Roe: 00:40:05.240
Yes, absolutely.
Andrew Pudewa: 00:40:06.862

And basically, if you’ve got your math facts memorized, you can multiply, divide, know a little bit of algebra, you can go knock off gen ed classes pretty easily. And I know a girl who’s doing this. She took an accounting class, and she was all nervous, like, “I don’t know anything about accounting, and I’ve got my first test coming up.” She got 199 out of 200 points. And she’s just a high school kid taking a college class. And she was pretty happy about that.

Gretchen Roe: 00:40:37.326
And I think one of the things here, Andrew, that is important to recognize is we as parents can cast a vision for our children, but then we need to get out of their way a little bit.
Andrew Pudewa: 00:40:48.741
Yes. Absolutely.

Gretchen Roe: 00:40:49.893
Because we can’t make them do this. My second child, first eldest son, graduated high school at 17 with a year’s worth of college credit under his belt, started his own business, paid his own way through college, finished in three years. And that was because no one told him he couldn’t. And I think there’s a lot of parents here on this list who are looking at this cup as half empty. And I think the– but what about the SATs? There were 31 people who said, “But what about the SATs?” It didn’t matter a bit.

Andrew Pudewa: 00:41:33.055
Yeah, that’s a real easy answer. If you go get a year’s worth of college credits, they won’t even ask you for SAT scores because you already have half your gen ed requirements down. You’ve got a decent transcript and you can even put a transcript together with classes from different institutions.

Gretchen Roe: 00:41:51.456
Yes, there was that question and you had highlighted that as one of the questions you wanted to ask. So what happens if you pull courses from different institutions?

Andrew Pudewa: 00:42:03.331
Yeah. Basically, they stay on a transcript with that institution. And then when you decide where you want to get the degree from, you ask for a transfer of credits. And if there are accredited institutions, almost all credits are transferable, and then you transfer them into one, consolidate, and then finish up there. There’s also organizations that will help do this for you. You knew about CollegePlus. They changed their name to Lumerit. And they built that organization and actually brought the whole idea from homeschooling kids doing college degrees from online accredited institutions. They brought it into the workplace, got some big corporate customers like Chick-fil-A and FedEx. And then the Lumerit, and this kind of hurt my heart a little bit because these were friends of mine who started CollegePlus. They sold Lumerit to Pearson. And of course, Pearson is kind of like the Monsanto of education. They want to control everything and everyone. And they’re in tight with the College Board, the SAT publisher. They’re in tight with McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin. The whole education monopoly conglomerate is pretty, pretty incestuously corrupt. But Lumerit had a subdivision called Unbound, and that was where they specialized in helping homeschool kids do this. Well, Pearson didn’t even know they had this part of Lumerit when they bought it. So it spun off. And now Jonathan Brush and his team run Unbound and Pearson’s not connected with that anymore. So Unbound, and I believe their website is beunbound.us.

Gretchen Roe: 00:43:58.212
It is. And if you want to know more about that, we actually did a webinar with Jonathan last April, so.

Andrew Pudewa: 00:44:03.085
Oh, awesome. Yeah, so reference that.

Gretchen Roe: 00:44:04.778
[crosstalk]. Put Jonathan Brush in the description on demilearning.com and you can watch that webinar and get a great deal of information. I wish I had known about that when I had children in the process. I did not. But Jonathan made me want to go to college again because he made it sound so fascinating.

Andrew Pudewa: 00:44:26.303
And that group, they all take college courses that they’re enrolled in independently, but they work in cohorts and groups and have project and supplemental material. It is a phenomenal program. I’ve been involved with them for a couple of–

Gretchen Roe: 00:44:39.327
It is. Yeah. And what I love about it is it teaches them to pursue their passions, but it balances that with the practicality of learning how to function in the adult world. And I think that that– I see college kids who graduate all the time who have absolutely zero functional capacity in the real world, so being able to balance those things is amazing. Another question for you is when would you suggest that the student stays as a homeschooled high school student versus dual enrollment? I think that’s a great question.

