This Golden Hour

97. Dan Hill and Paper Plane Learning

• Timothy Eaton

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In today’s episode, we get to spend time with Dan Hill from Utah. Dan is a homeschool father of three sons, 3D animator, artist, a multifaceted educator, musician, and entrepreneur. Dan describes his “Forrest Gump”-like meandering and falling into several unlikely situations, where he was discovered by a specific school official and told he had a natural gift for teaching. Eventually, Dan started an after-school program that became Dan’s business, Paper Plane Learning. A homeschool mother encouraged Dan to reach out to the homeschool community to make them aware of his classes. Now, 80% of Dan’s students are homeschooled, and Dan ended up homeschooling his three sons for a time. This episode highlights the advantages of homeschooling, the importance of early reading, and the innovative methods Dan uses to teach 3D animation, art, piano, and more to children around the globe. 

Check out Dan Hill's website and piano books:

paperplanelearning.net

Musical Reflections, Book 1

Resources: 

South Valley Leadership Academy

Wilson Language Training



This Golden Hour

Dan Hill:

I had no idea there was such. An underground movement of families that are going around the system and avoiding all the pitfalls that you see in public schools, avoiding the drugs, avoiding the promiscuity and the political environment and, just giving kids what they need and in an environment they know they can trust. Hi. I am Timmy Eaton, homeschool father of six and Doctor of Education. We've been homeschooling for more than 15 years and have watched our children go from birth to university successfully and completely without the school system. Homeschooling has grown tremendously in recent years, and tons of parents are becoming interested in trying it out, but people have questions and concerns and misconceptions and lack the confidence to get started. New and seasoned homeschoolers are looking for more knowledge and peace and assurance to continue. New homeschooling. The guests and discussions on this podcast will empower anyone thinking of homeschooling to bring their kids home and start homeschooling and homeschoolers at all stages of the journey will get what they need and want from these conversations. Thank you for joining us today and enjoy this episode of This Golden Hour podcast. As you exercise, drive clean or just chill. You're listening to this Golden Hour podcast. In today's episode, we get to spend time with Dan Hill from Utah. Dan is a homeschool father of three sons, 3D animator artist, and a multifaceted educator, a musician and entrepreneur. Dan describes his forest Gump like meandering in falling into several unlikely situations he was discovered by a specific school official and told he had a natural gift for teaching. Eventually, Dan started an afterschool program that became Dan's business Paper Plane Learning. A homeschool mother encouraged Dan to reach out to the homeschool community to make them aware of his classes. Now, 80% of Dan's students are homeschooled, and Dan ended up homeschooling his three sons for a time as well. This episode highlights the advantages of homeschooling, the importance of early reading, and the innovative methods Dan uses to teach 3D animation, art, piano, and more to children around the globe. I.

Timmy Eaton:

Welcome back to this Golden Hour podcast today we are very excited to have with us Dan Hill from Utah. Dan, thanks for being with us.

Dan Hill:

My pleasure.

Timmy Eaton:

So fun to have you here. Lemme just do a little bio and then you can complete the bio with anything you wanna say. Dan Hill is the father of three sons and homeschooled for a time. He's gonna tell us about that. He's also the CEO and founder of Paper Plane Learning and has tons of other titles at heart, a teacher, but does a lot with 3D animation, art, piano sculpting, video editing, programming and more. And tell us more about you and then we'll jump into some questions.

Dan Hill:

Well, maybe it's the three sons that I've had, but I found my greatest joy in life in, teaching my boys as they grew up. Even when I was a younger kid I taught swimming lessons to kids. I was asked by a neighbor down the street, I was ready to quit piano at the age of 11 years old. And I absolutely hated it, begged my mom to quit for years and years. And finally at age 12, she said if you were still wanna quit when you're 12, you can quit. And I. About a month before that day, I got a call from a neighbor down the street whose kids that I had taught swimming lessons to, and she said, Dan I'm afraid of my sons thinking the piano sissy. So maybe if they took from a boy they would think a little bit higher of it differently. So I thought, you want me to teach? I, I hate piano, but I credit that woman. For my lifelong love affair with music. And from there I stepped into it, with both feet, and studied in college and ended up writing several books. I'm almost finished with my fifth book of piano solos and, it's just funny how life. Turns like that, you know, if had she not happened into my life, I might have, hung up music forevermore. And teaching at Paper Plains was the exact same way. It was almost, by accident or by Providence, what, whatever you wanna call it. That's I feel like a little bit of a Forest Gump, walking through life. And it just points me in directions

Timmy Eaton:

that's great. Oh, man. That is cool that that it was almost like by accident that, that lady motivated you to do that and found your way into teaching and other things. I wanted to ask you can you give our audience a little bit of background? It's on your website, so everybody can go to paper plane learning.net and look at this. But just take people from like where, when you started with Waterford Institute and then how you got to the point where you started paper plane learning. And then we'll dive into like how homeschool got involved with all this.

