Happy Summer! Be Awesome!

Summer is here!  Here are some things you can consider doing to aid you on the path of awesome.

• Read!  Make a list of titles (they can be academic, practical, or just for fun) you have been meaning to get to, and actually read them.  Some of them, anyway.
• Start a business, or grow one you've been working on
• Volunteer
• Travel
• Find something you don't know much about, and research it.  I got to go to London earlier this month ('twas incredibly cool), and in preparation I decided to try to patch some of the yawning gaps in my knowledge of British history.  My study was impeded by the principal characters' irritating habit of all being named Richard, Henry, or Edward, and I can hardly claim complete fluency, but I knew more than I did going in, which is always something.
• Take a class
• Attend a conference

BUT!  Beware the fearful monster known as burnout!  Don't get so overwhelmed by classes and projects or goals that you forget to breathe.  Summer is a great time to let yourself relax, at least a little bit.  Be sure to set some time aside to do things you enjoy, just because you enjoy them.  And give yourself time to not really do anything in particular.

I hope I've given you some ideas.  Remember, all I know about you, o my reader, is that you are interested in nontraditional higher ed, so I don't know how applicable this will be.  But, as I say in the tittle, have a happy summer.  Be awesome!

On Hobby Learning

"I didn't go to school, but I went to the library."

-Ray Bradbury

I hate to break it to you, but going to college to pursue a passion that doesn't translate into a marketable skill is pretty dang dumb.  I'm glad that you are fascinated by Old English alliterative verse, or the Wars of the Roses, topiary through the ages, or Swiss military history.  I really am (g'luck with that last one, though).  I believe that, as the name suggests, the humanities are a crucial part of what makes us human, they help us to connect with others across time and space, give us a broader perspective on life, and help us to be well-rounded, interesting people.

But the thing is, the average degree from a public college (including room and board) costs $57,200 (according to the National Center for Educational Statistics).  Your best career bet for a humanities degree is teaching, which we all know pays well.  Excuse me as I shed tears of pure sarcasm.

My point (yes, there is one) is that unless you have money to burn, getting that liberal arts degree just doesn't make much sense.  Instead, pursue your passion on the cheap, informally.  They invented libraries for a reason, and the information available for free on the internet is virtually limitless.  The advent of podcasting and iTunes U has made expert information more accessible than ever before.

To put it all together, and indulge my love of goofy statistics, for the price quoted above, you could return a book to my local library 522 years late.

Interesting Degree Program

Enjoy!

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/this-new--10-000-degree-has-everyone-talking-194103390.html

Florida Teen Graduates From High School and College in the Same Week

Wahoo!  Congratulations, Grace!

Here's a link to the article and video.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/florida-teen-graduates-high-school-and-college-in-same-week-140934181.html

4 Myths that Students Believe about College

Blimey Cow, the salvation of lazy bloggers!

Enjoy!

On Media & Unprecedented Opportunities

The other night I went to some political event, because I am so very so-phis-ti-cate-ed (or just a nerd), and the host jokingly suggested that the group should raise money to buy the local newspaper and make the guest speaker the editor.  And while I think that such a course of action would improve the newspaper in question, my bloggish little mind said "But lo!  That's not really necessary!"

You see, rather than the system of old, anyone with something to share can take to the Internet, air their views, and anyone interested in learning about it can find it with ease.  And all of the participants do this from the comfort of their own homes, in their pajamas!  Huzzah!

Can it get better?  Perhaps not, but there's another aspect I want to point out, and that's global access.  On my humble blog, I've had 321 page views from the USA (home sweet home), 62 from the  UK, 14 from Germany, 10 from Malaysia, 3 from France, 1 from the Dominican Republic, and 1 from Poland.  And how many of those people would be remotely interested in my local newspaper?  (By the way:  Hello!  Guten Tag!  Hari Baik!  Bonjour!  Hola!  Dzien dobray!  Fun with Google Translate!)

Everything is lousy, sometimes.

