Aaron and Kaleena Amuchastegui: Episode 204

Transcript

[0:00:14] CH: What’s up everybody, it’s Charlie Hoehn, the host of author hour where I interview authors about their new books. Today is an awesome episode, it is with Aaron and Kaleena Amuchastegui, they are the coauthors of The 5-Hour School Week and this is such a cool episode because Aaron and Kaleena were both frustrated with the traditional schooling system and the toll it was taking on their kids and their family and their collective happiness. They decided that there has to be a better way to learn and they began to experiment with schooling and start hacking this better way for them to enjoy their lives and their family time. The solution they came up with is really incredible, they’re able to teach their kids in a way that doesn’t drain them but allows them to really fall in love with learning and we talk about what this journey was like for them. It wasn’t easy, it was filled with fear and self-doubt at times but ultimately has created something that’s really worked well for them and could potentially work for you and your family too. Now, here is our conversation with Kaleena and Aaron.

[0:01:37] Aaron and Kaleena Amuchastegui: It was like we were living the life that we actually always wanted and like growing up, you’re like, “Okay, this is what I’m going to do when I’ve made it.” We were doing everything that people told us to do, you know, we had the beautiful family, we had great jobs, great house, kids would go to school at the private school, we would go do all the extracurricular stuff and they would be in cheerleading and play soccer and do all the extra sports. So we were living this life and we were kind of doing everything we dreamed of and we would pick up the kids at the end of the day and they’d be exhausted and then we get home and we’d be doing a couple hours of homework with them and all of a sudden the day would be shot and then you’d realize like month and month would go bay and we’re like, wow, our life is really flying by. We didn’t really realize that we were as discontent and unhappy until after it builds up and builds up, you know, where’s our life gone? We’re in the rat race, we’ve done everything that we thought we were supposed to do and everything right and now it just feels like we’re in the rat race like everyday just flies by us and we don’t even get to enjoy it.

[0:02:37] CH: Before we talk about what you did to kind of break out or the change that you made, let’s dig into the problem here, it seems like the problem for you two was actually mainstream education.

[0:02:50] KA: Yeah, absolutely. It was from the 6:30 waking the kids up until 3:30 picking them up from school. And it was like, we were unhappy every single day. You know, you have to get them up early, they’re exhausted, they’re tired, we’ve got homework that needs accounted for, lunches that need to be packed and so everyday, we were starting our days off with like hurry and scurry from the minute, right?

[0:03:17] Aaron and Kaleena Amuchastegui: I know, you think about the term alarm clock, who wants to be alarmed when they wake up, it’s a terrible thing.

[0:03:25] CH: Right, we start our kid’s days off with like, “Okay, we got to go,” right, panic right now because we have all these things and then we would pick them up at 3:00.

[0:03:35] Aaron and Kaleena Amuchastegui: Yeah, in those mornings, it would always feel like a rush out the door, talk about it in the book, that morning scramble was just crazy, you know? When you’ve got that many kids, you’re looking for items for sharing and homework and signing the slips and we always did it because we were told we were supposed to, right? We would take our kids to school and by the time they got there, you know, it’s morning time, now they’re alert, now they’re ready, now they have some energy. For the first hour and a half of their day, we’re getting them ready and then they start and then we hand them off and then we pick them up from school and they’ve just spent eight hours using their brain and going hard at school and so when we pick them up, they’re not happy, they’re tired, they’re exhausted, they’re cranky, we would get in like just tons of little fights on just driving on the way home because they were hungry and tired and cranky. We felt like we were - the best of our kids, from the best time from nine AM to three PM when they’re at their prime, we weren’t seeing them, we weren’t a part of that, we got the leftovers , we got it when they got back in the car and they were tired and cranky. So we got to rebuild them and get them ready to go attack their school day the next day. But in their best hours, we weren’t the ones hanging out with them.

[0:04:47] CH: Yeah, I mean, I feel like you two are preaching to the choir here where I am on your side, I know all the beefs with mainstream education, I’ve read a lot of books on this topic and I’m with you. But, as host, I have to play a little bit of devil’s advocate here. I’m friends with many teachers and people who have gone to – I’ve been a product of mainstream education. I assume you too were as well, I mean, millions of people are and I feel that his is a common song among parents and children is the frustration with all these issues but we still kind of have to go with it. Obviously, you two wrote a book called The 5-Hour School Week, what was the solution that you arrived at and how did you go about it?

