Don't tell me I can't
An ambitious homeschooler's journey
By Cole Summers
All of my friends and my brother were running around, playing, and having a good time, just like we all usually do together. I wasn’t so into it that day. At first I just sat back in an inner tube, floating, and watching everyone else. I spent some of the time thinking about my ranch. Mainly about the fifty-ish acres where no plants grow and how I want to build soil there and plant native seeds like I did around my rabbit barn. But mostly I just watched everyone else, quietly, and enjoyed relaxing.
When I got out of the pool I went and sat with some old people who were sitting at the tables and doing the same thing I was, watching all the other kids play and have fun. I started talking to them and the next thing I knew I had sat there for at least two hours listening to their stories about their families and about the history of where we live.
I occasionally looked over at my friends playing, but I was having more fun listening to these old people tell me what it was like here back in the 1950s and 1960s. I was picturing what that public pool was like before it was a pool. They used to swim there in a natural spring before the pool was built.
My friends had a blast running around, swimming, and playing games. I had a blast time traveling in my mind. We had fun in different ways, and it was a great day for all of us.
If you ever do a search for “homeschool” on Twitter, a lot of the results are all about how different homeschool kids are. It’s either public school advocates that think all homeschool kids are friendless, weirdo, freaks, or homeschool advocates who want their kids to be different from all the evil stuff in today’s culture. A lot of it gets really mean and hateful. Almost all of it is made out to be negative.
I don’t understand why we don’t encourage being different as a good thing. Michael and I aren’t the same. He works numbers through his head like magic but doesn’t understand much of anything about business. I’m constantly looking at businesses and farms to see if I can find ways they can improve what they’re doing, but I rely on a calculator a lot more than I’d like to. We’re different people with different skills and different interests. That’s a good thing. We’re supposed to be different.
The times Michael and I talked during that summer I was hauling water, our minds were in totally different places. He was enjoying his summer vacation and didn’t want to think about learning at all. Soccer was most of what he talked about. My mind was somewhere else.
Honestly, my mind was a hundred and forty feet below my feet. That’s about where the water table was at that time. Learning what I did from our well driller, dealing with my third dry well in two years, and being at his house to haul water, it was impossible not to think about it.
It’s just another way that I was different because my experiences and what I learned was different.
Most of when I was hauling water during 2021, and even a lot of the time I wasn’t, I spent time alone, focused on embracing being different. Being different is just a tool that we have to help us achieve whatever goals we set for ourselves. And my experiences have helped me set some very different goals for my future.
An excerpt from Don’t Tell Me I Can’t: An ambitious homeschooler’s journey currently the #1 new release in Two-hour biography & memoir short reads on Amazon