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The Homeschool How To
I don't claim to know anything about homeschooling, so I set out on a journey to ask the people who do! Join me as I chat with homeschoolers to discuss; "why are people homeschooling," "what are all the ways people are using to homeschool today," and ultimately, "should I homeschool my kids?"
The Homeschool How To
#128: From Public School Teacher to Homeschooling Dad & Filmmaker: This is David Alford’s Story
Are you questioning the traditional education system? Curious about homeschooling, creative learning, or how to raise lifelong learners? In this powerful episode of The Homeschool How To Podcast, meet David Alford—a former public high school English teacher who left the classroom to homeschool his children and eventually became an award-winning independent filmmaker.
When David’s wife entered medical school, he made the bold decision to leave his teaching job to stay home with their daughter. That moment sparked a complete shift in his view of education. What started as a practical move quickly became a transformative journey into child-led learning, educational freedom, and the incredible impact of storytelling in education.
You’ll hear how David and his family learned history through novels, explored creativity through theater, and turned homeschooling into a lifestyle filled with meaning, flexibility, and purpose. His latest film, Searching for the Elephant, takes on addiction with empathy—rooted in the same storytelling values that shaped his homeschooling philosophy.
🔗 Explore David’s Films and Work: www.crosspurposes.productions
⏱ Episode Chapters
00:00:00 – Meet David Alford: From Teacher to Homeschooler
00:09:51 – The Path to Homeschooling
00:17:37 – Theater Background and Film Beginnings
00:27:36 – Education Freedom and Learning Through Stories
00:31:24 – Behind the Scenes: Family Filmmaking
00:33:24 – College Alternatives and Individual Paths
00:40:30 – Searching for the Elephant: Film Overview
🎯 What You’ll Learn:
- Why many parents are leaving the public school system
- How homeschooling creates space for creativity, connection, and curiosity
- How to teach history and literature through storytelling
- The role of theater and filmmaking in family bonding and learning
- Alternatives to college and traditional career paths
- How to build confidence in your homeschooling journey—even if you're just starting
💬 David’s Advice to New Homeschoolers:
“Give yourself grace. Teach them to love learning, and all the rest will come as needed.”
What is the most important thing we can teach our kids?
HOW TO HANDLE AN EMERGENCY!
This could mean life or death in some cases!
Help a child you know navigate how to handle an emergency situation with ease: Let's Talk, Emergencies!
🛒 Get 15% off the Tuttle Twins books mentioned in this episode using code Cheryl15:
🎧 Subscribe and share with a fellow parent who needs to hear this.
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Welcome, and with us today I have David Alford. He is a film director, film writer, screenwriter you do everything and homeschooling dad.
Speaker 2:David, welcome, Welcome to the show Well, thank you for having me, Cheryl. I really appreciate you having me here.
Speaker 1:This is exciting. Yes, I was told about your movie. I checked it out, I really did love it, and I'm so excited to talk to you because not only did you write the film, direct the film and produce it, but you also are a homeschooling dad. So this is going to be a really exciting conversation. So let's start from the very beginning. How did you end up as a homeschooling family?
Speaker 2:Well, it started when my wife was accepted to medical school. I was a public high school teacher. I taught English in public high school and when she was going to medical school it was kind of a shift of gears. God kind of sent us in a weird direction that we weren't expecting and we thought, well, if he gets her in, then he got her in. So I quit my job teaching in public school to stay home with our then one-year-old daughter. And then when it came time to deal with the medical school schedule, which was constantly changing like every month a whole different rotation we realized that she was never going to be able to see our daughter if we were stuck in the traditional school system. So I said I'm a teacher, I've taught 150 high school students, teenagers Could one child be? Oh my goodness, I thought it was going to kill me off. I couldn't believe how much work it was taking care of one toddler. But she was great. I was just nonstop. I got breaks when I talk in public school, so I didn't at home.
Speaker 1:I was a government worker. Yes, that's what I say all the time. I got three breaks a day before.
Speaker 2:But I ended up staying home with her and became a homeschool parent and we opted for homeschooling and then we had two more kids that came along throughout the whole medical school process and the residency and the end of it, and so we had three kids by the end of it and we just became a homeschool family and fell in love with the freedom that it gave us the freedom to learn, the love of learning and the relationship that we have with our kids and the fact that we could adapt their schedule so they could see mom more than the average bear.
Speaker 2:And we thought, if we wanted to leave the medical community intact as a family, we had to be more fluid and flexible, and homeschooling gave us that ability to do so. So my kids and I have been doing arts and stuff for years together, because part of our schooling was going and doing theater together and doing children's theater, and they acted in it and they helped make props and costumes and they just grew up in that kind of artistic environment and so we just made that part of what we do as a family and we've had a blast doing it for years so what did you teach in school?
Speaker 2:I taught high school english. I was a literature teacher. Yeah, literature and humanities were the two subjects I taught english, but you ended up a filmmaker, obviously the acting.
Speaker 1:Who started that? The kids or you Well?