[0:05:37] KA: Yeah, we arrived at the solution because - our kids actually went to traditional school for about six years, our oldest Madelyn had just finished third grade when we took her out and we had a vice principal at our private Christian school that had left to go start an alternative school, an Acton Academy which is like an entrepreneur based school from kindergarten all the way through high school. He was like one of my favorite administrators at the school, when I found out he was leaving him, you have to go out to coffee with me, tell me what you’re doing and it was in that moment of him stepping out of the box and saying like, I can’t send my own kids to a school like this. School first, literally, he’s like, I love being an educator but my kids can’t go here and so I need to start something different. I think that gave me permission to look outside education a little bit more. I didn’t know that we had options. I didn’t know that there were actual choices. Home schooling wasn’t really – we grew up in a really small town in Oregon, both of our parents were administrators in the education system and teachers. For us, the only option was to go to school. This is the first time I’d heard alternative education was a choice for us.

[0:06:56] CH: I guess the alternative schooling has a little bit of - to the outsider, a little bit of fear like that must just be for certain types of kids, maybe weirdos or whatever, right?

[0:07:08] KA: Yeah, there’s a negative connotation around home schooling and the type of people that usually choose to home school. And so, I’m like, that’s not for us until I saw this guy who is really well educated, super normal, really good with kids go, “School systems are like really toxic actually.”

[0:07:27] CH: Yeah, absolutely.

[0:07:29] Aaron and Kaleena Amuchastegui: Some of it too is we were both products of regular education and I have a college degree and we went through and so it’s not that maybe necessarily like normal education doesn’t work for some people but we are trying to create this kind of – is there even better? A lot of people are like no, you have to suffer through the education system because that helps prepare you for life and so – life’s hard, you know? We had kind of adopted that too. We were like okay, this is hard but we need to deal with it, this is real life, this is what it’s supposed to be. I think the experience of Kaleena talking to Matt was one of those first times where we were like, I wonder what life could be like, you know? I had joined like an entrepreneur group where we would go out and do these bucket list adventures and talk about grabbing life big and making the most out of our lives and making all these like key decisions that hey, we’re not just trying to survive, we’re trying to excel. Do something fantastic all the time. As we started to look more and more, we start to get inspired from that. Kaleena had gotten that seed planted and so our journey to turn it into The 5-Hour School Week was kind of, it was kind of a long one over several months or to a year. One of our big turning points was we did this - we took a family trip to Yosemite on a random week, you know, Kaleena, do you want to tell the story?

[0:08:51] KA: We had – I had already talked to Matt and we had started throwing around the idea of something different. We didn’t really – yeah, we were really scared and we didn’t even know what that looked like, what we putt our kids and Acton, was home schooling for us or was there – what about Montessori. All of a sudden, I was starting to read and look into and listen to people that are talking about education.

[0:09:13] CH: Just to pause you there, what kind off books or what kind of influences were you looking into?

[0:09:17] KA: Yeah, Matt gave me like some great reading list, I started with Free to Learn, Peter Grey. What a perfect choice to start with. Yeah, it really set the tone for what I wanted. I went into most likely –

[0:09:28] CH: Like Peter Grey, yeah. I love that guy.

[0:09:31] KA: Is she? My gosh, I want to start it and reread it a second time actually. Now it’s been about a year, it’s so good, there’s so many good points in it. Then life changing for me was also most likely to succeed.

[0:09:43] CH: It’s so good.

[0:09:43] KA: So good because it goes over just like the history of education system and why it is what it is. Free Range Kids.

[0:09:52] CH: Did you read any – yeah, Free Range Kids.. Did you read any John Holt?

[0:09:56] KA: I haven’t yet but Mat, the old vice principal said that that’s a good route to go.

[0:10:02] CH: That one’s a great route, he’s been one of the pioneers of this kind of alternative education and a huge advocate for children’s rights which I think is going to be a shift we see in the hopefully not too distant future .

[0:10:18] KA: No, I love it, I love this.

[0:10:21] CH: Grab this a little bit but John Gatto, I think he wrote.

[0:10:25] KA: Most likely to succeed.

[0:10:26] CH: Yeah, Dumbing Us Down.

[0:10:27] KA: Dumbing Us Down, yeah.

[0:10:29] CH: He wrote that as well?

[0:10:29] KA: He was a coauthor on that and then dumbing us down is one, yeah.

[0:10:34] CH: Yeah, Dumbing Us Down I think was the first education book I read that – there’s some book by Ivan Illich as well that’s very good but just really opened my eyes to these problems that - when you’re in school, you don’t have a high enough degree of thinking or consciousness to even be aware that these are fundamental problems. Like you just feel that it’s off. But you can’t explain it really.