Dan Hill:

Right after college I literally, the last term of my design degree, I got the chance to take a 3D animation class. And this was before the first Toy Story movie came out. So this was such new stuff and I thought, yeah, that looks really cool. And I, I. Got into the class hated it because it, the tools were so clunky and everything, but I was able to produce a few neat little three-dimensional movies, and just real basic things. And about that time, a friend mentioned to me, he was a programmer, and he said, Hey, you ought to come. And. Jump onto this group that we're just starting. It's called the Waterford Institute. We're building software, video games, and I thought to myself, I, I've always been a little bit against those, shoot'em up, violent, type of games, and then they said no. This is educational software. This is teaching kids, teaching kids mostly reading, but also we're gonna be doing a math program and. And I thought that sounds cool. So I went and interviewed and most of my stuff was just, had nothing to do with the kind of things that they wanted to see on a portfolio. But then they came across these last little movies and they said yeah, I, we can see there's something in you. So they hired me as a junior artist. And I started going to work. We did a program called Memphis Math, and then we started the ERP program. That's early reading program that eventually morphed into the UPSTART program, which is a nationwide US program for reading intervention. But I did that for three or four years. And then one day, again, the For Gump thing kicked in the Waterford Institute that I started working at was a single building on the campus of a larger private school. And several people from the school were going back east in a to a conference and they needed some substitutes and the programming teacher came over and asked if I would just cover his classes for a couple of days while he was gone and I could just teach a graphics program and how animation links in with programming. And it would be a cool little. Break for the students. And so yeah, I said, sure I'll do that.

Timmy Eaton:

And is the Waterford Institute, was that like K through 12 or is this high school or what was it?

Dan Hill:

The institute was actually a business. It was a 5 0 1 C3 nonprofit, but it was on the campus of the Waterford School.

Timmy Eaton:

Okay. And

Dan Hill:

so it, it's funny the school was actually started earlier long before I got there. It was started by the institute as a way to test their software to see if it actually worked. They just needed students all the time. And so they said why don't we start a little K through three

Timmy Eaton:

Oh, cool. School. And

Dan Hill:

eventually it grew to a K through 12. Yeah. And now it's a school of. 1200, I think students and like I said, very prestigious. Most of their kids end up going to Ivy League colleges and Wow. But so I, I was asked to go and teach this little program and while I'm teaching one day it was mid-morning, the head of the school who I barely knew, walks in the back and she sits down just glistening and I suddenly, was breaking out in sweat. I'm like, I, I. Don't know if she's heard something that I, she's checking up on me or, and without a word. She, after about 10 minutes, she gets up and she walks out and I thought did I just do something that is gonna lose me, my job or something? And anyway few days later. My boss at the institute comes in and grabs me and says, Hey, I want to talk to you in my office. And I go in there and the head of the school is in there too, and I'm like, this is it. I'm getting canned for something. And she says Dan, I don't know if you knew it or not, but you're a natural teacher. And she's, a lady with a doctorate degree and more accolades than you could list on a page. But she says, I've always believed that teachers are born, they're not taught. And whatever she saw in me, I. I left there a little bit bemused, but my, my, my bosses we've worked out a daily plan for you. And I'm like, oh, great. I'm glad you've you've figured my, the rest of my life out for me. But they, it was such a wonderful thing for three hours a day, I got to leave my office after, a morning of animating and I would go over to the school, walk across the school and they had a lab set up and I started a graphics program at the school. I then started these kids on, just a rigorous on the job type program where they got everything that I got in college, but then they also got. All of the stuff that I had learned in the first few years of my career and I turned them into teams where they made animations and little short movies. They started winning awards at BYU and some other colleges around. I ended up having students that went on to Disney and Dreamworks and really. It was a fantastic program. There were some ups and downs as far as funding and things like that, and I could see the writing on the wall after I, I worked there for 17 years and I could have stayed at the school, but I felt like I had spread my wings as far as I could go. So in 2011, I wanted to start my own company, and after that great experience of being free to do what I wanted and teaching and stuff like that. I thought, I love animation so much. I'm gonna start. My own gig here and oh, so I began Paper Plane Productions, which is a company that makes video and animation for companies whether it's instructional videos or how to videos or just cool little animation shorts that they need for their website or things like that. I still do these almost all day long for companies when I'm not teaching. But I don't advertise anymore because I've gotten so busy with the school. But anyway,

Timmy Eaton:

right?

