My plan, this year, was to self-publish two books: a compilation of movie reviews written over the course of several years, and a little primer/crash course on homeschooling for parents who have no idea what they’re doing and what they’re getting into. Originally, I had scheduled things out so that the movie-review book would be done first, sometime around the summer or early fall. The rest of the year was to be devoted to putting out the homeschooling book.
But when the muse starts groaning and running to the toilet because she needs to fire off a big one, there’s no denying her, and for whatever reason, the homeschooling book came to me in a diarrhetic rush, spilling stinkily out onto the page in heaving spasms of pent-up inspiration. I had worked on the framework for this book last year and had even written up chapter titles. What I needed was content, and I guess all I had to do was allow my brain to marinate for a few months. The content, when it gushed out, was almost fully formed, and it neatly followed the structure of the chapter topics that had been laid out all those months before.
This isn’t to say it’s a perfect book. I gave it the title of Think Like a Teacher: A Parent’s Guide to the Basic Principles of Homeschooling. I’m cringing at that title a bit now: I could have said Basics instead of Basic Principles. Better rhythm. Catchier. Shorter. And after the paroxysm of writing that lasted about a week, I did pick over the manuscript and find some things that needed tweaking. This is also not a perfect work in that I have no idea how parents might react to it. When you give birth to something as a writer, you’re automatically proud of your child, no matter how deformed and ugly it might be. But what will the neighbors think when they see your mutant, yellow-eyed cat-lizard baby? Reactions to books and babies tend to be subjective. This book is meant only as a guide to getting parents started on their homeschooling journey; it’s not meant to be a detailed, step-by-step manual that does the reader’s thinking for him. So will parents be disappointed, despite my repeated insistence throughout the book that this isn’t about the details of homeschooling?
I hope moms and dads will find the book to be a useful intro that will orient them and keep them away from the worst pitfalls. There’s stuff in there about setting goals, making plans, being patient, checking knowledge, and creating scaffolded (i.e., intertwined, mutually reinforcing) curricula. I address the issue of teaching a subject you’re not an expert in; I go over popular wisdom like SMART goals, Bloom’s Taxonomy of Cognition, and the Feynman Method, all in what I hope is an accessible tone that doesn’t coddle or browbeat the reader. I talk about the value of student-centered, task-oriented, somatic (body-oriented) learning. I rant about the uselessness of multiple-choice tests. A lot of what I’m passing on comes from mistakes I’ve made as a teacher, especially the stuff about checking knowledge and reinforcing learning—areas where I used to be very weak.
I have to market the book, of course, and writing this essay is part of that larger project. I suck at marketing the way Whoopi Goldberg sucks at analyzing the Holocaust. One of the best marketing tips I heard was to start a YouTube channel, become a YouTube presence, gain a few thousand followers, and then tell everybody you’ve got a book. Sounds smart, and while becoming a video personality is actually another of my projects for this year (hello, Skillshare!), I haven’t started on that journey yet. Part of the problem is that I need to buy the necessary hardware.
Marketing or not, the homeschooling book is out. If you go to Amazon.com and try to find it off the main screen, it might not come up. Click on the Kindle e-books section and do a search there, and I think you’ll find my title right away. I’ll be printing a short run of hard-copy versions of my book, mainly to give away to people here in Korea. Amazon offers the option of creating a print-on-demand paperback version of my book; I might actually take Amazon up on that idea. We’ll see.
If you’re in the market for a book on homeschooling, or even if you’re just interested in the bare-bones principles of teaching, give my book a whirl and tell me what you think of it by writing a review. As for the movie-review book, well… that’s going to be much, much bigger (over 1,000 pages!), so it’ll take a while longer to put together.
Stay tuned!
Good luck with this effort. It does seem to me there is a market of frustrated parents out there who could use this.