[0:11:04] KA: Well, it’s hard to explain it when you have 30 other people doing the exact same thing as you. All your friends and you have an adult authority telling you exactly what to do and to question that process when nobody else is for a kid, it feels impossible to do, we don’t ask this questions very often.

[0:11:22] CH: Absolutely. I’d imagine you did some experimentation before you really arrived at The 5-Hour School Week?

[0:11:30] KA: Right, yes, that, she shoots us into the story where we decided to just take the kids out of school for a week, we had booked a week of camping in Yosemite National Park, it’s only about four hours from our house and we’re like, we’re going to take the kids out of school, we’re not going to worry about it for once, we’ll bring the homework with us, you know, because we don’t want to fall too far behind but we’re going to disconnect and see what it would be like to actually take the kids on a field trip on our own, right?

[0:11:58] Aaron and Kaleena Amuchastegui: I’d say it was almost an accident too, we wanted a vacation, we knew we want to go somewhere.

[0:12:04] KA: We’d been talking to Matt but it wasn’t like this – at the time it wasn’t like this is to see if we’re going to home school, it was like, we’re going on a trip to Yosemite. We go on this trip, there’s zero WiFi at the park which we weren’t really expecting and our oldest daughter Madelyn left her binder of homework at the house and it was a week’s worth, she was so stressed out because they were supposed to start long division that week. I mean, we get there and our kids are in like total breakdown, we hadn’t traveled with them much at this point and so, it wasn’t coming very easily for us. It took a couple of days and before we knew it, we’re hiking and going on all these ranger walks, riding open air buses through the park and it’s all these family time that we really had to experienced much prior.

[0:12:54] Aaron and Kaleena Amuchastegui: Yeah, part of why I say it started as an accident was we didn’t know that I wasn’t going to have cell service and be able to do my own work, we didn’t know we weren’t going to have WiFi. And so it forced us into spending this week as a family for a lack of better word like the old fashioned way. All right, we’re in Yosemite, no devices, no anything else, it’s just us, what are we going to do and we had some friends that were there with us too and so we would go on hikes and like she said the open air tour where they’re learning from a ranger and they’re learning about these falcons there and how they had to save their eggs and they learned about glaciation and how different things are formed. At night we’d go to these different fire side talks where a ranger would be teaching them something. They were learning so much about so many different things that they don’t learn in school and that is kind of this real world fun, adventurous education. We had a great time there and we were like wow, this was an amazing week and as we started to drive home, we could see Madelyn, especially she’s our oldest, start to get a little bit stress, start to see it, yeah, school starts again tomorrow and I didn’t do any of my homework.

[0:14:02] KA: We get home and I’m unpacking the car and Madelyn starts just going into a panic and so calmly, Aaron goes, I’ll just sit at the table with you for like two hours and we’ll knock out as much as we can and I’m sure that you know, you’ll have time throughout next week and I’ll just get it on the calendar, we’re going to knock this out so don’t stress out. I’m unpacking, Aaron’s sitting at the table with the girls, knocking out their homework from the week, I’m cooking dinner and I don’t exaggerate when I tell this story, it was less than two hours and Maddy had mastered long division. And there was like, there wasn’t the tears, there wasn’t the fighting, it was just, you know, she knew how to divide and so Aron would show her the step and she would master it and go, now what? He’d come back and show her just walk her through it. At the same time, he’s walking Charlotte through like some spelling test practices and Izzy’s writing. I’m cooking dinner and it’s just – it feels so natural and so good and an entire week’s worth of work was done in two hours.

[0:15:05] Aaron and Kaleena Amuchastegui: Part of the reason that – Charlie, have you ever read The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss?

[0:15:10] CH: Here’s a fun fact, I was Tim Ferriss’ first full time employee. I worked with him for three years, yeah.

[0:15:17] Aaron and Kaleena Amuchastegui: Well, very cool.

[0:15:19] KA: That’s the coolest thing ever.