Dan Hill:

I started paper plane productions and I was just head down working for companies thinking, Hey I'm making it, I'm busy and I'm working and on your own. And there was just something missing in my life at that point. And I'm going, I miss kids. I miss hanging out. And I miss teaching and seeing them progress, and being able to share what I've learned. And so I thought, how do I do this? And just at that time it was again, just a stroke of luck. The office next door to my office went vacant. The guy left and I thought, okay, I'm gonna do this. And I went to the landlord and I, and said, Hey, I wanna lease that other office. Will you gimme a deal if I'm leasing both of them? And I spent a few weeks, I took my kids and my own sons got to sledgehammer down the walls in between, we broke everything out and we turned it into a cool little state-of-the-art computer lab. Cool. And I threw computers in there and I. Got the software loaded and everything like that. And I started teaching just a few kids in the afternoons. It wasn't anything big, but I finally was able to, started, I taught'em Illustrator and I taught'em Photoshop. And then I got into, back into the, my, my True Love, and that was Maya 3D. And we started doing a a 3D program again. And at that point I was, I had only probably 60, 70 students and one night. About 6:00 PM in my last class, A mom comes to pick her daughter up, and she just in, in conversation, she says, Hey, have you ever thought of teaching homeschool? I. I literally said what is homeschool? I thought that was like those weird kids that, couldn't fit into real life. And so they had to live in their basements, with mom and dad helping'em. And she laughed and said, you, you obviously have got a lot of things to learn about Utah especially. And I had no idea there was such. An underground movement of families that are going around the system and avoiding all the pitfalls that you see in public schools, avoiding the drugs, avoiding the promiscuity and the political environment and, just giving kids what they need and in an environment they know they can trust. And I started my first homeschool class. It was with a group called SVLA South Valley Leadership Academy in Utah. And I this mother was part of that, and I went to their first meeting. They were held in a church and I went in and sat down and oh my gosh, I have never met such a bunch of. Just vibrant kids that were so well adjusted. And they definitely. Did not conform. They were a little bit eccentric, some of them, but in a good way,

Timmy Eaton:

yeah.

Dan Hill:

They had interests and that you could tell that they didn't feel like they had to, put their head down a walk, measure up to

Timmy Eaton:

the social, cultural way, or,

Dan Hill:

yeah. And they told you flat out, Hey, I love this and this is what I want to get into. I don't know how many kids, if you went and asked a group full of fourth graders, what do you wanna do when you grow up? My guess is you'd get, I don't know, especially nowadays, it's like kids just aren't thinking about the future. But these homeschool kids, they do, and I, for whatever reason they just seemed to have a plan for their lives.

Timmy Eaton:

This was 2012 when this happened.

Dan Hill:

Yeah, this was 2012 was my first year when I started teaching SBL. Yeah. And I still taught a lot of afterschool kids. It was probably 2080 and then Covid hit and the world changed forever, and parents started to see what kind of stuff goes on with teachers. Do the packet, don't talk to me. Just, turn it in on Friday and figure it out yourself. And I've got lots of friends that are teachers in the public school system, great people and stuff like that. I don't fault the teachers I fault the system and it, maybe it's just the nature when you get big systems like that together that they homogenize and they, for whatever reason, they just turn beige.

Timmy Eaton:

Bureaucracy is inevitable when you get large or something.

Dan Hill:

Yeah. And it becomes more a matter of feeding the bureaucracy rather than the goal, the bureaucracy was originally built for. And I think that's the nature of governments in general, and so without getting political I actually, for the first few years on my on my website, I think it was great education, zero politics, and that's the thing,'cause I've definitely got my political leanings and stuff like that, but I have no right nor business to be passing that off to kids. That's, yeah. You're not pushing your agenda

Timmy Eaton:

on these kids. Yeah. That's good.

Dan Hill:

Yeah. Let'em, and for heaven's sakes, let'em be kids.

Timmy Eaton:

Yeah.

Dan Hill:

So anyway, that kind of takes us to the present. We've last year we had just north of 500 kids now. I've hired a few other teachers and we're growing and trying to manage it. The other cool thing about the Covid thing, and I hate to say it that way, there were some interesting things that came outta Covid, some educational. Opportunities. But I learned how to do online very well. I remember trying to teach a guitar class. To one of my guitar students, and it was like no. Put your fingers no up, no down the fret. No, you're, no, you're doing it wrong. It was the most frustrating thing on earth and I'm a problem solver. And so when I started thinking how do I teach when drawing and painting. Okay, I've gotta get, cameras directly onto my art board and then, I've gotta be able to, show my face when I need to, and I wanna show the other students too, because I want these kids at home to feel like they're part of a group. And I'm trying every single day, I come and I think, how can I make these classes more engaging to a kid that's sitting in Calgary on a. On their computer, and I've had moms send me photos of their kids. Like one of my favorite ones is a mom in Sydney, Australia that is sending me a picture of her child. I'm teaching how to draw a human eye, and this kid is just locked onto, and you can see my hands, you can see my fingernails as I'm drawing this thing and I'm walking him through it and you can see his picture and it just looks, he is nailing it, he's just getting it so

Timmy Eaton:

perfect.

