America 250 Anchorage: Faith, Family, Freedom & 500 Artifacts with Dennis Tayman

Thank you.

Thank you for inviting me.

Give me the opportunity to chat.

Yeah, of course.

So Dennis, you've been bringing American history to life in Anchorage classrooms since 2011. long before it became a national conversation.

So tell us what Taman Tutoring is and what makes your approach different from what kids are getting in the public school system.

At 250 years, we have to ask, are we actually teaching the founding or are we teaching around it?

Well, I can't tell you who I am without telling you how it all began.

So I'm going to do a little brief backstory so you can get a good thing.

So we're going to go back to California in 1993.

That's when me and my wife, Susan, were married.

By 1995, we had our first kid, Sarah.

And then five, six years later, she's now looking into needing to be educated, 1999 to 2000.

The choices were do the Los Angeles school district or outside the box homeschooling.

Well, LA's school district was not going to be happening in our life.

So we chose to try this homeschool thing.

By 1997, we had our second kid, Noah, and then our third kid, Rachel, came in in 2001.

Well, that very beginning, we connected up to some co-ops.

And a co-op is just a bunch of other families that are doing the homeschool thing all together.

And we're just going to do this in a group as a setting.

2002, I got transferred to Alaska.

And it's when I discovered that the state of Alaska really did embrace homeschooling.

That is to say, if a family connected up to, and they're still with us today, charter schools, there's many of them around.

You could actually get public allotment money and you can teach your kid the way you want them to be taught and not have to worry about the public school system.

Well, we chose to do that.