[0:15:22] Aaron and Kaleena Amuchastegui: That is super cool and super funny. Part of the inspiration comes from, I’m a big fan of his book, you know, when I was rebuilding my business five, six years ago, I combined his book and The Miracle Morning and really totally changed the way our life was and changed the way that our businesses ran. At different self-help conferences and had to get up on stage and talk to people about the four hour workweek and try to talk to people about the four hour workweek and try to coach people through like hey, focus. The idea of why it works so well with the kids is there’s a lot of concepts like from The 4-Hour Workweek that were coming to mind at the time. Hey, if you’ve only got a couple of hours to get it done, there’s a lot more focus, there’s a lot more deliberate education. They’re paying attention to every step of the way because they realize they only have a couple of hours to try to finish it. There’s a lot of those concepts and me, being aware of them and trying to practice those of how they were able to get so much done within that specified period of time. Because they were out of time, because there was a deadline, because they had the ultimate focus, because I was there to help walk them through it. It was those concepts applied to their education that helped that work.

[0:16:22] CH: Well, just to pause you a quick second there, I think there’s also the other element which is they just come back from effectively a relaxed mini-vacation with their family, they felt more bonded, they felt more – even though they were a bit panicked about the homework, they were probably in a better physiological state than –

[0:16:43] Aaron and Kaleena Amuchastegui: Yeah, you know, I haven’t had anybody kind of bring that up or point that out just before but it’s a great point, right? Because during that week, their brains got to refresh and they got to refresh for normal book type work, they got to open other sides of their brain and experience and have all that stuff. I think that yes, because we had just come back from that vacation, it probably amplified that even further. Not just using the techniques and the focus but they were so much more ready at this point for us to all work together and for dad to be the teacher for a little bit in that. It was really this kind of crazy exciting night. We get our stuff done, they get their homework done and the next day we go drop them off and Maddy was just so, as we were dropping her off, she was like, thank you, she was so relieved and thank you and I went to pick her up from school that day and she jumps in the car and she goes – “Hey, how was your day? How was it? You guys had been gone for a week, you’re back.” It was the most hilarious thing, she jumps into the car and goes, “Dad, I’m the only one that knows how to do long division,” they didn’t get there last week. It was this really fun kind of example of that. That was our first experience of it working but we almost didn’t think much of it after that trip, we were like, “Okay, that was cool, really cool concept, we were able to catch it up within a week,” but we also weren’t ready to fully commit or fully convert. It just became kind of became one of the stepping stone stories of our memory.

[0:18:08] KA: Yeah, but incredibly important to me honestly because Maddy came home for I’d say probably close to a solid two weeks after that with long division homework. Every time, she was having to work on long division when I knew she already knew how to do it. Every day I felt myself becoming more frustrated with the fact that she spent seven hours at school that day. That had a lot of impact on me in the very beginning, honestly.

[0:18:35] Aaron and Kaleena Amuchastegui: Then we started to do a couple of more trips like that. Then we started intentionally going on trips, leaving the stuff at home, knocking it out the day before they’d go back and it was working and then a few months later, I was speaking at a conference and telling people, you know, to work less, to start adopting the principles from Tim’s book and some different steps they can take to where they can you know, work a lot less and get a lot more done and kind of live life to the fullest. To experience over things. You know, this big kind of inspirational thing and one of the ladies stood up at the end and you know, during the question and answer, and said, “This is so great but if you do this for your business, what do you do for your kid’s education?” At that time, it was funny because I was like well, that’s a good point. You know, my first part of the answer to her was, well, my wife and I aren’t real big fans of the educational system and then the only answer I could give her was the example of, we did go on a week vacation to Yosemite, we got her weeks’ worth of homework done in two hours and then she was the only one, you get to tell the story and she was the only one that knew long division. It was after that that within a couple of days, I told Kaleena, “Hey, we just bought the URLs for The 5-Hour School Week. I don’t know what this is going to become but,” –

[0:19:46] KA: I’m like, “What?"

[0:19:47] Aaron and Kaleena Amuchastegui: She had such a good point. The lady had such a good point to bring it up to us, it’s like hey, I’m telling adults, don’t work a 40 hour workweek, go live life and do it like this so why – even though we had started to make these –

[0:20:01] CH: Right, but kids have to have 40 hours.

[0:20:03] Aaron and Kaleena Amuchastegui: Yeah, they were still doing it. Even though we had transitioned and started to be inspired, we still weren’t fully committed, we were still making our kids go to school 40 hours a week most of the time. Except when we’d go on those vacations. That was the big moment where we started to get more intentional, it was still like a five, six month process after that. We had summer came and went and then school year started the next year and they were still going.

