November 5, 2025 • 57 mins
We challenge the grading mindset that squeezes the life out of young writers and replace it with coaching, curiosity, and real audiences. Julie Bogart shares practical steps—jot-it-down, family freewrites, reader response, playful revision, and a kind mechanics mop-up—that help kids find their voice.
• treating writing as self-expression first, transcription second
• separating ideas from mechanics and using scribing or voice-to-text
• shifting from evaluation to allyship and coaching
• creating real audiences to replace single-grader assignments
• using jot-it-down to “publish” kids’ spoken words
• family freewrites to build fluency and confidence
• reader response that guides without wounding
• playful revision that builds flexibility and voice
• gentle mechanics mop-up with student choice and intent
• releasing parent performance pressure and trusting development
About our guest
Julie Bogart is known for her common sense writing, critical thinking and home education advice. Julie’s the creator of the award-winning, innovative online writing program called Brave Writer serving 191 countries and hundreds of thousands of families. She is the author of Help! My Kid Hates Writing, The Brave Learner and Raising Critical Thinkers.
Her Substack, podcast, and social media are wildly popular sources of support to weary, well-intentioned parents. Julie home educated her five children who are now adults and she has three grandchildren.
Connect with Julie
Brave Writer
Substack
Podcast
@Julie Bogart
Got a story to share or question you want us to answer? Send us a message!
About the podcast
The KindlED Podcast explores the science of nurturing children's potential and creating empowering learning environments.
Powered by Prenda Microschools, each episode offers actionable insights to help you ignite your child's love of learning. We'll dive into evidence-based tools and techniques that kindle young learners' curiosity, motivation, and well-being.
Got a burning question?
We're all ears! If you have a question or topic you'd love our hosts to tackle, please send it to podcast@prenda.com. Let's dive into the conversation together!
Important links:
• Connect with us on social
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
SPEAKER_00 (00:00):
Because when they obey the language ticker tape in
their minds and they followtheir sophisticated vocabulary,
the complex sentence structure,their use of irony, their senses
of humor, that stuff is hard topunctuate.
It's hard to spell.
So when they take this braverisk of putting out their best
ideas, and someone comes alongand is like, but you're missing
(00:21):
a comma because it's misspelled,they literally learn to dumb
down their content to get an A.
SPEAKER_02 (00:29):
Hi, and welcome to the Kindle Podcast.
I'm Katie Broadbent, your host,and today we're gonna talk to
Julie Bogart, who is one of myabsolute favorite people.
And I'm so excited to share thisconversation with you because
you are gonna be so inspired andjust feel so much more confident
and excited to tackle writingwith your students or kids.
And I am so excited to share allof Julie's knowledge and her
(00:52):
wisdom and her love for studentsand for families and for parents
and for educators.
It was truly an incredibleconversation and so excited to
share with you.
Before we jump in, I'm gonnashare a little bit about
Julie's, just so you know whereshe's coming from.
Julie Bogart is known for hercommon sense writing, critical
thinking, and home educationadvice.
She's the creator of theaward-winning innovative online
writing program called BraveWriter, which serves 191
(01:14):
countries and hundreds ofthousands of families.
She's the author of Help, My KidHates Writing, The Brave
Learner, and Raising CriticalThinkers, all amazing books that
everyone needs to read.
Her Substack podcasts and socialmedia are widely popular sources
of support to weary,well-intentioned parents.
She's home and educated her fivechildren who are now adults, and
she has three grandchildren.
So let's get to our conversationwith Julie.
(01:35):
Julie Bogart, welcome to theKindled Podcast.
We're so happy to have you ontoday.
It's such a treat to be here.
Thanks, Katie.
So I want to get started byhelping our audience understand
where you're coming from.
Who are you?
Tell us your story.
How did you get to be doing whatyou're doing?
And what is kind of like yourbig why or the change you're
seeking to make in the world?
SPEAKER_00 (01:55):
Oh my gosh, great questions.
So I'm a mother of five adultkids, and I became interested in
homeschooling before I even knewwhat it was, or was married, or
had children.
I was introduced to a friend ofmy soon-to-be husband, and he
asked me if I was going tohomeschool my kids.
And I was like, home what?
Like I'd never heard those twowords together.
(02:17):
This was 1984.
And he proceeded to talk aboutthis idea that you could
tailor-make the education ofyour individual kids.
And ironically, I had a reallygreat public school experience.
I was raised in the 1960s and70s, before No Child Left
Behind.
My teachers were all likeex-Peace Corps, you know, first
generation Peace Corps hippietypes.
(02:37):
My school was in Malibu Canyon.
So they were really creative.
Like my memories of school arebeing in the creek and doing
nature study, doing anarchaeological dig, having a
renaissance fair for the entireseventh grade.
Like there was this trueinvestment in learning that was
both kinesthetic andimaginative.
(02:58):
And I really loved that.
But by the time I was incollege, I went to UCLA, I
worked as an assistant to ateacher in a junior high.
And all of that was gone.
Like this was the 1980s, and itjust seemed like everybody was
doing what we call dittoes.
They're like worksheets thatwere mimeographed in the old
fashioned.
Yeah, purple ink.
There was a lot of sitting atdesks and performing to
(03:21):
standards.
And so when I heard this pitchfor homeschool, ironically, my
thought was, then I can give mykids the kind of education I got
in public school, which is abackwards way of thinking about
it.
But for me, it made a lot ofsense.
By the time I had kids, I wasalready a freelance writer.
I worked in magazines andediting and ghostwriting at the
(03:43):
time.
And suddenly my peer group wasasking these questions of me.
How are you teaching your kidsto write?
And it had never dawned on methat I would need a curriculum
because my mother was aprofessional author.
She had written at that point, Idon't know, 20 or 30 books.
She's gone now, but she wroteover 70 books in her lifetime,
(04:03):
taught writing.
And I was a writer from theyoungest age, six, seven, eight
years old.
And I just used all of the toolsprofessional writers use to grow
as a writer.
And so when it was time to teachmy kids, that's where my brain
went.
Like, well, what does PeterElbow say about writing?
What does Pat Schneider sayabout writing?
I got interested inself-expression for writing, not
(04:28):
how do I hit all the formatsthat fourth grade standardized
tests require.
And we had great success.
So when my friends startedasking me how to teach writing,
it was like this naturalresponse.
I found myself suddenly likeleading a Sunday school class at
church on how to teach writing.
Parents and teachers came tothis thing.
(04:48):
Then I got invited by theCalifornia Independent Study
Program to give lectures onteaching writing.
I'm a history major, notjournalism.
My work was all freelance andgenerated by passion.
But for some reason, I kind ofhad this understanding that
writing support from an adultneeded to be more like an ally
(05:11):
and a coach rather than anevaluator.
And over the last 25 years, Ilaunched my company in January
of 2000 to help parents teachtheir kids to write.
And the number one goal I hadwas for them to build a really
loving, nurturing, supportiverelationship through writing, a
relationship that didn't seetears, resentment, pain, and
(05:36):
frankly, what happens in schoolabuse, like really harmful
instruction in the name ofteaching that ends up leaving
lasting scars long intoadulthood.
I want to reverse that.
That has been my passion for thelast 30 years.
And I really want to see schoolsget out of the business of
evaluation and more in thebusiness of support, coaching,
(06:00):
and allyship.
In fact, if they took more ofthe approach that a coach does
for a volleyball team, theywould get so much further with
writing than they do with thisevaluation strategy.
SPEAKER_02 (06:13):
Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, almost any time
a child writes something, it'scorrected.
All of it.
Yeah.
I mean, and then I've read Ithink maybe most of what you've
written.
And like I've read, I've readall of the writing things.
Like I I love it.
I'm I was telling my husbandthis morning, like, I'm so
excited.
I get to talk to one of my likeeducational heroes today and
(06:35):
like learn from her.
So I'm like so excited to haveyou.
One of the things that you'vesaid that has really like caught
me and like like reframed howI've been thinking about writing
for Prenda and also for my ownkids.
And my kids, my oldest hasdysgraphia.
He struggles a lot with writing.
They've done a few differentwriting programs.
(06:56):
They definitely have like a badtaste in their mouth.
And even that's even at Prendawhere they're not like doing
worksheets all day.
Like they they are like livingthe dream educationally, and
they still are having arehitting the struggle bus with
writing, like haven't figured itout.
And a lot of it has to do, likeI have this, my son who is 12,
and he is very creative.
This kid reads at like a 10thgrade level.
(07:17):
He'll read 500 pages in a week.
He like is very into, he's alanguage kid.
He just can't like get it outlike through he he has like his
motor issues, like you know,getting with the dysgraph.
So it's like all of thiscreativity and this
self-expression, all thesestories are like bottled in him.
And I've wanted so desperatelyto like unlock that.
(07:39):
And so I I guess I'll just kindof tell you his story a little
bit so you can know where we'recoming from.
Like I I discovered your workand started implementing some of
the things like just onSaturdays at home.
And we started doing freerights, we started playing the
games that you suggest.
And I hope we'll we'll get tosome of those things because
they're just so practical andlike things you can do right now
(07:59):
that are so easy.
So we'll get to those.
Um yeah, just started kind oflike Saturday morning writing
club with all my kids, like sixyears old to 12, or she's
actually five, five to twelve.
At first, they were like, We'renot writing.
Like, we all hate writing.
I was not like a lot.
I was like, okay, well, likejust have an open mind.
Like this might be a littledifferent.
And then after the first few,they were like, Oh, is this
(08:21):
writing?
Like exactly.
And I was like, Yeah, this iswriting.
And they like I I stopped beingthe person saying, like, it's
writing time.
And like they were like, Oh, wewe missed writing yesterday.
They were like reminding me.
Um, and it it was like soamazing to see it, like, took
three weeks of like just adifferent approach and like a
(08:41):
different attitude and belief inmy heart and mind around
writing.
And they felt that directly.
So talk a little bit about like,I mean, that that's probably a
very common story for you in in,you know, helping people through
this, but tell some of thosestories and like what do you
usually see when you what is thereframing that you try to try to
make for parents?
You know, how is this different?
(09:02):
We've talked about like notbeing an evaluator, but like,
what's the other thing thatyou're supposed to be doing?
How do you ally?
How do you coach?
SPEAKER_00 (09:10):
Absolutely.
That is really the heart of mywork.
And my new book, Help My KidHates Writing, is all about that
because we tend to focus on thechild, but really it has to do
with the person who issupporting and growing the
writer.
You know, imagine if your childwas learning to speak.
I tell this story, my son was 12months old and he was sitting in
a high chair behind me while Iwas washing dishes, and he said
(09:32):
nana.
And I knew he meant banana.
So imagine if I had turnedaround and said, Oh, Noah, nana
is the word banana.
It's a noun.
It goes in a sentence like thisI would like a banana.
And because it's a request, youneed to use the oral format
called etiquette.
I need to hear you say, I wouldlike a banana, please, right?
Like we never do that withspeech.
(09:53):
We immediately stopped callingbananas bananas for at least a
year.
We only called them nanas.
We tried to get him to eatbananas.
I called my mother on theinternational line to tell her
that her grandson is brilliantand said his first word.
And then I did what every parentof a new child does.
I wrote in his baby book theword nana and dated it.
(10:16):
In that moment, I turned himinto a published author because
my thought was this word is sointeresting.
I want generations from now toknow he uttered it.
Writing is self-expressiontranscribed.
That's all it is.
And the transcription can happenby the child or the parent, it
can be voice to text, it couldbe a hired secretary.
(10:38):
My father, who is a careerlawyer, never learned to type
until 15 years ago and he's 88years old.
Why?
Because he dictated everythingto his secretary, his entire
adult life.
Would we say he wasn't writing?
Would we give the credit to thesecretary?
Would we say that his closingarguments were written by the
(11:00):
secretary because she had goodspelling and punctuation?
Absolutely not.
We start with the premise thatwriting is the expression of a
self, it is the internalizedperson externalized, and we find
whatever availabletranscriptionist we can.
And right now that's radicallychanging because of spell and
(11:21):
grammar check, the coming ofChat GPT and other AI tools.
So in this moment, it's moreimportant than ever that we put
the priority on the unique humanmind, the thoughts that belong
to our children, because thetranscription skills are less
important than ever.
They've always been not asimportant as thought, but
(11:45):
they're a lot less important nowthan they've ever been.
So the reframe is what's goingon inside your child?
How do we get that out andpreserve it in writing for an
interested audience?
That's the goal.
The goal is to be read.
Imagine that you've been askedto do a full-on report on
(12:06):
ancient Greece, and you actuallyget excited about this report.
You do all the reading, you doall the preparation, and then
you write something to describewhat you learned, and there's
only one reader, and that readeris gonna grade it.
