Reschool Yourself

About the Project

Assessing Old Habits As a New Chapter Begins

I’m back home, and after a week of balanced living on the east coast, I’m finding myself already getting sucked back into an unhealthy routine. For the past few years it’s been this way: extreme relaxation on vacation, then extreme stress as soon as I went back to work. I would love to find a balance someday soon.

Right now I wish I’d scheduled in a few extra days to recover from jet-lag and finish processing my elementary school experiences, but I’m scheduled to start middle school tomorrow. I had also hoped to start rested and energetic instead of draggy and coffee-fueled, but alas, it will not be so. Sigh…it’s true that old habits die hard. At least I’m making progress in other areas, which helps keep the little setbacks in perspective. Perhaps starting a new chapter of the project will help me make some positive changes. Here’s today’s progress report.

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October 12, 2008 About the Project, Personal Development, 0 Read more >

A Week Down Memory Lane

I’m writing from a little library in the Maryland town where my mom’s parents live. They’ve lived in the same house since 1959, and they’ve actively refused to hop on the Interweb party bus. (I think my grandpa’s exact words were: “Don’t buy a computer for me. I won’t use it.”) As a result, I have 30 minutes to give you a brief update before I’m booted off the library computer.

I’m taking a week off between elementary school and middle school, which is giving me time to process my K-5 experiences. My scrawlings have filled a whole notebook with memories and observations, and I’m both eager to translate them into posts and petrified that I’ll lose the notebook before I have the chance. As always, I hope to catch up on writing in the next few days, and share more stories with you.

This week will generate some blogging fodder of its own, I’m sure. I’m spending a couple of days in Maryland with my mom and grandparents (Pop Quiz: 3 generations of anxious Asians + 2 days + 1 small space = ?). On Thursday, I meet two of my college roommates in the Boston area to see the new baby boy of our third college roommate. At my high school reunion, the mere thought of my classmates reproducing made me uneasy, so I’m sure seeing a close friend with an infant will blow my mind.

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October 7, 2008 About the Project, Elementary School, Student Stories, , 0 Read more >

People-Pleasing, Perfectionism, and Ten Reasons to Reschool

I’ve been drafting an official project proposal for Reschool Yourself bit by bit for months now, and intensively for the last week. As hard as I’ve worked, I’ve been unable to craft my countless notes into a cohesive, inspiring proposal. The very reason it’s taken me so long to craft a full project proposal is evidence for why I’m reschooling myself in the first place.

I have invested hours and hours detailing measurable goals and outcomes, doing research to support my arguments, and shaping the proposal into the format that most funders require. The result? Writer’s block in the attempt to communicate my ideas perfectly. Several drafts of lifeless rhetoric devoid of the passion that fuels this project. Exasperation with my inability to speak from the heart when I know I’ll be evaluated. School has trained me so well that I can’t stop behaving like an overachieving student even when it doesn’t serve me. And in adulthood, it doesn’t serve me very often at all.

In fact, the two qualities that were keys to my success in school have limited my success as an adult: people-pleasing and perfectionism.

People-Pleasing

Early in childhood, I learned to sense what people – especially authority figures – wanted from me, and that I would be rewarded for giving it to them. Now, as an adult, the rewards for people-pleasing aren’t so great. I often say yes to commitments just because I’d feel guilty saying no. I regularly sacrifice my own well-being for the sake of others, a story shared by many fellow nonprofiteers and educators. I unconsciously seek a “Wow” factor in the things that I do to replicate the affirmation that I got in school.

I know that I could be more effective, and generally happier, if I could just determine what I wanted to do, and then do it. It sounds simple, but after spending around 20,000 hours* in school doing what was expected of me, I’m out of touch with what I actually want to do.

* A very rough estimate of time I’ve spent in school from kindergarten through college, based on an 180-day average school year during K-12 and a quarter system in college.

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September 25, 2008 About the Project, Personal Development, Reschooling Reasons 8 Read more >

Movin’ On Up to Fourth Grade

Just a quick update, with more to come later tonight….