Speaker 2:the filmmaking came from theater background because I had I had been doing theater since I was a kid and part of my kind of mental sanity of being a homeschool dad was I did theater while my wife was in medical school. I would do theater, sometimes in the area of San Antonio. I'd do a couple of shows a year to kind of keep myself plugged into the adult world and my artistic expression, and so that's something I've done for a very long time. When we moved here, when my wife got her position as a physician here in Virginia, we moved here and there was a professional theater here that I was able to get involved with and start working at as an actor and also as running a youth theater program. I'd been doing that some in San Antonio, so I literally designed and created a youth theater program. I'd been doing that some in San Antonio. So I literally designed and created a youth theater program here and of course all my kids were in it and working with me in it, and my oldest daughter became a teacher in it when she became old enough, and so it was something we did together and so through that process I decided I was going to get a wild hair and write a play for a theater playwriting competition that we have here in this region, I thought I'll give it a shot. I've been wanting to write for a while and so I did. I started writing this play and as I was going through it I started realizing this isn't really going to work on a stage. It just isn't built that way. It's not thriving in that environment. So I had a crazy idea of maybe it could be a screenplay and I'd never written one before but I thought, well, maybe this would work. So I talked to some friends that I knew had done short films before and showed them the script and said do you think this would work? And they're like yeah, let's do it. So we got a group of people together here in our little rural community who knew about filmmaking and we made a short film and so my kids were all involved in it. One of my daughters acted in it, the other one was the props and manager and the other one's the sound person. And we just all did it together with some of our homeschool friends, because we've grown up in a whole homeschool community here in Virginia, and so all these kids had different talents and stuff and so I'm like come on, be actors or come in it and work on crew or something like that. Help us with this. And so it became a full little community project for all of us.
Speaker 2:And that little short film, which was called Cross Purposes, was picked up by a distribution company and it's about a 30-minute film. So it's kind of a mini feature slash short film. It's kind of long for the short film category but it's too short to be considered a movie. So we put it in some film festivals just to see if anybody would like it. And it got accepted into 15 film festivals and we only submitted it to 16. So we're like well, I guess people like it. And so it got into these film festivals.
Speaker 2:And I don't know if you've ever heard of the Kendrick brothers, but they're real well-known Christian filmmakers who've been putting Christian movies in theaters for a long time. They have a film festival and they put it in their giant film festival they do every year in the South, in Atlanta. They put that film in with the feature film category. So we were competing with full length movies made for hundreds of thousands of dollars. And here we are our little $9,000 homeschool project was competing in the category with all these other films, so we thought we didn't know what had happened. But it was just so much fun. Everyone was so gracious and the competition was so good spirited. We had such a good time doing that and that little short film for a short film took off, and so we've been able to make three more films since then, using largely the same crew. That's kind of old. They're all adults now. They were kids when we started, but they've all gotten to be adults now and so we still we still team up together and put films together that way.
Speaker 1:And I can't help but think, as you're saying this, like none of this would have happened if you didn't quit your job to homeschool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, our whole lives would have been very different, and certainly my relationship with my kids, because I know them so well. You know how it is when you homeschool your kids. You know their strengths and you know what they struggle with and you're able to help and you're able to find things in life that make them excited and you're able to build your education around that and that makes all the difference in the world, because they come out loving learning as opposed to thinking it's a chore that they just have to get through to get to the next phase of life. We can actually enjoy each phase of life we're in and learn as we go and just learn to learn, and that will get you further in this world than anything, I believe.
Speaker 1:I mean yes, that gives me chills just to hear and to hear a former teacher say that. Because I mean you, I don't know. I have so many questions or like so many thoughts going through my head right now because it's like you. You saw the classroom. You saw like the administration coming down on you, probably over the years, getting stricter and stricter on what you have to teach, how you have to teach it, um, what test scores the kids have to get in order to, I don't know, get X, y and Z funding. Did you see that that was becoming more of a problem in the school system? Was it hard for you to leave?
Speaker 2:No, no. Well, it was scary for me to leave. I mean, I'll be honest, as a man it's tough to say I'm going to stay home and take care of a two-year-old girl. I mean, you know, play group was me and a bunch of moms, you know, and I was like it was awkward. I mean there was times when it was just a little scary in that sense.
Speaker 2:But leaving the education field was hard because it was. There was so much need there. I taught in a very low income school in downtown Dallas and those kids had so many needs that were not being met by the school system and I found myself working overtime trying to find ways to get them applications to colleges and things like that in which their families were not capable of doing themselves, and so there was so much need that it was hard to leave. It wasn't hard to leave the system because the system was incredibly broken and the system was there to feed the system and the kids were kind of ground up in the gears of that and that was hard to leave for their sake. But, boy, I was thrilled to get out for my sake because that was one of the hardest things I ever did and to this day. I appreciate some things about public school systems, but I don't find that homeschool kids miss very much. Honestly, I feel like the things that we get so far outweigh the things that we miss. It's not even a contest.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I can hear that between the lines of what you're saying with there were things that kids needed that I was there for, like helping them fill out, you know, applications to colleges or scholarships. That parents weren't doing with their kids and and that's a systematic thing too, you know their parents weren't there to do it for them and their school system wasn't there to do it for them. So you know you were that teacher that went above and beyond, as so many teachers are, and not every family is cut out for homeschooling. You know that is just the plain and simple truth of it. Some people need the school system because what they have at home isn't going to cut it. But for the families that are able, you know it's.