Who wants that?
That would be like saying, I'mlearning to play soccer, and I'm
(12:27):
gonna stand out on this fieldand try to kick past the goalie
for one referee who's just gonnadecide whether or not it was a
good goal.
Like no one would play soccer.
That would never be the game.
The part that we forget aboutwriting is that it is not a
means to an end.
Most of us treat writing likethis is how we go up a grade, or
(12:50):
this is how we go to college, orthis is how we get a job.
No.
There was this huge TikTokraging anger by women, young
wives, who discovered theirhusbands wrote their vows using
Chat GPT.
Why were they mad?
Why do you think they were upsetabout that?
SPEAKER_02 (13:09):
I would imagine that they perceived that as like not
authentically the husband'sthought or like feeling.
Exactly.
SPEAKER_00 (13:19):
The goal of that man, those young men, was to do
it right.
They had been trained theirentire lives that writing has to
be done right.
It has to meet some standardthat's invisible to them.
It's out in the air.
They're hunting and pecking forthe words that live in somebody
else's mind and imagination.
And so they're facing thisreally important moment.
(13:42):
They don't want to do it wrong.
And the wives are like, I justwant to hear your heart.
I want you to be comfortableenough with how you feel about
me that you can put those wordsout there on your own.
And this is what's being lostevery single day that we keep on
with this very bizarre system ofwriting instruction that says
(14:04):
you write for an audience of onewho will tell you that that
first draft isn't good enough.
And guess what?
When you write your first draft,it's the best you can do.
If you could write it better,you already would have.
So why does someone get to comeback and say, well, you should
have done it this way?
Do you think they willfully heldback what they couldn't do?
(14:25):
No.
It's it's a horrible, horriblesystem for teaching writing.
SPEAKER_02 (14:30):
That's interesting.
It's like our obsession withdoing it well has neutered our
ability to do it authentically.
Like I have real thought.
Those husbands had real thoughtsand feelings, but because of it,
and I it kind of goes back tosomething you said earlier.
Like you said the sentence fromthe age six or seven, I was a
(14:50):
writer.
Like you gave yourself thatinternal like label.
Like I was living into me beinga writer, right?
Those kids, anytime they wrote,they were evaluated and they
were shown not a writer, not awriter, not a writer.
So then when it's like, hey, nowit's time for me to like express
myself, but I'm not a writer,what do I do?
I'm going to be evaluated.
And this is like a veryimportant moment in my life.
(15:10):
I don't want to mess this up.
So they go to ChatGPT out ofhonestly, like fear.
That's right.
But their self-expression wouldnot be sufficient.
SPEAKER_00 (15:20):
That's right.
Out of logic.
I mean, it's logical.
Like if your only experience ofwriting is repeatedly trying and
not hitting the mark, then whywould you keep trying?
Why not just let a tool do itfor you?
I mean, it's like using acalculator, right?
Like I'm not going to work on mytimes tables anymore.
(15:40):
I have a calculator, that'sover.
Yeah.
I'm not even against chat GPT.
In fact, in my new book, I havea whole chapter on it.
But what I am, what I do worryabout is that adults have
misunderstood what writing is.
Here's what I want you to know.
Kids love writing, they do itall the time.
In fact, with the advent of theinternet, the dawn of the
(16:02):
internet, more human childrenwere writing every day than in
the history of humankind.
I just want you to let that sinkin.
When the internet came along,children were like, the main
thing I want to do is write.
They all got live journals,MySpaces, they joined Facebook,
they started discussion groupsfor their online games.
They love writing.
(16:24):
Today they make TikToks, that'swriting.
They make reels, that's writing.
They have YouTube channels,that's writing.
And we're over here saying, no,it's not writing unless it looks
like a report that matchesfourth grade standards.
By the way, most of the writingthat gets A's in school is
boring.
No one wants to read it.
It's terrible writing.
(16:45):
I remember one of my friendscame to me, her name was Glenda,
and she said, Julie, I'mstruggling teaching my kids to
write.
And I know that you're afreelance writer.
Can you help me?
Now, at the time, my oldestchild was in fourth grade, and
we had already started doingfree writing, kind of like what
you described, and I wasn'treally struggling teaching it.
So I said, Well, what are youusing?
(17:05):
Because I had no curriculum.
I was like, What are you using?
I want to see what you're usingfor writing.
So she brings over this navyblue binder.
It's three-ring, very ugly.
I I think that's important tonote that even the binder was
awful.
I opened it up and there's asample descriptive paragraph and
then an explanation for how towrite one.
(17:25):
So I read the sample paragraphto myself and I turned to Glenda
and I said, Did you read thisparagraph?
And she said, Yeah.
I said, Did you like it?
She goes, What do you mean?
I said, Well, when you read it,did you think to yourself,
shoot, I wish there was a secondparagraph?
She goes, I can't even rememberwhat it said.
And I just closed the book and Isaid, Why would you use as a
(17:46):
model for writing something sounmemorable?
You can't even think about, youcan't remember what this
paragraph said.
It held no interest for you.
Why would that be a good modelfor writing?
She goes, but isn't it correct?
I said, So when you're out inthe world looking for things to
read, are you looking forcorrect things?
(18:06):
Or are you looking forinteresting things?
Writing at its core is aboutcompelling a reader to keep
reading.
Nobody finished a novel andsaid, you gotta read this book,
every comma perfectly placed.
I was so touched by the commas.
No one finishes and says, nailedthe format.
(18:27):
That is not what we say when weread.
And unfortunately, so many ofour kids who are actually really
clever, naturally good at usinglanguage, get marked down
because when they obey thelanguage ticker tape in their
minds and they follow theirsophisticated vocabulary, the
complex sentence structure,their use of irony, their senses
(18:50):
of humor, that stuff is hard topunctuate.
It's hard to spell.
So when they take this braverisk of putting out their best
ideas, and someone comes alongand is like, but you're missing
a comma because it's misspelled,they literally learn to dumb
down their content to get an A.
It's horrible.
SPEAKER_02 (19:10):
This is the same thing we do to kids in like
literature, right?
Where it's like, okay, you keepwe're we're we're being so
progressive and giving you likea choice over what book you're
reading.
And then, but your goal is toget an A on some comprehension
task, right?
It's like, so which is thesimplest, shortest book, right?
The logical choice.
And I remember being in highschool and thinking, like, oh,
(19:32):
well, that one's only 80 pagesand that one's 200.
Why would I pick that like moreadvanced, like more challenging
read if my goal is to get an A,right?
It's like Well, that's right.
It's undercurrence andmotivation.
SPEAKER_00 (19:43):
That's right.
Parents all the time talk aboutlike grades, standards.
I taught at the university leveland I had a student.
Uh, this is a great story.
I had a student who didn't wantto be in my class for sure.
My communication at thebeginning of the class was I'm
gonna be your favorite teacherbecause I don't care about
grades.
So if you want to rewrite youressay five times, you can meet
(20:06):
with me five times and we willjust keep working on it until it
satisfies you and me.
Your tests are open note, openbook, because it's up to you to
care about the material.
And I want you to actually readthe question and be able to
answer it the same way you willafter you're out of this class,
which is you're gonna go lookstuff up.
Like, I don't need it stored inyour brain.
I need to know it how you thinkabout it.
(20:26):
What insight do you have aboutit?
Not did you store theinformation in your brain?
That's just irrelevant to me.
So the student was pulling likea low B, and he really needed an
A to keep his scholarship.
So for the midterm, it was opennote open book, and he basically
didn't do it.
He got a D.
How do you get a D on an opennote open book test?
I don't know.
(20:47):
He pulled an A on the final, butwhen I put all of it together,
he came out with a B plus.
And he met me at my office hoursand said that I had not done the
correct percentage calculation.
He was trying to show me that Ihe's like, I did the calculation
and I knew I only needed a D.
And I said, you know, you didn'tdo the right calculation.
(21:08):
This is what's on the syllabus.
And he's like, no, you saidsomething different in class.
I said, it doesn't matter.
This was open note, open book.
Like you could have put ineffort, but you didn't want to
learn.
All you wanted was to maintain aGPA, and that's not what I'm
about.
I don't care about GPA.
I told you that at thebeginning.
This is the difference.
(21:29):
When we say to our students thatyour GPA is tied to your
scholarship, and then we gradeeverything, it's logical that
kids in college are using ChatGPT.
It's a financial decision atthat point.
It has nothing to do withlearning.
My writing sort of mentor, guru,Peter Elbow, he recently died,
(21:50):
but we were very close friends.
And over the years, he was justa wonderful cheerleader for my
work.
And one of the things he said tome, he worked at the University
of Massachusetts at Amherst andled this writing group.
And all of his work has beenused in freshman composition
books across the United States.
And one of the things he said tome when he heard that I was in
(22:12):
the homeschooling space was hesaid, Oh my gosh, you finally
get to do what I never got todo.
And that is teach writingwithout grades.
He said, No matter how manyassignments I gave in a
classroom that were grade free,the end result always had to be
a grade.
So it always felt a little bitphony.
He said, But you actually get towork on writing with no threat
(22:33):
hanging over any child's head.
And for homeschoolers, that isabsolutely factual.
Like, and yet they still thinkthat grades matter.
I'm like, yes, they don't.
You're at home.
SPEAKER_02 (22:47):
Yeah, so true.
Well, we're reallyindoctrinated, like as parents,
to like look to experts and likethat judgment and that expertise
is like the end all be all.
And it's really, really hard,myself included.
Like I live in this alternativeeducation world.
Like I've written many, manywords about the danger of grades
and like how that like you knowundercuts motivation and like
(23:08):
makes kids makes it logical forkids to not choose learning.
To cheat.
You know, these grades areprinting.
All these things.
And I still feel this pressurefor my kids to like perform and
like, you know, I feel thissocietal judgment, maybe.
And I I yeah, can we talk aboutthat since you admitted that?
Tell me more.
SPEAKER_00 (23:27):
Tell me more.
What is it when you say the wordperform?
Who are they performing for?
SPEAKER_02 (23:35):
Okay, this is gonna get raw.
Ready?
I am afraid of other humans'judgment of me and my choices as
a parent in the educationalworld.
If I was just sending my kids topublic school and they were poor
writers, I'd have a person toblame.
Like, oh, the schools, oh, theirteacher, oh, the classes are too
big.
Like I'd have like a an easy outthat wouldn't be my fault.
(23:56):
Because I've completely takenlike the reins here and like my
kids are in Prenda, I help buildPrenda, like I feel like
accountable and like, oh, you'redoing something weird.
Okay, like does weird work?
And I'm like, it works, but notby your standard.
It's like, it's it's like ifyou're over here playing soccer,
we're playing an entirelydifferent game over here, and
(24:18):
you're trying to judge our gameby soccer rules.
And it's like, well, it doesn'tlook like soccer to me.
Like, you're not getting a lotof goals.
I'm like, there's not even agoalie over here.
Like, what?
It's completely different.
But like I can't help youunderstand that.
So then just the little voiceinside, it just pops up like,
oh, maybe it's not working.
Maybe you should put them backin school.
Maybe you shouldn't trustyourself.
Like all of these things pop upfor me.
(24:39):
And it still happens all theseyears later.
My kids have, I mean, I'vethey've never been in
traditional school.
I've homeschooled, microschooledthe whole time, four kids.
So it just still happens.
No, that's exactly true.
SPEAKER_00 (24:52):
It's real for me.
I was running a writinginstruction business, right?
And uh, two examples of whatyou're talking about happened to
me.
One was my daughter decided shesaw I was teaching all these
online classes, so she thought,well, that would be fun.
I want to be in one.
So I put her in one.
And then I was mortified.
I'm like, they're gonna judge methat my daughter's misspelling.
(25:13):
So before she was in the class,it didn't bother me at all.
The second that she was in acontext where I would be judged,
suddenly now I am worried abouthow she looks.
And we actually had to have atalk about that once she was an
adult.
Like she remembered it.
She's like, Mom, you kind of goton me a little bit.
And this was, of course, I wasin my 30s.
We're like, you know, or early40s, like just working these
(25:36):
things out.
So that's one kind of humorousstory about how it even got to
me.
A second one is I started gradschool while I was teaching
these classes.
And I hadn't written a researchpaper or an essay since college,
and now it's like 20 yearslater.
And the first research paperthat I got assigned, I was
teaching an essay class online,and I had absolute massive
(26:00):
writer's block.
I could not even get startedbecause the fear was if I didn't
get an A on this research paper,I am a fraud and should not be
teaching this class and chargingpeople money for this
instruction.
And that log jam completelyblocked me.
The only way out of it at thetime is I did two things.
(26:22):
And I think these are kind ofremarkable.