Andrew Pudewa: 00:45:18.131
Well, I mean, it’s not exclusive. You can be a homeschooled high school student and be enrolled in college classes. That’s what dual credit, dual enrollment means. You’re taking the college class and you’re putting the grade for that class on a high school transcript so that if you need a high school diploma, you can get one. You can have one. And depending on what state you’re living in, there’re different ways, HSLDA will help people with their transcripts. There’re a couple of organizations that’ll help with high school transcripts. Although I’ll tell you the funny thing, my daughter Genevieve, the one who quit high school to go to the University of Idaho and then graduated from Franciscan University with a bachelor’s degree, she still never got a high school diploma. And she could easily have continued into graduate school. She just didn’t want to. So there’s no rule that says that somehow if you don’t have a high school diploma, you can’t get a college degree. But most people want to have that base covered just in case. And it’s just a dual enrollment thing. And you create the transcript the same way you would if you were homeschooling, only you use the grade that’s also on a college transcript for the high school class.

Gretchen Roe: 00:46:42.791
Absolutely. We have another really good question here because I know that I saw these three letters come up at least four times in the questions that were submitted. And this says, “As a homeschool foreigner emigrated to the US, we are pretty new to the US system. As I understood what you said, could my high school child directly enroll in a community college instead of doing a GED or is a GED requirement necessary to finish your high school?”

Andrew Pudewa: 00:47:13.238
It probably depends on age. So if you are 15 or 16 and you enroll in a community college, they will not expect a high school diploma or a GED. Like I said, they’re just going to give you a reading comprehension test, probably, if anything. If you are 18 – that’s traditional age of having finished high school – then they may ask for a GED. By the way, a GED is not a hard test to pass. I mean most anyone can walk in cold and do it. But if you want to, you can get a How To Study For The GED and take that test. But that’s the advantage. Now one thing I’ll mention here, Gretchen, is some of these schools will say that you have to be in 10th grade or 11th grade to do a dual enrollment. Okay, now here’s one of the cool things about homeschooling. Who says you can’t skip a grade? I mean, I skipped second grade. My wife skipped eighth grade. Why? Because we were bored to death in school. And so if you’ve got a very sharp 14 or 15 year old, why can you not just say, “Yeah, they’re in 11th grade. They can do 11th grade work.” Right? I mean, and then you just do a bunch of stuff, throw it on your transcript if you need to. But there’s no age requirement. It’s actually a grade level requirement. And I’ll give an example to illustrate this. I read an article just recently about an 11-year-old boy, 11 years old in Israel who entered a PhD program. Obviously, extraordinary, right, exceptional. But quite clearly, he did not cram in four years of high school and four years of college. There’s not eight years in his life to have done that. So what happened? Well, he demonstrated proficiency, was able to do the undergraduate level work at the age of 9, 10, 11, was able to crash through it and somehow, was this savant that– so age is not the point. They might say grade level, but you get to decide grade level. Much like, “Hey, if you if you know that, skip eighth grade, go to ninth grade.” Who’s going to care? Who’s going to even notice, really?

Gretchen Roe: 00:49:54.885
Well, and I laugh because I’m thinking of a cartoon that I read a couple of years ago that it was this student standing in a checkout line and the cashier says, “Oh, you’re homeschooled. What grade are you in?” And the student is like, “Well, in composition, I’m in 11th grade and in math, I’m in 9th grade.” And it’s going through this litany of different grades. And it really, it is true. It is a little bit up to us. I remember taking my eldest to the community college because we wanted her to do dual enrollment. And I was full of anxiety, pulled up, stopped the car. She gets out, goes in because she had an appointment to take this test. She was gone less than 11 minutes. And she comes walking back out to the car. And I’m thinking, “Oh my goodness, I have failed this child. I know nothing. I just see her walking toward me.” But she gets in the car and I said, “How did that go?” And she said, “Fine. It was a reading test. It took me about six minutes. And then I had a nice conversation with the lady and I start classes in 10 days.”

Andrew Pudewa: 00:51:04.051
Yeah. And it’s stories like this that parents need to hear because most parents, their only framework for thinking about this is their own experience.