[0:20:27] KA: Aaron came home from that conference and I had no idea what he was talking about. He’s like, I bought a URL and we’re going to be The 5-Hour School Week and I’m like, “Our kids go to school five days a week still, I do not know what you’re talking about. I don’t know who’s going to be teaching them because I still wasn’t so sure – my mom was like a teacher, she was a science teacher with a college degree. I don’t have a college degree and I was a real estate broker for the previous last seven years. The very thought of home schooling three girls and I had a brand new baby, I honestly thought Aaron lost his mind completely. No, we’re looking into alternatives and I really love the philosophy of everything that we’re talking about but actually pulling them out of school was terrifying.

[0:21:10] CH: Right, what were you terrified of? Because I think this is important to hit upon. Because a lot of parents have these thoughts but they’re like, no. What were you scared of?

[0:21:20] KA: I was scared that I was incapable, I was scared that I was going to be failing my children that I wouldn’t be able to socialize them in a healthy way. That they wouldn’t learn the things that they needed to learn, that everybody was going to think I’m absolutely crazy and that we’re turning our kids into weirdos. I was worried about all of it, I was worried about h ow my kids were going to feel about it and how they were going to thrive within our home. I was worried about what other people looking from the outside in were going to think about what we were doing. We had started – number one, we had four kids which most people think it’s crazy in itself and then you go and you start traveling with them and people think that’s insane, especially when you have a brand new baby and here we were talking about taking them out of school. I was like, full on anxiety attack for months because I knew that it was exactly what was the best thing for my kids and walking through the fear was really difficult, honestly. It was so bad, my fear was so bad that we’d had an amazing summer, we lived our entire summer as if we were home schooling our kids and adapting this five hour school week principle. For June, July, and August, that’s how we lived. We went on incredible vacations and we taught our kids. It just felt super natural and then September came and I put them back in school because I couldn’t walk through the fear of having them home for the next nine months, right? Or 10 months.

[0:22:52] Aaron and Kaleena Amuchastegui: Or forever.

[0:22:53] KA: Or forever, yes. They start school, I get elected as the PTA President which is like I always volunteered. I was always in the classrooms and so it was a good fit for me, the school felt like so I am running the meetings, we get through September and it’s pretty rocky and the kids are pretty discontent and I am getting burnt out. We get to October and I am not even exaggerating, there’s probably tears from my either myself or one of the kids three times a week. We just know that this is going against our belief system now right? I am taking them to a place that it wasn’t that I didn’t think that it was not only not a good place for them to go. I almost felt like it was unhealthy for them to go to school at this point and I am taking my kids there. So every day we are going through this and then November.

[0:23:46] Aaron and Kaleena Amuchastegui: And so I saw that happening and Kaleena was super stressed, the kids we’re super stressed but it was also falling a little bit back into that mindset of there is nothing we can do, right? There isn’t really an alternative. So we scheduled a three week trip in November. I was like, “So here’s what we’re going to do, we are going to go out to Boston and we’re going to stay at the tea party and we’re going to go to Philadelphia.” We’d do all of these fun US history type stuff and just put it on the calendar and said we’re going, right? Because I could definitely see they needed a break, everybody needed a break and it could be that chance for us to go test it again.

[0:24:23] KA: Right, so he puts this on the calendar and we’re going into November and tuition is due and we’re going to be gone the entire months of November pretty much.

[0:24:34] Aaron and Kaleena Amuchastegui: When it comes the holiday break it’s just out of it will only be five days anyway.

[0:24:37] KA: Right, exactly it’s like you’ve got Thanksgiving coming up and so now fall tuition is due for literarally the kids sitting in a classroom for four days or something crazy and I had parent-teacher conferences the next day and Aaron is out of town. So Aaron is out of town and I am driving to parent-teacher conferences and I all of a sudden, the fear was gone and I couldn’t bring myself to write that check for them to sit in a classroom for four days. And I just told Aaron unless I hear something that completely changes my mind about the education our girls are getting, I am going to take them out of school today and like always he said, “I support whatever you do. You’ve got this.” And that’s what he’d been saying for almost a year now in regards to this. So a part of me wonders if he even thought that I was going to do it that day or not but I got in there and I got to Maddy’s parent-teacher conference. And my straight A amazing citizenship star student daughter was top of the class and everything that I have been hearing every single year and then the teacher did whatever teacher does, she goes, “But what we could be doing to get a reading at a seventh grade level.” And I am like, “She’s a fourth grader. Why do we want her to be at the 7th grade level?” So I go that’s awesome, you do a great job here, this is a great school. I am actually starting to homeschool and so Mattie is not coming back next quarter. And I did the same thing with the other two teachers. I had a kindergarten teacher say I would do the exact same thing for my daughter if I could financially figure out a way to make it work and I went skipping out of that school. I literary jumped of the front steps. I was so excited and then when I got home and I told the kids and they cheered and I said, “We don’t have this all figured out. We got to go through and figure out what’s going to be the most important to us”. “But this is how I envisioned it and I want to know what is really important to you and what you want to learn and we’re just going to dive in and figure.”