The first one was I told mystudents, I was like, it just
hit me that I am nervous thatI'm gonna get a B on this paper,
and that means I'm a fraud, andhere you're trusting me to
prepare you for college.
I'm so nervous about this paper.
And the way high schoolers dowhen you trust them with
(26:43):
vulnerability, they're like,Mrs.
Bougar, you got this, you know.
And I said to them, I imaginesome of you feel that way about
submitting your essays to me.
And I just want you to know Iknow the feeling.
So I will, I'm not harsh.
I will be walking with you everystep of the way.
I hold no judgment for you.
So that was our bargain.
It was really amazing.
Then I reached out, oh, and theywere saying things to me like,
(27:05):
just free write, Mrs.
Bogart, like the very advice I'dgive them.
Then I called my professor and Ishared this dilemma with her.
And she said something I'llnever forget.
She said, Julie, the goal ofthis class isn't writing
instruction, it's learning.
Just write a paper.
She said, Maybe you need to justwrite 10 pages that you throw
(27:25):
away.
This is advice I give all thetime.
And then write the paper.
But I'm here to support you inlearning.
So even if you make a mistake,we're gonna fix it because
you're here to learn.
And those two things reallystruck me at the time, the way
students were so willing tosupport me when I was honest,
and the way my professor waswilling to reframe with me.
(27:48):
And of course I did.
I wrote 10 pages of crap andthen threw it away and then
wrote my paper.
And I did actually get an A, butby then it mattered so much
less.
I was suddenly back in the worldof writing, the way that I knew
it.
And so I think we have to bereally honest that the peer
pressure as adults is as strongas it is for kids.
(28:09):
And if we're carrying it, we'retransferring it to our children,
like I did with my daughter.
My youngest daughter, uh, I havefive kids.
So by the time I got to her, I'dalready been through four kids,
right?
And she decided to go to publichigh school, which for all four
years.
And during that first semester,she had some challenges with
(28:30):
math, didn't feel as prepared asshe thought she should have
been, and met with the teacher,got all the way up to grade
level within a semester, and gotan A.
And I was like super proud ofthat.
And I was talking about it.
And she stopped me and saidthese words.
She said, Mom, you've nevercared about grades.
And now that I'm in high school,I need you to keep not caring.
(28:51):
So you are not allowed to go onthe parent portal.
You will not know any of mygrades for the rest of my
academic life.
And I think I'm the only parentwho never visited the portal for
all four years of high schooland never college.
I didn't know her GPA.
I don't know how she did on asingle test.
It wasn't until I got to hercollege graduation that I saw
(29:14):
she made the honor roll.
I had no idea until I saw thelittle asterisks.
And that was liberating for bothof us.
And I'm telling you, I thinkthat's the problem.
You named it so beautifully.
It's this peer pressure, thisfeeling of being judged that
grades already create.
And then we we internalize it sodeeply and we forget what
(29:36):
learning is.
What is learning?
SPEAKER_02 (29:38):
Yeah.
A big part of the backbone ofwhy I think that that peer
pressure and societal likestress has persisted is because
of grades, largely, but theunder the furry underbelly of
grades is like the belief thatkids should be at a certain
place at a certain time.
And if they're not, it's aproblem.
And so when I was reading umyour your your writing program,
(30:02):
you discuss you talked about,and you'll you'll correct me, I
won't quote this correctly, butsomething like the process of
learning how to speak, you know,is like the foundation for
learning to write.
And that happens between likezero and five or zero and seven
or whatever.
And then the process of learninghow to write happens from the
ages of eight to eighteen.
And it's like that just likerelieved so much stress off of
(30:25):
my parent.
Because now it's like, hey, mychild is nine.
They're, you don't have to likecarry this huge weight of all of
these standards and things thatthey have to do or should do and
but like make them like thestory is if you can do these
things, you're valuable.
And I think we really need tostep back from that.
It's like the ideas inside ofyou are valuable no matter how
(30:46):
they come out of you.
And we want to know them.
We want to hear your voice,right?
But we we put, we crowd out allof that with how it should be
and the you're not enoughsunless kind of vibe that we feel
as parents and then we transferas you're saying to kids.
And so just knowing like this isa really long process just
allowed me to take a deepbreath.
(31:07):
And remember like I feel like Iwas not learning what my kids
are supposed to be learning now,like until late high school or
college.
Like it is so pushed down onthem.
And I just want to like pushback so hard and create the
space for them to just be andthat's not to say like I don't
want them to have strong writingskills.
I do.
I do want them to know where toput the commas and the periods
(31:29):
and stuff but you have to we'regetting the cart before the the
horse before the cart.
No, that's the right way.
The cart before the horse that'sthe wrong way.
SPEAKER_00 (31:38):
Well also they're just two different sets of
skills and it would be reallynice if we could separate them
like work on the mechanics.
That's why I love CharlotteMason and the European continent
emphasis on copy work anddictation in France last year.
French people love dictation Istudied in France for a year of
college and the first week I wasthere one of my teachers had us
(32:00):
do a sight unseen two-pagesingle line space dictation.
So the front of a page and theback of the page I got 83
mistakes because I'm an AmericanEnglish speaker.
This was sight unseen.
I was new to the Frenchuniversity system.
Like they love dique.
And last year in France athousand people gathered on the
(32:21):
Champs Élysée at the Arc deTriomphe in Paris to do a group
diquet.
So like we can celebrate beinggood at punctuation spelling,
handwriting, taking a text sightunseen and accurately
punctuating it.
Like that's a beautiful kind offun marathon run a marathon kind
of challenge.
Yeah.
Like that's what we want to seeit as like this is a skill but
(32:44):
that's completely separate fromthe ideas in your head.
The ideas in your head deserveto be valued even if I gouged
out both your eyes and choppedoff both your hands.
You don't have to be good atspelling and punctuating to be
considered a good writer.
A good writer is somebody whohas thoughts that they value
that generate insight andentertainment for other people.
(33:06):
And here's what's amazing ourkids are great at it.
They are quirky, they'reinventive they don't use all the
tried and true cliches becausethey don't know them yet.
Their perspective is unique.
One of the analogies I use in mybook is a lot of times the way
writing gets taught is thatyou're supposed to imitate an
adult writer.
(33:26):
So like Aesop you know write afable like Aesop or copy this
you know descriptive paragraphthat was created by an adult and
do some version of that as aneight-year-old it's almost like
they're saying your writing willbe valuable once it sounds like
an adult wrote it.
That's kind of the messaging butimagine if we did that with the
(33:47):
photographs of our children.
Like we take a picture of themat age seven and then we
photoshop it to look like theadult they will become that's
what we're doing.
We're taking the mind life of achild and photoshopping it into
the mind life of an adult in ourwriting instruction instead of
valuing each adorable expressionof a mind as it grows over time.
(34:12):
What's so beautiful is thecollection of writings I have of
my kids are actually moreprecious to me than my photo
albums.
When I go back and read them Iam instantly awestruck by their
ingenuity, their vocabularytheir senses of humor.
Sometimes my heart is rippedout.
I found this um this journal ofmy oldest son who struggled with
(34:36):
anything that looked likeorganized learning, any
organized structured learning atall.
And he had a series of freewrites that were literally
painful.
Like I read them just a fewweeks ago and I wanted to call
him he's 37 I felt the angst ofall of that he is a self-taught
computer programmer with threechildren and a wife and a house
(34:58):
somehow got there right quitcollege three times taught
himself everything he knows andrereading that knowing who he
actually is was painful becauseI thought I think I was worried
and he could feel my worry.
He was my oldest child I didn'thave a blueprint or a roadmap.
I didn't know how to trust allof the process but that's what
(35:20):
we need to do.
And I'm grateful that he had aplace where he felt he could
tell his truth that he could getthis angst that was living
inside of him out onto a pageand not hide it.
I'm certain that I read it backthen.
We probably talked about it backthen.
But I share that with youbecause I think I think in our
rush to try and get our kids tofit in, we actually damage them.
(35:44):
We harm them there's a story Itell in my book about this 69
year old man that I met at abusiness networking event.
He has built multiple six, sevenand eight figure businesses.
Like the guy is really smart.
And I told him oh well I run youknow this homeschool business
for writing right like thatdoesn't sound the same to a guy
(36:05):
like that.
And he said oh tell me about it.
So I described that we teachthese classes where we bring in
the parents and the kidstogether and we teach not just
the child but the parent how tobe a good writing coach and ally
to their child.
And he said oh I wish I had hadthat and I said oh really and
then he unfolded this story ofhow he wrote a paper it was like
(36:26):
a short story in elementaryschool his mom loved it his
friends loved it he turned it inand when it came back it got an
A for content and an F forgrammar.
And he said that F has loomed solarge in his life that to this
day he only uses voice to text.
If he's giving a presentationfrom front of the boardroom and
(36:47):
there's a whiteboard he makessomeone else do the writing on
the whiteboard while he'stalking that he is terrified to
write emails because he's soworried he'll make a mistake.
He's 69 and I said to him youknow what it didn't have to be
that way and he got tears in hiseyes the amount of trauma that
(37:09):
we justify in the name ofwriting correction is
horrifying.
I meet these adults all the timeevery conference I give there is
a mass of adults who havewriter's block and yet they
double down on the same methodsthat harmed them with their
children because they've neverheard there was another way.
SPEAKER_02 (37:29):
Okay let's go into that what is the other way just
give us I know like I've spenthours and hours reading all of
your content and all the tipsand tricks and things like that.
Just give us like two or threegetting started you know like if
I wanted to treat my childdifferently or my microschool
kids differently around writingtomorrow what are some light
things that I could you know goin with the very beginning is to
(37:51):
catch your child in the act ofself-expression and to jot it
down.
SPEAKER_00 (37:55):
So you're making dinner, your child comes running
in from the backyard they'relike hey Rocky was chasing a
squirrel you know they'retalking about their dog just
turn the stove off grab a pencilthe back of an envelope and
without saying a word don'tannounce anything just start
writing the exact words yourchild's saying a child will
likely say something along thelines of Mom, what are you
(38:15):
doing?
And you say back to your child,this is so good.
I don't want to forget it so I'mwriting it down.
That's your script.
And most kids will keep talkingsome will double the length that
they talk because that's apretty impressive moment.
Some kids don't like you to jotit down and so if they tell you
to stop just make eye contactlisten like you are a little
audio recorder.
(38:36):
And the second they walk awayjot down as much as you remember
as close to what they said asyou can.
That night at dinner I want youto pull out the envelope and
simply say hey Josh was tellingme about how Rocky was chasing a
squirrel in the backyard and Iwas afraid I was going to forget
it.
So I wrote it down.
I just want to share it with youand read their exact words to
(38:57):
the family and just value it ascommunication.
It's obvious that it's writingbecause you wrote it down.
The words that would havedisappeared into the thin air
are now protected and preservedon the back of this envelope.
When you're done toss it in thelibrary basket and over the next
few weeks when you're readinglibrary books every now and then
(39:19):
just pull it out oh rememberthat story Josh told let's read
it again.
The first message your childrenneed around writing whether
they're 16 or six is that thewriter lives inside and is
self-expressed through a mouthnot that it comes through a pen.
And until they know that theirinner life the way it lives in
(39:41):
them with the vocabulary that'snatural to them is worthy of the
page and being read andappreciated until they know that
they don't know what writing isthey think it's about spelling
they think it's about guessingwhat the teacher wanted them to
say.
So we always start by jottingdown those free thoughts.
And if you have a teenager theymight not tell you a story in
(40:03):
quite the same way.
I say just wait until you'rehaving a discussion over a rule
in the family, right?
Like how many hours they can beon the computer or whether
they're allowed to drive alonedowntown or go on a date,
whatever it is, jot down theirreasoning for their point of
view.
Stay very interested and writeit all down.
Oh, and you think this and thisis how you understand it.
(40:25):
And then share that with theother parent the three of you
and value the thought life inwriting that's the beginning of
the writing life.
SPEAKER_02 (40:34):
I love that.
So I've done this with my kidsthat hate writing and it was
like instantly it switched fromthe I hate writing and this is
not a thing to you see me as awriter.
You see me as someone who hasvaluable thoughts and I'm like
I'm so sorry for whatever I didbefore.
Like they were even like likesaying these things to me and I
(40:56):
would we were I remember it waswe were up way too late.
We stay up so late readingnovels together me and my boys I
know sometimes people say likemy kids are too old to read
aloud to them like never hopethat never happens.
We're never reading it to myhusband allowed I did it for
years.
Yeah that's great.
Yeah so we're up super latereading and I just like paused
and asked a question and theylike gave some like little like
(41:19):
not an answer that they haven'thadn't really thought about it.
But I wrote it I had a notebookand I wrote it down and then I
wrote down what the other sonsaid and he they were like what
are you doing?
