For those of you who asked (no one did, but I imagine one or more of you may have wondered...), here is the list of the schooling I had from birth through age 23:
Ages 2-4: I attended a "Mother's Day Out" preschool a couple of mornings a week at the Episcopal church down the street from us.
In the 2-year-old room, my favorite thing to do was to sit in the time-out chair, because it was quiet and the other kids wouldn't bother me. The teacher had to ask me to move when it was time for someone else to sit in it. I remember the 3-year-old teacher showing us how to lay our hoodies out on the floor upside down in front of us, stick our arms in, and flip it up over our heads so that she only had to zip it. I think I might teach Anne that trick soon. Also, I remember learning "Jesus Loves the Little Children" and "I'm a Little Teapot" in the music class after recess. And being very concerned on the playground when it was windy that the barrettes would blow out of my hair and I'd lose them. I also remember eating my lunch in the lunch room. I think on the particular day I'm thinking of, I brought celery sticks with peanut butter.
Age 5: Waldorf Kindergarten at the Friend's Meeting House.
I loved that school. We were the only little class, and we had two teachers. We had snack time with real candles (one day our teacher's long, wavy hair caught on fire). We had to wash our own dishes. There were fold-down tables along the wall for daily watercolor time. There was a special ceremony for birthdays which included some lovely robes and crowns my mom made. I learned how to make some delightful crafts with sticks and yarn. We were allowed to use the hose in the sandbox. I remember making a point to play with every different child at recess so as not to slight anyone. We had assigned nap time spots, and I often got in trouble for talking, although I'm pretty sure I was never the instigator - someone next to me always started talking, and I remember getting into a whispered nap time argument with one of the children over my tights, which I knew were navy blue, because my mother, the artist said so, but the other child insisted were black because they didn't look blue to her.
Age 6: A year at home.
It wasn't really homeschooling. Unschooling, perhaps... My mom just knew that I had a billion interesting things planned when I woke up every day, and I wasn't the legal age to have to attend school, and she knew I would be happier and better educated and less often sick if I stayed home and read and made things and played outside and practiced the piano, and drew pictures...
Age 7: I attended the Isley School, which was a little private K-3 school in an old house near the University.
It was brick and painted pink. My first grade class met in the two-room apartment up back behind the courtyard. I remember learning about volcanoes and seasons and the five senses and dinosaurs. I had my first and last taste of cooked beef tongue and my first (but not last taste) of amazing Ethiopian bread. We had a sort of PE class with a visiting teacher which sometimes involved this huge parachute either on the grass of the tennis courts across the street or on the quiet overgrown cul-de-sac behind our classroom. I remember we had to memorize the addition tables and when we had them by heart we could go to the teacher and recite them. I was probably more advanced at math than most of the kids in the class, but I was behind on testing out of my addition tables, because it made me such a nervous wreck. I think I often "cheated" by counting on my fingers behind my back as fast as I could. For the science fair, I made a little rocket out of a film canister that shot along the length of a string when you poured in vinegar and baking soda. I had the use of our generous art closet, well covered with old newspapers for the purpose. At some point in my reading book, there was a story that involved a snake, and my teacher sent me down to the "museum", a sort of basement room open to the courtyard, to bring up a snake skin for the class to look at. If you know my snake phobia, this was the worst thing a teacher could ever ask of me. I went to the top of the stairs down into that dark dungeon and waited a very long time, panicked thinking about a snake skin. Eventually I returned to class and told the teacher I couldn't find it. We went to the library in the main house once a week, and I remember a book I loved there about children who made flying inventions out of crazy things they found around the house, such as egg beaters. It was only in the last year or so that it dawned on me it was a fantasy book, and not a how to! We also went to a music class and a Spanish class in the same little former bedroom behind the library, and all the Spanish I know I learned there. Also the Hanukkah songs I learned there. I spent most of recess doing the monkey bars and flipping on the trapeze, and I often had horrible blisters on my palms. I also enjoyed galloping from one end of the playground to the other at high speed and "grinding grain" - a process which did not impress my mother, as it involved sitting behind a brick, laying the skirt of my handmade dress on top of the brick, putting a handful of sand on top of that, and then grinding the whole thing with another brick. The three bathrooms I knew of in the school did not lock, but had a little sign on the door that you'd flip for occupied vs. unoccupied. When I went in the bathroom nearest the playground at recess, I got it wrong more than once. The sign was a toucan, and if the beak was pointing right? or left? I never knew - it meant occupied, and the opposite meant unoccupied.
Ages 8-10: Public elementary school down the street.
I started out in second grade, but it turned out to be rather easy academically, so my parents took me to some rather extensive special testing at the University or the school district office (don't remember) which was required to allow me to move up a grade. So at spring break of that year I switched to third grade, where they were doing a lot of fractions. The next year I went to fourth grade, and then I went to fifth grade until Thanksgiving.