[0:26:39] CH: You asked students what they cared about? That is unheard of.

[0:26:43] KA: That is part of the philosophy of The 5 Hour School Week actually. Every single week I also ask what do you want to learn and more importantly, how do you want to learn that and that’s what we have been doing now for a little bit over two years.

[0:26:56] CH: Two years and what have the change has been since you’ve implemented this new school week?

[0:27:03] KA: We have been traveling the world and learning together. So as a family I think we’re closer than we’ve ever been. I mean I didn’t even really know that families could get this close.

[0:27:13] CH: What do you mean by that?

[0:27:14] KA: So I have a tween right? I have an 11 year old and she tells me everything. She talks to me, I get a play by play of her and her friend’s conversations every single day. She will show me the text messages that her friends are sending me or my nine year old will tell me her biggest fear when it comes to soccer. Our lines of communication are open in a way that we don’t have the time to work on that when they were in school for 40 hours a week. Because it takes to pour into your kids and to have the time to sit there and really listen to what they have to say. It is time consuming and we didn’t have that kind of time before.

[0:27:56] Aaron and Kaleena Amuchastegui: It is also creating that team mindset. So when we say we’re really close, we would start to see how far we could push different trips or like, “Hey we can fly from here to here and stay there for a week and then fly from here to here and then rent a car and drive a thousand miles and then stay here?” Like each time we would do a trip we would challenge ourselves more. Oh can we fly to London now even though Brax was only one and can we do these different things? So as we would set this up as these challenges almost like this extreme challenges like, “Hey can we really live on the road for a few weeks and do this, this and this before coming home and getting a break?” And every time you’d accomplish one of those and succeed through one of those, it would be that these team unity experiences with going to Cuba and getting there and having our first several hours like first we are trying to get Cuban currency and we are battling just to try to get milk. When nobody there speaks English and at the end of that when we got to go home, all of us in the family we’re like, “Whoa we really went through something intense and accomplished it and it was great” we get that sort of stuff with the experience but when it comes to their regular school, they do these online courses from different resources that clean the nose and can share with different people but it tracks their grade level and where they would be. And the more important part is over the last couple of years, they are still at or above the grade level they would have been had they stayed in school but they had a whole bunch of life experiences too. We have different people influence us along the way too and talk about that it was there were more important things to learn than just what they teach in school. There’s stuff about real life lessons that people can apply later and so we’ve gotten a lot of travel experience. But also real life experience and we’re teaching them about entrepreneurship and other things but they haven’t fallen behind on the school work. They just only spend an hour a day on it.

[0:29:46] CH: Right, so that is what I was going to ask you next. I’d imagine you hear plenty of objections to this five hour school week from parent who aren’t in it. So you just talked about results so to speak or how your kids are performing which is up to speed if not above it but I’d imagine that a lot of parents are wondering, well how much more does this costs and how much time are you able to spend on your work? A lot of parents have 40 hours per week jobs and so what do you say to them?

[0:30:23] KA: Absolutely and I love answering this question because you get to be as creative as you want when you build out a five hour school week or when you step into an unconventional education environment. So whenever – The 5-Hour School Week is about inspiring and encouraging you to make sure that you are living the very best life that you can live with your children and I feel like why education is the core of that is because they spend so much time in the school system. So it is about taking them out of the school system like intentionally focusing for about an hour a day on academic so what that looks like for us is sometimes, I will have a kid that will spend an hour just working on math for the week or an hour just working on social studies. My oldest Madelyn would spend all five hours a week on social studies and honestly sometimes I let her. I let her lead her learning the way that it’s the most comfortable for her and where she’s going to get the most content out of it. So it’s been about an hour on that and then additionally, learning happens organically in life and that’s the way that we’ve always learned first and foremost. So my kids cook with me, they shop with me, we play, we play outside, we go on local field trips here. I 100% understand that everybody either has the desire or the capability of traveling the world the way that we do but this week alone we’ve been on two field trips to our local pumpkin patch. There’s orchards, there’s local museums and so you can make those field trips as close to home or as far away as you want if that is an aspect of The 5-Hour School Week that is really attractive to you but what it really gets to be about is building out an education that works for your family lifestyle and for your kids so that they can learn the best way possible.

