Schooling

Once upon a time, I went to school. And, let's face it, I'm still there. Oh, I've taken a few breaks here and there, but between the not knowing what I wanted to do in life, and the hating the school system, and working through school while I took classes very slowly, I'm still there. I've worked for 10 years (so far) to get one of the easiest degrees known to man.

Truthfully, I'm not as bitter about this as I sound. I like to learn slowly. I like to soak up the material that I'm learning. I hate the deadlines. That's why, right now, I'm taking Human Anatomy as an independent study class and have a year to finish it. Well, there's that, and the fact that I don't have to go look at human cadavers in the independent study version. Blech!

Anyway, here's the thing. You ready? I hope so, because here it comes:

When I was nine, I was blessed to move to Hollister. In and of itself, it's not that cool a place. What made it cool was the 600 acre ranch I grew up on, and the school I went to there. It was a two-room schoolhouse. There were 40 kids from kindergarten through 8th grade. My grandmother was the principle. She also taught grades k-4. I was under her tutelage for half a year before I moved into The Upper Grades. It was a nerve-wracking transition. All the older, cool kids were there, and I didn't know the teacher. Scary.

As it turned out, the teacher was amazing. She was one of the best teachers I've ever had. Because of the structure and setup of the school, each student received one-on-one attention from her in any topic and any assignment. She didn't do the work for us, but she taught us how to think our way through it. Also, we learned to type. When we were able to pass off the keyboard, we were able to do our classwork on the computer. Yes, that means there was a computer per student in the upper grade classroom.

The day-to-day basic structure was fairly routine, including math, spelling, phonix, history, science, P.E., and language, but occasionally there were also amazing projects. I remember once we divided up into teams and strategized our way through the civil war. (The North still won. Slavery was still abolished. All is well with the world, no worries.) Once or twice a year, we would do individual research projects, but here's the kicker: they were done completely on the computer, on a program called hypercard. We created links to go from one page to another. We created animations. We used graphics. The information and the grammar all had to be correct, but we could choose any topic we wanted and decorate them any way we wanted. How cool was that?

Also, there was no assigned homework. Ever. We were required to finish our school assignments. If we didn't get the work done in class, then we had homework. When we did get the work done in class, we had a free afternoon. I rarely had homework. My brothers almost never did. My poor little sister had homework every day of her life. Such were our choices. Our choices. We had power over our little lives.

In that two-room schoolhouse, I enjoyed learning, I enjoyed the structure, and I even came to enjoy school.

Then came high school, and the worst four years of my life. I won't enumerate all the evils, except to say that I struggled with the overcrowded atmosphere and classes, the apparent lack of teacher concern over both the individual student and (in some cases) the subject material, the inevitable homework, and the fact that most of my peers had far more interest in getting out of real work than they did in actually learning anything. To be fair, there were a few teachers to truly cared, and their classes were both fun and enlightening, which made them seem easy.

Sadly, the same themes seemed to me to carry over into college life. I had a little more freedom in the classes I chose to take and how I spent each day, but, having known what a good education felt like, what it felt like to really learn and stretch and have a constant resource to whom I could always turn for help, I have been sorely disappointed in the way the rest of the school system seems to run.

I know that each person experiences school differently; what were your experiences? Did you find school to be generally a positive or negative experience? Why? What one thing would you change about the way you were schooled?