Our homeschooling venture started before I was born, and I was homeschooled all the way to High School. I do remember well our old homeschool group, FAITH (Families Active In Teaching Homes) which is now under a different name and different management. We had lots of fun in the homeschool group! My older sibs attended classes for a long time, and all of us kids could join in the P.E. activities from early ages, (which were a blast). We also sang choir in the homeschool group for Christmas parties and had special days where we could show off our studies to other families and see what they had been studying. Those days were fun, filled with carrying snakes and wielding heavy Scottish Broadswords, examining carefully assembled villages, castles, temples and pyramids, and checking out western US frontier artifacts.

When I got about ten or eleven I was old enough to tag along with my older sibs on their speech tournaments and I got a taste of speech and debate as I timed their rounds. I couldn't compete with them until I was thirteen, but I watched and learned as best as I could, and enjoyed their parties and meeting the other kids as they timed. I loved it when I got to time a duo impromptu speech or a drama or humorous interpretation, and I got bored easily when it was an extemporaneous or a debate round. But it was still fun to travel across California, with or without dad, with the older guys. I got so used to hanging out with the crowd and having fun, that when I actually became a man (turned thirteen) and joined the competition, all my efforts put towards the tournament were primarily focused towards social engagement and not towards my work. The only reason I got my Illustrative speech finished was that we had a wonderful speech coach who spent hours with me at a time, personally, working through all of my ideas and finding pictures and printing them out and cutting them out and figuring the whole plan out. I was a poor planner, and even a poorer speaker, at thirteen, but thanks to her and her wonderful family (who I miss so much) I was fully prepared as the competitions drew near. I finished all the competitions with one diploma for an amateur impromptu apologetics speech, and a lot of judges comments on improvement.

Whether or not they would have helped me improve we'll never know, because for reasons that were good to my parents and have been forgotten by me, we left the homeschool group, got our act together, and began homeschooling on our own. We continued for a while, working completely independently, until Andrew and I started taking sporadic classes at the junior college nearby with Samuel, and by the time I became a part time college student. By that time we were back into a co-op homeschooling network, and Andrew started taking classes again with friends throught the network. Homeschooling was hard when I was in it, but now that I'm in the school system, it was so easy - and so fun too! We had lots of time to finish it, and it was our fault if we were doing school all day, because we could finish faster if we wanted too! But now I was in public school, and there were class periods and homework due and tests that couldn't be procrastinated... ah, the good old days.

I attended the community college for most of my remaining high school classes and for my Gen Ed for college. I knew I couldn't afford four years at a good private university, but with help from the junior college, perhaps I could afford two years at a good college and graduate. My finances were a lot more serious now that I had (three years ago) gotten into a fender bender with a much bigger SUV and had to pay for the complete engine block on our Maxima... I still moan to think of it! I was looking at a few schools, but mostly just The Masters College because my brother and a few cousins went there, and my aunt and uncle taught there, and John MacArthur was the president (we listened to him a lot on the radio) and it was ranked like third or forth best in its category in US news and World Report or some other prestigious sounding magazine.

So with that goal in mind I started taking classes in the summer of 2004 (I turned thirteen during the class). I took Latin that summer with Mom and Andrew (who was eleven) as a night class, and it was very fun! The teacher was neat, and he wasn't that worried about this class because it was his last class to teach at the college before he transferred, so he was really chill. We all went to class each day, got our assignments, got home, would do them together, and then turn them in the next day, and for the most part, whatever Andrew and I missed, mom would go over with us, and so we all aced that class (thanks mom!). Next we took a judo class together (Andrew and I) and after that a piano class. Then we started taking real classes. Statistics and History and Music appreciation and more piano and economics and computer science and chemistry and spanish and biology etc... in all, about 90 or so units transferred, so a little more than two years got finished. Which was radical awesome, because each class that I finished counted for one less class I had to pay for here. My favorite class would have to be biology. Not the first time I took it, but the second time. Our instructor was a student at another university at the time, and of course our views on origins didn't align perfectly, but he was an inspiring man, even to two or three years later. I still remember his lecture on studentship and scholarship, and his ending lecture of continuing to learn. It was an amazing experience - if any readers have to take biology at Solano Community College, definitely take it with Brad Paschal (Also, take Judo with Jimmy Tanaka - it's awesome)! I also deeply appreciate all the people who gave us rides to school, from our friends at school to Sam, and Kelly Allio, and Adams Tegeler... and a lot more, but they helped the most.

But I finished those up soon, my later classes pulling my GPA down from the A's that I had gotten in Judo and Piano and Latin, but I finished all the classes that could transfer, and I got the financial aid to go to Masters as I had always figured, and off I went. I was excited to leave all the way up to the week before, and then a wave of depression hit as I realized that a new life down south means I loose the old life up north. Thankfully, that wasn't the case, and It did kinda bring me closer to all the other people that had to leave Vacaville before me, the pioneers of the past...