Speaker 1:You know, and you don't want to sound like righteous about it either, but it's like I just don't want my kid to be another number, like I want them to shine above the rest. So why would I put them into kind of this factory system that you know we kind of when we look into the school system and how it was created, you know, for for the industry, the Rockefellers, you know they wanted worker bees and that sort of thing. You know it's so hard because, yeah, you're like, oh, I want everybody to homeschool, but then at the end of the day, like we know that that's not true. I come from, you know, upstate New York or inner city kind of school where it's like, yeah, no, a lot of these kids need to be in some sort of regularity throughout their day that they're not getting at home.
Speaker 2:This was 25 years ago and I don't think I could handle being a public school teacher today. I couldn't handle fighting with cell phones, I couldn't handle the attitudes of entitlement where kids feel like they're supposed to pass because they breathe, not because they've actually done anything. I mean, I have friends who are still in the public school system and the nightmare stories I hear, even up to junior colleges and colleges I'm like I don't think I have the patience. Maybe I'm too old and cranky, but I don't have the patience for any of that anymore and I don't think I could go back now, even if I wanted to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I worked in government for 16 years and I think it's the same thing. Now that I've seen like the other side, like wait a minute, I can wake up in the morning and do what I want with my kids all day and nobody's dictating where I go, what I do, what I learn Huh, it's like it's very liberating, but also it's like I've stepped out of a matrix or something.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, definitely. I've unplugged from the matrix and never looked back. We actually tried private schooling with our girls when we first moved out here to Virginia. There was a lovely Christian private school. We thought we'd try it. They did it for about 10 weeks and said dad, can we please go back to homeschooling? We'll start the year over from the beginning, but we're only reading books that we already read two years ago which were bored out of our minds. The kids don't seem very interested. We just want to go back to learning the way we've learned before. And so we we unplugged and we went right back to homeschooling and never looked back.
Speaker 1:So what were some of the? Um? Like hard times with homeschooling. You have all girls, right.
Speaker 2:I have two girls and one boy.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:My youngest, who's 17, is a boy.
Speaker 1:Okay, what were the hard things? Like you know, we think about things like oh my God, they're going to miss the prom, the football games, yada, yada. And then you know it's so funny.
Speaker 2:I think if you were to talk to them they'd sit here and tell you we missed nothing. I mean we had. We moved here particularly. I mean our oldest was 11. Our little boy was only six months old and so we moved here. We had been a homeschooling family and, being from a theater background, we had all kinds of theater activities we were doing. The kids had friendship circles they were part of. They were so plugged into so many social activities that they were already going to that they didn't miss doing the schoolwork at home during the day because you could get it done in half the time. You'd go to sit in a public school do it. They'd get done by noon and we'd be out doing stuff by afternoon. And they never missed a thing.
Speaker 2:When we moved here we met a whole community of homeschool families. There's some of the fact that my daughters have married siblings from out of that family and that's now they're all family family at this point in time. But we've just had met this beautiful community and our kids just grew up together, going places and doing artistic adventures. A lot of them came and did my theater arts program. They did plays together in a professional theater. I mean, they've had so much fun that none of them they all want to homeschool their own kids. They're like there's no way we'd want to plug into a system now.
Speaker 2:This has been too great, the challenge being, I guess, having kids that are five years apart.
Speaker 2:You know you're doing kindergarten and you're doing eighth grade, you're trying to feel all together and you know trying to keep everyone rolling at the same time was probably the most challenging aspect of it. As far as making sure everyone's engaged and going simultaneously when they're that far apart, None of them were close enough together they could share any curriculum whatsoever. We were all at different places and they all have very different skills. Being patient enough to say, okay, this kid, this is easy for this kid, but this kid really struggles with it. It's not because they don't care, it's just they have a different skill set and me having to adjust as their teacher and realize I need to change my tactic on this and the tactic I thought worked so well before suddenly doesn't work, with this child and me being humble enough to say I need to change. It's me that needs to change, not them. That was probably the one of the biggest struggles, I think, as far as being on top of things for homeschool could you do that in the school system where you worked?
Speaker 2:no, no, everything was very rich, decided ahead of time, and there was no. You had 30 kids and you couldn't meet half their needs because they all had very different needs. But we were told to teach everything the same way and our tests were uniformed and designed by the school system. So I didn't even know what was going to be on the test. It was that dictated from on high. I couldn't even make tests that fit their needs any better than that, because it was. It was automated. So, no, there was no way I could accommodate their education and I had a joy doing it for my own children, that's for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and do you think that you needed the teaching background in order to say, oh, this child learns a bit differently, maybe? My daughter likes to be more hands-on, my son likes to be more outside and, you know, really taking the reins on his own, figuring out problems on his own, like, do you have to be a teacher to do that, or could just you know, your child and any common parent do that?