In second grade I had a good buddy named Andy who was incredibly short for his age, and I walked home with him and his sister Jane almost every day. His sister was in fifth grade and only about my height. There was another boy in our class who frequently got in trouble for trashing the restroom we shared with the neighboring second grade class. I'm pretty sure I only managed to have to go in that restroom once for the entire school year. There was another boy in our class who several times during the year, came up with nearly identical answers to me in English class, and it wasn't because either of us was copying. We just figured great minds thought alike. The teacher let me and a couple of other kids do a more advanced math book while the rest of the class was doing the standard math stuff. At first I always got lost in the school, because in the very center of the school were the offices and the hallway around it was a weird triangular shape with various wings jutting off in different directions.
In third grade we did some quick math drills, and I was good at them, but they were ridiculously frightening, because of my personal competitive nature. I remember one day drawing a beautiful leafy tree, which I still think is a good drawing, even for an adult. Another day our teacher sent a boy and me outside to collect some long blades of grass for our class guinea pig. My dad apparently arrived with the lunch I'd forgotten while I was bent over under a shrub and this boy kept telling me my dad was there. I was sure he was trying to trick me, and it was quite some time before I popped up and found that this boy was telling the truth.
In fourth and fifth grade we switched classes for some things, and all of our classes were in the portables. In all the grades, we had three "specials" that rotated every day: music, art, and PE. I liked music. I was a little scared of the art teacher, but I liked making art enough that it was fine. PE was NO fun. Our teacher was a loud, chubby, drill-seargent sort of lady who wore crazy 80's workout clothes, and we had to do sit ups and run the mile and have all these units on sports I didn't care about like baseball and bowling and football. However, I did love track and field day, because I was really fast on short runs and I could hurdle.
In fourth grade we had a semester of D.A.R.E. to Say No to Drugs and a semester of health. I learned that drugs hurt your brain and quite a bit about what the different drugs were (tobacco, LSD, angel dust, alcohol, cocaine). One day I drew a detailed map of a country I invented and turned it in to our homeroom teacher's homework basket for extra credit. I didn't need or want the extra credit, but I thought the map was really neat and didn't know how else to show it to her. After about a week, I was eager to get it back, so I nervously asked if she'd received it, and she said she'd had been showing it to the other teachers. I was really embarrassed. I was invited to join a "club" with three other girls. I'm not sure there was ever a point to the club, but among other things we read books, played in the yard, and attempted to make a few '80's hair barrettes with neon balloons... Also, that was the year of the New Kids on the Block, and I attended more than one birthday party themed around the band. It was very exciting, although I wasn't really into pop music. More into Vivaldi and Bach... Music class was great, because we were learning the recorder, and I got way more excited about it than any other elementary kid you've ever met. Our teacher would send me outside during the class to tutor the kids who needed help with Hot Cross Buns or whatever tune we were supposed to be learning. I ended up getting alto and tenor recorders as well, and learning harmony parts for all of this great Rennaissance music. Miss Jeffrey, our music teacher and leader of three after-school clubs I joined (recorder club, choir, and Young Astronauts), took us to the Rennaissance festival three hours north in Waxahatchie, and we got to wear costumes and play ancient music. It was pretty much the highlight of my young life. The lowlight of forth grade was lunch time. We had more girls in our class than boys, and we had two assigned tables with assigned seating at lunch. Another sweet, responsible girl Jennifer, and I were assigned to the boys' table. Way to punish kids for being well-behaved! The boys took delight in tormenting the two of us, so I took to raising my hand at every offense and tattling to the lunch monitor. I'm pretty sure the lunch monitor got ridiculously tired of all of this and talked with my teacher about it. Her solution was to give me a laminated sheet of paper with all the boys' names on it and an erasable marker. Then, rather than tattling, I could tally up offenses next to each boy's name and turn it in to her after lunch. I knew she always erased it and never looked at it, but it still gave me a little bit of comfort knowing she knew how miserable we two girls were. Really, I think she could have come up with a better seating plan!
In fifth grade, I was sad to leave school in November, strictly because our teacher was reading us the Chronicles of Pridain every morning, and I loved the stories. My mom got me the set of books, but I never finished reading them, because it wasn't the same. Also in fifth grade we did a 50 states project where we each made little books in those old plastic binders; there was a page about the flag and map and other important facts for each state. In the mornings while everyone was arriving to school, our teacher played the Classical radio station (that got big points from me!) and put up some sort of brain-twisters on the overhead. They were tricky, and I didn't get all of them, even though I was a straight-A sort of student.
Ages 10-11: My first round of homeschooling.