Dan Hill:

And when she sent me that, and I get this all the time, but that was my first one that, and I was like, this Eureka, this is it. I have the ability now to affect and improve kids 12,000 miles away. And that is such a powerful thing.

Timmy Eaton:

Even from a business standpoint. It opens up your classroom to outside your walls, to indefinite. Infinite amount of people

Dan Hill:

yep. And I've got this board of the world that we just started me and our administrator where we started to put pins into all the countries that we're in now and it's crazy. I got my first Saudi Arabia child two weeks ago, and cool. And it is just it's crazy. It's so cool that kids around the world can participate in this stuff.

Timmy Eaton:

I found the same thing for this podcast. I, I thought it was really gonna be a Canadian, us, audience, which it is principally, especially us, but it's all over the world. And I just am like, holy cow. People care about home education all over the place. And so it, it's just cool principles.

Dan Hill:

I was just gonna add to what you just said there. Isn't it amazing what a worldwide movement it has become?

Timmy Eaton:

Oh my goodness. So I've been studying, I wrote my dissertation at the university of of Alberta on home education and. We've been homeschooling for almost 20 years and our kids have done nothing but that and don't have diplomas. And, but I didn't do that. I grew up in Chicago and I was totally in a huge public school and loved my experience and love sports and that kind of thing, and. If my high school friends were like, you homeschool they'd be weirded out by it. So let me just ask you, like they invited you to that church or whatever where you were just meeting parents or what was the Yeah,

Dan Hill:

It's I've since found out I didn't realize it at the time, but I was really being shown in on a red carpet as far as being introduced to homeschool because SBLA South Valley Leadership Academy. It's much more than a homeschool co-op. It's become such a prestigious type of thing because they really vet their teachers. When they brought me in, it was actually like almost an interview. It wasn't just, Hey, would you like to teach a class? But they are

Timmy Eaton:

homeschool students.

Dan Hill:

Yeah, they're all homeschool students. It's basically, think of a co-op that's got about 150 kids in it, and they are really shepherded by all the moms. Just in a very special way. They actually. You have to like interview with them if you want your kids to be in that group now, it's that'cause they want to keep, just the highest level of behavior and stuff like that. But yeah I, we went in this, it was Pentecostal church and I remember the lady gets up on the band and there's the, the rostrum and there's, a drum kit over here and electric guitars over here and. I was just looking around. I'm sitting in the crowd and it was just, it was great introduction. They had me stand up and introduce myself and I think I ended up getting. Almost every single kid in that room signed up for my class. I talked about how cool 3D animation is and beyond that was my mainstay when I first started was just 3D animation. I didn't have any drawing or painting classes, which I always loved to do. I had a, I. A fine arts degree and but I 3D animation was just such a useful class. It seems like it's something that's oh, it's just for movies or video games. But, if you name me any type of profession, whether it's dentistry, I've got a friend that has, a CNC machine in his dental office, they take readings and measurements of your teeth and in the office using 3D technology, 3D software, they can get that thing up. Model it a little bit and then they cut outta these little porcelain cubes. They cut your crowns right there. Wow. I've got a brother-in-law who is an ER doctor and they put on VR goggles and 3D to test new surgical techniques. Cool. Okay, you know what one of my biggest clients are? It would blow you away. It's law firms for 3D animation. And you're going, what? Yeah. Why? It's accident reconstruction show, showing this car coming here and showing that car. And you can actually put in the forces and the friction and everything like that and show, how the thing went, for court cases or de create,

Timmy Eaton:

recreate what happened kind of thing. That's cool. Yeah,

Dan Hill:

exactly. But in addition, like any company that produces I just spent a three year stint working almost full time for a company that's an energy company and they were just coming out with all these new solar. Products and they wanted to teach the public. And so they had me working, gee, five, six hours a day just doing 3D animated simulations and videos showing these different products that they were building. How

Timmy Eaton:

does that work? Because I bet you our listeners, especially like you said, if you sold pretty much that entire group that SVLA group. Obviously it's something that they see as relevant. So maybe for my audience that listening, they'd be like, oh, that's something cool to look into, obviously. So what, how does it go down, like the law firm, they, they approach you, what do you ask of them so that you can produce what it is they're looking for? What do they ask or what do you ask

Dan Hill:

them? Are you saying like on a job situation or On a student? Like a student? Yeah. If

Timmy Eaton:

a, like you said, a law firm is trying to recreate an accident, accident reconstruction. What do you ask of them in order to get the information you need to produce what they want?

Dan Hill:

That's such a good question, because that is the frustrating part of talking and dealing with clients is getting inside their head and trying to recreate what they want and not what you want, what you're trying to picture and it's the kind of thing that, like you mentioned a little bit, I've got two, two college degrees as well, and I remember, okay, this is a true story. When I was finishing my business degree, I literally went in the last day of the term and went to go get audited. You'd look at all your classes, make sure that you've ticked all the marks and

Timmy Eaton:

Yep.

