Reschool Yourself

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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 girl I’d become close friends with through our youth group, planned to go to St. Vincent and encouraged me to apply as well. Being very shy and insecure at the time, I thought that a more personalized environment would suit me well. I had gotten a little lost in the crowd of around 800 students at Altimira Middle School (there are only around 500 now), and I felt connected to very few of them. Though attending SV meant a 30-minute commute and a work-study commitment to help offset my tuition, I decided that the opportunity for a change would be worth the effort. I carpooled to and from Petaluma every day with several other students from Sonoma until I could drive myself.

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As you can see from the archives, I had written only a handful of posts when I kicked off Reschool Yourself a few months ago. The post that you’re reading now, I am proud to say, is my 100th. I find the timing excellent, because I want to take this opportunity to digress from reschooling and celebrate the election of our new president.

Tonight I want to flood the streets with my fellow Americans, whooping and carrying on like the Europeans do after their team wins a soccer match. Tonight I can say that I’m proud to be an American, and I haven’t said that in a long time.

I studied in Spain in the Fall of 2000, during the infamous election that would make the name “Chad” as unpopular for new babies as “Judas.” I voted absentee. When I went to bed the night of the election, the news channels favored Gore as the winner. When I woke up the next morning, it looked like Bush had won, but there was much rapid debate in a lanugage I was just beginning to understand. I felt incredibly confused and desperately wanted to know what was happening. I now know I would have felt the same way if I’d been watching the coverage in the U.S. in English. When Bush was finally declared president, a lot of my American classmates said that they wished they didn’t have to go back to the U.S. We predicted the Bush presidency would be bad, but we couldn’t have imagined the magnitude of what was in store for our country.

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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 in class. This week, on top of that, parent-teacher conferences had shortened Friday’s classes to 30 minutes each.

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I’ve completed middle school and begin high school tomorrow. Yes, I’m flying through!

This weekend I seem to have set a new record for posting. Of course, there are still a bunch of posts I’d like to write, including ones about the following:

- Seeing kids react to being graded, and remembering how much it affected me

- Trick-or-Treating on Halloween for the first time in 14 years

- How little of the material I remember from a lot of the middle school classes, and how little most adults would remember

I’ll do my best to write about these sometime this week.

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Here are some middle school memories you may not have thought about in a while. Do you remember….

1) Being asked out by the friends of a kid in your class?

During lunch last week, a 7th grade boy approached me on the blacktop.

Boy: Jack wants to know if you’ll go out with him.

Me: Does Jack know that I’m 16 years older than he is?

Boy: Yeah. So will you go out with him?

Me: Well, since I don’t know him, I guess I can’t go out with him.

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The use of technology at Altimira is one of the biggest changes I noticed upon return. In math class, I couldn’t get over the digital overhead projectors, which display 3-D color images. I’m not sure how they work, I kept staring in wonder at the image of the teacher’s hands in full color, instead of shadow. In music class, instead of using LPs, cassette tapes, or even CDs, today’s teachers have thousands of songs at their fingertips with iTunes.

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