I was like oh your thoughts arejust so interesting.
I just wanted to get them downright just like you say.
And then the discussion changedsuddenly they were very pensive
and they were like how I reallyfeel about this is blah blah
(41:40):
blah blah blah blah like it wasjust like just erupted with
thought and like we weresuddenly having this very deep
conversation about like a realissue in the world and like how
they are anyways it was justlike our conversation just got
so real because I was showingthem that it mattered and that
(42:01):
like making a record ofsomething matters.
SPEAKER_00 (42:04):
And that they will come to you once they believe
that they'll even ask you towrite things down for them.
I remember when my son Liam wasfour and he was making all these
little Lego men and they eachhad superpowers and kinds of
skills and points associated andhe really wanted me to love this
system but there was no way Iwas going to remember it.
(42:24):
So I got a clipboard and I put alittle sheet of paper on it and
I said tell me about each one soI wrote down their names and
their special powers and whatthey did for each one.
And then I wrote down the pointshe assigned to them.
He carried that clipboard aroundfor a month he was four and he
started adding zeros to the endof the numbers like it started
(42:44):
out at 40 by the end it was like40 billion right but think about
that then every time we read itthe number changed because he
had made an actual change to thenumber and so his understanding
of reading and writing were soblended so early that the
thoughts in his head mattered.
He memorized what order I hadwritten them in.
He couldn't read yet but he wasproud of the fact that there was
(43:08):
a written record of these littleLego characters.
My daughter Johanna one timejotted down an entire version of
Cinderella that her sister toldher at bedtime when I was out
one evening I came home shemeets me at the front door she's
like Catrin wrote a story andI'm thinking Catrin's five she
hasn't written yet and thenJohanna pulls out a clipboard
(43:28):
and here she's transcribed thisentire story at the pace of
Catrin telling it it's allsloping bad handwriting
misspellings beautiful story.
And she understood that this iswhat we do in our family.
If people are saying greatthoughts we better get them down
right so that's the first step.
The second step you talked aboutbefore and that is free writing.
(43:52):
So when we make the shift fromyou being the transcriptionist
for your child to them writingtheir own thoughts we give them
time and space to write howeverit comes out but we do it as a
group like I love that youshared that it was a family
practice on a Saturday morning.
This is not a timed writing testand it isn't something we do to
(44:13):
our children.
It's something we do with them.
I'm really big on family freewriting the point of it is this
we dedicate a little short spanof time you could start with
three or five minutes.
You set the timer you know up onthe stove everybody's got a
blank sheet of paper and apencil and then you write
without stopping that's the onlyrule.
(44:34):
There's no crossing out there'sno starting over you just keep
writing so if you get stuck andyou can't think of something to
say you just write I'm stuck I'mstuck I'm stuck or I hate this
or it's really stupid or youknow I wish I could go play on
the computer like you write whatcomes to your brain because what
you're doing is you're trainingyour hand to take dictation from
(44:54):
your mind, to follow that tickertape of thoughts and to put it
in written language.
What ends up happening is kidswho learn how to do that start
to value their own thoughts.
They're putting their ownthoughts into a written record
that can be read back.
I had one of my kids who wasjust not as into journaling some
(45:14):
really love journaling somedon't but he would be really sad
at the end of like an overnightcamp experience or a rock
climbing wall competition andhe'd he'd be so nostalgic for it
it would like hurt his heart.
And I said well I know you don'tlike journals but you could keep
a special occasion journal whereyou just write after something
(45:35):
that's really meaningful thesame way you would have taken
pictures of it.
Just write a little record of itand you can just do that
whenever it happens.
He's in his 30s and he still hasit and it's just one composition
book but it's got all of hismost precious memories as a
child written at that age andstage of development in his own
hand.
(45:56):
This is the gift we're trying togive our families is the freedom
to value their own thinking.
I write in my book a whole bunchof free writing prompts ways to
use that activity if youpre-order my book we actually
are giving a family free writingguide to everybody who
pre-orders so that's those arekind of the two beginning steps
(46:18):
for a really vibrant writinglife but of course I have all
kinds of strategies for revisionand editing where the parent
learns how to give the kind offeedback that a child can
receive because that's reallywhere the rubber meets the road.
You're trying to correctsomething that the child already
thinks is good.
And we have lots of strategiesfor that too.
SPEAKER_02 (46:40):
Yeah so you're saying that there is a time to
like circle back and like let'stalk about some mechanics let
mechanics let's talk about somethought organization ideas but
it isn't the first thing you do.
SPEAKER_00 (46:50):
It's not the first thing and we also approach it
completely differently.
So to give you a thumbnailsketch most people approach it
like here are some things to fixand change, right?
That's that's the teacher.
But a reader doesn't a readerreads to the interested so the
kind of feedback I have parentsgive is what I call reader
(47:11):
response feedback.
So you're gonna read like thefirst two sentences and you
might notice in your body ohthis is a cool topic I'm
interested in knowing more.
So you're gonna literally say toyour child or write on the sheet
of paper to your child, cooltopic octopuses, I don't know
that much about them.
Thanks for that topic.
Then two sentences later you'rereading along and they have this
(47:34):
really interesting likedescription about the tentacles
and it grips you and you say wowthat's suction cups like we have
on the back of our you knowrinse side of the sink holding
that little mat down.
You described it to be likethat.
That is a comparison I've neverthought of did you know that's
called a simile you just used asimile that's amazing.
(47:58):
Okay.
Now you keep going and they saysomething they do a non sequitur
and you're you're suddenly offtrack and you don't know why
they went there.
And so you say I'm reading alongI'm really following and then
you brought up something fromour Lake Michigan visit.
I'm curious to know more aboutthat.
How does that connect?
I'm curious about that asopposed to disconnected vague
(48:21):
off topic that's a teachercomment.
A reader comment is much moregenerous.
It's the same way you spoke withyour child when they were
learning to talk.
Sometimes you'd say things likedid you mean to say and then you
give them a script and they copyit.
You don't feel bad about thatbut you would never say no
that's not how you say it.
(48:42):
You know you should know alreadyhow to say it.
That's not how we talk tochildren.
So when we're being readers whoare responding we're actually
sharing the impact of thewriting which is the only reason
anyone writes is to have animpact on a reader.
SPEAKER_01 (48:58):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_00 (48:58):
So I give you all kinds of understandings of how
to be that reader.
What are things you can saybecause you have to train
yourself.
It's not something you know howto do because you've been
indoctrinated by school.
And we have these strategies forrevision that teach kids to get
comfortable making changeswithout improving the writing.
So the goal isn't to improve itit's just to get comfortable
(49:20):
imagining that it could be adifferent way.
Could we write it in a differentvoice?
Could we turn it into a lie?
Could we just count threeadjectives and just change three
adjectives like what you knowusing a die.
Just roll the dice oh the numberis five we're gonna change five
nouns and just see what thatfeels like as opposed to it
always being like the perfectstandard lives in the
(49:42):
imagination of this otherperson.
And I didn't do a good enoughjob yet of guessing what that
is.
SPEAKER_02 (49:48):
One of my favorite suggestions that we've done is
like they'll do a free write andthen um one of your prompts I
think is something like rewriteit as if everyone were pirates
or something love that.
And my mom my my kids lost it.
Like they were having so muchfun and I'm like okay this feels
so much different and when Itold them first like they
(50:09):
they've used they used severalother writing programs which I
won't mention but um I wastalking about maybe doing this
is before we started kind oftrying this new writing approach
and they were like does thatmean that we wouldn't have to do
this and this like all likenaming all of the mechanics and
grammar things andsimultaneously my two boys 10
and 10 and 12 simultaneouslyfist bump in the air and they
(50:31):
just yell freedom and I'm likeoh my gosh that was like it
seemed like you scripted that ina movie and that was real like
simultaneously shouts of freedomand I'm like I just want that
for every child and I want to beable to continually to like give
that that to my kids and I Ifeel like we just don't know
how.
And so I'm so grateful for yourwork in painting that picture.
(50:53):
How do we do this?
SPEAKER_00 (50:54):
That's right.
And you know there is a time atthe end of this lengthy process
after a child feels red, afterthey've messed with it Six Ways
to Tuesday, after they enhancethe content to then do what I
call the mechanics mop-up, whichis just cleaning up the the
stragglers, right?
But here's the amazing thingyour kids are capable of doing
(51:15):
it.
We don't need a teacher to provethey know where a period goes we
need the child to know where itgoes.
So when a teacher goes throughand makes all those changes
they've done research that showsit never shows up in the next
paper.
That doesn't improve anyone'sskill set to see that a teacher
knows how to spell a word.
That's absurd.
What we want to do is send ourkids back to their own papers
(51:37):
weeks later or a week laterwhere they have some distance
and we ask them to put on theirown editor hat.
And then I use this language Isay go through your paper now
and make sure you like all yourspelling and punctuation
choices.
That's very different than gothrough and correct your
mistakes because sometimes thechoice is deliberate.
(51:58):
You misspell it because it'ssupposed to be misspelled in
that character's personality oryou don't use a period because
you really do want it to be arun-on sentence there are
reasons to make choices that goagainst conventions but we want
our kids to go through first andsee if they can even see their
(52:20):
own writing challenges you willbe amazed.
And I give a little strategy forhow to set that up for success
and a little guide that you cangive your kids but that's all in
this book Help My Kid HatesWriting and it's in our
curriculum at Bravewriter.
And this approach, you know, ittakes time to get used to but
once you're in it starts to feelvery natural because it is it's
(52:43):
the natural way you want to bewith your family.
It's not this weird adoptedpersona of teacher.
SPEAKER_02 (52:49):
Right.
I love it.
And it has really changed ourfamily so I'm so grateful for
it.
Tell everyone how they can learnmore about your work.
SPEAKER_00 (52:57):
Yeah so I'm on Instagram at JulieBraveRider so
please follow me there.
I have a Substack called BraveLearning with Julie Bogart.
It includes a weekly podcast forkids on Monday mornings called
Monday Morning Meeting and it'sme talking to kids giving them
one sort of creative way toembrace their learning that week
and so far the feedback's beenincredible.
(53:18):
Like the kids just do all of it.
It's very fun.
And especially if you feellimited in your own imagination
you can sort of borrow mine fora little while and get in the
groove.
And then I have my books all onsale at my author site
juliebartwriter.com.
I have the Brave Learner whichis the book that tells my
pedagogy about homeschoolingraising critical thinkers you
(53:41):
know needs no explanation inthis moment.
SPEAKER_02 (53:44):
I see it on your books deck.
Yep.
And this is also one of our top10 books at Prenda so as you go
through the prenda professionaldevelopment when you get to our
master guide level of trainingit is one of the books you read
and that we constantly recommendall of our books that's amazing.
SPEAKER_00 (54:00):
And then my final and newest book is Help My Kid
Hates Writing How to TurnStruggling Students into Brave
Writers comes out April 15th2025 and I'm very excited about
it.
So thank you for letting me talkabout it.
SPEAKER_02 (54:12):
My goodness I'm so excited to get it I can't wait.
And then just to wrap up who issomeone we always ask this
question because we're trying toinspire our audience to become
grown ups who can kindle thelove of learning the passion the
motivation in the nextgeneration so who was that
person for you and how did theysupport you, see you, hear you
and help you become the personthat you are today Wow I could
(54:35):
go two ways.
SPEAKER_00 (54:36):
Am I allowed to have two the first one though I would
say is Peter Elbow who Imentioned earlier.
His book Writing with Power Iread in 1981 when I was 20 and
it that's when it came out and Iremember writing in the margins
I still have that copy of thebook in fact wow you mean other
people write this way I thinkwhat really struck me when I
(54:58):
read his work is that nowhere inmy academic education had anyone
spoken to me like the writer Iwas.
And here was somebody who was ata university level speaking to
the masses of academics thatknow actually this is the right
pathway to grow as a writer.
It's not reserved only forprofessionals.
It is also true for academicwriting which is by the way my
(55:21):
favorite kind of writing so Ireally valued his approach he's
very curiosity driven verywriting voice driven so that was
a massive influence on mybusiness Brave Rider,
Bravewriter.com but then theother person who had a massive
influence on me is the Britisheducator Charlotte Mason.
I think her education of thewhole child, her passion for
(55:43):
seeing children as persons rightnow, not adults in training or
adults mini adults reallychallenged the idea that school
was putting out which iseverything is for the future.
We're doing all of this for thefuture I think I really adopted
her sort of rich vision fornature study, art history,
(56:03):
reading living literature, usinga kinesthetic approach to all of
the activity of learning notjust book learning.
So I would say those are the tworeally formative people in my
imagination around learning.