Dan Hill:

And my counselor said, we got a problem here. Here I am 27 years old, and my counselor says, you're missing a PE credit. The only thing we can do is this summer, we've got a beginning volleyball class that, that you can take. And I went, you've got to be joking. I spent three years at night. I'm working full-time now for the Yeah, the institute. I've already got one degree and you want me to go take a volleyball class with a bunch of 17 year olds? To get my degree. I said, that isn't gonna happen. And so I ended up negotiating a kind of a extracurricular study thing. I was just coming out with my fourth book and I said, how about if I create a marketing plan for my book? It's more in, keeping with my field and stuff like that. And so they went all the way to the top and ended up doing that. But I thought, this is what we're dealing with. It's not a matter of,

Timmy Eaton:

oh.

Dan Hill:

What do I wanna do? I wanna be a pilot. Okay, let's have you play croquet for and charge it$1,200 a quarter.

Timmy Eaton:

I

Dan Hill:

know. To just so you're well-rounded. And I look at it like this, everybody knows Star Trek and you've got the enterprise and you've got all these young people, that are, you got Jordy laforge, or. Or the doctor and they can't be over, in their thirties and they are the most expert engineers or doctors or navigators, that you could possibly be. You don't do that doing three years of college. You do that starting out as a five-year-old.

Timmy Eaton:

Yes.

Dan Hill:

And like I said these kids that are being homeschooled. Again, maybe it's just'cause their parents are saying, what are you interested in? What do you want to do? I really like building things. Okay, let's get you into all of the type of mechanical engineering and construction type fields that we can from the time you're a kid, so that you, that's so good. And even if you'd end up not doing that, at least you found out early, not after paying$75,000 of classes and realizing, Hey, I'm not interested in a Elizabeth and poetry, it's totally. And it's I think that to a great extent, I don't wanna say this, but I do wanna say it, that to a huge extent, college is a scam.

Timmy Eaton:

I think a lot of people are starting to feel that way. I feel like that's a common sentiment. And to what you were just saying, like in a few weeks here, I'm gonna speak at this conference and I. At the conference, my, one of my titles is begin with the end in mind and then work backwards. And I feel like what you just described for a not all, but a typical homeschool family is they do that. They say, what is a likely road that this my child's going to pursue? Not that you're dictating for them, but even like you said, even if they don't end up pursuing mechanical engineering, they've had the experience of going deep on something instead of this idea of widespread. It's good to have wide exposure, but when they hit a certain age. To pursue something and then work backwards and say, what do I need to do at present to accomplish that end goal? And I feel like homeschoolers, especially their parents and the students, they're so dialed in on that. And that's what universities want too. And that's what employers want. They want somebody who knows they have the skills and the knowledge and when you go to school, and again, I'm not ripping on schools either, but it's just about this whole, like you said, like this exposure. You have to take the volleyball class. It has no relevance to your life. Not that you're saying exercise isn't good, but that's just not relevant to what you were doing. And so anyway, I think you said it well.

Dan Hill:

Yeah. And to leapfrog over what you said there too as a child is growing, their parents get to know them so intimately, and. My son's like always drawing these little technical things and he's always, making these little blueprint type things, and I, it's obvious that he's got this, technical mind and I'm actually I'm speaking

Timmy Eaton:

of one of your son kind of

Dan Hill:

hypothetically. But not really. I, my, my oldest son was like that, and by the time he was five or six, we knew that he had a technical mind and he was always trying to make these fanciful machines that probably didn't work, but it was almost like, this little Leonardo da Vinci type of a thing. We were like, now tell me how this works. And he'd go, see, this thing is gonna go and push that rod and then it's gonna, and for a 5-year-old. And lo and behold, my son's an engineer today oh, way is he. I guarantee you that at some point he probably had a teacher get annoyed and say, stop drawing and listen to me. It's parents that know from the get go better than any teacher ever could, what their kids have a propensity for and what they have an aptitude for, and what they're interested and care,

Timmy Eaton:

and care the most about that, as a teacher, if somebody who's taught in the system for more than 20 years I love my students, but there's a lot of students. I just don't have the capacity. To dive and frankly, I care more about my children. And so it's like you said I love my six kids and I want to really direct them to a very fruitful future. And so it's in my interest too as a parent. And so I see what you're saying there. One thing I was gonna ask you what percentage of those 500 plus students that you have now are homeschooled students, if

Dan Hill:

