The Homeschool Highschool Podcast

The Homeschool Highschool Podcast is about the stage of homeschooling that, as one episode admits, a lot of people find a little scary: the high school years. Episodes are credited to SevenSistersHomeschool.com and the Ultimate Homeschool Podcast Network. Vicki opens most of them. By her own account she also works as a career coach with young people and with middle-aged adults changing careers, and career planning runs through the episode list. In one conversation she is joined by Sabrina and Kim, and the three joke that the teen years look far less daunting once you are through them. That episode is about teens with no idea what they want to do. It argues for giving them a wide range of experiences and for building writing and public speaking skills, even for teens who are not headed to college. The reasoning is simple: everyone needs words to explain what is going on in their life. The same conversation remembers a field trip that went so badly the family now uses it to measure other disasters. The resume episode gets down to line editing. Working through a sample resume for a teen named Sally, Vicki explains starting each line with a verb such as assists, organizes or coaches, keeping one tense throughout, and listing the family's homeschool under education, either by the name the parents gave it or simply as homeschool. The procrastination episode starts from the point that putting things off is simply human. It cites the marshmallow experiment on delayed gratification, then separates true procrastination from distraction, depression or anxiety. Often, the episode suggests, the real problem is a teen who feels overwhelmed and does not know where to start. Vicki passes along a tip Sabrina once gave co-op writing students who were stuck staring at a blank page. Guest interviews show what came after high school. Dr. Sarah Varnell, a former student of Vicki's who became a veterinarian, describes sitting down in her first semester with the class listings and vet school requirements to plan each course, since some were offered only every other year. Her parting advice is that liking something as a hobby is not, on its own, a reason to make it a career. Morgan, from the Homeschool Curious Podcast, grew up in traditional school. She describes the night she asked her parents what they thought of her stepping back from work to homeschool her boys, and she talks through the Base Camp Ed app she developed. The register is warm and encouraging, closer to a kitchen-table conversation than a lecture. A family with a teen looking for a first job could start with 'First Resume for Your Teen’s First Job'. For a teen with no direction yet, the career exploration conversation is the better fit, and it closes on a line that sums up the show's outlook: 'there is not one right way to do this.'