Reschool Yourself

About the Project

How to Support Reschool Yourself This Holiday Season

This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for the opportunity to do this project and for all of you who have helped make it happen. Thank you for reading and donating; it has meant more to me than you know. Here are is an update on fundraising and how you can keep the project going.

Fundraising Update and Thank-You to Sponsors

A big thank-you to my sponsors, whose names can be found on the right sidebar of my homepage. Due to your generous support, I met my goal to raise $5,000 for start-up expenses for the first three months of Reschool Yourself. Your contributions funded all the tools I need to document my reschooling, including a computer, camera, and digital camcorder. You also funded the basic living expenses that have allowed me to focus on spending time at the schools, writing about that experience, and spreading ideas about lifelong learning. Thank you for making this project possible!

Ways to Support Reschool Yourself

This fall, spending time at the schools and documenting it has taken my full-time attention, so I’ve been largely relying on your donations to cover basic technology, education, and living expenses. Freelance writing, small grants, and donations will sustain the project through next June, and here’s how you can help:

1. Visit Amazon through the Reschool Yourself site

I support buying local above all (especially books from a local bookseller or through the website of Sonoma’s independent Readers’ Books, where I used to work.) However, if you plan to shop through Amazon anyway, please consider using my site to get there. Four percent of whatever you buy — not just the items I feature on my site — will be donated to Reschool Yourself.

Click on one of the books I recommend on the home page, which will take you to the Amazon site, and shop as usual within that browser window. Or you can click the link below and do the same: http://tinyurl.com/66tah3
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November 28, 2008 About the Project 0 Read more >

New RSY Series: Op/Education

I’m starting a new series on the RSY site called Op/Education. It’s a way for all of us to find out about noteworthy schools, educational trends, and programs, and to exchange our thoughts about them. Some will inspire, others may horrify, but I hope that all give us a better sense of our own educational ideals. Featured projects can be American or foreign, new or old, for youth or adults, but they will all have characteristics that set them apart from mainstream schooling.

The purpose of Op/Education is to raise awareness about the variety of school options that exist for people of all ages. I wish more than anything that I’d been aware of educational options while I was a student, so I could have chosen the one that best suited me. For people raising kids now and in the future, understanding their options and values can make a big impact on their children’s development. For those of us adults seeking ways to educate and develop ourselves as adults, knowing about graduate programs, community or online classes, books, and other resources could give us needed guidance.

I’m excited to share the programs I’ve visited over the years, and to hear your opinions on them. I’d also like for you to introduce the alternative programs you know about. If this interests you, email me so I can either write about the programs myself or feature you as a guest blogger. I look forward to swapping knowledge with y’all.

November 19, 2008 About the Project, Educational Philosophy & Practice 0 Read more >

What’s to Come for RSY

Today I concluded my official reschooling at St. Vincent High School, even though I wish I could spend more time there. In particular, the conversations about education, many of them informal and impromptu, that I’ve had with my old teachers and the current students have been so rich that I want to have more. However, travel plans call. In fact, I have to catch an aiporter at the inhumane hour of 3:55 a.m, in four hours.

Here’s the plan for the next few weeks:

  • Through 11/16: Public Allies board meeting in Milwaukee, and the weekend in Chicago with friends.
  • 11/16 – 12/3: In Jackson visiting Darren. I’ll be processing the K-12 journey and writing about many of the experiences I’ve been dying to share but haven’t had time. Expect flashbacks all the way to the start of my reschooling in kindergarten, and handouts galore.
  • 12/3 – 12/6: Santa Clara University. I get to stay in the dorms and visit classes. I’ll also be making a presentation to a UC Berkeley Education class about Reschool Yourself.
  • 12/6 – 12/24: School follow-ups and educational autobiography. As I draft the book proposal, I’ll pop back into my old classrooms to snap photos and ask follow-up questions. I’ll also go through old photos and keepsakes from each grade to piece together an “educational autobiography” that traces my evolution through school. I think everyone could benefit from doing this, and I’ll share my own process.
  • Spring – I promise to write an update in the next few days about what the spring will hold.

Stay tuned. I’m looking forward to sharing amusing anecdotes and my conclusions thus far, as well as hearing about your school experiences. Thanks to those of you who are sharing — I’ve always intended for the site to be a forum for people to reflect on their education and story-swap. To those of you who are reading but don’t comment….PLEASE COMMENT! It would be nice to know that you’re out there.

November 13, 2008 About the Project 3 Read more >

First Week Back at High School: Highlight Reel

My first week back at high school was so overwhelming that I’ve been procrastinating writing about it. I participated in classes taught by my old teachers, took a few tests, ate lunch with current students, and had a lot of thoughts and memories flood my brain along the way.

As I’ve mentioned, I’m packing my high school experience into an intense couple of weeks, so I’ve already shadowed a freshman, sophomore, and a junior so far. I’d forgotten that shadowing was common practice at St. Vincent…for eighth graders scoping out the school, that is. The high schoolers deduce that I’m not in eighth grade and ask me, puzzled, “Are you coming here?” “What grade are you in?”

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November 10, 2008 About the Project, High School 0 Read more >

Returning to High School 10 Years Later

I’m spending this week and half of next at St. Vincent de Paul High School in Petaluma. Having gone to public schools through 8th grade, I chose to attend St. Vincent — a private, Catholic school — rather than the big Sonoma high school for a few reasons. The most significant was that Katie, a girl I’d become close friends with through our youth group, planned to go to St. Vincent and encouraged me to apply as well. Being very shy and insecure at the time, I thought that a more personalized environment would suit me well. I had gotten a little lost in the crowd of around 800 students at Altimira Middle School (there are only around 500 now), and I felt connected to very few of them. Though attending SV meant a 30-minute commute and a work-study commitment to help offset my tuition, I decided that the opportunity for a change would be worth the effort. I carpooled to and from Petaluma every day with several other students from Sonoma until I could drive myself.

