[00:00:00] Gretchen Roe: Hi, everyone. The recording that you are about to hear, of my conversation with Kelly Noah, has some glitches in it and we apologize sincerely for the technological challenges that we experienced. We think this information is important enough for you to hear, that we are going to share it anyway. Please enjoy this conversation. I think you will find it insightful and engaging.

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[00:00:33] Gretchen: Good afternoon, everyone. This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show, and it is my absolute delight and pleasure to welcome my esteemed guest and friend, Kelly Noah, to this conversation today. Kelly brings a wealth of knowledge to the table. I had the privilege of meeting her, two years ago, at the MÂCHÉ Conference in Minnesota.

It’s always a serendipity when you find someone who’s like-minded. We have just enjoyed each other’s company. You may have joined us for the last webinar that we did together, and I’ll include that one in the show notes because I know you’re going to find lots of wonderful information. Today, I asked Kelly to talk to me about what it’s like to be a homeschool mom and a full-time working professional. Kelly, tell us about you.

[00:01:21] Kelly Noah: Absolutely. Again, my name is Kelly Noah. I live in Minnesota. My boys, now, are 14 and 12. I was a happy public school student and my husband was a boarding school student internationally. We both were well in our careers when we realized homeschooling was going to be the right fit for us. The boys were preschool age almost, at the time, and we were able to weave in the homeschooling piece along with our jobs and our childcare over the years.

Next thing you know, we’re 10 years into it and we’ve got a model where I’ve been working full-time in the financial industry, my husband’s working full-time in the banking industry, and our kids have been homeschooled the whole time.

[00:02:03] Gretchen: Which is pretty awesome. Part of the reason I wanted to have this conversation is because I am asked frequently, “How do you juggle both homeschooling and working?” I did that for 17 years. I also have to make the caveat that there was a lot less that came at me, in the 17 years that I did that, than comes at any homeschool parent today because of the virtues of technology. Kelly, were you working when you first decided to begin homeschooling?

[00:02:40] Kelly: About 20 years ago, I left the corporate world and I started working with my father in the financial industry. He has a financial planning practice. We already had that work-life balance piece in place. We started right off the bat. The kids would come to work with me one day a week before they were born. We had that piece in there and we had started out with just part-time child care with the idea that I would have two days a week that I’m only working and not also being a parent and making that a very extended day.

We started from the very beginning having a little bit of compartmentalization. As we added on the other pieces of education, in addition to taking care of raising our little humans, it really fit in one step at a time, pretty stainlessly.

[00:03:30] Gretchen: Kelly, did you know that your children learned differently from the very get-go, or is that something that unfolded to you along the journey?

[00:03:39] Kelly: Along the journey. I think that’s a two-piece answer in that we learned pretty early that, as parents, we were going to be involved in our children’s education. We wanted to raise lifelong learners and that was not specific to, “Are you going to public school? Are you going to private school? Are you homeschooled?” That was a piece on our end. Then we ended up having kids who were pretty academically advanced.

Those two pieces came together pretty quickly. We started just being deliberate learners at home, realized homeschooling was going to be a deliberate way of extending their education track.

[00:04:12] Gretchen: When I met you at MÂCHÉ, you were the representative for the Minnesota Group for the Gifted and Talented. You still work with them and run a full-time business and educate your children. Are you still involved in the sheriff’s department, in the training, and things like that as well?

[00:04:33] Kelly: Fortunately, the volunteer part of doing all that rescue and recovery, I chose to close that chapter when the kids came around. There are a lot of people who can do that work, but there’s only one person who could be my kid’s mom, and it was time to move on to that. I do still volunteer extensively with Minnesota Council for the Gifted & Talented, not just to give back, but because, through these 10 years, this is where I’ve learned everything that I know that I can help other parents learn too.

[00:05:03] Gretchen: I think that makes everything that you’ve got to say exceedingly valuable. Now, you also, just a couple of months ago, completed the opportunity to keynote for a classical organization. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

[00:05:19] Kelly: Absolutely. In 2023, the Minnesota Classical Education Conference featured keynote speaker Susan Wise Bauer. I hadn’t gone to the conference before, but the opportunity to sit and have a conversation with Susan Wise Bauer was fantastic. I went to the conference, and after the conference, the organizers got ahold of me and said, “Hey, we had some conversations over dinner with you. We want to hear more about the homeschooling community and how we can really help the homeschooling community and classical education community learn from each other more.”