Speaker 2:oh no, I can't speak because I because I've had educational training it certainly helped. I mean, I didn't, it didn't hurt me in any way. I I'm like you, though my son if he was not moving, he was not learning, and that was something that it didn't hurt me in any way. I'm like you, though my son if he was not moving, he was not learning, and that was something that I didn't. Have that issue with my girls. They could sit at a table and talk with me and we would learn.
Speaker 2:But if my son wasn't bouncing up and down on a giant exercise ball or sitting on the floor with his legs in the chair and his head on the floor spinning in circles, if he wasn't doing that, he wasn't learning. And at first I was like, are you even listening to me? And then I'd ask him a question. He answered it. I'm like he is listening to me. He's actually listening better because he's physically squirreling around than if he was forced to sit in a chair and stare at me. He would drift off.
Speaker 2:And that's when I realized you know, this public school is one size fits all, and that was, that was one size fits all, and that was. That was always the case, no matter what the students needs or learning styles were, we had to do everything the same way, but I love the fact that I didn't. I could let him bounce on an exercise ball and he learned his lessons and he had fun and we were able to talk, because that's what he needed. That's the kind of person he is. He doesn't do that as much now. He sits still better now he's 17,. But you know he barely moves now, he just lays.
Speaker 1:Yes, they do slow down after a while, you know, and she works with high schoolers to get the career that they want without necessarily needing that college degree. And is it necessary? And yeah, how do you? What's your take on that and how did you approach that with your kids?
Speaker 2:My attitude with them was college is not required for whatever thing you want to do. I mean, I talked with you about Joseph, who did the movies with me. He was the lead actor in Searching for the Elephant and he's done all the movies with me up to this point in time. He chose not to go to college because filmmaking is his thing and, frankly, going to college for filmmaking isn't that particularly helpful. You can be a filmmaker without college. He rather spent that four years making movies and learning how to do it, and now he's kind of ahead of the curve when kids are graduating from film school. So in his case, no college. He's not my kid, he practically is, but he isn't and so he's.
Speaker 2:The college was just not in the cards and not necessary. My daughter went to a couple of years of college but she got married and she's a homeschool mom now, so she's got what she needed. My other daughter is going, is applying to medical school and will probably start medical school next year. She needed to go to college to get that information and so she went to all four years because that's what she wanted to do. And my son wants to be a pilot, so he wants to be a pilot for the mission field, and so learning how to repair and pilot airplanes is a critical thing. Now you can do that without going to college. We just happened to find a college that actually had missionary pilot training as a degree. So he will leave that with a pilot's license and a certification to work on small single-engine aircrafts, and so he's going to go to college and learn that.
Speaker 2:So it depends on what you're gifted to do, and we're all gifted in different areas. Sometimes college is required and sometimes it's just not. So I always tell my kids I never put the pressure on them that that's like you got to go, no matter what. I think you got to do something because you got to continue to grow as a person, as a human being, and learn how to support yourself. But college isn't always the way, and to say that it is, it's not true, and I think your kids know that. So I think it's more honest to say sometimes it's true and sometimes it's not.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I love that we're bringing it back to the individual, Like what do you want to do with your life? Because I was kind of that era. I graduated in 2002. So it was like you go to college or else you're kind of just going to be, I don't know, like Joseph's character in Searching the.
Speaker 1:Elephant, you know you're going to college or else you know so you're not going to make anything of yourself. So I went and it was like I don't know what I want to do, because nothing in high school really you know, and I bring it back to even earlier than that Nothing in life ever allowed you the time to discover what you like to do because you're so busy from you know, it was like school and like the before care, because my mother worked and during the school. And then you know I had dance class after. You know whether we had dance competitions or somebody's birthday parties. You know a class of 30 kids, 30 birthday parties throughout the year on the weekends and it's like your time is always dictated that to be bored and figure out what you like to do.
Speaker 1:I didn't. I remember writing songs, actually as a child, but where those little notebooks are now, I'll never know.
Speaker 1:But, um, but yeah, it's so interesting that, like it, it never allowed me to kind of like move forward with that Like cause, as you went into middle school and high school and college, your time only got more dictated on what you have to do. So there wasn't that boredom to say, like, what do I like to do? Let me write this, let me you know. So not until just in the last couple of years where I was like, well, kind of after COVID, for me it was like, I don't know, it was the world backwards. Is it crazy? Like am I crazy? I don't really know. And you know my, they were masking in New York three-year-olds in daycare. So that's what my husband and I were like we're taking them out Cause we're not going to mask our three-year-old. We're we. I don't know what's going on with the world, but I know that's wrong.
Speaker 1:So then it was like I was working from home with my son here and then I got pregnant for my daughter and we were like I don't know if I want to vaccinate at all anymore. What?
