Trampoline Gym from Darren Schwindaman on Vimeo.

Trampolining is one of my favorite ways to reschool, for these reasons:

1. It’s incredible aerobic exercise. I’m a regular jogger but get exhausted in about ten minutes. Your legs and booty will feel sore the next day.

2. It makes you feel like a little kid. No matter how old you are, on a trampoline you bounce and giggle like you did when you were five years old. At Sky High, there’s also a foam pit where you can fall in backwards or do bellyflops, and a dodgeball court where the littlest kids will surely get you out in the blink of an eye.

3. It brings out your inner daredevil. You feel emboldened to try all kinds of crazy stunts. I’m normally very cautious, but I end up somersaulting and doing adventurous things like jumping off the bouncy walls (which is how I fell and skinned my elbow). I curbed my risky behavior when I remembered what kind of basic insurance I have and how accident-prone I am. But for a few precious minutes, I felt like Evel Knievel.

This post marks the debut of the video series capturing my spring learning. When I launched Reschool Yourself in August, I bought a digital FlipCam with the expectation that I’d film some of my key experiences and publish video logs. There were just three small problems: I didn’t know much about a) filming, b) editing, or c) publishing video to blogs. I was already expending so much effort writing that I didn’t want to invest the effort to learn amateur filmmaking for the web.

Trampolining in June: If Darren and I had an 80s sitcom, the opening credits would end with this freeze frame.

Luckily, Darren got his own digital video camera (in HD….you think you’re better than me, huh?) for Christmas and is already putting it to use. We took one of my former Spark students to the trampoline gym in Santa Clara, and he took the above (slightly shaky but awesome) video of Darren and me attempting our patented double-butt bounce and flying high-five.

We’ll be filming this spring as we take on a bunch of do-it-yourself projects. These are a few of the ideas we have:

  • Building a dining room table.
  • Refinishing wooden picture frames.
  • Installing a pegboard in the kitchen for hanging pots and pans.
  • Screen printing t-shirts that we design.
  • Turning a boy apartment into a co-ed apartment in a variety of ways. (I may patent a device that will train Darren to leave the toilet seat down.)

Stay tuned for more video!

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