Gretchen Roe: 00:51:16.085
Correct.

Andrew Pudewa: 00:51:17.111
And what did I do? I spent four years in high school. Then I applied to a university and I had to submit transcripts and SAT scores and I had to pay tuition. And so a lot of people, because that’s what happened to them, they think, “Well, that’s the only way to do it.” But what we’re trying to do is pull up enough stories and examples here, I think, so that everyone realizes, “No, there are way more options than you even know about right now. And there are groups that will help you figure this out.” I want to mention another group, if I may, Gretchen, this group is called Christian Halls International. Their website is christianhalls.org, and their goal is to help communities set up small groups of teenagers and young adults who want to take college classes from accredited institutions, distance learning online classes in a group. So for example, I could say I want to start a Christian Halls group. I can get, 2, 3, 4, 10, 12, 100, however many, teenagers I’ve got or young adults over that age. You don’t have to be any particular age. And we would then, as a group, let’s say I had half a dozen kids. Okay, here’s the menu of classes that Christian Halls International will offer from these different universities. He’s got over a dozen fully accredited universities he’s got courses from. Let’s all enroll in this one class or these two classes or three classes or however many one. So the kids in the group enroll in the same class. They do the work and they’re kind of independently connected to get the credit, which is brokered through Christian Halls International. They handle the fees and the record keeping. But the kids can get together and do the readings, study, write their papers, bounce ideas off each other, hopefully under the supervision of a tutor or an adult who would kind of lead through– help them go through this. And so then you get the best of both worlds. You get a small group tutorial-style study club. You can choose from thousands of different classes that you want to do. You can do one or two or three or more, and they’re fully accredited. And most of these institutions require a kid to be in 10th grade or 11th grade. And they’re not even going to really care if you just say, “Yeah, I’m in 10th grade or 11th grade.” And so then you’re getting community, you’re getting control. All of the schools he works with are Christian colleges, so the course content is done.

Andrew Pudewa: 00:54:09.346
And he even took our structure and style for students one seat. This is a first year grammar and composition course that we offer as a video course. He got that approved from Southeastern University in Florida and Donnelly College as a full year of grammar and composition at the college level. So you could take our first-year high school writing course and get college credit for doing it. Obviously, you have to buy the course from us and then pay more for the college credit. But still, it’s a fraction of what you would pay, say $1,200 for a three-credit course at the University of blah blah, or twice that at a private school. So this group, Christian Halls International, is really doing, I think, a phenomenal job of creating a local person-to-person community building with dual enrollment, college options, fraction of the cost. More classes available than you could imagine. Things like, criminal, criminology, psychology, aviation mechanics, all sorts of classes that are available from these various institutions online. And so you can sign up for a class here, a class there, and a class over there, and they will keep all the credits. And then, like I said, when you’re ready to transform that into an associate’s degree or decide where you want to get a college degree from, you transfer them all into the same institution. And they help with that whole system. Any homeschool convention that anyone goes to now, where your state or GHCs or wherever you go to a homeschool convention, there will be colleges there. And all of those colleges are very interested interested in enrolment for high school kids.

Gretchen Roe: 00:56:06.813
Yep.

Andrew Pudewa: 00:56:07.469
Because if that school, if Cedar Ridge enrols your kid as an eleventh grader, and starts getting them college credits for a couple of years, well where are they most likely to want to go to finish that degree? So for them, it’s outreach, it’s their best potential future student base. So they’re very excited to talk to you about the dual enrolment options. So worst case, just go to a homeschool convention and talk to people.

Gretchen Roe: 00:56:36.483
Absolutely. Andrew, this is a question I had. And hadn’t really pondered, and hadn’t come up in our list. But what if your student fails the dual enrolment course? Will that reflect poorly on a future admission?

Andrew Pudewa: 00:56:48.929
It may or may not. Probably not. But the trick would be drop the class before you fail. I mean, let’s face it. If you get in and it’s– you’re over your head and stuff, you get in the wrong math class, or you get in a tech– and it’s usually going to be a math or science thing. You get in a physics class, and you do really badly on your first quiz. And you’ll know, I’m not ready for this. Then drop the class. That’s the other great thing about this. You can drop a class and maybe lose some money. But not nearly as much money as you would lose if you went to the state university, signed up, and didn’t miss the drop deadline after the first however many days they give you. You drop the class, you save your transcript, but you just lost $1200.