Speaker 2:are we going to?
Speaker 1:do. We're in New York so you can't even go to school here unless you have everything on the CDC schedule. So it was kind of like, all right, we have to put some brakes on, because I want to research some things and I can't do that if my kids are in the system. So yeah, I ended up quitting my job last year, officially starting the podcast two years ago, and it was more just like can I homeschool? I don't know. I was interviewing homeschooling families to see how weird you people are well, and that's.
Speaker 2:I think that's the beauty. I think you hit the head when you say they're so busy they can't think straight. I mean, the beautiful thing about homeschooling is you're going through a subject and suddenly your child lights up on something. You're like, oh you love this, let's pursue it further. Let's go to a place where people do that. Let's talk to people who do that for a living. Let's find out more about it, because clearly this is lighting your fire and we can take the time to do that and we can change the subjects to talk about the things they're really interested in.
Speaker 2:And my kids kind of grew up with this sense of purpose, like maybe education means something, maybe it's going to help me in the long run and so I'm going to buy into it too. And so you'd be surprised how much easier it is to teach kids who have bought into the process and see the value in it than kids who are sitting behind a desk in public school being drug tooth and nail through these lessons that they see no value in, they see no purpose in it. They just see a bunch of hoops we're all jumping through and they're not dumb. They see the system happening and they see how unfair it can be at times and how silly it can be at times, how redundant it can be at times, and they know they're just in a holding pen sometimes and so it's a whole different attitude, and so my kids have just been.
Speaker 2:I'm sure everyone who homeschools has a different experience, but my kids just love learning and they love the world and exploring it and they grow up with this sense of who they are and I think we have time for that. And having a dad who understands that with them means that he can walk along beside them and help them get there just a little bit faster. So we're a team in that regard and I love that. I've loved that all the way through.
Speaker 1:So your film is called Searching for the Elephant. Is that the elephant?
Speaker 2:Like the elephant. That's actually that, that that film Searching for the Elephant, is the one that we shot, the last one we've shot. We've shot four films as a company and that last one, Searching for the Elephant, is a ranch phrase. It's a phrase when ranchers would go out and go to this call-in where they had hired hands for the year to come work on their ranch and take care of the animals and the hay in the fields and that kind of stuff, and they would look for people to work for them and that would commit to staying there for a year. And there were people like, oh, yeah, yeah, feed me, house me, give me a salary, I'm there for the year. And there were those like, yeah, I'll take the job for now. And you could tell that these people were always looking over their shoulder for a better situation. They're always looking for something that they can do that's better than the job they have with you. And the other men would look at each other and go, oh, that guy's searching for the elephant, he's looking for the perfect situation that doesn't exist and he's never going to be content with any place that he is right now. And so that's where that France comes from.
Speaker 2:And when I read that about ranchers I was like, well, that's kind of the theme of the film. So I adapted as a title. It's a weird title and people are like what does that mean? There's no elephants in this movie. I'm like it explains it in the film, but that's really a ranch term and that's for the idea of never being content and that's part of what the film's about but as I was watching it, thinking of this I mean thinking of this in the homeschool perspective it made a lot of sense for me because it's like in school they kind of are always like, okay, and you're gonna get good grades and you gotta do well on the test and you're gonna go to college and you're gonna be successful.
Speaker 1:But nobody ever says like what success is. And it took for me to get to my um, you know government job after 16 years. I was a supervisor. I was making six figures. That's what I'd always wanted to do.
Speaker 1:I figured I'd be successful then and it was like okay, you know, I went to work, I sat in my cubicle, I took my 15 minute breaks twice a day and my half hour lunch where I put my headphones on and walk around downtown Albany and, um, never once did I ever know what the Hudson river was about, the history of it as I'm walking alongside of it. Never once did I know a bird that flew by. And it's just interesting because when I quit to homeschool, my kids and I, I mean, we're, we're looking, we're watching birds that are actually like making nests and how they make them and laying the eggs, and watching the baby birds and see what are they feeding them and watching this whole process. I'm learning about the. I'm like every time we pass the Hudson, probably three times a week, and I'm like, oh my God, colin, do you know what we're passing now and we'll talk a little bit about Henry Hudson?
Speaker 1:Or you know the Indians that lived here? You know and then what happened to them? You know how the Puritans came in and this whole the Erie Canal getting built right off of it and it's like this is the elephant I was searching for. It was here the whole time. It was at home and I wasted 16 years in a cubicle. But I think I needed to waste those 16 years in a cubicle to appreciate it. But if I can get other people there quicker, I'm happy to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I've never loved learning more. I learned so much more teaching my three kids homeschool. I mean I went through history three times. I went through algebra three times. I went through Spanish three times. I'm better at school now than I ever was before, but I've had fun. I mean we read these books together and there's stories that I didn't hear because I was busy memorizing the dates of the Civil War or the names of the generals or you know, I was like trying to memorize it just long enough to get through a test and then dump it out because none of it meant anything to me. But reading stories and books and going to the side of the Gettysburg Address with the kids and going places and seeing things and then just talking about the stories, like stories, because I'm a storyteller. That's the way I learn the world. I absorb it through stories and learning these stories with the kids and sharing their excitement. I learned so much more as a homeschool dad than I ever did in public school and I had fun.