(56:24):
Oh my gosh, definitely andthere's a book called another
one he wrote called WritingWithout teachers that is equally
phenomenal and really good forpeople who are working in any
kind of micro school academicsetting.
So I highly recommend that tooI'm gonna get that today.
SPEAKER_02 (56:40):
Thank you so much for taking the time to come and
share with us.
We've learned so much I'm justfeeling like so inspired and
excited to write and to help mykids write.
And I just appreciate all ofyour work and thank you so much
for coming on the KindledPodcast.
SPEAKER_00 (56:55):
Thank you, Katie.
SPEAKER_02 (56:56):
The Kindled Podcast is brought to you by Prenda.
Prenda makes it easy to startand run an amazing microschool
based on all the ideas we talkabout here on the Kindled
Podcast.
Don't forget to follow us onsocial media at PrendaLearn and
if you'd like more informationabout starting a microschool
just go to prenda.com.
Thanks for listening andremember to keep Kindling
Because when they obey the language ticker tape in
their minds and they followtheir sophisticated vocabulary,
the complex sentence structure,their use of irony, their senses
of humor, that stuff is hard topunctuate.
It's hard to spell.
So when they take this braverisk of putting out their best
ideas, and someone comes alongand is like, but you're missing
(00:21):
a comma because it's misspelled,they literally learn to dumb
down their content to get an A.
SPEAKER_02 (00:29):
Hi, and welcome to the Kindle Podcast.
I'm Katie Broadbent, your host,and today we're gonna talk to
Julie Bogart, who is one of myabsolute favorite people.
And I'm so excited to share thisconversation with you because
you are gonna be so inspired andjust feel so much more confident
and excited to tackle writingwith your students or kids.
And I am so excited to share allof Julie's knowledge and her
(00:52):
wisdom and her love for studentsand for families and for parents
and for educators.
It was truly an incredibleconversation and so excited to
share with you.
Before we jump in, I'm gonnashare a little bit about
Julie's, just so you know whereshe's coming from.
Julie Bogart is known for hercommon sense writing, critical
thinking, and home educationadvice.
She's the creator of theaward-winning innovative online
writing program called BraveWriter, which serves 191
(01:14):
countries and hundreds ofthousands of families.
She's the author of Help, My KidHates Writing, The Brave
Learner, and Raising CriticalThinkers, all amazing books that
everyone needs to read.
Her Substack podcasts and socialmedia are widely popular sources
of support to weary,well-intentioned parents.
She's home and educated her fivechildren who are now adults, and
she has three grandchildren.
So let's get to our conversationwith Julie.
(01:35):
Julie Bogart, welcome to theKindled Podcast.
We're so happy to have you ontoday.
It's such a treat to be here.
Thanks, Katie.
So I want to get started byhelping our audience understand
where you're coming from.
Who are you?
Tell us your story.
How did you get to be doing whatyou're doing?
And what is kind of like yourbig why or the change you're
seeking to make in the world?
SPEAKER_00 (01:55):
Oh my gosh, great questions.
So I'm a mother of five adultkids, and I became interested in
homeschooling before I even knewwhat it was, or was married, or
had children.
I was introduced to a friend ofmy soon-to-be husband, and he
asked me if I was going tohomeschool my kids.
And I was like, home what?
Like I'd never heard those twowords together.
(02:17):
This was 1984.
And he proceeded to talk aboutthis idea that you could
tailor-make the education ofyour individual kids.
And ironically, I had a reallygreat public school experience.
I was raised in the 1960s and70s, before No Child Left
Behind.
My teachers were all likeex-Peace Corps, you know, first
generation Peace Corps hippietypes.
(02:37):
My school was in Malibu Canyon.
So they were really creative.
Like my memories of school arebeing in the creek and doing
nature study, doing anarchaeological dig, having a
renaissance fair for the entireseventh grade.
Like there was this trueinvestment in learning that was
both kinesthetic andimaginative.
(02:58):
And I really loved that.
But by the time I was incollege, I went to UCLA, I
worked as an assistant to ateacher in a junior high.
And all of that was gone.
Like this was the 1980s, and itjust seemed like everybody was
doing what we call dittoes.
They're like worksheets thatwere mimeographed in the old
fashioned.
Yeah, purple ink.
There was a lot of sitting atdesks and performing to
(03:21):
standards.
And so when I heard this pitchfor homeschool, ironically, my
thought was, then I can give mykids the kind of education I got
in public school, which is abackwards way of thinking about
it.
But for me, it made a lot ofsense.
By the time I had kids, I wasalready a freelance writer.
I worked in magazines andediting and ghostwriting at the
(03:43):
time.
And suddenly my peer group wasasking these questions of me.
How are you teaching your kidsto write?
And it had never dawned on methat I would need a curriculum
because my mother was aprofessional author.
She had written at that point, Idon't know, 20 or 30 books.
She's gone now, but she wroteover 70 books in her lifetime,
(04:03):
taught writing.
And I was a writer from theyoungest age, six, seven, eight
years old.
And I just used all of the toolsprofessional writers use to grow
as a writer.
And so when it was time to teachmy kids, that's where my brain
went.
Like, well, what does PeterElbow say about writing?
What does Pat Schneider sayabout writing?
I got interested inself-expression for writing, not
(04:28):
how do I hit all the formatsthat fourth grade standardized
tests require.
And we had great success.
So when my friends startedasking me how to teach writing,
it was like this naturalresponse.
I found myself suddenly likeleading a Sunday school class at
church on how to teach writing.
Parents and teachers came tothis thing.
(04:48):
Then I got invited by theCalifornia Independent Study
Program to give lectures onteaching writing.
I'm a history major, notjournalism.
My work was all freelance andgenerated by passion.
But for some reason, I kind ofhad this understanding that
writing support from an adultneeded to be more like an ally
(05:11):
and a coach rather than anevaluator.
And over the last 25 years, Ilaunched my company in January
of 2000 to help parents teachtheir kids to write.
And the number one goal I hadwas for them to build a really
loving, nurturing, supportiverelationship through writing, a
relationship that didn't seetears, resentment, pain, and
(05:36):
frankly, what happens in schoolabuse, like really harmful
instruction in the name ofteaching that ends up leaving
lasting scars long intoadulthood.
I want to reverse that.
That has been my passion for thelast 30 years.
And I really want to see schoolsget out of the business of
evaluation and more in thebusiness of support, coaching,
(06:00):
and allyship.
In fact, if they took more ofthe approach that a coach does
for a volleyball team, theywould get so much further with
writing than they do with thisevaluation strategy.
SPEAKER_02 (06:13):
Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, almost any time
a child writes something, it'scorrected.
All of it.
Yeah.
I mean, and then I've read Ithink maybe most of what you've
written.
And like I've read, I've readall of the writing things.
Like I I love it.
I'm I was telling my husbandthis morning, like, I'm so
excited.
I get to talk to one of my likeeducational heroes today and
(06:35):
like learn from her.
So I'm like so excited to haveyou.
One of the things that you'vesaid that has really like caught
me and like like reframed howI've been thinking about writing
for Prenda and also for my ownkids.
And my kids, my oldest hasdysgraphia.
He struggles a lot with writing.
They've done a few differentwriting programs.
(06:56):
They definitely have like a badtaste in their mouth.
And even that's even at Prendawhere they're not like doing
worksheets all day.
Like they they are like livingthe dream educationally, and
they still are having arehitting the struggle bus with
writing, like haven't figured itout.
And a lot of it has to do, likeI have this, my son who is 12,
and he is very creative.
This kid reads at like a 10thgrade level.
(07:17):
He'll read 500 pages in a week.
He like is very into, he's alanguage kid.
He just can't like get it outlike through he he has like his
motor issues, like you know,getting with the dysgraph.
So it's like all of thiscreativity and this
self-expression, all thesestories are like bottled in him.
And I've wanted so desperatelyto like unlock that.
(07:39):
And so I I guess I'll just kindof tell you his story a little
bit so you can know where we'recoming from.
Like I I discovered your workand started implementing some of
the things like just onSaturdays at home.
And we started doing freerights, we started playing the
games that you suggest.
And I hope we'll we'll get tosome of those things because
they're just so practical andlike things you can do right now
(07:59):
that are so easy.
So we'll get to those.
Um yeah, just started kind oflike Saturday morning writing
club with all my kids, like sixyears old to 12, or she's
actually five, five to twelve.
At first, they were like, We'renot writing.
Like, we all hate writing.
I was not like a lot.
I was like, okay, well, likejust have an open mind.
Like this might be a littledifferent.
And then after the first few,they were like, Oh, is this
(08:21):
writing?
Like exactly.
And I was like, Yeah, this iswriting.
And they like I I stopped beingthe person saying, like, it's
writing time.
And like they were like, Oh, wewe missed writing yesterday.
They were like reminding me.
Um, and it it was like soamazing to see it, like, took
three weeks of like just adifferent approach and like a
(08:41):
different attitude and belief inmy heart and mind around
writing.
And they felt that directly.
So talk a little bit about like,I mean, that that's probably a
very common story for you in in,you know, helping people through
this, but tell some of thosestories and like what do you
usually see when you what is thereframing that you try to try to
make for parents?
You know, how is this different?
(09:02):
We've talked about like notbeing an evaluator, but like,
what's the other thing thatyou're supposed to be doing?
How do you ally?
How do you coach?
SPEAKER_00 (09:10):
Absolutely.
That is really the heart of mywork.
And my new book, Help My KidHates Writing, is all about that
because we tend to focus on thechild, but really it has to do
with the person who issupporting and growing the
writer.
You know, imagine if your childwas learning to speak.
I tell this story, my son was 12months old and he was sitting in
a high chair behind me while Iwas washing dishes, and he said
(09:32):
nana.
And I knew he meant banana.
So imagine if I had turnedaround and said, Oh, Noah, nana
is the word banana.
It's a noun.
It goes in a sentence like thisI would like a banana.
And because it's a request, youneed to use the oral format
called etiquette.
I need to hear you say, I wouldlike a banana, please, right?
Like we never do that withspeech.
(09:53):
We immediately stopped callingbananas bananas for at least a
year.
We only called them nanas.
We tried to get him to eatbananas.
I called my mother on theinternational line to tell her
that her grandson is brilliantand said his first word.
And then I did what every parentof a new child does.
I wrote in his baby book theword nana and dated it.
(10:16):
In that moment, I turned himinto a published author because
my thought was this word is sointeresting.
I want generations from now toknow he uttered it.
Writing is self-expressiontranscribed.
That's all it is.
And the transcription can happenby the child or the parent, it
can be voice to text, it couldbe a hired secretary.
(10:38):
My father, who is a careerlawyer, never learned to type
until 15 years ago and he's 88years old.
Why?
Because he dictated everythingto his secretary, his entire
adult life.
Would we say he wasn't writing?
Would we give the credit to thesecretary?
Would we say that his closingarguments were written by the
(11:00):
secretary because she had goodspelling and punctuation?
Absolutely not.
We start with the premise thatwriting is the expression of a
self, it is the internalizedperson externalized, and we find
whatever availabletranscriptionist we can.
And right now that's radicallychanging because of spell and
(11:21):
grammar check, the coming ofChat GPT and other AI tools.
So in this moment, it's moreimportant than ever that we put
the priority on the unique humanmind, the thoughts that belong
to our children, because thetranscription skills are less
important than ever.
They've always been not asimportant as thought, but
(11:45):
they're a lot less important nowthan they've ever been.
So the reframe is what's goingon inside your child?
How do we get that out andpreserve it in writing for an
interested audience?
That's the goal.
The goal is to be read.
Imagine that you've been askedto do a full-on report on
(12:06):
ancient Greece, and you actuallyget excited about this report.
You do all the reading, you doall the preparation, and then
you write something to describewhat you learned, and there's
only one reader, and that readeris gonna grade it.
Who wants that?
That would be like saying, I'mlearning to play soccer, and I'm
(12:27):
gonna stand out on this fieldand try to kick past the goalie
for one referee who's just gonnadecide whether or not it was a
good goal.
Like no one would play soccer.
That would never be the game.
The part that we forget aboutwriting is that it is not a
means to an end.
Most of us treat writing likethis is how we go up a grade, or
(12:50):
this is how we go to college, orthis is how we get a job.
No.
There was this huge TikTokraging anger by women, young
wives, who discovered theirhusbands wrote their vows using
Chat GPT.
Why were they mad?
Why do you think they were upsetabout that?
SPEAKER_02 (13:09):
I would imagine that they perceived that as like not
authentically the husband'sthought or like feeling.
Exactly.
SPEAKER_00 (13:19):
The goal of that man, those young men, was to do
it right.
They had been trained theirentire lives that writing has to
be done right.
It has to meet some standardthat's invisible to them.
