Reschool Yourself

Even if they’re not always recognized for it, children and senior citizens are some of the wisest people you’ll meet. Children still have a fresh perspective on life, and seniors have seen it all and tend to give sound advice.
Author Roger Fishman decided to collect the wisdom from both sides of the age spectrum, interviewing [...]

I spent last evening sitting on the living room floor of my childhood home, letting go of hundreds of pages of old letters. This is something that I never thought I could do.
For most of my life, I have been exceptionally sentimental. I suppose it comes with the writer’s temperament, because you’re always collecting experiences [...]

This is one of several poems I’ve come across lately about childhood, school, and growing up.
I’ve always written more prose than poetry, and most of my poems are from my teen years, when I was having trouble accepting that I was growing up. The poems are filled with nostalgia for a simpler past and often [...]

This is one of several poems I’ve come across lately about childhood, school, and growing up.
I read “Fern Hill” for the first time in high school English. It captured my nostalgia for what I remember as a fairly idyllic childhood, which gave me a bit of a Peter Pan complex. Why grow up if being [...]

I’ve taken a breather from blogging in the past few days to let my fall reschooling sink in. It feels good to take a few days of real vacation, probably the first that I’ve let myself have since August. When alone, I work myself into the ground, but when I’m with friends, they thankfully wrench [...]

I’m spending this week and half of next at St. Vincent de Paul High School in Petaluma. Having gone to public schools through 8th grade, I chose to attend St. Vincent — a private, Catholic school — rather than the big Sonoma high school for a few reasons. The most significant was that Katie, a [...]

Although I’m in high school now, I’ll still be catching up on a couple of middle school posts.
It felt appropriate to close my time in middle school on Halloween. I always loved celebrating holidays in school, because everyone spent the day sugared up and in a good mood, and we didn’t get any work done [...]

A weekly pilgrimage to the library with my mom and sister was one of the staples of my childhood. I’d sit on the yellow carpet and pull books off the shelf one by one, putting into my bookbag the ones that piqued my interest. The novelty of nearly unlimited, free books never wore off, and [...]

I think I’ve gotten what I need from elementary school and am ready to move on. When I started fifth grade on Monday morning, I felt restless. I hadn’t slept enough, as usual, and I was feeling kind of spacey, with a lot on my mind (I’ll post about that topic soon). I was disappointed [...]