Gretchen Roe: 00:57:45.961
Correct.

Andrew Pudewa: 00:57:46.738
So I think most kids are going to know pretty quick whether they’re doing well in this class or not after the first quiz, assignment, or whatever. I have never heard of that being much of a problem.

Gretchen Roe: 00:57:58.789
So one of the other things that I think is important, if you’re a parent who is thinking about this, your child needs to advocate for themselves. They need to go in, they need to meet the professor teaching the class if they’re doing some sort of online enrolment at a local school. They need to make themselves known. Because the students who make themselves known to the professors are the ones who, if they get in trouble, the professor is willing to help. This is a student they’ve never seen, the odds of them being willing to help you are very small indeed.

Andrew Pudewa: 00:58:34.208
Yeah. That’s so true. And much like your daughter had the experience, most of the kids I know that go and take in-person classes as high school students, professors love them.

Gretchen Roe: 00:58:46.329
Absolutely.

Andrew Pudewa: 00:58:46.979
You know why? They sit in front, they smile, they take good notes, they study for their tests, they participate in classroom discussion. For the most part, your homeschooled 16-year old is a student that is infinitely more appreciated by the professors than the average public school, high school kid that comes in and slumps down in the back row.

Gretchen Roe: 00:59:10.057
Absolutely. Absolutely. And that is part of what our character training needs to be for our children. Whether they matriculate at a local community college while they’re still at home with us, or if they go off somewhere to college. That’s a life skill that they need to know. And we have another question here. It says, “My son would like to study engineering. He already has taken some gen ed dual-enrolment classes. English, history, etc. And plans to take DE calculus and physics. His desired college said to take courses that show your interest in engineering. But refused to be more specific. Do you have any advice?” I do, but I’ll leave that–

Andrew Pudewa: 00:59:54.609
No, I have nothing to say because I don’t know personally, none of my kids, nobody that I know was in this situation. I don’t know what DE stands for. But you go ahead and answer that one because–

Gretchen Roe: 01:00:07.813
I would say that it would be worth another call to the matriculating university to say, “I need you to be more specific.” And here’s here’s what I would do if it were me. I’d coach my student through that conversation and I’d make my student make that phone call yeah and say, “You want me to take some courses that show my interest in engineering. Would you please help me define what those courses would be?”

Andrew Pudewa: 01:00:35.347
Yeah. And honestly, doing an internship at some kind of engineering company even for free would look really, really good on an application tom a higher-tier engineering program at a larger school.

Gretchen Roe: 01:00:53.294
And very often, I will tell you, I have met countless students who now have degrees. And their pathway to that degree started out with doing an internship somewhere locally. And here’s a key: that internship might not be paid. But if they’re willing to invest the time and the effort and the energy, that shows that they have the desire. And that could make a tremendous difference for them.

Andrew Pudewa: 01:01:24.052
And yeah, internships are really the apprenticeship model that worked so well for so many hundreds, thousands of years. And I know one example of a kid who got an internship and it was actually an engineering kind of situation. And they liked him so much, they said, “If you will continue to work for us part-time and go to school here, we’ll pay your school. We’ll pay your tuition at the University of Oklahoma. But you got to stay in workforce.” And that’s pretty much okay. Then, you’re guaranteed a position. At least you know what you’d be getting. And I think that there’s a lot of employers that are very willing to invest in the education of their people if they have some kind of hope that those people are going to stick around and be an asset later on, so.

Gretchen Roe: 01:02:26.324
Right. Kristen did answer the question DE is dual enrollment. So we’re trying to make it into something [laughter] beyond what it really is. So I’m really glad that she answered the question. But I think the important thing here is as parents, we can collaborate, but we can’t be the creative end of the stick. If we want our children to do these kinds of things, they have to take the initiative to go forward with that.