Speaker 1:I mean I really did. You had amazing, that's amazing. Had fun. I mean I really did, you had amazing, that's amazing. I mean that's so telling, like you were a public school teacher and you learned more teaching your kids, yeah, and to learn through stories, that's how it's always been done.
Speaker 2:Yes, and our curriculum is such that we learn history through historical novels and you know stories that are made up about that time period of history.
Speaker 2:So you're living that history through a character who's there in it usually a kid their age, and so they're living in that world and we're talking about it, we're making pictures of it and we're doing diagrams and we're doing stuff and we're other subjects are kind of overlapping into it and it's like it's just so exciting and so when they hear something they're like oh well, that's what happened. When blah blah, blah blah happened, I'm like, yes, that's right, like they learned it because they heard it through a story and not because someone asked them to memorize a cold hard fact and the whole hard facts come and go and they don't mean anything. But when you've walked in someone's shoes for a mile, you feel like you've lived with them and you feel like you've experienced their life with them and those kind of things stick with you and history sticks with you when you live in it that way and I had a blast doing it with them.
Speaker 1:And I love what you said about how it all integrates too, because your history, your reading, your writing you know all of that does intertwine. So it's not like you're taking the 40 minutes for history and then switching gears and going into 40 minutes of reading or 40 minutes of English and 40 minutes of writing. You can intertwine them all, which is why it takes half the time to homeschool.
Speaker 2:But, also.
Speaker 1:It makes sense, it's relevant to what they're learning about, so it's such a beautiful way to do that. So how involved were your kids in searching for the elephant when you were writing and creating?
Speaker 2:this. Well, my oldest daughter is the production designer, which means she designed all the costumes and she decorated all the sets. And so for this film we rented a ranch for a month and it had a giant house that was like 120 years old and about 800 acres, and so we shot in this house. So my daughter went through and designed the decorations of the house and she set up all the colors and the palettesettes and she mixed the costumes with the colors in the house and she designed all that. Now she's a mom of three of her own and so she did all that at home, because she's also a homeschool mom. So she did all that home ahead of the film and pre-production and then just came out to the site just long enough to help her helpers get everything set up and then she'd go home. So that was how her limited involved, because that's what she could do on her own. Then my younger daughter, who's five years younger than her she's my assistant director and she keeps the crews on schedule. She designs the schedules. If there's a problem with the schedule, she readjusts it, gets it going. She's on set there with us and says you've got 10 more minutes to get this shot. Then we've got to move on. So she's my bossy little girl but she does okay, she kind of thrives in that role. So she's the one that keeps us going and we all listen to her when she says something to do that.
Speaker 2:Now my son he was just 16 when we shot this film and so he is a boom mic operator. So he works with the sound designer and so he works with the sound designer and the sound designer has the headsets in the pack and is doing all the mixing and he's collecting the sound with the boom mic as the actors are talking and so, uh, this is the first time he worked all the way through on a film and it was a lot of work. But he, he held up really well and did a great job. The sound was fantastic. And I don't he's not, that's not his thing, this isn't his thing, he does it for me. He he kind of had fun. It's not something he wants to do for the rest of his life, but he had. He had fun this time around, just being with the whole family working on it together yeah, it's got to be so fun, and did you wrote it as well?
Speaker 2:I did. Um, yes, I wrote it with joseph stam, who's the lead actor in it, and he and I have been working together on these films since that very first little short film we did when I needed an actor for that he was 16 at the time. I needed a boy to portray someone who was dying of cancer and I had a casting call and about 30 young men came in an audition for the role and Joseph won the part as a 16 year old kid, and so after that he kind of stuck around and wanted to help with writing and he wanted to help with directing and he kept acting in each movie. Sometimes it was a big lead, it's just a small part he'd do in the background and he's really just a passionate young filmmaker, and so I've been able to kind of mentor him through the entire filmmaking process. He's been a part of all the business decisions, the writing, the directing, the producing. He did his own first short film all on his own this last year and he's ready to take off and do his thing. So, and he's ready to take off and do his thing.
Speaker 2:So when I'm old and gray I can sit. You know, I'm already gray, but if I'm older and grayer, I can sit in the easy chair and watch Joseph Stamm films and maybe even talk on the phone and just tell them what to do. You know, as the cranky old man in the chair, give them advice that way, because he's the future of filmmaking as far as I'm concerned. He's just extraordinarily talented. Far as I'm concerned, that goes. He's just extraordinarily talented.
