Reschool Yourself

Reschool Yourself is the story of my education, in school and out, from kindergarten to the age of 28. During the 2008-2009 academic year, I aim to understand how school shaped what I believe about myself, and begin to reeducate myself on my own terms. This journey starts by spending time in my childhood classrooms and ends with my traveling around the world following a curriculum that I’ll design as I go. By sharing my experiences on this blog and eventually in a book, I hope to encourage others to consider how they can reshape their own learning and self-image at any age.

Starting on the first day of elementary school in September 2008, I’ll revisit my own schools—from kindergarten to college—while they’re in session, volunteering and observing, digging through old photos and journal entries. In order to understand how school influenced my beliefs about myself, I’ll explore classroom experiences that opened up opportunities for me, and others that narrowed what I thought was possible. In the process, I’ll have the chance to relearn the things that didn’t stick the first time and reevaluate what I think I already know.

Over the following months, until June 2009, I will “reschool” myself—following my curiosity, filling in gaps in my knowledge, and pushing the limits that I’d previously placed on myself. I plan to leave my itinerary open in order to pursue interests and opportunities as they arise. I expect to learn things that I never thought I could understand, such as car repair and computer programming; I’ll visit places that I never thought I’d be able to go, perhaps studying Egyptology at the pyramids of Giza or meditation at a monastery in Tibet. For the first time as a student, I will be able to decide what I want to learn and how I’d like to learn it: by reading a book, watching a documentary, or by apprenticing with recognized experts or knowledgeable people in my own network.

In this blog, I’ll share the skills I learn along the way, from money management to designing clothes, and stories about the experience of learning them. I hope that readers will use the forum (coming soon) to exchange memories, knowledge, and resources of their own. Reschool Yourself is intended as both a personal journey and a statement that regardless of your educational past, it’s never too late to reschool yourself.

For more details on the project, check out the FAQ section.

I am writing from the same couch where you could have found me over 24 hours ago, wearing the same pajamas. I haven’t showered or put in my contact lenses, and I have crossed off a grand total of one item from my Saturday To-Do list. To my usual self, it would appear that I have done nothing today. My usual self would be annoyed about all the items left for tomorrow. It would sigh and fret over the opportunities missed by spending a full day vegging out. My enlightened self, on the other hand, that fleeting self that I’m always chasing, knows that I accomplished a lot more in my day of doing nothing than I would think.

If it weren’t for my throbbing headache, the one that has stayed with me on and off for days, I would have gone through with the day’s agenda. I would have walked over to the Carnaval parade before going to the bank, two grocery stores, and the gym. I would have done the sinkful of dirty dishes and vacuumed the rug, then would have driven an hour to a friend’s graduation party. I might have then stopped by another friend’s birthday at a beach located an hour in the other direction before driving home. But my headache kept me glued to the couch, too exhausted even to get up and brush my teeth.

I almost never get headaches, but for the past couple of months a potpourri of health issues has started cropping up, practically a new one each day. It’s like the menu du jour in hell: “What’ll ya have today: the cracked lips or the numb toes?” I know that I’d be healthy if I could just listen to my body’s needs, sleeping when I’m tired and exercising when I’m restless instead of pushing through physical fatigue in order to do more. I pulled an all-nighter last Wednesday to complete a copywriting assignment, and at 5 a.m. the anxious tightness in my chest that has been growing for months screamed at me, “You need to stop and breathe!” But I could not take a full breath, and being on deadline, I ignored my body’s warning signals and soldiered on.

I’ve been this way since I was little, not wanting to miss out on anything, trying to cram as much activity into a day as humanly possible. My mom loves to remind me of how, as a toddler at naptime, I’d tell her, “I’m not tired! I don’t want a nap! I—” and fall asleep mid-sentence. There’s a photograph of me reading two books at once with a bottle dangling from my mouth, eyes at half-mast, my mind fighting off the sleep my body knows it needs.I have been trashing my body in this way for months now, perhaps even years, while unreasonably expecting it to be there when I need it. And let’s be honest here, I kinda need it all the time. If I want to do anything on my to-do list, my body needs to be humming along well enough to get me there. I’ve always thought of myself as more centered in my head than in my body, viewing the two as separate entities. A friend describes this attitude as “seeing your body as a vehicle to tour your brain around town.” I think that my people (as I like to call the Chinese) may be on to something with all their talk about mind, body, and spirit being one.

Today I began listening to my body, instead of offering it a nice warm glass of shut the hell up. As a result, I did a few things that I haven’t allowed myself to do in many moons. Here’s a chart of what I accomplished today, and what my usual self and enlightened self would have to say about it:

My usual self normally disdains any activity that lacks a clear outcome by thinking, “You want to invest your precious time doing WHAT?” On weekends, while my roommates eat popcorn and watch Dancing with the Stars, I make work calls from my bedroom or run errands. When people ask me, “Have you seen <insert any movie made after 2005>?” I shake my head no, since I never seem to have two hours to spare. Thankfully, this will change in a month, after I leave my job. One of my top priorities is to remember how to watch a movie without thinking the whole time that I should be doing something more productive. I’ve realized that if I get hit by a bus tomorrow (I’m safe for today, still planted on the couch in my PJs) I would rather have spent my final hours watching a Top Chef marathon with my roomies than doing laundry alone.

