This is Chapter 2 of a story about Reschool Yourself that I wrote for a GoodReads.com contest, which asked for a story written in a  24-hour period purely in status update form. Each line could be only up to 140 characters, though I’ve edited slightly here for readability. Chapter 1 gave a background on the idea for the project and how it developed.

Chapter 2: Back to School

The first day of school, I wondered if I might be crazy to start over. But I knew it was something I had to do to move on with my life. I put pencils and a notebook into my backpack, and at 7:30 a.m. went walking to my elementary school to become a student there once more. I passed the swings and jungle gym, and checked in at the front office. Everything at the school seemed to have shrunk.

“Welcome to kindergarten,” said the brightly colored sign on the classroom door. The teacher toured me around. She showed me the blocks, the playhouse, and the story rug. The 5-year-olds began to arrive with big backpacks on. Only one cried when his mom left. I told the kids it was my first day of school, too.

They didn’t seem to find it odd to have a big person among them. Their minds were on their overwhelming first day of elementary school. We colored with crayons, sang together, and played games with movement and music. We made a gingerbread man and decorated him with candy.

At lunchtime, we lined up single file to walk to the cafeteria for “hot lunch.” The kids were literally half my height. Hot dogs, macaroni salad, carrot sticks, a cookie, and chocolate milk. $3.50 for an adult, not a bad deal, and healthier than the lunches were in the 80’s. We sat down at the benches of the long lunch tables with wheels. I folded my legs under me awkwardly so I could maneuver them under the table.

The kids bombarded me with requests for attention. “Will you open my string cheese?” “Can I have your cookie?” “Hey, guess what? My grandma has a dog!”

Surprisingly, the food wasn’t bad. I barely had time to eat until the yard duty blew her whistle and yelled at us to clean up and go out to recess. My pint-sized friends and I spilled out of the cafeteria onto the playground. I hung on the monkey bars with them until the whistle blew.

If Billy Madison Had a Mission

The element of the ridiculous within the project isn’t lost on me. I did sit in little desks, play kickball, and listen to story time. Yes, I love the movie Billy Madison, where the main character repeats school as a grown-up, but no, it did not inspire the project. It’s sometimes silly, yes, but serious, too. It’s participatory journalism. There’s no better way to capture an experience than go through it yourself. And let’s face it, for one reason or another, everybody wants to be a kid again.

The best way to remember what school was like for you, and to make it as good as possible for the kids in school now, is to go to school as a kid. Not as an observer, and not as a teacher. It’s completely different as a student yourself. If adults, for just one day, would be treated like a kid in school, I believe that school would end up looking much different.

We adults expect things of kids that we don’t expect of ourselves. We can take breaks whenever we need them, to drink water or stretch. If we have to take work home with us, we usually get upset. Kids get homework every day. These are double standards. Plus, do you think you could answer every question in an elementary school textbook?

As you can see, when I was reschooling I noticed many things that I would change. Some were about individual classes, but more were about the system itself. Of course, I saw some wonderful things, too, and I’ll share those later in the story.

The story continues in Chapter 3.

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