Hello readers,

For the past couple of weeks, I've shied away from posting anything, because I've been 1.) discouraged, 2.) sick, and 3.) indirectly exhausted from my sister's theatrical endeavors.

I'm just not brimming over with good ideas or words to express them.  Everything I considered posting about seemed to quickly degenerate into an all-out whinefest, and who needs that?

Upon further reflection, however, it seemed dishonest not to tell this part of the story.  I'm not trying to sell anything, just document my adventure.  And adventures tend to be "nasty, uncomfortable things that make one late for dinner."  (Bonus points if you get that reference!).

This is simply an Important Fact About Things in General:  Whatever you do, it will occasionally be lousy, and it applies to everything.  College is, contrary to the glossy brochures, not all cheery multi-ethnic young adults sitting in trees.  (Seriously, what's with the trees?  Every college's marketing materials include a picture of kids in trees.  I've been to several college campuses, and have yet to see these mythical tree-dwelling students.)  There's also homesickness, roommates with incompatible circadian rhythms, and nutritional deficiencies brought on by bad cafeteria food.

In the same vein, un-College is not all sleeping in as much as you like, pursuing other interests in your spare time, counting the money you've saved, and doing little dances to celebrate your defeat of The System.  Allow me to address a few lousy things that have manifested themselves in my own un-College experience.  Not everyone will have the same experiences, and I'm not saying mine are universal.  I'm simply pointing out the ones I've encountered.

• You're home a lot.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it's difficult to get away from anyone else you live with.  My mom is the greatest.  However, when she's stressed, I absorb it and magnify it.  My sister was in a musical last weekend, and there was so much stress vibrating through the house.  I was completely exhausted, and mildly concerned about having mutant children.  
• On the flip side, my sister's in school and my mom and brother are on the go a lot.  Sometimes, I get a twinge of cabin fever, and desperately want to have a conversation with someone who isn't my dog.
• A lot of people just don't get it, and will offer unsolicited advice on what you ought to be doing.  When you say, "I'm going to do accelerated distance learning, rather than traditional college," people tend to respond as if you said, "I'm going to study abroad in North Korea, and play hopscotch across the DMZ in my spare time."  "WHAT?  Are you SURE?"  People have even told my parents to make me go to college, so I don't ruin my life.
• It's easy to get distracted, and you're the only one keeping yourself on task.
• That goes double if you're stymied on something, or an assignment doesn't make sense.
• You're dependent on various techno-things that can act up.  For example, I haven't been able to do my SL work since Thursday, because I'm waiting for an e-check thingy to clear.
• This reveals one of the darker facets of my personality, but here goes:  The un-College community has a high concentration of the beings I refer to as WonderKids.  These are the people who say things like, "I'm such a failure.  This summer, I only built 43 water filtration systems in Africa from recycled components of land mines I sniffed out and defused myself, and I really wanted to hit fifty, but I had to leave for my cello performance with the London Philharmonic."  I'm exaggerating, but after spending a lot of time with gainfully-employed, well-rounded kids, who are barely older than me but have at least five times as many college credits and some grand vision for their lives, it's easy for an insecure, low-energy blogger to feel a little discouraged.

This doesn't mean that un-College is bad, or doesn't work.  Everything is lousy sometimes, and you just have to pick the option with the lowest lousy-to-otherwise ratio.

Article: Is college worth the cost?

Enjoy!

Is college worth the cost?

I finished my first StraighterLine course!

Hello y'all,

So, Introduction to Religion is now behind me, and I can begin spewing forth opinions.  Yippee!

For a quick overview:  StraighterLine offers online college courses, but not degrees, and you can take classes to either transfer credit or for personal enrichment.  Ultimately, I'll transfer everything over to WGU.  

I moved pretty quickly through the material.  For each unit, there was a "lecture" for each topic, and there was a test every other unit, plus a midterm and final.  The lectures were self-paced and a lot like power points, with a mix of narration, text, images, and review quizzes.  Speaking of the narration, it seemed awfully expressive for a robot, and awfully inexpressive for a human.  (If it turns out it was a human and she reads this, I apologize). 

