Tag Archive: press

I’m pleased to report that my post “Five Ways to Reschool on the Interweb” was published in YES! Magazine online. Reschool Yourself will also be featured in the fall print issue. YES! is a magazine that I love for publicizing the positive, inspiring news in the world, and I’m happy to be a part of it.

YES! is a award-winning, ad-free, nonprofit publication that supports people’s active engagement in building a just and sustainable world. It draws around 100,000 visitors to its website each month.

I’m honored to report that the Mutual of Omaha Aha Moment campaign chose Reschool Yourself to headline its August/September newsletter. Thanks to Len Markidan, Communications Manager for Skadaddle Media, for documenting the story. He was able to summarize the project briefly while still getting to the heart of it, a task that I myself find challenging.

Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

“The biggest challenge we face is that kids aren’t allowed to develop fully and become who they want,” Melia explains. “School is about ‘have to’ and not ‘want to,’ and that’s a very dangerous thing to teach kids; they lose touch with the joy of life and what makes them tick as a person. Kids who are meant to be the next Picasso can’t develop because they’re stuck learning chemistry. The most important thing is to nurture that natural curiosity.”

But when Melia looked around her, she didn’t just see the problems with the system. She also realized just how much we could all learn from the kids.

“Watching the kids run on the playground,” Melia says, she found herself jealous. “I just wanted to have that joy that I hadn’t felt in so long, and that carefree attitude. And I looked around at the adults, and a lot of us didn’t seem to have that anymore. I felt like it didn’t have to be that way.”

See the 2-minute video of my Aha Moment here.

Editorial Intern Lynsi Burton wrote about Reschool Yourself for a forthcoming issue of YES! Magazine and found that she personally resonated with the project. Read her blog post here.

Here are a couple of excerpts from Lynsi’s post:

Reading Melia’s thoughts and observations, I discovered that I see a lot of myself in her, which is probably why I love her site and her project so much. She writes about how she developed a destructive perfectionism somewhere between youth and adulthood, in a schooling environment in which one is rewarded for following the rules and doing what is expected. But, after school, when there are no teachers and grades, who sets the rules? Melia discovered that the habits she developed in school were actually inhibiting her ability to enjoy and find personal peace in adulthood.

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