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November 5, 2008 About the Project, Childhood, High School 5 Read more >

Can’t Wait to Go to High School?

I’ve completed middle school and begin high school tomorrow. Yes, I’m flying through!

This weekend I seem to have set a new record for posting. Of course, there are still a bunch of posts I’d like to write, including ones about the following:

– Seeing kids react to being graded, and remembering how much it affected me

– Trick-or-Treating on Halloween for the first time in 14 years

– How little of the material I remember from a lot of the middle school classes, and how little most adults would remember

I’ll do my best to write about these sometime this week.

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November 3, 2008 About the Project, High School 2 Read more >

Reliving the Past to Release it

I set out in the beginning of the project to sort through the stacks of keepsakes. I’ve tended to romanticize the past and get very attached to people and experiences, and I’ve kept almost every piece of memorabilia possible: movie tickets, school projects, and letters. They fill whole boxes and drawers. I’ve kept a journal on and off since I was about ten, so collectively they take up half a bookshelf.

I’ve finally decided that having hung on to everything has held me back from moving forward, and it’s time to let go of “the good old days.” I’ve been so busy gathering new experiences at school that I haven’t devoted time to processing the past, but I’m realizing how important and urgent this is. I keep meeting resistance from myself as I strive to move forward, and my instincts say that I’ll be able to bring fresh experiences into my life more easily once I clear out the old. Over the next few days, I’ll post snippets of writing, some old photos and other keepsakes, and reflections on what I’m remembering.

October 30, 2008 About the Project, Personal Development, , 1 Read more >

The Storm Before The Calm: The Dark Side of Reschooling

It’s been one of those days when I wonder if I’ve become any happier and more evolved than I was ten years ago. I sometimes conclude my blog posts by reflecting on how I’ve thankfully become more confident, socially skilled, and calm in challenging situations than I was as a student. I recognize that I’ve made progress in those areas. Unfortunately, I still face some of the same struggles I had back then, especially perfectionism, overachieving, and a hyper-awareness of my “issues” and their causes. I still have melancholy tendencies, have trouble taking care of myself, and avoid taking risks because I’m scared to fail.

Though I may not always express it in the blog, this fall has been one of the hardest times in my life. I’ve had to structure my time completely on my own and am facing my past head on, almost every waking minute. I’ve shared only glimpses of this process. I tend to write instead about the highlights of my reschooling, which I’ve found entertaining and fascinating, like learning guitar with the third graders and doing P.E. with the middle schoolers. I’ve written about frustrations in retrospect, once I’ve taken a lesson from them. However, it’s the times in between these moments of enjoyment and learning that are the most difficult. I’ve been hesitant to write about these times, and about re-experiencing the parts of the school system that I desperately want to change. These things are not only tough to describe accurately, but they’re also so important to me that I want to do them justice.

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October 29, 2008 About the Project, Personal Development, 4 Read more >

Teacher Training Day and Sixth-Grade Lunchtime Tales

This will be a quick update, because it’s again well after midnight, and my body is telling me that it’s fed up with my late-night writing sessions. Last night I stayed up until 4 a.m. writing about my rediscovery of music. There’s no telling when creative inspiration will strike, but I am going to start begging the muse to visit me at a reasonable hour. The chest pains and tightness that I’ve experienced on and off for the better part of this year have plagued me consistently this week. Even though I tell myself that no activity — not even learning a cool new song on guitar — is worth putting my body through the wringer, I get into a trance while on the computer late at night. One of these days, I will learn to like sleeping. Ever since I was a baby, I’ve always preferred to be awake and doing things to going to bed. It may be time to for another mandatory Day of Doing Nothing.

One note: While I was at my elementary school, I refrained from using its name to maintain a bit of anonymity. However, there’s no mystery about what middle school I’d attended because there was only one in town at the time I was a preteen, and its name was also emblazoned on my P.E. shirt. I’ve been calling the middle school by name, Altimira, and from now on, I’ll do the same for my elementary school, El Verano.

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October 21, 2008 About the Project, Middle School, Student Stories 2 Read more >

Keeping Secrets in Sixth Grade

Today I started middle school — a different campus, and completely different world. There’s nothing I’d like better than to share my first action-packed day of sixth grade, but unfortunately it’s after 2:30 a.m. and I need to be up in less than five hours. I’ve spent all night developing the plans for the spring phase of Reschool Yourself and can’t wait to share those with you, as well. Apparently my middle schooler classmates have taught me the art of keeping a secret…and then blabbing it the next day. As soon as I have a moment, I’ll write about:

– Changing in the locker room and running the track in P.E. clothes

– Standing around in a patented pre-teen cluster at lunch

– Triggering a variety of memories about classes, teachers, and personal dramas

I’m going to try a new approach of simply documenting what I’ve experienced each day without necessarily commenting on its greater significance. I hope this will let me share more as I go, and I can put on my psychology hat later. For now I’ll say that I’m in sixth grade this week, seventh next week, and eighth the following.

Ugggh, I just remembered that I didn’t do my homework, and there’s a test on the Language Arts selection first thing in the morning. Guess who’ll be getting up extra early to cram?

October 14, 2008 About the Project, Middle School 3 Read more >