Andrew Pudewa: 01:02:52.016
Yeah, yeah. Before we run out of time here, can I give a plug for our newest product?

Gretchen Roe: 01:02:57.554
Yes, please do because we– I can’t believe we– this conversation has gone so quickly and it’s been so fascinating.

Andrew Pudewa: 01:03:04.764
Well, I’ll go as long as you want. But [laughter] I did want to mention that a lot of people are kind of familiar with IEW. And in some ways, we have a reputation of being really good for, say, upper elementary, middle school, a lot of the classical conversations, people they encounter it in Essentials. But then, their kids go on into challenge levels or– but we do have our newest product I’m very excited about. It’s called The University Ready Writing. URW is our code for this. And what we did in this course was we– it’s a 12-week course. So it’s just basically a semester’s worth rather than a year. And we basically teach as much as we can about the structuring style system combined with the needs– what to be aware of when you go into doing academic writing. So your MLA and APA and formatting and your sources and citations and that stuff. It has a superb module on advanced note-taking, which is kind of like keyword outlines, but on steroids, because you’re using graphic organizing. And it’s the single most valuable thing I ever learned when I was in college was this method of kind of stick branch keyword note-taking. It’s so efficient, so effective. Just that is well worth the whole cost of the course and doing it. But it’s a great course. You can actually get a couple samples online and see if you like it. So if someone is in high school and did not do IEW or feels like writing is kind of a weaker point in the whole equation. You’ve got a kid who’s super strong in the math tech, robotics loves that stuff, but the writing is not the favorite thing. This course is kind of, I think, the most efficient way to get as much experience and information as possible in the shortest amount of time. So very pleased about this course, the way it came out. It was recorded live with live kids in the studio. And we had a lot of professional input from college and university professors to be sure that we would be teaching exactly to that point of need.

Gretchen Roe: 01:05:33.629
Andrew, we’ve come to the end of the hour. So what closing advice would you give to our parents?

Andrew Pudewa: 01:05:39.990
Well, the world is changing very, very quickly. The requirement for having a college degree in order to have a good life is really no longer the case. There are so many opportunities that are outside the traditional go to school for four years, pay a lot of money, and get a piece of paper to hang on your wall. It’s just not a good deal anymore. And that’s not even touching on the problem of the wokeism and the indoctrination and the environment at most colleges. Now, are there good colleges? Yes. Are there Christian liberal arts schools that still have a higher goal in terms of rigor, in terms of character development, tradition? Yes, but they’re harder to find. And right now, I think that most public universities are just really bad environments in so many ways. Your schools like Harvard and Yale are just Uber, Uber woke. And it doesn’t even seem to be necessary. In fact, Elon Musk just recently made a statement. He said, “Educational background has no effect on our hiring.” So you could be an autodidact. You could teach yourself programming. You could teach yourself engineering. You can go get the entire curriculum at MIT for free online and study it. You won’t get the piece of paper that says you paid $120,000 to be at MIT. But do you really need it? And then you think of the fact that most of the jobs that exist today didn’t exist 40 years ago. And a lot of the jobs that exist today won’t exist even 10 years from now. And so kids, they’re much more in tune to the trends and the things that are happening in the people in their demographic. If they can get involved with adults who are running businesses and doing real things, not college people who live in an alternative, pseudo-professional environment, but living in interacting with people who are really working in a professional way and get involved with adults right there while they’re still teenagers, they will have a better concept of what they need to be prepared to do that type of real work and be at the top of their game 10, 15 years from now. The other thing I want to say is there’s this kind of sick thing that is set up. If kids don’t go straight into college from high school, then they lose Pell Grants or scholarships. They lose opportunity. The system is designed to trap the kids into high school and then trap them into college. And it’s a scheme. In some cases, it’s even like a scam. But the scheme is set up to make everybody think that’s what you have to do. Whereas if you would– if you finished a couple of years of college during high school, you’d have a couple of years you could go and do a missions trip. You could go and work in a business for a couple of years. You could go and start your own business for a couple of years and see how that goes. And then decide, well, Okay, from knowing now with a couple of years of real-life experience, what do I want to get out of continuing my college education? Rather than saying, yeah, I’m going to go into social work, and then you go straight from high school and then you graduate with this degree in social work, and you have to go work for somebody that hires social– and you may not even like that. You weren’t old enough to have a concept of what that was before you were so heavily invested in it that you couldn’t back out with losing too much time and money. So I really like the idea of a gap year or a gap two years to just grow up a little bit and know better what the world is about and what you like and how you want to live as an adult. And you can afford the gap year a lot more easily if you are going into it with a year or two of credits already under your belt.