Speaker 2:So he helped ride and direct elephant, but he was also the lead actor. He played a drug addict and it was a very challenging thing. He has no experience of that all. He talked with a lot of people who were living that situation or in recovery and he interviewed them and got very specific detail about their stories, their lives and what they went through. And then he took that on as an actor and portrays it beautifully in the film. You'd have no idea he has no experience whatsoever in any of this, but, boy, to watch him portray that role is gut-wrenching because you really feel like you're watching his character go through it. So while he was on set I was the primary director who shot all the photography and then he and I went back and mixed the film together after it was produced and he so he's a co-director in that project and a co-writer as well.
Speaker 1:Awesome.
Speaker 2:It's been a beautiful thing.
Speaker 1:And homeschooled as well.
Speaker 2:And he's 100% homeschooled all the way through. Yeah, and so as are all of his nine siblings yeah, no, he totally looked like a drug addict.
Speaker 2:No, yeah the tattoos were wash off, kind we had to order them from. And then we sadly, in the middle, he has a tattoo on his neck during the film. He has no tattoos but he had one on there and we had to apply it and if it started wearing off, the makeup artist had to go through with a pencil or pen and try to connect the missing parts until we could order the new tattoos and get them back to set before we ran out. It was a panicky thing, these tattoos.
Speaker 2:But no, joseph yeah, he really plays a troubled child and in the story he and his grandfather are forced to live together on this ranch and they are estranged. They don't know each other, but they both lived lives where they've pushed every one of what's important in their lives out of their lives if it's important in their lives out of their lives. They both isolated themselves in many ways. They put up a lot of thick walls around themselves and through a series of circumstances, they are forced to live on this ranch and this farmhouse together and they don't even like each other, and so the movie is about them getting to know each other, getting to understand each other and finding a sense of family between them. That becomes very healing for both of them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it kind of reminded me, as I was watching it, the docu-series Dope Sick have you?
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, yes, yes, I've heard of that. I've not seen it, but I've heard about it.
Speaker 1:Oh, it is something to watch because it's all about how the medical industry you know, I know, I know your wife is in medicine, your daughter is going to know, hey, let's get people on prescriptions which kind of led into you know Joseph's situation in the movie. I mean, you don't get into how he got into that, but it was very common so it was. It's relatable in that. You know, this can be so easily anybody. What made you want to write a film about this?
Speaker 2:easily anybody. What made you want to write a film about this? In our area we live in Southwest Virginia and there's not a family here that hasn't been touched by drug addiction in some way, shape or form, and I mean the nicest, sweetest, most wholesome families you can imagine would come and watch our movie at the theater and come back after and goes yeah, my brother has been an addict for 10 years and he's broken our family's hearts, and so when it comes to addiction, it's such an unfortunately universal problem that so many people deal with, and we didn't just want to sensational, we wanted to deal with the people who are addicted, but also the family that's hurt around them and trying to love them but constantly being pushed away and trying to love through that, and so that was something that we thought was a big, big part of the story. And so having a family that's torn apart by this and a grandfather who's torn apart by PTSD from Vietnam you know he's suffering from residual hurts and pains, and so he's suffering too and watching two suffering people locked up in a room together, kind of spewing things at each other and then learning to love each other and seeing each other through each other's eyes, it's just kind of a beautiful thing and then to see families who have kept trying to love and kept trying to go kind of get rewarded with hope at the end.
Speaker 2:We're real big on not putting a big red bow at the end and having everyone clapping in a church choir with white robes because instantly something great happened and everything's flipped, switches and everything's great again. That's just not how life is. So we had the characters kind of turning a corner at the end. You could see hope on the horizon but you knew that it was still some work away. And then I think that non pie in the sky approach really spoke to the people that came to see our film and had been through this process. They said that's real life. That felt real to me and that's what I hope will happen to me and my family over the course of time and that meant a lot.
Speaker 1:Yes, I won't ruin the ending. It's not where I thought it was going to go because it wasn't the traditional ending but yes, I think it is more realistic the way that that you portrayed it. And you know, I think this is a great film for homeschooling families because we we, our kids are not exposed to a lot of this in like they are in the school system. The you know how easy it can be to get hooked on a drug because you know this is a prescription that someone's doctor gave them or you know even, just hey, try this at a party, like when you homeschool.
Speaker 1:Hopefully we are pulling our kids away from that sort of stuff, but it doesn't mean they're never going to encounter it right. They are going to graduate someday, they are going to get friends that have been in the school system, they are going to get jobs or, you know, they're going to leave our home at some point. You have to equip them with stuff that is in the real world. You cannot isolate your child from anything bad and expect that nothing bad will ever happen to them. You have to expose them to this. I think this film is a great way to have you know lead into the conversations Like we're now. Now this is something we can talk about because you've been exposed in a healthy way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and, and the film is it's gritty. I mean it's not for little kids, I mean it's for older teens and adults to talk about. It's gritty and it's realistic and you saw you see him go through detox and it's a painful thing to watch because it's an awful situation, but there's a lot of humor in it and there's a lot of family laughter in it and there's we kept the content really, really mild to try to keep it as clean as possible without seeming like you know it's a Sunday school pamphlet. You know that's not a realistic view of the world. So we try to keep it as realistic and as clean as possible. But keeping it realistic as possible.
