Hi, I’m Alanna.

I taught middle and high school English in public schools for eleven years, mostly ninth grade, and somewhere past two thousand students I couldn’t pretend anymore that the problems were one-offs. I had honors kids, bright, high-achieving kids, who couldn’t remember their own project on the day it was due, because someone was always going to bring it in that morning.

Give them an assignment with no rubric and no model and they’d stare into space, and then every hand in the room would go up at once. “What do I do? Where are the directions?” And honestly, the best part of the job was closing my door and doing it differently anyway (Socratic discussions, projects built around what they actually cared about, big questions about human nature tied to the books). Some kids lit up. But I was doing it inside a system that pulled the other way every single day.

We’re a secular homeschooling family, and we worldschool, which means we’ve lived and learned in nine countries over the past four years (full-time travel for a few years, part-time since). Academics take about two hours a day. The rest is reading, which my kids do for hours without being asked, outdoor play that would make some parents nervous, a micro school a few days a week, co-ops, and a lot of boredom, which I consider a feature. When they tell me they’re bored, my answer is always the same: “That’s great. Your boredom is not my problem.”

There’s ADHD and giftedness in our house, including mine (which I didn’t find out about until my forties), and a standard grade-level classroom was never going to fit kids who are years ahead in one subject and wired completely differently in another. That’s part of why we do this, too.