I was less stressed out than I had been in school, although I was sad not to get to learn cello in the 6th grade orchestra at the public school. My mom taught me algebra and some pretty advanced arithmetic in the form of word problems, and I loved it. I also took German lessons three days a week from our Swiss neighbor where I read some great kids books in German, had fun with German workbooks, and sipped tea while playing German scrabble. I did a lot of reading and some violin and piano practicing, and started taking serious ballet classes in addition to my music lessons. Also, my mom and I decided I should do a research project on a topic of my choice, and it was hard to narrow it down, but eventually I decided on the invention of the printing press. Said research project never turned into an actual report, but in the process I did interview a neighbor (not sure if I asked any useful questions) and learned how to use the card catalogue in one of the University libraries. Also, we had one of those chemistry sets where you can do all kinds of fun reactions, almost like magic tricks, and I liked doing those with my mom. I was excited about chemistry!
Ages 11-12: I moved over to a private K-12 school, Kirby Hall, in February of sixth grade and stayed through seventh grade. We switched classes all day long, although the group of children stayed together. We had some excellent teachers, most notably our 6th-grade reading/English/World history teacher. I learned a lot about grammar, read some excellent age-appropriate books, and got my first in-depth overview of world history. We also had some rather so-so teachers, particularly our science teacher who spent most of the year reading us Roald Dahl (not that I minded, of course!)
In seventh grade we took Biology 1 in the former kitchen turned science lab. Did I mention the school was a former private dorm for UT? Neighboring dorm rooms had been joined to create classrooms, the cafeteria remained that, but the kitchen was the science lab. The other large lobby area had been turned into the library, and the basement became the gym and kindergarten rooms. The third floor was reserved for the upper school, meaning eighth grade and up for the most part. Anyway, about biology, our teacher John DeMoss knew so much, and I could barely keep up with all of the vocabulary and processes we needed to know for each exam. His special area of interest was human evolution, and it was a very spiritual topic for him. Also in seventh grade I took Latin 1 for the first time, and Algebra 1, which was pretty easy at that point. Our English and Western history teachers were good friends, both named John. In English we were to read a lot of novels and discuss their themes, and most of it was over my head. Let's just say I mostly read excerpts. I'm sure I would appreciate that literature much more as an adult. I got in trouble in history one day when our teacher said that the following week we'd begin studying the Industrial Revolution, and I muttered under my breath, "oh great." He took me down for having a bad attitude and didn't want me spreading it to certain other students in the class who weren't as good students as I. There is no way I could have possibly explained to him that my "oh great" was an expression of my personal sadness over how the Industrial Revolution had caused so much personal and environmental suffering in addition to its spectacular gains, so I didn't try. During the last couple periods of the day there were various classes offered such as music, speech, art, study hall... My mom arranged that I could have practice time for my violin instead. I was offered daily the choice between the music office filled with music textbooks (mostly unused) and a second-story library room filled with National Geographics going back to the 1920's (also mostly unused.) I certainly spent my time in those two room practicing. And reading. Simultaneously. Also in seventh grade, I ate a King-sized crunch bar, available in the lunch room for only $1 nearly every day. This may have had some bearing on my frequent head colds and inability to sleep well at night. All the girls in our class did this every day, pretty much. Group drug therapy?
Age 13: Homeschooling round two.
I was still very involved in ballet and violin, although piano tapered off and lessons vaporized mid-year. I learned geometry (which I loved, although I hated the proofs) and some trigonometry, which didn't really interest me. Algebra had been much better. Other than that I don't really remember what I studied specifically. A friend from seventh grade asked me whether I liked being homeschooled, clearly with the assumption that I would hate it, and she was rather surprised when I said I was enjoying it because I got my school work done faster and I still had time to practice and take dance and breathe a little bit. I'm sure I did some drawing lessons with my mom. Also, I think that's when I learned how to do the laundry, a skill I used almost daily in the 30's. One of the great things about homeschooling is that my mom knew me well and knew when to push and when to just let me go, so that I could be well prepared for my future life. She estimated pretty well most of the time!
Age 14: Ninth grade at Kirby Hall.
By ninth grade, most of the students at the school transferred to public schools, so our class size dwindled to about seven. We were a rather peculiar assortment of misfits. We combined for many of our classes with the tenth grade which was down to five students. We took Biology 2 with Mr. DeMoss which was quite rigorous, and we spent most of the year dissecting things. I think this is pretty much what drove me to eventually become a vegetarian. I hated cutting up the poor, dead animals, and the smell of formaldehyde right after lunch was awful. I was put in a lab group with two tenth grade girls who LOVED dissection and also loved discussing their love lives. Not a good fit for my odd, young self. I survived by volunteering to do all the lab drawings, which worked out well, as I was good at it. Toward the end of the year I finally asked the teacher if I could switch over to join the two-person lab group of my best school friends Alexi and Patricia, and I was much happier when he allowed the switch. We had the same English teacher as in seventh grade, and he had a special fondness for science fiction, so we spent the year reading things like Dune and Firestarter. I finished a few of the required books, but many of them didn't interest me and I did not do all the required reading. We took Algebra 2, which was a welcome relief from the previous year's geometry (proofs seemed so pointless!). Our teacher was Eastern Orthodox and occasionally had interesting religious or philosophical things to say. I also did sort of an independent study of Latin 2. We also had a semester of a study class, combined with the tenth grade, on how to take the SAT and other standardized tests, and I have to say that the tricks I learned in there probably added quite a few points to my scores a few years later.