Why do nothing? Because the body needs to decompress in order to tackle that list of somethings; the vehicle that tours your brain around town needs regular maintenance. Because “nothing” may surprise you by enhancing the quality of your life (consider this: you might actually become a secret fan of J. Lo). And most importantly, and this must not be underestimated, because doing nothing is FUN.

Sending home amusing travel stories is just about my favorite thing to do in the world (besides eating, of course). I recently asked my mom – a paragon of organization – to unearth my travelogues from Europe and Latin America. Even after nearly five years, bless her heart, she had them neatly filed away in her Outlook archives. I’m posting them here both for your entertainment and as an example of the stories I hope to send home during my upcoming travels. The main difference is that in my new adventures, I’ll take more of an intentional educational angle, describing the specifics of what I’m learning in each place. Don’t worry: I won’t bore you. I imagine that the stories of me fiddling under the hood of a car, or shoveling manure on a farm, will be at least as amusing as the ones about my gallivanting around Europe as a recent college grad. I’ll post a few of the travelogues at a time, starting with the Europe trip, and will upload accompanying photos soon. I’ll backdate them, so you’ll read them from the bottom of the page up. 

The first set of posts are travelogues from Summer 2002 to Spring 2003, when I traveled through Europe and lived in Barcelona, Spain. During my junior of college, I’d spent a semester in Salamanca, Spain but had never made the 9-hour train ride to Barcelona. 
I consider my Barcelona adventure my first taste of reschooling. Moving there sight unseen, without work papers, an apartment, any promising contacts, or mastery of the language was—and is, to this day— the riskiest thing I’ve ever done. If I ever complain about a difficult situation here in the states, remind me that I once made dozens of calls in broken Spanish, from a pay phone, looking for a cheap apartment that I could rent despite being unemployed. Remind me of those unsettling days spent dropping off resumes badly translated into Spanish (and begrudgingly edited by the guy who ran my youth hostel), looking for an employer that didn’t require work papers or subject me to inhumane working conditions. I try to remind myself that if I could make a life for myself in Barcelona against the odds, I can certainly survive where I speak the language fluently and can work legally.

7/28/02 Melia’s Adventure Abroad

8/14/02 Quick Update

8/27/02 I’m in Holland, Isn’t That Veird?
 
The second series of posts wil be emails from August 2006, when I traveled to Latin America for the first time. It was also my first time traveling alone, though I ended up meeting other Americans and traveling with them. There were many more firsts on the trip. I saw a jungle, and monkeys in their natural habitat. I climbed an active volcano and stood so close to flowing, orange lava that I could feel my face flushing. I dove into open ocean waters into a swarm of sharks. Yes, on purpose.

“All I really need to know, I learned in kindergarten” was just a cutesy commercial saying until I actually spent a day with kindergarteners. Now I understand.

I visited the kindergarten in order to generate ideas for the first phase of Reschool Yourself, to nail down specifics about what I’d like to do in my old classrooms. I spent the day observing and interacting with the kids. I cut a cardboard box into a stage for a puppet show, listened to a story, and watched the kids practice movement and dance. I agreed to play tag at recess, and only then was informed that I was “always it.” As I chased the kids around the jungle gym, they joyfully teased me by sticking out their tongues and taunting me with singsongs of “Nanny nanny, foo foo.”

The day’s activities began with Kid Writing, a time for students to draw pictures in their personal journals and practice writing about them.

“Do you have a kid journal?” a boy named Max asked me. I told him that I didn’t. “I’ll make you one,” he replied. He disappeared and then returned within a few minutes, presenting me with a paper booklet neatly stapled down the side. He had trimmed the side of the page “to make it look nice” and had printed the words, “Melia AND THE” on the fluorescent pink cover.

“Melia and the what?” I asked him.

“That’s up to you,” he said.

I raised my eyebrows, impressed by this 6-year-old sage. “Hmm, I’m not sure how to finish that,” I said. “I’ll have to think about it.”

Max looked me straight in the eye. “Sometimes it’s good to just do what you want to do,” he told me. “Sometimes that’s the best thing.”

I told Max that this was such great advice that I would write it down. I printed his words in oil pastel inside my new journal, on the paper with dotted lines for handwriting practice. When I showed him his own words on the page, he said, “This will be on the first page to remind you, for life.” This kid was a regular Yoda. I wished I could shrink him down to pocket-size and carry him around with me—my own insightful little Pez dispenser.

