Well, Let's Get Started!

James R. Hannibal - Stealth Pilot, Adventure Writer, Home School Dad

Well, Let's Get Started!

That's my favorite line from an old Steve Martin routine. Twenty minutes into the performance, he's still trying to get started. That's how I feel as I try to write this blog (a crumpled pile of rejected openings lies strewn about my desk), and that's how I often feel as a Home School Dad... Okay, now I'm ready, let's get started! I've been saying that weekly for a little over a year.

So... seriously... Let's get started!

It's an honor to kick off the Dads Teach Blog for TeachAndEquip.com. The founders hope that this will just be the first of hundreds of entries from Dads across the Home Education community. Everyone's invited. This isn't a writing contest or a business promotion. It's a forum for sharing ideas: Why you Home School, what challenges you face, what you've learned, your deepest fears about Home Education, anything that will support, aid, and encourage the rest of us that are facing the same obstacles.

Share? Talk about our fears? Come on Hannibal, we're GUYS! Mainly we grunt and nod and occasionally bump knuckles.

I know. But let's face it - Home Education is exploding, it's spreading like wildfire, and as macho as explosions and wildfire sound, we're not the ones blowing things up or blazing trails...

The chicks are.

If you're like me, you're hanging on for dear life as Mom blazes the trail ahead.

As unlikely as it sounds, it seems all of that sharing and caring that the girls do is making serious headway. And praise God! Because if it was up to us (the grunting, knuckle bumping crowd), the Home Education community would still be trapped in tiny islands around the country, each desperately trying to keep the other islands from seeing their weaknesses.

Now, if Home Education is building at this rate fueled mostly by Moms, imagine what would happen if (gulps nervously) if we started  communicating with one another!

Anyone... Anyone... Bueller? (crickets chirping pointedly)

Alright, I'll start.

A year and a half ago, if you'd have asked me about Home Schooling, I would have given you a long practiced soliloquy about child isolation and my awkward college roommate. Even though I lived in the midst of the largest Home Education community in the country, I had no clue. And because I'm a guy, my first answer was my final answer. Discussion was unnecessary.

I knew Home School Dads. Worse, I was related to Home School Dads. I didn't ask... they didn't tell (you military guys in the back quit snickering).

Fortunately for me, my wife is an incredibly persistent woman. She ignored my stonewall attitude and showed me the difference between my perception and the reality. Wow! How could I have been so wrong?

If only I had asked instead of assuming I knew the answer. If only one of those Home School Dads had said "Dude (obligatory grunt), you are missing out!" If that had happened, I would be a three year Home School Dad instead of a rookie one year Home School Dad.

Was I scared to leap off of the Home School precipice? Ha! I have faced enemy bullets and missiles. I have hurled my body out of perfectly good airplanes. I have wrestled with professional fighters... I was terrified.

But we did it, for many of the same reasons that you did. The state of public education, the dangers, the freedom of determining our own schedule. We did it. And it has been wonderful. The change wrought in my life by this transition is immeasurable. I've gone from watching my kids grow up to helping them grow, from standing on the sidelines to getting in the game.

Is it hard? Does it take sacrifice? Of course. But the reward is so much greater than the cost.


I hope that you Dads out there are experiencing the same joy. Maybe next time we'll get into some more details about those sacrifices. Maybe one of you would like to (gulp again) share.

Jot down a couple of paragraphs and send them to DadsTeach@gmail.com (don't use attachments, just put your submission in the body of the e-mail). It's time we got moving on this fellas...

Let's Get Started!