It's out in the air.
They're hunting and pecking forthe words that live in somebody
else's mind and imagination.
And so they're facing thisreally important moment.
(13:42):
They don't want to do it wrong.
And the wives are like, I justwant to hear your heart.
I want you to be comfortableenough with how you feel about
me that you can put those wordsout there on your own.
And this is what's being lostevery single day that we keep on
with this very bizarre system ofwriting instruction that says
(14:04):
you write for an audience of onewho will tell you that that
first draft isn't good enough.
And guess what?
When you write your first draft,it's the best you can do.
If you could write it better,you already would have.
So why does someone get to comeback and say, well, you should
have done it this way?
Do you think they willfully heldback what they couldn't do?
(14:25):
No.
It's it's a horrible, horriblesystem for teaching writing.
SPEAKER_02 (14:30):
That's interesting.
It's like our obsession withdoing it well has neutered our
ability to do it authentically.
Like I have real thought.
Those husbands had real thoughtsand feelings, but because of it,
and I it kind of goes back tosomething you said earlier.
Like you said the sentence fromthe age six or seven, I was a
(14:50):
writer.
Like you gave yourself thatinternal like label.
Like I was living into me beinga writer, right?
Those kids, anytime they wrote,they were evaluated and they
were shown not a writer, not awriter, not a writer.
So then when it's like, hey, nowit's time for me to like express
myself, but I'm not a writer,what do I do?
I'm going to be evaluated.
And this is like a veryimportant moment in my life.
(15:10):
I don't want to mess this up.
So they go to ChatGPT out ofhonestly, like fear.
That's right.
But their self-expression wouldnot be sufficient.
SPEAKER_00 (15:20):
That's right.
Out of logic.
I mean, it's logical.
Like if your only experience ofwriting is repeatedly trying and
not hitting the mark, then whywould you keep trying?
Why not just let a tool do itfor you?
I mean, it's like using acalculator, right?
Like I'm not going to work on mytimes tables anymore.
(15:40):
I have a calculator, that'sover.
Yeah.
I'm not even against chat GPT.
In fact, in my new book, I havea whole chapter on it.
But what I am, what I do worryabout is that adults have
misunderstood what writing is.
Here's what I want you to know.
Kids love writing, they do itall the time.
In fact, with the advent of theinternet, the dawn of the
(16:02):
internet, more human childrenwere writing every day than in
the history of humankind.
I just want you to let that sinkin.
When the internet came along,children were like, the main
thing I want to do is write.
They all got live journals,MySpaces, they joined Facebook,
they started discussion groupsfor their online games.
They love writing.
(16:24):
Today they make TikToks, that'swriting.
They make reels, that's writing.
They have YouTube channels,that's writing.
And we're over here saying, no,it's not writing unless it looks
like a report that matchesfourth grade standards.
By the way, most of the writingthat gets A's in school is
boring.
No one wants to read it.
It's terrible writing.
(16:45):
I remember one of my friendscame to me, her name was Glenda,
and she said, Julie, I'mstruggling teaching my kids to
write.
And I know that you're afreelance writer.
Can you help me?
Now, at the time, my oldestchild was in fourth grade, and
we had already started doingfree writing, kind of like what
you described, and I wasn'treally struggling teaching it.
So I said, Well, what are youusing?
(17:05):
Because I had no curriculum.
I was like, What are you using?
I want to see what you're usingfor writing.
So she brings over this navyblue binder.
It's three-ring, very ugly.
I I think that's important tonote that even the binder was
awful.
I opened it up and there's asample descriptive paragraph and
then an explanation for how towrite one.
(17:25):
So I read the sample paragraphto myself and I turned to Glenda
and I said, Did you read thisparagraph?
And she said, Yeah.
I said, Did you like it?
She goes, What do you mean?
I said, Well, when you read it,did you think to yourself,
shoot, I wish there was a secondparagraph?
She goes, I can't even rememberwhat it said.
And I just closed the book and Isaid, Why would you use as a
(17:46):
model for writing something sounmemorable?
You can't even think about, youcan't remember what this
paragraph said.
It held no interest for you.
Why would that be a good modelfor writing?
She goes, but isn't it correct?
I said, So when you're out inthe world looking for things to
read, are you looking forcorrect things?
(18:06):
Or are you looking forinteresting things?
Writing at its core is aboutcompelling a reader to keep
reading.
Nobody finished a novel andsaid, you gotta read this book,
every comma perfectly placed.
I was so touched by the commas.
No one finishes and says, nailedthe format.
(18:27):
That is not what we say when weread.
And unfortunately, so many ofour kids who are actually really
clever, naturally good at usinglanguage, get marked down
because when they obey thelanguage ticker tape in their
minds and they follow theirsophisticated vocabulary, the
complex sentence structure,their use of irony, their senses
(18:50):
of humor, that stuff is hard topunctuate.
It's hard to spell.
So when they take this braverisk of putting out their best
ideas, and someone comes alongand is like, but you're missing
a comma because it's misspelled,they literally learn to dumb
down their content to get an A.
It's horrible.
SPEAKER_02 (19:10):
This is the same thing we do to kids in like
literature, right?
Where it's like, okay, you keepwe're we're we're being so
progressive and giving you likea choice over what book you're
reading.
And then, but your goal is toget an A on some comprehension
task, right?
It's like, so which is thesimplest, shortest book, right?
The logical choice.
And I remember being in highschool and thinking, like, oh,
(19:32):
well, that one's only 80 pagesand that one's 200.
Why would I pick that like moreadvanced, like more challenging
read if my goal is to get an A,right?
It's like Well, that's right.
It's undercurrence andmotivation.
SPEAKER_00 (19:43):
That's right.
Parents all the time talk aboutlike grades, standards.
I taught at the university leveland I had a student.
Uh, this is a great story.
I had a student who didn't wantto be in my class for sure.
My communication at thebeginning of the class was I'm
gonna be your favorite teacherbecause I don't care about
grades.
So if you want to rewrite youressay five times, you can meet
(20:06):
with me five times and we willjust keep working on it until it
satisfies you and me.
Your tests are open note, openbook, because it's up to you to
care about the material.
And I want you to actually readthe question and be able to
answer it the same way you willafter you're out of this class,
which is you're gonna go lookstuff up.
Like, I don't need it stored inyour brain.
I need to know it how you thinkabout it.
(20:26):
What insight do you have aboutit?
Not did you store theinformation in your brain?
That's just irrelevant to me.
So the student was pulling likea low B, and he really needed an
A to keep his scholarship.
So for the midterm, it was opennote open book, and he basically
didn't do it.
He got a D.
How do you get a D on an opennote open book test?
I don't know.
(20:47):
He pulled an A on the final, butwhen I put all of it together,
he came out with a B plus.
And he met me at my office hoursand said that I had not done the
correct percentage calculation.
He was trying to show me that Ihe's like, I did the calculation
and I knew I only needed a D.
And I said, you know, you didn'tdo the right calculation.
(21:08):
This is what's on the syllabus.
And he's like, no, you saidsomething different in class.
I said, it doesn't matter.
This was open note, open book.
Like you could have put ineffort, but you didn't want to
learn.
All you wanted was to maintain aGPA, and that's not what I'm
about.
I don't care about GPA.
I told you that at thebeginning.
This is the difference.
(21:29):
When we say to our students thatyour GPA is tied to your
scholarship, and then we gradeeverything, it's logical that
kids in college are using ChatGPT.
It's a financial decision atthat point.
It has nothing to do withlearning.
My writing sort of mentor, guru,Peter Elbow, he recently died,
(21:50):
but we were very close friends.
And over the years, he was justa wonderful cheerleader for my
work.
And one of the things he said tome, he worked at the University
of Massachusetts at Amherst andled this writing group.
And all of his work has beenused in freshman composition
books across the United States.
And one of the things he said tome when he heard that I was in
(22:12):
the homeschooling space was hesaid, Oh my gosh, you finally
get to do what I never got todo.
And that is teach writingwithout grades.
He said, No matter how manyassignments I gave in a
classroom that were grade free,the end result always had to be
a grade.
So it always felt a little bitphony.
He said, But you actually get towork on writing with no threat
(22:33):
hanging over any child's head.
And for homeschoolers, that isabsolutely factual.
Like, and yet they still thinkthat grades matter.
I'm like, yes, they don't.
You're at home.
SPEAKER_02 (22:47):
Yeah, so true.
Well, we're reallyindoctrinated, like as parents,
to like look to experts and likethat judgment and that expertise
is like the end all be all.
And it's really, really hard,myself included.
Like I live in this alternativeeducation world.
Like I've written many, manywords about the danger of grades
and like how that like you knowundercuts motivation and like
(23:08):
makes kids makes it logical forkids to not choose learning.
To cheat.
You know, these grades areprinting.
All these things.
And I still feel this pressurefor my kids to like perform and
like, you know, I feel thissocietal judgment, maybe.
And I I yeah, can we talk aboutthat since you admitted that?
Tell me more.
SPEAKER_00 (23:27):
Tell me more.
What is it when you say the wordperform?
Who are they performing for?
SPEAKER_02 (23:35):
Okay, this is gonna get raw.
Ready?
I am afraid of other humans'judgment of me and my choices as
a parent in the educationalworld.
If I was just sending my kids topublic school and they were poor
writers, I'd have a person toblame.
Like, oh, the schools, oh, theirteacher, oh, the classes are too
big.
Like I'd have like a an easy outthat wouldn't be my fault.
(23:56):
Because I've completely takenlike the reins here and like my
kids are in Prenda, I help buildPrenda, like I feel like
accountable and like, oh, you'redoing something weird.
Okay, like does weird work?
And I'm like, it works, but notby your standard.
It's like, it's it's like ifyou're over here playing soccer,
we're playing an entirelydifferent game over here, and
(24:18):
you're trying to judge our gameby soccer rules.
And it's like, well, it doesn'tlook like soccer to me.
Like, you're not getting a lotof goals.
I'm like, there's not even agoalie over here.
Like, what?
It's completely different.
But like I can't help youunderstand that.
So then just the little voiceinside, it just pops up like,
oh, maybe it's not working.
Maybe you should put them backin school.
Maybe you shouldn't trustyourself.
Like all of these things pop upfor me.
(24:39):
And it still happens all theseyears later.
My kids have, I mean, I'vethey've never been in
traditional school.
I've homeschooled, microschooledthe whole time, four kids.
So it just still happens.
No, that's exactly true.
SPEAKER_00 (24:52):
It's real for me.
I was running a writinginstruction business, right?
And uh, two examples of whatyou're talking about happened to
me.
One was my daughter decided shesaw I was teaching all these
online classes, so she thought,well, that would be fun.
I want to be in one.
So I put her in one.
And then I was mortified.
I'm like, they're gonna judge methat my daughter's misspelling.
(25:13):
So before she was in the class,it didn't bother me at all.
The second that she was in acontext where I would be judged,
suddenly now I am worried abouthow she looks.
And we actually had to have atalk about that once she was an
adult.
Like she remembered it.
She's like, Mom, you kind of goton me a little bit.
And this was, of course, I wasin my 30s.
We're like, you know, or early40s, like just working these
(25:36):
things out.
So that's one kind of humorousstory about how it even got to
me.
A second one is I started gradschool while I was teaching
these classes.
And I hadn't written a researchpaper or an essay since college,
and now it's like 20 yearslater.
And the first research paperthat I got assigned, I was
teaching an essay class online,and I had absolute massive
(26:00):
writer's block.
I could not even get startedbecause the fear was if I didn't
get an A on this research paper,I am a fraud and should not be
teaching this class and chargingpeople money for this
instruction.
And that log jam completelyblocked me.
The only way out of it at thetime is I did two things.
(26:22):
And I think these are kind ofremarkable.
The first one was I told mystudents, I was like, it just
hit me that I am nervous thatI'm gonna get a B on this paper,
and that means I'm a fraud, andhere you're trusting me to
prepare you for college.
I'm so nervous about this paper.
And the way high schoolers dowhen you trust them with
(26:43):
vulnerability, they're like,Mrs.
Bougar, you got this, you know.
And I said to them, I imaginesome of you feel that way about
submitting your essays to me.
And I just want you to know Iknow the feeling.
So I will, I'm not harsh.
I will be walking with you everystep of the way.
I hold no judgment for you.
So that was our bargain.
It was really amazing.
Then I reached out, oh, and theywere saying things to me like,
(27:05):
just free write, Mrs.
Bogart, like the very advice I'dgive them.
Then I called my professor and Ishared this dilemma with her.
And she said something I'llnever forget.
She said, Julie, the goal ofthis class isn't writing
instruction, it's learning.
Just write a paper.