After a week’s hiatus, I started back at elementary school yesterday. It was strange coming back into a child’s world after spending last week completely among grown-ups. It was even stranger to think that many adults live a completely child-free life, rarely having occasion to interact with kids unless they have little ones at home. I find that the kids keep me on my toes, since I’m never sure what they’ll say next, and that I have to raise my energy level to meet theirs. The third graders welcomed me with hugs, personal updates, and — of course — requests for more scary stories. I told them that I was fresh out of stories, and I was glad to find that they still wanted to hang out with me when I wasn’t performing for them.

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September 23, 2008 About the Project, Elementary School 0 Read more >

New Site Features!

You’ll notice that the Reschool Yourself site continues to develop, thanks to Darren‘s help. Here are the newest features:

1) Profile Photo for Comments & Forum

Many of you read much more often than you comment, so first of all, please comment on the posts and forum! Your comments let me know that my words aren’t floating off into the void, and they attract other readers’ interest as well. I hope that the forum will become a way for people to share school memories, thoughts about education, and reschooling ideas, so please register and contribute!

As Facebook addicts know, online exchanges feel more personal if you can see the people you’re communicating with. Through Gravatar, you can easily register and upload a profile photo. If you have a WordPress blog, are probably already registered with Gravatar.

2) Your Two Cents

As I’ve mentioned, my fingers can’t type fast enough to keep up with my growing list of blog post ideas. If you let me know which topics you’d most be interested in reading, it will help me prioritize which ones to write next. Check the boxes next to your topics of choice and click “Vote.”

Feel free to suggest your own topic by commenting, emailing me, or posting on the forum, and I may add it to the list. You can also sponsor a post from the list by making a donation in any amount, and I’ll give you a shout-out when I write it. More info to follow.

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September 17, 2008 About the Project 0 Read more >

Growing Pains

I’m feeling stuck. Stuck, stuck, stuck. That’s all I can think to write. The whole point of taking a break from elementary school this week was to catch up on blog posts, but I can’t seem to finish a single post. I can’t even seem to finish a sentence.

On my To-Do list are around 50 posts about grades K-3 that I want to generate, dozens of features I want to add to this website, and 200+ miscellaneous items, but all I can do is sit here feeling exhausted and overwhelmed. Darren’s in town, and instead of spending time with him, I am staring at my laptop and deleting every other word I type.

Tonight I had a breakdown. I got misty-eyed in the coffee shop where I’d spent hours agonizing over a blog post that I never finished. I teared up when I walked out of the coffee shop and saw the parking ticket on my car. I full-out bawled when I felt like I was ruining the farmer’s market date that Darren and I had been planning for a month.

It was one of those days where I wanted to drop to my knees, look up at the sky, and sigh, “I give up.” It was a day when I was surrounded by reasons to be happy, but I still wasn’t. The farmer’s market was full of music and laughter and delicious local food. Darren surprised me with roses to cheer me up. We ate incredible calzones, followed by ice cream cones. And still I felt stuck.

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September 16, 2008 About the Project, Personal Development, , , 7 Read more >

Playing Catch-Up

This week I’m staying home from school to play catch-up. It’s times like these that make me appreciate my grown-up privileges to do independent study when I feel like it (I prefer the term “independent study” to “ditching class”). I’ll finish my last week of elementary school next week, spending a couple of days each in 4th and 5th grades.

My three and a half weeks in elementary classes have generated pages upon pages of notes on school memories and observations, and I’ve been frustrated that there aren’t enough hours in the day to turn them into blog posts. I dream of an invention that downloads ideas directly from my brain and turns them into polished pieces of writing. I figured that if ordinary monkeys can control a mechanical arm with their thoughts, surely I can get my laptop to do my bidding.

Until I become as smart as Bubbles, I’ll just have to keep typing out the entries myself. I have many, many experiences and epiphanies to share with you from the last few weeks, including:

  • My high school reunion, and why some of the highest achievers are having a hard time leading efficient, happy lives
  • Why I’m reschooling myself: a direct answer
  • My personal school history, grades K-3
  • Why education won’t change if adults don’t reschool themselves
  • My reschooling curriculum
  • A variety of reschooling tools to develop your intuition, happiness, and knowledge

Get ready. The contents of my brain are about to spill onto the page.