I would say 80% now. So it's become reversed completely. Yeah. I. They're all homeschool kids. And the cool thing about it is that I found that I can have a career I with just teaching the afterschool kids. I was like, I have gotta have a real job and then teaching will just be my hobby. But I wanted it to be the other way around, and now it's the perfect life. I get to hang out and teach all my classes and get everything done. And by four or five in the afternoon. Things are, winding down and I can sit down for a couple or three, eight hours and finish a client job. And that's really honestly where my passions lie. I would much rather spend most of my energies sharing the stuff that I've learned and getting kids really interested in this. And with the art and things like that, there was an interesting study the Waterford did, it was a study that was done by Harvard this is back in like 1995, where It was the seven components of a well-rounded education and a well adjusted and prepared child, and three or four of them were not, the technical and learning things. It was all about. The liberal arts, it was about languages, it was about art, it was about music. And these are things that are, they're hardwired into us. And more and more in schools, they're being set aside because of, we've gotta tick the boxes, to get the federal funding or whatever it is. And so things like music programs are a thing of the past. You can actually just get online and Google, the benefits of doing fine art and they're everything from, with kids with behavioral disorders and things like that. It's a calming thing. I can't tell you how many kids that are on the spectrum that I've taught over the years that come in and they just get locked onto something and they're just so quiet. And mom will come in to pick'em up and they are still just head down focused and they're like. Has he been like this the whole class period? And I said, yeah, no, he's, and they are, you would not believe him At home. He is bouncing off the walls. But in that class they are just focused. I always play, some nice classical music or good new, new age stuff, just calming thing, painting and drawing and music just go together. And it's just great for concentration. It's great for patience, and when kids start to identify themselves as something it's a springboard into a lot of other things. I try to tell the kids that, when they get to be, along the road and they're actually learning some skills I go, you are an artist. I want you to remember that, for whatever thing you might be a football player or whatever, but I want you to think of yourself. You are now an artist too. Identify yourself as that because that's what you are.

Timmy Eaton:

One thing I enjoyed in preparation for this interview was looking at some of your videos on Instagram. That was one thing that I caught my eye. I thought, man, how engaged? Kids were, and some people might say, oh, of course it's a computer or something like that. And it's no. This is they're actually engaged and interested and wanna finish the work and want to complete things and want to develop.

Dan Hill:

One thing too that is great about these online courses is I recorded every class. And then post them immediately. So the kids, I never learned things the first time. Repetition is just so important. And a video is eternally patient. They can sit and watch a technique, if we're doing a 3D modeling, technique or something like that, they can just rewind, play, rewind, play rewind, play. The best way to look at what we do, I think is probably our Facebook Sure thing. If you just Google or, if you go onto Facebook and just look at paper plane learning, but this is the year. In fact, I had a meeting just a couple of weeks ago at the end of the school year with our teachers, and I said, this is the year you guys that we have gotta get a much bigger video presence online, because I feel like we're. Looking for gold with a shovel in a pan. And we should be using a, a dump truck and a front end loader.

Timmy Eaton:

But I think the order is good. You're, you what matters really is your passion and the quality of it. And so that will come. I see what you're saying, but I think that you're doing it the right way. The do you do like a group online classes?

Dan Hill:

Yep. In fact, all of our online classes except for a couple of'em, there are a few of them that I focus just on the online, but most of my classes I teach online and in-person simultaneously. So I've got, at any one time, I'll have, 15 kids in the classroom and I'll have, 20 kids online and I'll always turn the camera around, everybody say hi, and we try to get to know each other and stuff, and. The kids that are online are on the loudspeaker, and so we can talk back and forth and it gives'em a feeling of community and it works surprisingly well. Every once in a while, I'll have a couple of classes that are on different levels. Like I'll have a beginning and an intermediate 3D animation class together and the beginners are looking at what the intermediate kids are doing and going, oh man, that's really cool. I want, I wanna get into that and Awesome. The advanced kids help it out and it ends up being this mentor protege sort of a relationship and. We're innovative. We try everything. If it doesn't work, we don't use it. And if it works, we adopt it.

Timmy Eaton:

Do you have a totally automated one that people could just buy the course and just take it totally automated? I know it's probably more effective with the community and with you personally, but is there an option for just evergreen. Just like you can just do it.

Dan Hill:

Yeah. It we absolutely do. Surprisingly, a lot of families I would say 90% of the families here in the US and Canada and even the UK end up wanting just the live classes because that's something that is, is not as frequent. It's rare to have a teacher, that is gonna be, live and can answer questions, but absolutely I do. I lived in South Africa for a while and they're on the opposite side of the globe, and I actually just a couple of weeks ago did a 4:00 AM class. Just I do free classes all the time to, to let students just try my stuff out, in Yes. Whatever topic it is. And I posted this on a couple of sites that I know go around the opposite side of the globe, and I had 15 kids from South Africa show up at 4:00 AM for them. It was, in the late afternoon. And I instantly started and I went uh, and they just blew. They were like, you speak Africans? Are you kidding me? It was so fun. But for kids in Australia and New Zealand and Japan where they just Absolutely. Unless they want to get up in the middle of the night, they can't take those classes. Live I do have absolutely an option where they can just purchase. It's greatly reduced in price. And but I'm still available 24 7 if they wanna ask questions. I try to, turn their questions around as fast as possible and wow. Make'em feel like they're still part of the community. So.