She said, Maybe you need to justwrite 10 pages that you throw
(27:25):
away.
This is advice I give all thetime.
And then write the paper.
But I'm here to support you inlearning.
So even if you make a mistake,we're gonna fix it because
you're here to learn.
And those two things reallystruck me at the time, the way
students were so willing tosupport me when I was honest,
and the way my professor waswilling to reframe with me.
(27:48):
And of course I did.
I wrote 10 pages of crap andthen threw it away and then
wrote my paper.
And I did actually get an A, butby then it mattered so much
less.
I was suddenly back in the worldof writing, the way that I knew
it.
And so I think we have to bereally honest that the peer
pressure as adults is as strongas it is for kids.
(28:09):
And if we're carrying it, we'retransferring it to our children,
like I did with my daughter.
My youngest daughter, uh, I havefive kids.
So by the time I got to her, I'dalready been through four kids,
right?
And she decided to go to publichigh school, which for all four
years.
And during that first semester,she had some challenges with
(28:30):
math, didn't feel as prepared asshe thought she should have
been, and met with the teacher,got all the way up to grade
level within a semester, and gotan A.
And I was like super proud ofthat.
And I was talking about it.
And she stopped me and saidthese words.
She said, Mom, you've nevercared about grades.
And now that I'm in high school,I need you to keep not caring.
(28:51):
So you are not allowed to go onthe parent portal.
You will not know any of mygrades for the rest of my
academic life.
And I think I'm the only parentwho never visited the portal for
all four years of high schooland never college.
I didn't know her GPA.
I don't know how she did on asingle test.
It wasn't until I got to hercollege graduation that I saw
(29:14):
she made the honor roll.
I had no idea until I saw thelittle asterisks.
And that was liberating for bothof us.
And I'm telling you, I thinkthat's the problem.
You named it so beautifully.
It's this peer pressure, thisfeeling of being judged that
grades already create.
And then we we internalize it sodeeply and we forget what
(29:36):
learning is.
What is learning?
SPEAKER_02 (29:38):
Yeah.
A big part of the backbone ofwhy I think that that peer
pressure and societal likestress has persisted is because
of grades, largely, but theunder the furry underbelly of
grades is like the belief thatkids should be at a certain
place at a certain time.
And if they're not, it's aproblem.
And so when I was reading umyour your your writing program,
(30:02):
you discuss you talked about,and you'll you'll correct me, I
won't quote this correctly, butsomething like the process of
learning how to speak, you know,is like the foundation for
learning to write.
And that happens between likezero and five or zero and seven
or whatever.
And then the process of learninghow to write happens from the
ages of eight to eighteen.
And it's like that just likerelieved so much stress off of
(30:25):
my parent.
Because now it's like, hey, mychild is nine.
They're, you don't have to likecarry this huge weight of all of
these standards and things thatthey have to do or should do and
but like make them like thestory is if you can do these
things, you're valuable.
And I think we really need tostep back from that.
It's like the ideas inside ofyou are valuable no matter how
(30:46):
they come out of you.
And we want to know them.
We want to hear your voice,right?
But we we put, we crowd out allof that with how it should be
and the you're not enoughsunless kind of vibe that we feel
as parents and then we transferas you're saying to kids.
And so just knowing like this isa really long process just
allowed me to take a deepbreath.
(31:07):
And remember like I feel like Iwas not learning what my kids
are supposed to be learning now,like until late high school or
college.
Like it is so pushed down onthem.
And I just want to like pushback so hard and create the
space for them to just be andthat's not to say like I don't
want them to have strong writingskills.
I do.
I do want them to know where toput the commas and the periods
(31:29):
and stuff but you have to we'regetting the cart before the the
horse before the cart.
No, that's the right way.
The cart before the horse that'sthe wrong way.
SPEAKER_00 (31:38):
Well also they're just two different sets of
skills and it would be reallynice if we could separate them
like work on the mechanics.
That's why I love CharlotteMason and the European continent
emphasis on copy work anddictation in France last year.
French people love dictation Istudied in France for a year of
college and the first week I wasthere one of my teachers had us
(32:00):
do a sight unseen two-pagesingle line space dictation.
So the front of a page and theback of the page I got 83
mistakes because I'm an AmericanEnglish speaker.
This was sight unseen.
I was new to the Frenchuniversity system.
Like they love dique.
And last year in France athousand people gathered on the
(32:21):
Champs Élysée at the Arc deTriomphe in Paris to do a group
diquet.
So like we can celebrate beinggood at punctuation spelling,
handwriting, taking a text sightunseen and accurately
punctuating it.
Like that's a beautiful kind offun marathon run a marathon kind
of challenge.
Yeah.
Like that's what we want to seeit as like this is a skill but
(32:44):
that's completely separate fromthe ideas in your head.
The ideas in your head deserveto be valued even if I gouged
out both your eyes and choppedoff both your hands.
You don't have to be good atspelling and punctuating to be
considered a good writer.
A good writer is somebody whohas thoughts that they value
that generate insight andentertainment for other people.
(33:06):
And here's what's amazing ourkids are great at it.
They are quirky, they'reinventive they don't use all the
tried and true cliches becausethey don't know them yet.
Their perspective is unique.
One of the analogies I use in mybook is a lot of times the way
writing gets taught is thatyou're supposed to imitate an
adult writer.
(33:26):
So like Aesop you know write afable like Aesop or copy this
you know descriptive paragraphthat was created by an adult and
do some version of that as aneight-year-old it's almost like
they're saying your writing willbe valuable once it sounds like
an adult wrote it.
That's kind of the messaging butimagine if we did that with the
(33:47):
photographs of our children.
Like we take a picture of themat age seven and then we
photoshop it to look like theadult they will become that's
what we're doing.
We're taking the mind life of achild and photoshopping it into
the mind life of an adult in ourwriting instruction instead of
valuing each adorable expressionof a mind as it grows over time.
(34:12):
What's so beautiful is thecollection of writings I have of
my kids are actually moreprecious to me than my photo
albums.
When I go back and read them Iam instantly awestruck by their
ingenuity, their vocabularytheir senses of humor.
Sometimes my heart is rippedout.
I found this um this journal ofmy oldest son who struggled with
(34:36):
anything that looked likeorganized learning, any
organized structured learning atall.
And he had a series of freewrites that were literally
painful.
Like I read them just a fewweeks ago and I wanted to call
him he's 37 I felt the angst ofall of that he is a self-taught
computer programmer with threechildren and a wife and a house
(34:58):
somehow got there right quitcollege three times taught
himself everything he knows andrereading that knowing who he
actually is was painful becauseI thought I think I was worried
and he could feel my worry.
He was my oldest child I didn'thave a blueprint or a roadmap.
I didn't know how to trust allof the process but that's what
(35:20):
we need to do.
And I'm grateful that he had aplace where he felt he could
tell his truth that he could getthis angst that was living
inside of him out onto a pageand not hide it.
I'm certain that I read it backthen.
We probably talked about it backthen.
But I share that with youbecause I think I think in our
rush to try and get our kids tofit in, we actually damage them.
(35:44):
We harm them there's a story Itell in my book about this 69
year old man that I met at abusiness networking event.
He has built multiple six, sevenand eight figure businesses.
Like the guy is really smart.
And I told him oh well I run youknow this homeschool business
for writing right like thatdoesn't sound the same to a guy
(36:05):
like that.
And he said oh tell me about it.
So I described that we teachthese classes where we bring in
the parents and the kidstogether and we teach not just
the child but the parent how tobe a good writing coach and ally
to their child.
And he said oh I wish I had hadthat and I said oh really and
then he unfolded this story ofhow he wrote a paper it was like
(36:26):
a short story in elementaryschool his mom loved it his
friends loved it he turned it inand when it came back it got an
A for content and an F forgrammar.
And he said that F has loomed solarge in his life that to this
day he only uses voice to text.
If he's giving a presentationfrom front of the boardroom and
(36:47):
there's a whiteboard he makessomeone else do the writing on
the whiteboard while he'stalking that he is terrified to
write emails because he's soworried he'll make a mistake.
He's 69 and I said to him youknow what it didn't have to be
that way and he got tears in hiseyes the amount of trauma that
(37:09):
we justify in the name ofwriting correction is
horrifying.
I meet these adults all the timeevery conference I give there is
a mass of adults who havewriter's block and yet they
double down on the same methodsthat harmed them with their
children because they've neverheard there was another way.
SPEAKER_02 (37:29):
Okay let's go into that what is the other way just
give us I know like I've spenthours and hours reading all of
your content and all the tipsand tricks and things like that.
Just give us like two or threegetting started you know like if
I wanted to treat my childdifferently or my microschool
kids differently around writingtomorrow what are some light
things that I could you know goin with the very beginning is to
(37:51):
catch your child in the act ofself-expression and to jot it
down.
SPEAKER_00 (37:55):
So you're making dinner, your child comes running
in from the backyard they'relike hey Rocky was chasing a
squirrel you know they'retalking about their dog just
turn the stove off grab a pencilthe back of an envelope and
without saying a word don'tannounce anything just start
writing the exact words yourchild's saying a child will
likely say something along thelines of Mom, what are you
(38:15):
doing?
And you say back to your child,this is so good.
I don't want to forget it so I'mwriting it down.
That's your script.
And most kids will keep talkingsome will double the length that
they talk because that's apretty impressive moment.
Some kids don't like you to jotit down and so if they tell you
to stop just make eye contactlisten like you are a little
audio recorder.
(38:36):
And the second they walk awayjot down as much as you remember
as close to what they said asyou can.
That night at dinner I want youto pull out the envelope and
simply say hey Josh was tellingme about how Rocky was chasing a
squirrel in the backyard and Iwas afraid I was going to forget
it.
So I wrote it down.
I just want to share it with youand read their exact words to
(38:57):
the family and just value it ascommunication.
It's obvious that it's writingbecause you wrote it down.
The words that would havedisappeared into the thin air
are now protected and preservedon the back of this envelope.
When you're done toss it in thelibrary basket and over the next
few weeks when you're readinglibrary books every now and then
(39:19):
just pull it out oh rememberthat story Josh told let's read
it again.
The first message your childrenneed around writing whether
they're 16 or six is that thewriter lives inside and is
self-expressed through a mouthnot that it comes through a pen.
And until they know that theirinner life the way it lives in
(39:41):
them with the vocabulary that'snatural to them is worthy of the
page and being read andappreciated until they know that
they don't know what writing isthey think it's about spelling
they think it's about guessingwhat the teacher wanted them to
say.
So we always start by jottingdown those free thoughts.
And if you have a teenager theymight not tell you a story in
(40:03):
quite the same way.
I say just wait until you'rehaving a discussion over a rule
in the family, right?
Like how many hours they can beon the computer or whether
they're allowed to drive alonedowntown or go on a date,
whatever it is, jot down theirreasoning for their point of
view.
Stay very interested and writeit all down.
Oh, and you think this and thisis how you understand it.
(40:25):
And then share that with theother parent the three of you
and value the thought life inwriting that's the beginning of
the writing life.
SPEAKER_02 (40:34):
I love that.
So I've done this with my kidsthat hate writing and it was
like instantly it switched fromthe I hate writing and this is
not a thing to you see me as awriter.
You see me as someone who hasvaluable thoughts and I'm like
I'm so sorry for whatever I didbefore.
Like they were even like likesaying these things to me and I
(40:56):
would we were I remember it waswe were up way too late.
We stay up so late readingnovels together me and my boys I
know sometimes people say likemy kids are too old to read
aloud to them like never hopethat never happens.
We're never reading it to myhusband allowed I did it for
years.
Yeah that's great.
Yeah so we're up super latereading and I just like paused
and asked a question and theylike gave some like little like
(41:19):
not an answer that they haven'thadn't really thought about it.
But I wrote it I had a notebookand I wrote it down and then I
wrote down what the other sonsaid and he they were like what
are you doing?
I was like oh your thoughts arejust so interesting.
I just wanted to get them downright just like you say.
And then the discussion changedsuddenly they were very pensive
and they were like how I reallyfeel about this is blah blah
(41:40):
blah blah blah blah like it wasjust like just erupted with
thought and like we weresuddenly having this very deep
conversation about like a realissue in the world and like how
they are anyways it was justlike our conversation just got
so real because I was showingthem that it mattered and that
(42:01):
like making a record ofsomething matters.
SPEAKER_00 (42:04):
And that they will come to you once they believe
that they'll even ask you towrite things down for them.
I remember when my son Liam wasfour and he was making all these
little Lego men and they eachhad superpowers and kinds of
skills and points associated andhe really wanted me to love this
system but there was no way Iwas going to remember it.
(42:24):
So I got a clipboard and I put alittle sheet of paper on it and
I said tell me about each one soI wrote down their names and
their special powers and whatthey did for each one.