Flickr Creative Commons image courtesy of benny yap.

September 15, 2008 About the Project, Elementary School 0 Read more >

Melia passed the third grade!

I’m officially done with third grade — high five!

It’s a good thing, because I’m out of scary stories. I had to mine the Internet for stories like “The Hairy Toe” and “The Hook.” After three days of constantly performing, I felt like the kids’ little trained monkey, dancing on command. Turns out, that kind of popularity is exhausting. I hid out in the teachers’ lounge at lunch and enjoyed some grown-up conversation that didn’t conclude with the words “And she was never heard from again.”

I’m still not sleeping much, 5-6 hours per night. I’ve been going nonstop since school started and tend to write until the wee hours of the dawn. I may be the most workaholic elementary school student that ever lived. Tomorrow I’m stopping in at school to check out Picture Day, and then I’m taking the rest of the day off to do errands and pick up my boyfriend Darren, who’s visiting from Mississippi.

Here are a few highlights of this week, which I’ll try to expand upon in later posts:

  • The most caring reaction I’d ever seen to a boy crying in class, and the cultural shift that I think may be responsible for it.
  • A mini “School of Rock” in one third grade class that teaches kids a large part of the curriculum through music.
  • The first school award I’ve gotten in many moons, and how I felt about it.
  • Illustrating a story about a dragon and not wanting to stop when the teacher said so.

Next week, I’ll move on to being a big 4th grader, then a top dog 5th grader. It’ll be my last week of elementary school, and then it’s on to become an angsty, pimple-faced middle schooler. I see much eye-rolling and crying in the bathroom in my future.

September 11, 2008 About the Project, Elementary School 1 Read more >

Feelin’ Rough in 3rd Grade

Lately, I’m having more trouble than usual with balance. It’s after 5 a.m. right now, I haven’t gone to bed yet, and I’m supposed to be at school in three hours. There simply isn’t enough time for me to go to school, work part-time (as I’ve been attempting starting yesterday), document my experiences, AND take care of myself with enough sleep and exercise — much less to have a little downtime and fun.

The most frustrating thing is having almost a full notebook of ideas and no time to share them on the blog. I have posts from my first days in kindergarten — and posts from the education conference before school even started — that I have yet to generate. I might just have to save some for the book.

I’m in 3rd grade through Wednesday, and I’ll start 4th on Thursday. I’m averaging three days in each elementary grade and will spend a bit more time in each of my middle and high school classes.

I keep reminding myself that it’s important to sleep enough so I can get the most out of my classroom experience. When I’m tired, the kids’ constant stories about their pet dogs and their grandmas and their sparkle pencils just aren’t quite as entertaining.

This week, I also have an extra motivator: Looking decent for my 10-year high school reunion this weekend. Right now I look like something the cat hocked up. Let’s hope this changes before Friday.

September 9, 2008 About the Project, Educational Philosophy & Practice, , 0 Read more >

Reschool Yourself in the News

There’s an article about Reschool Yourself in the Sonoma Index-Tribune today. Thanks to reporter Emily Charrier and photographer Robbi Pengelly for capturing the spirit of the project so beautifully.

For those of you who are new to Reschool Yourself, welcome! Here’s how to get to know the site:

1. Get oriented.

  • Use the menu across the top of the site to browse pages. The content of these pages is updated occasionally.
  • The left-hand column contains blog posts about my reschooling experiences in and out of the classroom. The most recent posts are at the top of the page, and the blog is usually updated daily. Make sure you click on the red link to read the rest of a given entry.
  • The middle column contains a project summary, a link to my fundraising page, a list of recent comments and posts, and a link to my online photo album.
  • The right-hand column contains tools for finding older blog posts by topic. Categories organize posts by general subject. Tags organize posts by specific topics. Clicking on an item, such as “Reschooling Tools” or “busyness,” will bring up a list of posts on that topic.

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September 5, 2008 About the Project, Elementary School 1 Read more >