[0:32:22] Aaron and Kaleena Amuchastegui: You are just getting that much more of your life back so you are choosing. So yes, we chose to do it traveling and that cost money but plenty of people choose to do it at home and it is just about taking and eight hour school a day into a one hour school a day and instead, you have the rest of the day to do other things. Now a lot of people do sports and extracurricular activities but now at soccer practice they are just less tired than they would be if they had finished a full day of school or for any of the other extracurricular. I think one of the problems that people have when they try to adopt homeschooling and the mentality it is almost like a reset mindset though too. Parents need to be ready for the idea that they have to trust the system and your kid only has to do an hour a day. So people would call me and say, “Hey, well my kid is just trying to rush and get all their stuff done and they are finishing it in an hour or two and then they just want to play the rest of the day,” and the parents get –

[0:33:11] CH: It’s what they’re supposed to do.

[0:33:14] KA: Exactly.

[0:33:14] Aaron and Kaleena Amuchastegui: And that’s what we say. That’s exactly what you are supposed to do and parents, that is a really difficult thing. When you go from the mindset of formal schooling to that, it is like reprogramming the parents too to explain to them like, “Hey that’s okay. It’s okay if your kid is trying to rush all of their work and get it done so that they can go play on the swing set outside the rest of your day and do that for seven hours and only do school work for an hour that’s what we believe in but I think that they have a tough time adopting to that.

[0:33:42] KA: I think parents and even children, if you come from a traditional school setting like we did, there’s this whole phase that happens when you take them out of school called de-schooling where just to get out of that habit of what they were doing every day, day in, day out for so many hours, you have to break those unhealthy habits of what that created and so letting them play for six months after you take them out of school and not doing any curriculum is actually super healthy as well. It’s about clearing their minds and making space for them to learn in a way that they’re actually taking it in, mastering it. It is providing real value to their life. Not learning it to pass a test, not learning it to get an A but learning it to have real impact and value on their life because if my kids are just learning something to pass a test then the minute they put their pencil down from that test everything that they memorized is immediately gone.

[0:34:41] CH: Right, it’s just regurgitation, yeah.

[0:34:43] KA: It’s just regurgitation and so we focus less on regurgitation and more on learn this when it feels right for you to learn it in a way that is comfortable for you to learn it so that it adds value to your life and then it is something that you actually can use instead of learning the same thing in second grade, 3rd grade, 4th grade, 5th grade, all the way but how many times did we learn about the civil war? How many times did we learn about the great depression and still so many of us don’t really actually know anything about those events as soon as we leave high school or college?

[0:35:16] CH: Right because it wasn’t an innate sense of play and curiosity that drove us to it. It was external pressure and incentives to memorize regurgitate the information and then move on.

[0:35:30] KA: Right, yeah. Exactly.

[0:35:31] CH: That is just the way the system is built and you know there is so much stuff in your book that tragically we’re not going to be able to cover all of it. you talk about giving your children a better social education, how to do that, how to help your kids enjoy physical education and use their bodies, giving children life skills in a real world education and of course, making travel and exploring a part of that learning and it is a beautiful philosophy and I am a huge personal believer. I have written two books on play, I think humanity’s biggest sin frankly is robbing itself of play and so any system that you can create that enables our humanity to flourish and our kids especially to be able to learn in the ways that they naturally do that there’s not that hard lying division between work and play but understanding that play is both of those things simultaneously but work is not play always I think that is a beautiful thing. So I am curious if you had other parents adopt the 5 Hour School Week and what their results were.

[0:36:49] KA: We have, it has been such an incredible journey because when we first started we have a set of friends start shortly after. It’s been the most beautiful thing to watch. They started a little family farm, a flower garden. They have chickens and they have pretty much adopted The 5-Hour School Week. They homeschool their two little girls and their life is really beautiful and they are incredibly happy. It is really fun, we’re good friends. We get to do a lot of field trips together and that happened immediately after we did. Since then we had this year going into September, I had three other friends. Well, two friends and then an acquaintance reach out and said, “We’re doing what you’re doing,” and we have just in contact over the last couple of months. So they started their homeschool journeys and their five hour school week journeys and it is the coolest thing to watch because so far everyone is really excited and happy. And loving the transition and it is really neat to watch people go, “Oh yeah we definitely see what you’re doing there and that makes sense” and being able to open up people’s eyes the same way mine were open because I think that that’s what it’s about. I think that it is really obvious to all of us that there is a problem but it is realizing that we have the power to step into the solution that I think actually isn’t that available to all of us yet you know?

