Be Inspired in Your Homeschooling with Jennifer Pepito

Angie Tolpin (0:00)

Hey guys, welcome back to the Courageous Parenting Podcast. Today, I have a special friend on the podcast with me. We're going to be talking all things homeschool. It's Jennifer Pepito.

She has just come out with another homeschooling book, another encouragement for moms. It's called The Inspired Homeschool. And so we're going to talk a little bit about that, but we're going to talk about all things regarding homeschooling, because how long have you been homeschooling, Jennifer?

Jennifer Pepito (0:23)

I'm in my 30th year.

Angie Tolpin (0:26)

30 years, you have a good six years on me.

Jennifer Pepito (0:30)

That's amazing.

Angie Tolpin (0:31)

I love that. You're like a mentor.

Jennifer Pepito (0:33)

Well, I have less kids, though. So I, you know, I have homeschooled that long, but I've never really full time homeschooled high school. I've always had my kids in high school in either college classes or co-op classes, or I've had tutors. So you can, you probably have more like real time homeschooling. I only have seven kids, Angie, so.

Angie Tolpin (0:52)

Only, you just said only. A lot of moms listening are like, seven kids. That's a lot.

You know what? God's grace is so needed when you're homeschooling, right? Because his grace is so much bigger than our mistakes and our shortcomings as moms, but it has been a true delight and joy. We're stepping into our 24th year, and my youngest is five. So I still have a good 11 years left.

Jennifer Pepito (1:18)

You'll be doing this for a while.

Angie Tolpin (1:20)

I will be, yeah. So it's funny because I don't know if you have spent a lot of time talking to other moms and trying to encourage them regarding seasons and saying, oh, well, this is just a season. And now after, I mean, being a mom of nine and having 24 years in, and I still have 11 years to go at least, it's like, oh no, that's like a good chunk of my life.

Yeah.

Jennifer Pepito (1:43)

And you know, honestly though, for me, it does feel like a season. Like I loved homeschooling. We did a lot of project-based learning.

I love being with my kids. I love the field trips and the watercolor painting and the reading aloud. And it was a very grievous thing for me to have to ease out of that because my youngest is a 17-year-old man and he's working and the time for me to do all those fun homeschooling things with him is pretty much over. And so I just loved it. It was fantastic, but it is over. And so it was a season. And I think moms listening, thinking, maybe it would just be even a shorter season. Maybe a mom would just do it for elementary school or just do it for, you know, for a season of their education. It really does go fast. And the memories we made are so precious and have really shaped our family.

Angie Tolpin (2:32)

That's incredible. Well, I want to just point to your book for a second because I love learning about famous people or people who have been inventors or have had big impact on the world and the ones that were actually homeschooled. That's actually been a huge encouragement to me. Even when I was a young mom, I got this, it was a lamp lighter book called Mothers of Famous Men. I don't know if you've ever seen it, but it was written a long time ago and it just highlights men who were homeschooled over the years like George Washington, Abe Lincoln, different people. And that to me was incredibly inspiring because one of the biggest things I felt was a lie that I struggled with was I'm not good enough. Or I never got a teacher's degree at college and so what am I doing teaching my kids? And people, when we first started, there were different people that would say things, whether it was socialization or how are you going to do high school math or how are you going to do that or science or because I love history, I love writing and reading, but then when it comes to stuff like science, that's not really my big jam. I like it, but it's not like, oh, let's do a science experiment. That sounds messy.

And so reading about people who were famous and had gone before made an impact in the world and that their home education didn't ruin them was encouraging.

And that's largely, you have highlighted so many people in your book.

Jennifer Pepito (3:59)

Yeah, and I think it is really encouraging, isn't it? Because a lot of people look at homeschooling as if it's this experiment, like, oh, you know, that's not the normal way to do things. But historically, history was the way of doing things. And so when you look at most of the really impactful people in history, they were homeschooled, at least part of the time. You know, even CS. Lewis, I include him in the book because he was homeschooled and his mother for a little bit in the early years. And then in high school, he was taught, you know, one-on-one with a tutor. So he was homeschooled, staying with his tutor, being a mentor by the tutor and his wife. And so, you know, there's just so much power in that kind of teaching where you're a little bit more one-on-one, or maybe you're one-on-five or one-on-nine in your case. But there's a lot more personalized attention. There's a lot more guidance available. There's a lot more conversation. Like, you know, my children all scored really well on the SAT tests. But I think in large part, it was all the reading we did and all the talking we did. Like they had to use vocabulary. We were talking so much as a family and reading so much that it gave them an understanding of words and their meanings.