We sat and had a cup of coffee, and then I got an email the next day saying, “Hey, all those things that we just talked about and had that great conversation, that would make a keynote speak. Would you please come and create this content based on what we talked about?” We did this great conversation called Teachable Moments with Temperance and talking about finding place for thoughtful questions and honored answers. It was an opportunity to take all these things I’ve learned over the years and bring them into education and parenting. Quite the honor.

[00:06:24] Gretchen: I should also say you volunteered for this one, to have this conversation. Kelly, in your experience, having had this conversation in bits and pieces with parents for a number of years, what’s the thing that parents most want to know about being able to juggle their children’s education and work?

[00:06:46] Kelly: What parents often want to know is different from what I can tell them. Often, in the world of 2020’s work and homeschooling, parents want to know how they can take one eight-hour block, and be an eight-hour employee and an eight-hour parent, and an eight-hour educator all in the same block. As much as I would love to have that happen, it’s really difficult to do those well, and you can be cheating yourself, your kids, and your employer by trying to do all of those things in the same eight hours.

What I’ve really learned, over the years, is that success can be based on creating a rhythm rather than a structured schedule that’s rigid, and knowing what all those pieces are. Over the years, as I’m planning curriculum, I’m not just looking at what my kids want to learn, I’m looking at what types of days I want them to learn that information. I’m looking for– Some days of the week, they’re independent learners. What can I give them and have them do on their own?

Some days of the week, what do they need me for? We’re going to be learning together. Some days of the week, what are they doing while I’m nearby and can help but I’m mostly working on my own thing? Being able to build my curriculum work. Boy, if math is going to be all me this semester, maybe social studies will be a little more independent work. Maybe we’re going to be working really hard on writing together, so science will be some things that they can do while I’m nearby. It’s building up those pieces that have the flexibility.

[00:08:21] Gretchen: You are probably more intentional in advance with planning than a lot of parents see themselves as being. How did you learn to do that?

[00:08:34] Kelly: The hard way. Right. Again, we got really lucky in the way that we had my work schedule, from the very beginning, and that if you consider a five-day work week, I had one day where the kids came with me, two days where I was home with them but doing some work, and two days where I go to the office and I am not available. We can have different levels of focus. I think that’s one of the most important keys I would recommend for a family is to work out with sometimes two adults in the house or sometimes more, to have days where each day you know what the focus is.

Do you remember, from COVID, the term “Blursday”? If we try to have all days be all the same and we’re just squishing all these pieces together and doing everything part way and they all blend together, that can be really difficult. Where instead we’ve learned the hard way, over the years, to have days that feel like those days. In our family, it’s by the day of the week.

We know what a Monday feels like. We know what a Tuesday, Thursday feels like. We know what a Wednesday feels like. I actually have a quick story. As these kids get their rhythms down, I’ve got a 14-year-old in that stage of sleep where, despite his best intentions, he can’t get out of bed without a blast of dynamite. He’s at that stage. I went into his room one day last week. We’ve been going through a merger at work, so I’ve been a little busy. I said, “Hey bud, I know it’s a Wednesday during co-op, right? It should be a mom lesson day, but I need to go take a meeting at the office and I’ll be home by lunchtime.” I wrote this down.

The little bundle underneath the covers said, “Should I do Math Lesson 73, Science Unit 5 Lesson 1, and read History Chapter 3, and we’ll do the others together when you get home?” Out of complete sleep, this teenager knew Wednesday, mom lesson day, what can I do on my own and what am I going to do when mom gets home? Even remembered the lesson number he was working on. That’s 10 years of work.

[00:10:41] Gretchen: I was going to say, so at what point could you have that kind of interaction? My kids were all wildly different. My brilliant eldest son couldn’t be left alone to do a single math problem until he was 17 years old. My youngest son said, “Why don’t you give me a list and I’ll let you know if I need you with [unintelligible 00:11:01]

[00:11:02] Kelly: Absolutely. I didn’t say any of those things actually got done. Even in the child’s– He made groggy, mostly asleep, under the cover pile, he could translate, “Wednesday, co-op break, mom will be back. What can I do by myself and what do I know mom wants to do together?” It’s just building those rhythms in and knowing what a Monday feels like or a Thursday feels like is really useful.

[00:11:32] Gretchen: How did you create that? They don’t spring full-blown from the beginning with that kind of thought process. What was your process to create that in them?

