Christiaan Mader hosts Out to Lunch Acadiana at Gravy in Downtown Lafayette

Fun fact about me: I was homeschooled. Growing up, when people asked me about homeschooling, they assumed I was at a table teaching myself physics from a textbook. If I’m honest, my mom did most of the work.

About 3 million American kids are homeschooled now. That’s roughly 6 percent of students, about twice the share before the pandemic. It’s much bigger than it was when I was a kid. And how it works looks much, much different.

Many homeschoolers still need a teacher when Calculus comes around, or maybe when it’s time to prep for college testing. In Lafayette, they can turn to my guest Mary Kay Allain at The Learning Curve.

Mary Kay Allain, Owner of The Learning Curve, where homeschooled kids get tuition, guidance, exam prep, and classmates

Mary Kay Allain grew up in rural Jeanerette as one of eight kids. She helped raise the younger ones and played school every chance she got.

Her father pushed her toward nursing, and she spent time in a convent in St. Louis. Neither path stuck. What did stick was tutoring a classmate who was failing math and watching her go from an F to a B.

After college, Mary Kay went on to a career in teaching. First in private schools and then, for most of her, career in Lafayette public schools. She started weekend ACT prep workshops in 2004, retired from public school in 2007, and turned those workshops into The Learning Curve.

It’s a small tutoring program in math, science and ACT prep, and most of its students are homeschoolers whose parents want outside help with the hard subjects. Fifty-five years in, she puts it this way: “When I taught, it was my job. Now it’s my vocation.”

Picture a writer, and you might imagine a solitary life. But I can tell you from experience that your best work gets done with input from other people.

That’s true in fiction and poetry too, particularly if you’re going it alone. Self-publishing has taken off. One publishing industry monitor counted more than 2.6 million self-published titles in 2023 — more than double the number from a decade earlier, and over four times as many as traditional publishers put out that year.

My guest John Comeaux has written just about everything: poetry, short stories, puppet plays and screenplays, including a Star Trek script that an agent got in front of Paramount. The studio read it and passed, and he still claims to be the biggest Trek fan in the parish.

John Comeaux, author, poet, and President of the Writers Guild of Acadiana, where writers meet for company and critique

Along the way the Lafayette native spent 40 years in the oil industry, published three novels for young readers with his wife, and self-published a collection called Fun Songs and Poems.

John joined the Writers Guild of Acadiana to be around other writers. He mostly listened at first. Then he suggested the group start keeping minutes and writing agendas, and they made him president.

Five years later he leads a guild that dates to 1986. It has about 60 members, charges $25 a year in dues, meets monthly on Tuesdays and runs a booth at the Saturday market at Moncus Park, where writers who’ve never shown anyone their work tend to find it.

If I had to come up with a nifty wrapup to today’s conversation, it would be Mary Kay Allain and John Comeaux prove nobody has to do their homework alone.

Out to Lunch Acadiana was recorded live over lunch at Gravy in downtown Lafayette. Photos by Astor Morgan.

Christiaan Mader hosts Out to Lunch at Gravy in Downtown Lafayette