Gretchen Roe: 01:10:16.109
Absolutely. I think that makes a tremendous amount of difference. And I also think there’s merit– and if you have a child who wants to be a social worker, find an opportunity for your child to shadow that person. My youngest son had said from the time he was six, he wanted to be an attorney until he did a three-week internship with an attorney. And he said, absolutely not. I do not want that. But if we had said to him, eh, that’s really not what you want to do, we wouldn’t have been able to dissuade him of that. Having another adult who was willing to bring him alongside them and allow him to see what a real-life attorney’s life looked like. And the attorney he apprenticed with was a criminal defense attorney. It was a valuable experience. Now, if you had told me at the outset that he would come back saying, oh no, I wouldn’t have believed you because I thought for sure his eyes were going to stand on sticks and he was going to want to do that. But here’s where a parent can come alongside your student and say, hey, do you want to do something like this? Let’s see if we can find an opportunity here in our community for you to see what that is like. And what a valuable service for us as parents to be able to provide to allow our children to begin to discern, is this something we want to do?

Andrew Pudewa: 01:11:45.763
Yeah. All good. Well, I hope everyone who was listening and those who listen to the recording will get enough ideas that they can more readily pursue this. And I would encourage anybody, anybody who’s never been to a homeschool convention, just plan on going, even if it’s just a driveway or fly, it is so worth going to a convention. And if you happen to be at a convention where I am or probably where Gretchen is and you want to talk about this some more, I think we’d be very happy to talk about the options. And I’m very excited for young people today. It’s probably the hardest time ever to have been born into history in terms of just keeping up with technology and everything moving so fast and a somewhat uneasy geopolitical climate. But on the other hand, the resources and opportunities and options for young people today are so much greater that it’s kind of a double-edged sword in that way. And we, of course, as parents want to, as you said not micromanage, but help them find the best options and trust that the Holy Spirit will guide and direct as well. I mean the bottom line I figured out about kids is they’re not actually my kids. They’re God’s kids. I just try to help out a little bit and you don’t get to design the sheep. You may be the shepherd for a while, but you don’t get to design the sheep.

Gretchen Roe: 01:13:25.496
Absolutely. That is absolutely the truth. And enjoying the journey is part of the process. Your kids are going to grow up a lot faster than you ever realize. And I wouldn’t have traded a single day. There were some days I might have liked to put them on the big yellow bus, but I wouldn’t have traded a single day. It was awesome. Thank you so much for taking this time to share with us today, Andrew. We’ll have to do it again. There’s a million things we could talk about. I laughed when you said, “Oh, we don’t need to plan this. You and I could talk about anything.”

Andrew Pudewa: 01:13:59.859
Well, I think it was good. And hopefully, we answered some of the more important questions for everybody.

Gretchen Roe: 01:14:06.051
Absolutely.

Andrew Pudewa: 01:14:07.139
I’ll see you in the not-distant future somewhere.

Gretchen Roe: 01:14:10.036
Yes, sir. I will look forward to that. This is Gretchen Roe for the Demme Learning Show. Thank you all so much for joining us. It has been our very great pleasure to spend this time with you. And of course, the show notes and the recording will be available on our YouTube channel or at demmelearning.com/show. Please be sure to rate, follow, review, or subscribe wherever you may be hearing this, especially if you really enjoyed it. And Andrew, I look forward to having a conversation with you in the near future and all of those resources that we talked about today. I promise, everyone, they will be in the show notes. Take care, everyone, and thank you.

Andrew Pudewa: 01:14:48.735
Thank you.

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