[00:11:46] Kelly: It was a matter of living it consistently. Part of the beauty of homeschooling is that we look at school often as being 180 to 200 days a year, and we look at work as being 200 to 220 days a year, and we try to fit those into the same calendar. By homeschooling, we were able to tear that apart and put it back together in a way that we layered those across the 365 days and kept it consistent.

Just that simple concept of being able to go to year-round homeschooling and shortening the days and flexing the days goes a really long way. We’re able to look at it from a year-long perspective and say, “This is what we do on Saturdays, this is what we do on Tuesdays.”

[00:12:40] Gretchen: I know there’s people who are going to hear you say that and it’s so ingrained in their head that school is from September to May, that a lot of this, in your world, had to be a paradigm fit for you and your husband before you could even bring your kid for work.

[00:13:00] Kelly: In a way, but then in a way, we’re parents 24/7. Everybody who’s looking to do this are parents 24/7. It’s just a matter of, is this time when my kids are playing by themselves? Is it time when they’re playing with us? Is it time when we’re going to church? What are all of these pieces together? Layering that education is just a different part of parenting in a way.

By expanding into year-round, by choosing a day—for us right now, it’s Saturday, that’s also a lesson day—it allows us to confine how much we’re trying to accomplish during that work day into a smaller amount.

[00:13:35] Gretchen: Are you choosing your subjects to accomplish or are you accomplishing more subjects from a classical perspective? Stick with the classical subjects, you’re just spreading them over a wider period of time.

[00:13:55] Kelly: I would say we’re doing more subjects, but a smaller amount to be complete. If I look over the course of the year, how much time have we spent on each subject and each sub-subject, it’s going to add up to the same amount but in a different way.

[00:14:10] Gretchen: How do you and your husband share that burden? My husband is amazing, but there are some hilariously funny stories of the few times where he was in charge of the academics and it didn’t go well. He is a great dad and a great collaborator with our children until it came to the academics, and friction arose. How do you negotiate that?

[00:14:42] Kelly: Good question. I’ve had the privilege of talking to a lot of family, and I’ve found, most often, the tension comes if one parent is in charge and they’re assigning the other parent to do things their way, and with their objectives. That can be a really challenging handoff to say, “Oh, it’s Tuesday. I need to go somewhere. Here’s everything I want done with the kids my way. You do this my way.” That can be a lot of tension. “Tell me what to do or tell me how to do it, don’t tell me both.”

The most success that I’ve seen when parents are talking about sharing homeschooling is dividing a jurisdiction very clearly and dividing most commonly by subject. Having one parent’s smaller involvement, they might choose one subject that they do or two topics that they do, and those get finite and in this finite periods of time, and it doesn’t swap off depending on who happens to be home that day.

I’ve heard a great story. One of my husband’s former coworkers, he and his spouse shared a job and homeschooled their kids and it sounded like a nightmare to me. I couldn’t picture one of us is at the office, one of us is at home, and it gets to the end of the day, and never mind, “Hi, honey, what are we having for dinner? I missed you today.” It was, “Here’s everything that happened at work. Here’s everything that happened with the kids,” and swap them back and forth.

I found that they job-shared, but they swap every six months. They had clear jurisdictions that one parent was home for six months while the other parent did the job and got to be the adult. Then they only had to transition twice a year rather than wasting time constantly going back and forth about, whose job is this part? How do we communicate the clear boundaries, good jurisdiction, and trust in each other, that they’ve got this, even if it doesn’t look the way that you think it might?

[00:16:38] Gretchen: That makes sense, but then you add on—or maybe not add on—also, that an extraordinary number of families where there’s a single parent trying to juggle work, trying to dabble the academics. Do you have those conversations with–

[00:16:59] Kelly: I do have those conversations, and I haven’t seen working models where one person is full-time employee and full-time parent and full-time educator all at once. Unless you’ve got complete flexibility and you can squeeze all of your workday around the childcare and the homeschooling. There just needs to be some other support. It’s a lot to ask of the kids to be patient all day while you’re working too. If your work is a 9:00 to 5:00 type thing, there will need to be bigger village, I think, for success.

[00:17:39] Gretchen: You think so. Now have you had conversations with that group who have had villages? I also find that, as you have said, clear jurisdictions, clear responsibilities, I think sometimes, particularly when a grandparent might be involved, it gets a little muddy as to who’s responsible for what.