[0:38:07] Aaron and Kaleena Amuchastegui: Over the last month, Kaleena has had several people reach out over the last month that she didn’t know had started homeschooling. That part of it was like, “Hey a month ago because of what we talked about,” two months ago or a month ago, “We started and this is what we have done over the last month and life is really working.” And so it is almost every few days somebody reaches out and say, “Hey I’ve applied a little bit of that in my life but my kids are still going to school.” She’s had teachers reach out to her that found her online that said, “Hey I am actually a teacher but I am trying to apply some of this stuff that you talk about to my classroom to make it a better experience.” So different people are taking different parts and pieces of our stories and our philosophies and even in normal main stream education trying to apply what they can but then it is really exciting. Like at least once a week, I walk in and Kaleena is getting another email or message from somebody going, “Hey you have inspired me, I have started what’s next?” Or “Hey, you inspired me six months ago and this is what our journey has been like over the past six months.” It was really cool to see that. I mean at the very beginning I was like, “Let’s write it down to see if you can inspire one family.” Or if we can just tell people there is another option out there and the whole goal of the book already has been accomplished before it even got released.

[0:39:19] CH: That’s awesome and there’s got to be so much more for you two to come and the impact it is going to make. I am really excited for this book. I honestly thought a while back like am I going to have to write a book on alternative schooling at some point because I am going to have to learn this stuff. So I am so thrilled this book exists and our listeners can find you guys at the fivehourschoolweek.com. Is that the number or just a written out FIVE?

[0:39:48] KA: Both, you can get to our website both.

[0:39:51] CH: Great, I want to leave with a final question which is give our listeners a challenge, what is the one thing they can do from your book this week that will have a positive impact?

[0:40:06] KA: From the book, I’d say sit down and ask your kids, are they happy with the lifestyle that they’re living right now and that’s even your four year old, regardless of the age, I’d sit down and ask them, what are you the most happy about in your life and what aren’t you – figure out what the solutions are or can be to what’s not actually adding value to their life at the moment. Because I think as parents, we go, they’re good, they’re going to school they’ve got friends, their grades are good. I think that there’s a lot of negates that we assume our kid are happy or our kids are stepping into their passions. The sad part is, when we don’t ask them that and we don’t hear them and listen to their responses, those passions start to get buried. I would really urge parents like sit down, are your kids happy in their class? Are they happy in their alternative education, are they happy in their home school life? If not, what can they do alongside you, how can you support your kid to add more value. Because I think that’s important.

[0:41:11] Aaron and Kaleena Amuchastegui: I’d like to give people like almost a broader challenge some of the time like the paying attention when you drop your kid off at school. What mood are they in and when you pick them up, what mood are they in?

[0:41:21] KA: Yeah.

[0:41:21] Aaron and Kaleena Amuchastegui: Just being super conscious of like, what are they like when you pick them up? Are they happy on the way home, do they feel nice and filled up or do they feel like they need to be filled up? I always tell people to go try it. Some people think, I can’t pull my kids out of school for a couple of days or they’re going to fall behind or it’s over. No, they cannot miss a single day or they’ll never catch up. That is such the saddest experience and thing ever like if that’s true then we’re putting our kids and we’re training them for this rat race that’s so hard. If people are just like starting to wonder a little bit, you know, just go hey, maybe we could do something different or maybe we could try some of this stuff, I’d say, all right, just take a couple of days off school and the night before they’re supposed to go back, see if they can do the makeup homework, see how long it takes them to get the makeup homework and go back. Did they really miss out on that much by a couple of days?

[0:42:11] CH: Awesome challenges. Awesome, I love it. The book is The 5-Hour School Week. Aaron and Kaleena, thank you guys so much for being on the show and writing this book.

[0:42:22] KA: Thank you.

[0:42:23] Aaron and Kaleena Amuchastegui: Thanks Charlie, what a great time.

[0:42:25] CH: Thanks so much again to Kaleena and Aaron for being on the show. You can buy their book, The 5-Hour School Week, on Amazon.com. Thanks for tuning in on today’s show. If you liked what you heard, here is what I want you to do next. Open up the podcast app on your phone or iTunes on your computer and search for “Author Hour with Charlie Hoehn” and then click “ratings and reviews”. Take 10 seconds to rate this show or leave a review. It is a small favor but it’s really the best way to show your support and give me feedback and if you know someone else who’d love Author Hour, take another three seconds to text them a link to this episode. We’ll see you next time.