Timmy Eaton:

That's awesome. So your first exposure was basically 2012 at that SVLA introduction, and then you experienced homeschooling yourself. So can you tell us a little bit about that? Like, how did you guys get into homeschooling and what was that journey and what was it like?

Dan Hill:

Yeah for me it was my oldest son was, and he is the one that did all the little technical drawing things, and we didn't know whether he was genius or just crazy and he's just a fidgeter and I'm not the kind, instantly let's go and start pumping him full of drugs and things like that. And but we had a. on again, off again, thing with the schools where we said, you know what? We're gonna involve him in the reading programs and things like that. When we got later on to the private school, they actually recommended that we take my oldest son especially because he just seemed to do better at home to start out, and they said, Hey, there's no problem with that. They develop at their own rate socially and. And they gave us the resources and we ended up, doing a lot of the things. And they said, as long as the homework's getting done, as long as we see we're seeing progress, we have no problem with working with you for him. And then Mace, my second son, ended up liking it, so much. He was always looking over the shoulder of mom while she was going through these things with Connor. And so we thought, what the heck, the, the nice thing is they gave us the materials for free. We didn't have to pay for the private school. That, that

Timmy Eaton:

wow.

Dan Hill:

So for that first few years we did that with the others. My youngest kid Hayden, he had spina bifida. And so he had a whole list of additional problems that made it difficult for him. Everything from having to catheterize himself, and being embarrassed about that at school and that sort of thing to, having a shunt that, was a little bit worrisome. And so for him it was much more medical to keep him around the house, where we knew my wife's a nurse and knew how to take care of him properly in his condition, but all three of them ended up taking off. I've got my oldest son, like I said, is a Connor is now an engineer working for a biomed company. Mason is in his second year of pilot flight school, and Hayden is started pre-med. He left to go on a mission for our church, but he is set to come back and go into to pre-med. And yeah, no it's been a fantastic thing and I really credit the getting them interested early on in life with not just learn your ABCs, read the book, fill in the blanks, do that kind of thing. Getting them to think about what is your life gonna be like? And what's the pathway? To follow that, and where are you most passionate? And like we've talked about, we've beaten the dead horse on this thing, there's no sense in sending kids down pathways of education that they have no interest and no gifts in or things like that. Why do it? Just to expose them to it, when they're gonna hang it up and not. N never look back at it again.

Timmy Eaton:

Yeah. I think a common challenge for a lot of parents, and especially, specifically homeschool parents, is that they have kids that are, passionate about something and help them identify that. And then they have kids that are just. They get into the youth years and they're still like, I don't really care about anything right now. And you just keep exposing and keep, inviting and, it's not everybody's gonna be the exact same. One thing I did want to touch on because and I know we're all over the place, you and I talked before the interview about that first thing you were involved in was about teaching reading at the Waterford Institute. And as you've been exposed to homeschool, you've had lots of parents be like there's a lot of philosophies about, let them read when they're ready to read and you have a strong feeling about early reading. So maybe talk about that a little bit

Dan Hill:

I heard one of the best reading specialists, she's renowned, at least around Utah and the Intermountain West. She said, I think this is a pretty common phrase now. I think she might've been the one who coined it. She said from grades one to three kids learned to read From grade three to the time they die they read to learn. And you think about that during that. That initial time, they're learning to read, they're learning to absorb, they're learning to comprehend what they read, and that's a process. And those synapses in your brain, they have done studies on that thing showing how they are stimulated and they grow and they create connections. So by the time a kid's, eight, nine years old, they should have it pretty much down that they can look at words on a page and it will create lasting memories that they can then use. For implication or application for other things. And so when these kids are not learning to read early, it's not that they won't learn later on in life, but they're missing out on a lot of the opportunities that. Can only happen when you're a younger child. And we're not in a race. I don't wanna pressure parents or say that, you're failing if your kid can't read by the time they're nine years old. But I would just say that, I think just make sure that your motivation is not one of, wanting to hand it off to someone else or, heaven forbid the child, it's their own responsibility to figure that out. Parents have a duty to get their kids on the right path and as soon as possible, and let's face it, I. Like I said, I hated piano. I absolutely hated piano. There are a lot of parents that would've said that my mom was being abusive when she said, get your books. I'm driving you to piano lessons. There's not a week that goes by that I don't thank my mom for being hard nosed with that, yeah. And I think it's the same with reading. Kids may not, like it, but at least, read'em stories, get'em to sound out words. There's a great little method called the Wilson Method that we do, where the kids will actually, when they're saying caps, like they'll touch their index finger to their thumb and go, and then they'll, to their middle finger, ah, and then their for finger. And they use physical actions with the actual sounds and that, auditory plus mechanical action. It was such a great thing for me to work for the Waterford Institute because they taught me that kids learn in different ways.