Ages 15-17: Homeschooling, round three. The three years sort of blend together in my memory, but I know I studied pre-calculus, calculus (wherein my laziness didn't allow me to finish the book), chemistry (I had liked the explosions version of chemistry, and I kept willing myself to like the moles-calculation version of chemistry, since I had friends at the magnet school who were so enthusiastic about it), physics (I liked the videos about how things worked but got sidetracked when I tried to do all the math, because I didn't have a dangerous Titan standing over me with a stick), economics, American and world history, and more German. I wasn't the most diligent student when a topic didn't interest me, and I was so overly diligent in topics of interest that I would nearly give up at some point due to my over-attention to detail. On occasion I wished I were in the public magnet school with my youth orchestra buddies, because they were doing this super-rigorous work in so many topics and had mean teachers doling out grades all the time, so they couldn't give into their natural laziness. At the same time I recognized they were really stressed out and sleep deprived, and in the end, I still got invited to prom and went to my first choice of college, where I was one of the top academic performers in my year. As a homeschooler, I had to do a lot to prove to the colleges to which I applied that I was educated, so I took the PSAT, the SAT, and a whole bunch of SAT 2 subject tests: German with listening, world history, English writing, English literature, and math IIC (the one which had calculus on it.) I did pretty well on all of these tests, and the school I went to didn't much care anyway - it was basically all one's violin audition that counted. I also did a research project on atonal music, which involved spending a bit of time at the University arts library. I wasn't prepared to understand it well, because I didn't yet have all of the theory and history background, but that came later in college. On the whole I enjoyed homeschooling, but I don't have as many quirky stories about it as I did my "formal" schooling, because it was mostly pleasant and natural.
Ages 18-23: Cleveland Institute of Music, Bachelor of Music in violin performance, Master of Music in violin performance.
It was my dream school for my undergrad. I had two violin lessons and two performance classes every week with two teachers and two sets of repertoire. I played in orchestra three days a week, and chamber ensembles at least that frequently. I played music by student composers, and took Dalcroze Eurythmics 1 through 8. I took five semesters of harmony/sightsinging/eartraining/keyboard as well as 18th century counterpoint and some other advance theory classes. I took semester after semester of orchestral repertoire, and the standard music history sequence covering midevil through 20th-century music. Plus I took symphonic history and some other special courses. I took freshman English and then later the History of the English language. I took all the required courses for a minor in German, including a summer stint in Munich. I took a great class on the archaeology of Eastern North America in the basement of the natural history museum. I was surrounded by people who were headed for the top of their music fields, and it was amazing. I performed week in and week out, and was surrounded by amazing teachers and music professionals.
I applied to three high powered music schools for my masters, and was accepted at all three. In the end I stayed at CIM, because that was the school where I got the largest scholarship and had gotten the violin teacher I really wanted. Two years of weekly lessons with Paul Kantor was one of the most amazing things that every happened to me. I took all sorts of music history and theory seminars, including a memorable course on the music of Hindemith and Stravinsky, another one on all of the Beethoven Symphonies, and another one on counterpoint from the 18th-20th centuries. I kept up with all of the orchestra rehearsals, chamber rehearsals, performances, and recitals.
Those six years at CIM were the most intense six years of my life and I wouldn't trade them for anything. I made my best friends there, I learned more about music than I ever thought possible, I played the violin for four, six, eight, and ten hours a day, and I learned a lot in my personal life in the areas of faith and friendship. And I met Jared. I shared my first apartment with a revolving list of lovely ladies, and as the owner of a car from my junior year on, helped a lot of people run errands and move house. I learned all about lake-effect snow and winter, which I loved, and discovered how glorious spring is after a Cleveland winter. I had lots of ideas for what I'd like to do after school and made lots of useful connections to people which I utilize to this day.
...So there you have it.
In case you're wondering, my school-switching was not because my parents were crazy. Every school switch was for a logical reason, and it probably prepared me well for my adulthood of seismic change all the time! I was not odd because of homeschooling. Homeschooling was chosen for me at times because I was so odd. :-)
No comments:
Post a Comment