Speaker 2:And I think another side benefit of that is when we isolate our kids with homeschooling.
Speaker 2:In certain ways we kind of we do protect them and I love that about homeschooling is we can let the world in as little or as much as we need to to help them grow under without falling under the weight of it, and that's super important at the same time, because we're not around any of that.
Speaker 2:I do also want my kids to be compassionate, and so when you spend two hours with someone, with a character in a movie who is at times frustratingly angering, but also very likable, and you care about them and you love them because you want them to do better than they're doing.
Speaker 2:I think when you spend that kind of intimate time with movie characters like that, it helps you to be more empathetic to people in real life that you run into or running in that situation, so maybe you can kind of understand their experience a little bit better and be more compassionate toward them, rather than just sitting back going well, I didn't do that, so I'm going to be judgmental because you did so. I think that's a great opportunity for families to see families that don't look like them or don't sound like them or don't act like them, that when they do meet a family and they say my child's gone through it, you can feel the sadness they're going through and understand that as much as the illegality of what their loved one is doing. So I hope the movie can do that for homeschool families.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I definitely think it will. David, is there anything that you kind of wanted to let homeschooling families or even prospective homeschooling families know, maybe to ease their tensions about it, calm them down if they want to homeschool but are just really afraid to? What do you have to say to them? You've had 25 years of experience.
Speaker 2:Well, when I started off homeschooling I was coming from a public school background, so I had my lesson plans written and I had my checkboxes to check and I had everything I was supposed to accomplish according to the curriculum and I had to hit every one, you know, and I was a little bit rigid that way when I first started. As the years went by, my oldest daughter will tell you dad was tougher on me than he was on any of the rest of you kids. But it's because I started realizing that all the check boxes don't need to be checked, that all of the things in the curriculum don't have to be done. If a book is not registering with you and your kids, it's okay to say let's just not do this one and let's go on to the next one, because the next one will, because really learning to love to learn is the greatest thing you can teach your kids and not that they have to do every check in the box. Because I tend to be a little bit that way and I had to learn not to be, and I started having more fun and the kids started learning more when I allowed myself the freedom to say no to some things because they're just not that important and say yes to things that I didn't want to do, because I need to learn how to do it too. So I really kind of went off the rule of thumb of am I ever going to use this in life? Yes I am, because we all knew things that we learned in school that we have never used a single day in our life. So it never came up, it was never useful, it was never helpful, it didn't matter. And so when I run across things in the school curriculum, I go you know what? This is not going to change your life. Let's just move on and do something that is, and let's teach you how to write a check in a checkbook instead, or teach you how to do grocery shopping instead.
Speaker 2:I learned that I'm trying to equip people to be adults and healthy, balanced, functional adults in society who love people and love what they do. And if I've done that, that's all the education they need. The rest of it's book stuff they can learn that If they know how to learn, they can learn that on their own anytime they want to. And that's kind of been true all the way through. You know my kids, they're successful at what they do and they love what they do, and I didn't do it all right and I didn't do it all. Probably enough hours of what I was supposed to do have.
Speaker 2:I didn't do poetry as much as I was supposed to because I don't like poetry very much. So I did try. I know people love it, I just don't. So I just kind of him and hot on poetry. But they're okay, they're functioning just fine in society. They're functional adults and they're not in, they're not in prison. They did all right, so I think it's okay. So give yourself some grace and teach them to learn to love learning, and that all the rest of it will come about as it's needed.
Speaker 1:I love that. That is award-winning advice. And where can people find you and where can people find your films?
Speaker 2:Our movies are on our website you can links to our films are on crosspurposesproductions is the name of our company and website and if you go there, all of our film catalogs there with direct links that will take you straight to the movies on the various platforms that they're on. They're all they're on the major platforms that you'd want to watch movies on already. So if you want to look up our films, you can just click there and it'll take you to amazon prime or it'll take you to 2b or it'll take you to different places like that pure flicks, places that you'd want to watch movies. Watch the movies for free. If you don't mind some commercials or if you pay for those platforms, you can watch them without commercials, but all of our movies can be found there amazing and I'm gonna link all of that in the show's description so you don't have to remember all that.
Speaker 1:Just head right on down, click on it and you can have some very fun entertainment and a little bit of learning too. And it was nice for me because I don't really take a lot of time to myself to just watch something for enjoyment or entertainment. You know, usually it's like research stuff, so this was a nice kind of research. I enjoyed my two hours.
Speaker 2:Well, our movies vary. Now, Elephant's a pretty heavy movie but like Found and Royal, ashes and Cross Purposes are a little more family oriented. They're a little bit more humor in it. They're a little bit lighter hearted. So there's different types of movies for different folks. So our lightest one's pretty heavy, but the rest of them aren't quite so dramatic well, I still loved it either way.
Speaker 1:I can't wait to check out the rest. David, all for it.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for joining us today thank you, cheryl, I've had a great time and thanks for having me me too,