I watched Max as he created an elaborate picture of rockets exploding in space, layering pastels and texturing the paper by scraping it with the side of a pencil. I admired his self-assurance as he worked, never doubting a single decision. It struck me how much more confident these six-year-olds were than most of the adults I knew, and how much more imaginative. The kids were constantly inventing: a blank page became a picture of “a green alien who goes around making everything sticky.” A cardboard box became a broken-down car, then a doghouse, then a robot suit. Every moment held a new opportunity to create or explore. The kids had begun to brainstorm questions that they would investigate during an upcoming project. They had filled large pages of butcher paper with questions like “Why did peepel yoosto b moncees?” and “I wot to no how dogs wer formd?” Reading these questions made me wonder along with them–what were seeds made of, and what did happen before we existed?

In addition to confidence, imagination, and curiosity, the kindergarteners were filled with a contagious joy. I’ve heard that children laugh around 400 times a day, whereas adults laugh only around 15 times. I believe it. I think I laughed more during the first half hour of being in kindergarten than I had all week. One boy told me that when the classroom pet iguana wanted to eat, she did “the hunger dance.” He demonstrated by jumping up and down, waving his hands around wildly, grinning with wide eyes. The kids cracked me up again when I told them that I was 27, and they piped up one after another, trying to outdo me and each other: “My mom’s way older than THAT!” “My grandpa’s 63!” “Well, my grandma is 70!”

Most of us adults can’t remember the last time we spent a day doing dance, free play, art, and storytelling—a day full of laughter, variety, curiosity, and a sense of fun in all things. Life really doesn’t get much better than kindergarten. There must be a way for adults to hang on to what comes naturally to us at age six, or at least a way for us to find it again.

After my day learning from kindergarteners, I took another look at the journal Max had made for me and decided to leave “Melia AND THE” open-ended. I hope that in the coming months, this will inspire me to fill in the blank in hundreds of different ways. One possibility might be “Melia and the secrets of the Greek cheesemaker.” Another could be “Melia and the creatures of the Costa Rican jungle.” (Possibilities that I’m hoping to avoid include “Melia and the tenth package of Top Ramen this week” and “Melia and the empty nights of jug wine.”)

“Melia AND THE” blank – terrifying and thrilling, full of possibilities. To navigate the uncertainty, I plan to follow the kids’ lead. Each morning, they open their kid journals to a blank page and know that they’ll fill it with something original. They’re not yet sure what, but they expect that they’ll figure it out as they go. Though I feel a bit apprehensive about not knowing where I’ll be in a few months, I’ve decided to take Max’s advice: I’m just going to do what I want to do, and trust that whatever results is the best thing.

People have been asking me what my year of reschooling will look like: how long I plan to spend in my old classrooms, where I plan to go during my travels, what I plan to do when I get to each location. I haven’t known what to say, and the question has begun to stress me out. Until now, I had been planning from a practical standpoint: I would spend a few days in each grade at my old schools from September to December, then travel from January to June with a pre-determined itinerary. This plan made sense — I could find a place to stay and make arrangements for the learning opportunities in each location, well in advance of my arrival. But making a schedule seemed arbitrary and limiting.

I have been basing these plans on what makes practical sense, or what I think I should do, rather than what I really want to do. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become less sure of what it is that I want to do. I have so lost touch with my own intuition that making even the smallest decision becomes a cosmic crisis. Should I wear the black skirt or the jeans? Should I go jogging or lift weights? In line at Tartine Bakery, I nearly hyperventilate when faced with all my options — should I order the almond croissant or the chocolate? Or the bread pudding? (My life is so hard.)

A book I read recently recommended dumping “should,” (guilt & obligation) from one’s vocabulary and replacing it with “could” (empowerment & choice). My main goal in reschooling myself is to get back in touch with what I want to do in any given moment, and do it — with total confidence in my actions. When I spent four days alone at a coastal hostel over the holidays, I experienced for the first time what it felt like to follow every impulse. When I wanted to eat, I ate. When I wanted to collage, or jog, or play the piano, I did that. I spent a full day on Wikipedia (nerd alert!) letting one thread of interest lead to the next. Looking up Napoleonic Code led me to legal systems and martial law, which led me to the Tiananmen Square protests, then Mao Zedong, the Cultural Revolution, and the relationship between China and Taiwan. Retaining all this information wasn’t as important as having the freedom to indulge my curiosity to its end.

Tonight I realized that in order to pursue my interests as they evolve, I want to leave my reschooling agenda almost completely open. I could feel satisfied with two days in my old kindergarten classroom but need three weeks at my high school. Opportunities for spontaneous travel could arise – an invitation to learn samba in Brazil, or Feng Shui in China — and I want the flexibility to take advantage of any one of them. I believe that by staying open to every opportunity and following my instincts, I’ll find whatever I’m looking for. This “plan to have no plan” will also, I hope, make my journey more exciting to read about, since readers will never know where I’ll end up next.

With you as my witness, I am committing right now to making Reschool Yourself “should”-free. If I use that dirty little s-word, please zap me with a cattle prod, firmly say, ”COULD,” and ask me what it is that I want to do.