Timmy Eaton:

Yeah.

Dan Hill:

Some kids learn by just listening to it. Some kids learn by listening and doing. Some kids learn by observing. And that's another thing that I try to do as much as possible in my instruction with my own kids is teaching'em, telling'em, and displaying for them, getting them to give me the answers. Repeating, there's just so many different. Venues and avenues that the brain absorbs information.

Timmy Eaton:

What I love that you said that it's a nuance for me, and I'm glad you said it. It's not that you're worried about them not catching up or something like that. It's that they might be missing out on what they could have been. You know, I, and I love what you said about, you learn to read so that you can read to learn for the rest of your lives. And again, every kid's gonna be different. I have noticed in our situation that being read to by a loving parent on a daily basis and on a very regular basis, I. It's almost like they just learn to read. It's not like you have to use these technical things, it's just exposure. And I'm not saying that happens every, with every kid and there are disabilities out there, but I love the idea of just this like total emphasis and because it's true, it's like for the rest of your life that is a skill. That's going to be employed.

Dan Hill:

One of the big things that kept getting drummed into us at the institute, and they did multiple studies on this over years. Like you said it's just about exposure. There's no. Getting around it. The biggest indicator of whether kids will learn to read and be on, on grade level and excel in that kind of thing is how many minutes they were exposed from birth to age five when they enter kindergarten. It's absolutely heartbreaking, with, honestly, I can't remember what it is, but it's in the tens of thousands of hours, over those first few years that kids that really do well are exposed to. In some inner cities, it's as much as, the kid by the time they go into school may have had 50 hours. Of exposure, in that first five years. And it just, how can you possibly expect a child to have any sort of, of success when it's absolutely foreign to them, but like you said, when you just read, when you just sit'em down and do your finger, you'll find them going, the cat, they just know it. It just happened.

Timmy Eaton:

Yeah, we don't look back at our experience and go we sat down and did this systematic thing. We literally just read to our kids. And that probably sounds yeah, but what did you do? And it's like, well, we signed out letters here and there for the first, but our last three kids, like literally nothing. We read to them and they read on their own. I want to give you the last word and then please tell us the the titles of your books and we can put that in the show notes.

Dan Hill:

Sure. The books are called Musical Reflections and they were just I've, like I said, I've taught piano forever, and these were songs that I kinda wrote for a lot of'em for students. And ended up liking'em enough to putting a polish on them. And they've done very well. I haven't. Really pushed them, especially as my school has grown and grown. They sell in bookstores here and in Idaho and a couple in California. I eventually will get down to marketing them a little bit more highly. But if you guys are interested just message me and I can send'em out to you. They're really great and I start intermediate. I don't have beginning ones, but they started the intermediate leveling up.

Timmy Eaton:

Okay. Awesome. No, that's great. And then anything else you wanna say? We'll just wrap it up.

Dan Hill:

Just yeah, if you guys want to take a free class, I give away free classes weekly. So if you want to take a drawing class or a painting class, or a 3D animation class, if you wanna try video editing. I learned in this field that advertising is not worth a bucket of spit it. Homeschool moms are my biggest advocates, and I literally do not spend a penny on advertising. Now it's all word of mouth. Wow. I give away classes and homeschool moms talk. I've jokingly only half jokingly commented that when, Armageddon comes and the world burns, it's gonna be homeschool moms that rise from the ashes and rebuild society because. They network so well.

Timmy Eaton:

They do. No, I can definitely attest to that. That's so true, man. And the fact is it's whatever you would've spent on advertising by doing a free class, there it is, yeah,

Dan Hill:

absolutely. No, and it's a fun way just to get to know people. There are never strings attached. Sometimes I'll have 70, 80 kids in one class and I'm just, Hey you guys, it's been a pleasure to get to know you. I've got kids from England to, Mexico to all in one course, and it's just kind neat to get that kind of a group together.

Timmy Eaton:

Yes. Paper plane learning.net. And we'll put that in the show notes. And that's where you can find those free classes too, correct? Yep. Alright, this has been Dan Hill. Thank you for taking time. I appreciate it and hopefully we get to, connect again. Thanks a lot

Dan Hill:

ab. Absolutely. Tim, thank you. Been a pleasure.

Timmy Eaton:

You bet.

Dan Hill:

Thank

Timmy Eaton:

you. That wraps up another edition of this Golden Hour podcast. If you haven't done so already, I would totally appreciate it if you would take a minute and give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot, and if you've done that already, thank you much. Please consider sharing this show with friends and family members that you think would get something out of it. And thank you for listening and for your support. I'm your host, Tim Eaton. Until next time, remember to cherish this golden hour with your children and family.