Jody raised four children, taught fourth grade, presided over Brandywine Valley quilter’s club, created award-winning quilts, pulled up roots and moved by herself to Virginia Beach where she knew no one, attended graduate school, and defended her dissertation in her sixties.

 

She stumbled into homeschooling. While an avid fan of traditional schooling for herself, in the 1990s she found herself faced with an untenable schooling situation for one of her children. Settling on homeschooling as a way out, she thought, “Well, even if he only reads books for a year, he’ll be fine.” But homeschooling sucked her in. Eventually she read John Holt’s Growing without Schooling and was sold on even the most extreme form of homeschooling. She wandered deeply into different philosophies of learning after reading many books, including Holt's book How Children Fail.  She homeschooled some of her children for six years.

 

Jody attend Bryn Athyn college for two years, then the University of Delaware for two years graduating with a BS in economics (1974). She graduated Widener University with a Master’s in education and a certification to teach in PA in 1997. In 2015 she received an EdD in Curriculum, Instruction, Technology, Education from the college of Teaching and Learning at Temple University.

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"I love to watch children learn, more specifically how they learn. For that matter, I like to watch anyone learn. I want to do everything I can to foster learning. I have been a fan of alternative forms of education ever since I stuck my neck out and homeschooled my fourth-grade son."

 

Jody's dissertation at Temple focused on how technology was employed, or not employed, to learn literacy in homeschooling families. She interviewed twenty homeschooling families who held a wide variety of educational philosophies. She has continued to interview fourteen of these families for seven years now and hopes to continue for another three years. She has learned so much about how homeschooling can work and has many resources to draw on to offer help and ideas.