Diogenes Academy

    In Louisiana, there are two options to legally homeschool -- the home study option, and the home-based private school option.  Under the home study option, you have to turn in a portfolio for each of your children to the state each year, showing the progress achieved.  You have to submit standardized test scores each year.  It's not a lot to ask.  Still, it involves Uncle Sam a little more than I care to, given that there is the other option.  Under the home-based private school option, you inform the state that you are starting your own school, and that your children are enrolled in it.  There is no outside involvement required.  I chose this option because the freedom it offers fits our chosen lifestyle a little better.
     I read somewhere online that I should send my letter of intent to the Louisiana Board of Education on my school letterhead.  First I needed to make a "school letterhead."  To do that, I needed to choose a name for my "home-based private school."
    As funny as it may seem to those who have never homeschooled, many homeschoolers name their home schools for various reasons.  It gives the children a sense of belonging.  It lends a feeling of legitimacy, which in turn encourages the parent/teacher to keep better records, and the student to perform at the best of their ability.  Having a name allows the parent/teacher to make business cards to show at bookstores so they get the educator discount.  It even gives the students (and parents) an easy out when someone asks where the child attends school.  Let's face it, explaining our choice to homeschool to complete strangers gets old after a while. 
    We are second generation homeschoolers.  I was homeschooled by my grandmother in the cozy town of Ruston, La, home of LA Tech and a School for the Blind.  My well-meaning grandmother had no experience teaching, and in fact had to study hard to learn the materials the night before she taught them to me.  Often she would even push the books at me and say "Figure it out, then teach me, so that I know that you understand it."  One thing she didn't need books to teach me, she taught me through example--humility.  She named our home school "School for the Blind Leading the Blind."
     I wanted to chose a name that would be uniquely ours. 
     We have a heavily biblical course of study.  Besides using the ABeka curriculum for all the traditional subjects (ABeka is a curriculum produced by Pensacola Christian College, a Baptist college in Florida), I also use Rod & Staff (a Mennonite curriculum)Spanish reading books (reading and phonics in Spanish language, as my children are bilingual) and Christian Liberty Press books for Bible study.  We also use AWANA (a Baptist church-based program) books for Bible verse memorization, as well as the ABeka ABC Bible memory cards (a verse for each letter of the alphabet).  With this in mind, we considered choosing a biblical reference for a name.  However, we realized that without someone knowing us, a biblical name may seem pretentious.  I thought of the passages that command us to pray in private rather than in the public square for others to see.  The humility my grandmother taught me won out, and I decided that it is more important to teach my children to LIVE as Christians should rather than simply proclaiming ourselves to be Christians.  Such labels have become cliche.  But if we live as we should, we don't need to label ourselves.  Others can do the labeling. 
      I asked myself what was so unique about us.  I thought of a few things.  My husband is from Mexico City, while I'm from Louisiana.  Our first two children were born in Texas, the youngest two in Louisiana.  We speak Spanish at home, and English with everyone else.  When my children began to ask whether they were Mexican or American, I never said half and half -- I said both.  They are 100 percent American.  They live here, they speak English, they were born here, they know the pledge of allegiance and the national anthem.  They learn American history and folktales.  There is no question about it.  They are 100 percent American.  But they are also 100 percent Mexican.  They qualify for dual-nationality, and we plan on getting them both US passports and Mexican passports.  They speak Spanish, though not as well as English, which is understandable since they lack the same levels of exposure.  We plan on spending some time in Mexico sometime soon to reinforce their language skills.  They learn Mexican history, they know the saludo a la bandera and the himno nacional.  They eat Mexican food almost every day at home.  Our oldest even lived in Mexico for the first year of her life.  But beyond this dual-national identity, we try to instill something deeper.  We don't want our children to have the same ethnocentric world view that is so common today.  We believe that ethnocentricity is rapidly becoming outdated.  We want our children to be prepared for a world where they may need to travel for a job, or work with people from different cultures.  For this reason, we love the old quote from Diogenes: "I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world."
        A second unique quality of our family is our love for travel.  We travel mostly out of necessity.  My husband works for a company that remodels Wal-Marts across the country.  He has remodeled stores in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Iowa, and Delaware.  Before this job, he had worked building homes and hospitals in Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, California, Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana.  When I was still teaching public school, I taught in Texas, California, and Louisiana.  It has been our unfortunate experience that when we move, we often are forced to leave behind most of our worldly possessions.  We left a king size bed, a wrap-around leather sofa with built in recliners and sofa-bed, top of the line washer and dryer, all only months old, and several handmade (by my husband) wooden furniture pieces when we moved away from California.  We didn't have time to sell our things, so we basically just gave everything away.  When we moved away from Mexico City, we left brand new appliances and a carpentry shop full of expensive tools.  We have even remodeled homes we have bought (twice) only to sell them at tremendous losses when we move.  Through all of this, we have learned the very difficult lesson that these material possessions do not truly hold the value that our society generally places on them.  Now, we travel with extremely little.  We do have our two-story home in Louisiana that we built with our own hands (no hired work whatsoever) where we do have nice things.  But we understand that no matter how nice the stuff is, it's still just stuff.  It doesn't hurt to leave it behind.  What matters is our family.  What matters is that our family remain united.  Because of this family priority, we travel together and homeschool our children.  We travel with so few possessions, that we can easily relate to the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes, who slept naked in a barrel.  Diogenes kept no worldly possessions (not even clothes!).  He once saw a poor boy drinking water from his cupped hands, so he threw away his own wooden bowl.  While we don't exactly share Diogenes' conviction for living in poverty, we can often relate! 
       We believe that our lifestyle of traveling and homeschooling is just as legitimate as the regular family lifestyle of staying home, both parents working, sending their children to public school, and growing local roots.  Going against the grain is not necessarily wrong.  I dyed my hair with purple streaks last October, and not for Halloween!  I like purple.  It's not wrong.  I meet with a lot of disapproval on account of our traveling and homeschooling lifestyle.  But I'm stubborn and just a tad rebellious.  Again, another parallel to the life of Diogenes.  He often did things that were against the societal norm, while not morally wrong.  He liked to eat in the marketplace, which was taboo in his society.  He explained that it just so happened that he got hungry there, so he decided to eat.  He liked to carry his lantern lit during the daytime.  Everyone knows that story.  (He claimed he was looking for an honest man.)  You can google him, there's a lot of information online. 
      So I decided to go with the tongue-in-cheek name of "Diogenes Academy."  I may be the only one amused, but who cares?  It's as good a name as any.  Our mascot is a dog carrying a lantern.  Another Diogenes reference, of course.   I even found a nice Diogenes quote to use across the bottom of our school letterhead:  "The foundation of every state is the education of its youth."  I'm immensely amused at myself, and I feel clever.  So it's a great place to start this adventure of our life.