And then I wrote down the pointshe assigned to them.
He carried that clipboard aroundfor a month he was four and he
started adding zeros to the endof the numbers like it started
(42:44):
out at 40 by the end it was like40 billion right but think about
that then every time we read itthe number changed because he
had made an actual change to thenumber and so his understanding
of reading and writing were soblended so early that the
thoughts in his head mattered.
He memorized what order I hadwritten them in.
He couldn't read yet but he wasproud of the fact that there was
(43:08):
a written record of these littleLego characters.
My daughter Johanna one timejotted down an entire version of
Cinderella that her sister toldher at bedtime when I was out
one evening I came home shemeets me at the front door she's
like Catrin wrote a story andI'm thinking Catrin's five she
hasn't written yet and thenJohanna pulls out a clipboard
(43:28):
and here she's transcribed thisentire story at the pace of
Catrin telling it it's allsloping bad handwriting
misspellings beautiful story.
And she understood that this iswhat we do in our family.
If people are saying greatthoughts we better get them down
right so that's the first step.
The second step you talked aboutbefore and that is free writing.
(43:52):
So when we make the shift fromyou being the transcriptionist
for your child to them writingtheir own thoughts we give them
time and space to write howeverit comes out but we do it as a
group like I love that youshared that it was a family
practice on a Saturday morning.
This is not a timed writing testand it isn't something we do to
(44:13):
our children.
It's something we do with them.
I'm really big on family freewriting the point of it is this
we dedicate a little short spanof time you could start with
three or five minutes.
You set the timer you know up onthe stove everybody's got a
blank sheet of paper and apencil and then you write
without stopping that's the onlyrule.
(44:34):
There's no crossing out there'sno starting over you just keep
writing so if you get stuck andyou can't think of something to
say you just write I'm stuck I'mstuck I'm stuck or I hate this
or it's really stupid or youknow I wish I could go play on
the computer like you write whatcomes to your brain because what
you're doing is you're trainingyour hand to take dictation from
(44:54):
your mind, to follow that tickertape of thoughts and to put it
in written language.
What ends up happening is kidswho learn how to do that start
to value their own thoughts.
They're putting their ownthoughts into a written record
that can be read back.
I had one of my kids who wasjust not as into journaling some
(45:14):
really love journaling somedon't but he would be really sad
at the end of like an overnightcamp experience or a rock
climbing wall competition andhe'd he'd be so nostalgic for it
it would like hurt his heart.
And I said well I know you don'tlike journals but you could keep
a special occasion journal whereyou just write after something
(45:35):
that's really meaningful thesame way you would have taken
pictures of it.
Just write a little record of itand you can just do that
whenever it happens.
He's in his 30s and he still hasit and it's just one composition
book but it's got all of hismost precious memories as a
child written at that age andstage of development in his own
hand.
(45:56):
This is the gift we're trying togive our families is the freedom
to value their own thinking.
I write in my book a whole bunchof free writing prompts ways to
use that activity if youpre-order my book we actually
are giving a family free writingguide to everybody who
pre-orders so that's those arekind of the two beginning steps
(46:18):
for a really vibrant writinglife but of course I have all
kinds of strategies for revisionand editing where the parent
learns how to give the kind offeedback that a child can
receive because that's reallywhere the rubber meets the road.
You're trying to correctsomething that the child already
thinks is good.
And we have lots of strategiesfor that too.
SPEAKER_02 (46:40):
Yeah so you're saying that there is a time to
like circle back and like let'stalk about some mechanics let
mechanics let's talk about somethought organization ideas but
it isn't the first thing you do.
SPEAKER_00 (46:50):
It's not the first thing and we also approach it
completely differently.
So to give you a thumbnailsketch most people approach it
like here are some things to fixand change, right?
That's that's the teacher.
But a reader doesn't a readerreads to the interested so the
kind of feedback I have parentsgive is what I call reader
(47:11):
response feedback.
So you're gonna read like thefirst two sentences and you
might notice in your body ohthis is a cool topic I'm
interested in knowing more.
So you're gonna literally say toyour child or write on the sheet
of paper to your child, cooltopic octopuses, I don't know
that much about them.
Thanks for that topic.
Then two sentences later you'rereading along and they have this
(47:34):
really interesting likedescription about the tentacles
and it grips you and you say wowthat's suction cups like we have
on the back of our you knowrinse side of the sink holding
that little mat down.
You described it to be likethat.
That is a comparison I've neverthought of did you know that's
called a simile you just used asimile that's amazing.
(47:58):
Okay.
Now you keep going and they saysomething they do a non sequitur
and you're you're suddenly offtrack and you don't know why
they went there.
And so you say I'm reading alongI'm really following and then
you brought up something fromour Lake Michigan visit.
I'm curious to know more aboutthat.
How does that connect?
I'm curious about that asopposed to disconnected vague
(48:21):
off topic that's a teachercomment.
A reader comment is much moregenerous.
It's the same way you spoke withyour child when they were
learning to talk.
Sometimes you'd say things likedid you mean to say and then you
give them a script and they copyit.
You don't feel bad about thatbut you would never say no
that's not how you say it.
(48:42):
You know you should know alreadyhow to say it.
That's not how we talk tochildren.
So when we're being readers whoare responding we're actually
sharing the impact of thewriting which is the only reason
anyone writes is to have animpact on a reader.
SPEAKER_01 (48:58):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_00 (48:58):
So I give you all kinds of understandings of how
to be that reader.
What are things you can saybecause you have to train
yourself.
It's not something you know howto do because you've been
indoctrinated by school.
And we have these strategies forrevision that teach kids to get
comfortable making changeswithout improving the writing.
So the goal isn't to improve itit's just to get comfortable
(49:20):
imagining that it could be adifferent way.
Could we write it in a differentvoice?
Could we turn it into a lie?
Could we just count threeadjectives and just change three
adjectives like what you knowusing a die.
Just roll the dice oh the numberis five we're gonna change five
nouns and just see what thatfeels like as opposed to it
always being like the perfectstandard lives in the
(49:42):
imagination of this otherperson.
And I didn't do a good enoughjob yet of guessing what that
is.
SPEAKER_02 (49:48):
One of my favorite suggestions that we've done is
like they'll do a free write andthen um one of your prompts I
think is something like rewriteit as if everyone were pirates
or something love that.
And my mom my my kids lost it.
Like they were having so muchfun and I'm like okay this feels
so much different and when Itold them first like they
(50:09):
they've used they used severalother writing programs which I
won't mention but um I wastalking about maybe doing this
is before we started kind oftrying this new writing approach
and they were like does thatmean that we wouldn't have to do
this and this like all likenaming all of the mechanics and
grammar things andsimultaneously my two boys 10
and 10 and 12 simultaneouslyfist bump in the air and they
(50:31):
just yell freedom and I'm likeoh my gosh that was like it
seemed like you scripted that ina movie and that was real like
simultaneously shouts of freedomand I'm like I just want that
for every child and I want to beable to continually to like give
that that to my kids and I Ifeel like we just don't know
how.
And so I'm so grateful for yourwork in painting that picture.
(50:53):
How do we do this?
SPEAKER_00 (50:54):
That's right.
And you know there is a time atthe end of this lengthy process
after a child feels red, afterthey've messed with it Six Ways
to Tuesday, after they enhancethe content to then do what I
call the mechanics mop-up, whichis just cleaning up the the
stragglers, right?
But here's the amazing thingyour kids are capable of doing
(51:15):
it.
We don't need a teacher to provethey know where a period goes we
need the child to know where itgoes.
So when a teacher goes throughand makes all those changes
they've done research that showsit never shows up in the next
paper.
That doesn't improve anyone'sskill set to see that a teacher
knows how to spell a word.
That's absurd.
What we want to do is send ourkids back to their own papers
(51:37):
weeks later or a week laterwhere they have some distance
and we ask them to put on theirown editor hat.
And then I use this language Isay go through your paper now
and make sure you like all yourspelling and punctuation
choices.
That's very different than gothrough and correct your
mistakes because sometimes thechoice is deliberate.
(51:58):
You misspell it because it'ssupposed to be misspelled in
that character's personality oryou don't use a period because
you really do want it to be arun-on sentence there are
reasons to make choices that goagainst conventions but we want
our kids to go through first andsee if they can even see their
(52:20):
own writing challenges you willbe amazed.
And I give a little strategy forhow to set that up for success
and a little guide that you cangive your kids but that's all in
this book Help My Kid HatesWriting and it's in our
curriculum at Bravewriter.
And this approach, you know, ittakes time to get used to but
once you're in it starts to feelvery natural because it is it's
(52:43):
the natural way you want to bewith your family.
It's not this weird adoptedpersona of teacher.
SPEAKER_02 (52:49):
Right.
I love it.
And it has really changed ourfamily so I'm so grateful for
it.
Tell everyone how they can learnmore about your work.
SPEAKER_00 (52:57):
Yeah so I'm on Instagram at JulieBraveRider so
please follow me there.
I have a Substack called BraveLearning with Julie Bogart.
It includes a weekly podcast forkids on Monday mornings called
Monday Morning Meeting and it'sme talking to kids giving them
one sort of creative way toembrace their learning that week
and so far the feedback's beenincredible.
(53:18):
Like the kids just do all of it.
It's very fun.
And especially if you feellimited in your own imagination
you can sort of borrow mine fora little while and get in the
groove.
And then I have my books all onsale at my author site
juliebartwriter.com.
I have the Brave Learner whichis the book that tells my
pedagogy about homeschoolingraising critical thinkers you
(53:41):
know needs no explanation inthis moment.
SPEAKER_02 (53:44):
I see it on your books deck.
Yep.
And this is also one of our top10 books at Prenda so as you go
through the prenda professionaldevelopment when you get to our
master guide level of trainingit is one of the books you read
and that we constantly recommendall of our books that's amazing.
SPEAKER_00 (54:00):
And then my final and newest book is Help My Kid
Hates Writing How to TurnStruggling Students into Brave
Writers comes out April 15th2025 and I'm very excited about
it.
So thank you for letting me talkabout it.
SPEAKER_02 (54:12):
My goodness I'm so excited to get it I can't wait.
And then just to wrap up who issomeone we always ask this
question because we're trying toinspire our audience to become
grown ups who can kindle thelove of learning the passion the
motivation in the nextgeneration so who was that
person for you and how did theysupport you, see you, hear you
and help you become the personthat you are today Wow I could
(54:35):
go two ways.
SPEAKER_00 (54:36):
Am I allowed to have two the first one though I would
say is Peter Elbow who Imentioned earlier.
His book Writing with Power Iread in 1981 when I was 20 and
it that's when it came out and Iremember writing in the margins
I still have that copy of thebook in fact wow you mean other
people write this way I thinkwhat really struck me when I
(54:58):
read his work is that nowhere inmy academic education had anyone
spoken to me like the writer Iwas.
And here was somebody who was ata university level speaking to
the masses of academics thatknow actually this is the right
pathway to grow as a writer.
It's not reserved only forprofessionals.
It is also true for academicwriting which is by the way my
(55:21):
favorite kind of writing so Ireally valued his approach he's
very curiosity driven verywriting voice driven so that was
a massive influence on mybusiness Brave Rider,
Bravewriter.com but then theother person who had a massive
influence on me is the Britisheducator Charlotte Mason.
I think her education of thewhole child, her passion for
(55:43):
seeing children as persons rightnow, not adults in training or
adults mini adults reallychallenged the idea that school
was putting out which iseverything is for the future.
We're doing all of this for thefuture I think I really adopted
her sort of rich vision fornature study, art history,
(56:03):
reading living literature, usinga kinesthetic approach to all of
the activity of learning notjust book learning.
So I would say those are the tworeally formative people in my
imagination around learning.
(56:24):
Oh my gosh, definitely andthere's a book called another
one he wrote called WritingWithout teachers that is equally
phenomenal and really good forpeople who are working in any
kind of micro school academicsetting.
So I highly recommend that tooI'm gonna get that today.
SPEAKER_02 (56:40):
Thank you so much for taking the time to come and
share with us.
We've learned so much I'm justfeeling like so inspired and
excited to write and to help mykids write.
And I just appreciate all ofyour work and thank you so much
for coming on the KindledPodcast.
SPEAKER_00 (56:55):
Thank you, Katie.
SPEAKER_02 (56:56):
The Kindled Podcast is brought to you by Prenda.
Prenda makes it easy to startand run an amazing microschool
based on all the ideas we talkabout here on the Kindled
Podcast.
Don't forget to follow us onsocial media at PrendaLearn and
if you'd like more informationabout starting a microschool
just go to prenda.com.
Thanks for listening andremember to keep Kindling
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