[00:18:02] Kelly: Everything I learned the hard way is when you’re bringing other people in to be both carer and educator to pay attention to their strengths first. Though, for many of our years, two days a week, we’d have somebody come into the house and be with the kids. I had these lofty ideas. We hired somebody with very specific objectives in mind and she was going to teach the kids this and this and this, and that’s why I chose that person.

Then it turned out what she was best at is taking long walks with the kids and sitting and looking at bugs for 40 minutes. That is something that the kids need and that’s something that I can’t do while I’m going back and forth between work and teaching them. Being able to have the modesty to say, “Wait a minute, this person’s best skills for my kids are this.

Look, let that happen.” Then shift around where other things are happening.

It’s a little bit like when you talk to somebody who’s learning how to homeschool kids of multiple ages and a veteran parent says, “Start your day playing with the toddler.” Rather than asking the toddler to be patient all morning while you’re doing lessons with the older kids, just stop and spend a half an hour with a toddler and the rest of the day goes better. I think that that same concept can apply when you’re using your village, is just find out what need that fills the best for your kids because you can probably do anything but this other person’s going to do one thing best. Let that come first and shift your expectations for what your roles will be.

[00:19:37] Gretchen: There’s a couple of questions that I want to ask you that I thought were so important, and one of them is keeping your children engaged. This could be a whole conversation of an hour of its own, but do you find that your decisions for curriculum are driven by your boys’ preferences, or do you have the long-term objectives, and then you look for something that meets those chapters?

[00:20:12] Kelly: In our house, I would say the decisions are informed by their interests, but not driven by them. Absolutely. Getting that engagement. You know your learner and you don’t want to set them up for something that will just blow up. You also want to be giving your kids stretch material, and that’s another benefit of homeschooling. You can decide that this semester, this subject is going to be where they go into material they’re not interested in, because that’s just part of learning, but also knowing that this is going to be a stretch this semester. The other subjects, I might let lead a little more in the areas that they’re in the style or interest that they’re comfortable.

[00:20:51] Gretchen: The other question is, how do you have energy at the end of the day?

[00:20:57] Kelly: Insane amounts of caffeine.

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[00:21:00] Kelly: I’m not going to lie, there’s a lot of caffeine. Part of it is ensuring that all my communities where I’m plugged into—my work community, my volunteer community, my co-op community, my family narrowly and more broadly—they’re all places that feed me. I know I belong in all of those places and I’m making contributions and I’m getting supported back.

That is part of how I’m able to continue doing all of these things because I know they belong. They’re authentic to who I am. They’re getting what their value is and they’re bringing me, my family, and my community where they need to go.

[00:21:38] Gretchen: Brings to mind another question. How does Kelly [unintelligible 00:21:42] Kelly?

[00:21:42] Kelly: Late at night, after everybody’s gone to bed. Part of it is that building– At work, we call it deliberate recreation. Making sure that the things that you’re doing for pleasure also feed some other part of you. I’m still in a couple of book clubs just for me, or a couple of things that are good for my body in those couple of pieces. It is snuck around the edges.

I do put myself last more than I should, but it’s also deliberate to the stage of life. If anybody else feels like they can’t do it all, it’s true. Things do have to take smaller roles. If everything’s important, nothing’s important.

[00:22:24] Gretchen: Oh, I love that. That’s a really wise thing for us to take away. If everything is important, nothing is important. It’s true. They can’t all have equal space. In the closing moments of our conversation, as a parent who full-time homeschools her students, her boys, and full-time works a job, what would be the most imperative piece of advice you would want to share?

[00:22:56] Kelly: Be intentional about your rhythm. Not every day needs to look the same. Knowing that each day is going to have different purposes and not expecting a day to do something that’s not its job. Plan your time, your week, or your life, knowing that each day has things to accomplish and not all days will be all same.

[00:23:20] Gretchen: I thank you so much for joining me. This was really a deep conversation with a lot of pieces and parts. I think the one thing that I would want parents to take away from this is, you can do it, but you can’t do it if you can’t plan for it. Much of what you have said has been that forethought of planning in advance, and this doesn’t happen by happenstance, that we need to be very intentional to make things work the way we want them to.

[00:23:53] Kelly: Thank you for sharing everything that you’ve learned with me, Gretchen. I learn every time we talk. I appreciate that.

[00:23:57] Gretchen: I know. I always look forward to it. We’re going to have to find something else to talk about somewhere down the road.

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