The self-pacing was very nice; I could skim through subjects I was familiar with (ie: Christianity and Judaism), and spend longer on things I struggled with (sifting through Sanskrit terms that all have entirely too many letters). 

Coming from high school, it was so liberating just to have lectures and tests, without time-consuming assignments to get bogged down in!

The final was taken through ProctorU, a remote proctoring service.  They match you up with a friendly technician who spies on you through your webcam to make sure you aren't up to anything fishy.  My only real complaint was that SL didn't do a great job explaining how that all worked, and I was a bit bewildered and had some delays.

I graduated with an 80% overall, without that much effort.

My other objection is one that I'd have with pretty much every other world religions course.  It's not that they try to be impartial and fail, but that they succeed.  I think the only way to really understand what members of a religion believe and what it means to them is to learn about it from one of them.  You will get a much better idea of Christianity from reading C. S. Lewis than Wikipedia.  An impartial course will be happy to tell you names and dates, but has a hard time explaining the actual, far more important, spirit of the thing.  It will inform you that Pentecost occurs 50 days after Easter, but has a hard time conveying the importance of the Holy Spirit in guiding our lives.

Well, that's enough blathering.  Thanks for reading, and have a great day!

Article: A Higher Education Avalanche is Coming

http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20130316093956321#.UyMu5118CRQ.email

Enjoy!

Month in Review: February

And the dinky month of February has flown by.  By the time you feel entirely confident spelling it, it's over.  Alas.

Well, here's the breakdown of how this month went for me, and how March will hopefully go:

• CLEP:  US History and Biology are now behind me.  Huzzah!  I was supposed to take College Algebra, but I decided to put it off because it scared me.  Un-huzzah.

• StraighterLine:  I am now enrolled, and I've almost finished my first class (World Religions).  I've worked on Spanish a little bit, and I still have a DIY biology lab to contend with.

• This Blog:  Eh, not so much.  I only posted two things, one of which was an article written by somebody else.

• Literature Class:  We had our first meeting, and it went about as well as could be expected.  Their still getting to know the curriculum and each other, and I'm still trying to figure out what the heck I'm doing.

• Driving:  I've gotten out a couple of times, and it's gone pretty well (except for the time when I'd lost my glasses and I couldn't read the signs… uh, you don't want to know).

• Creative writing:  I've been struck by an idea so weird, that St. John the Evangelist would find it mildly discomfiting.  But I like it!  I haven't done much with it, but I'm cautiously optimistic.

Time Marches on (teehee), and here are my goals for next month:

• CLEP:  College Algebra.  You don't scare me!  Well, not much.

• StraighterLine:  Take the religion final, keep chipping away at Spanish, and tackle biology.

• This Blog:  Hopefully the blogfairy will be visiting.

• Literature Class: up next, The Hobbit!

• Driving: more of the same.

• Creative Writing:  Like I said, cautiously optimistic.

Thanks for reading!

What I'm actually doing: the basic idea

Hello friends,

It has occurred to me that, several weeks into this blog, I have yet to provide any useful explanation of the titular weirdness.

But, fear not!  The situation shall be remedied!  Grab tight to your spinny office chairs, and keep all arms and legs inside the vehicle until the ride has come to a complete stop.

I'm working towards a business degree from Western Governors' University, and I'm getting my gen-eds through CLEP and StraighterLine.

Now, all of these merit more detailed explanations of themselves in general, and what I'm doing with them in particular.  However, their websites already have (admittedly bamboozling) explanations, and I am rather lazy.  I'll be back with more details soon, but in the meantime, have fun with the hyperlinks.

Aloha!

Article: How to obliterate the cost of college

Enjoy!

How to Obliterate the Cost of College

DuoLingo: free online language learning resource

Hello everyone,

I just found a website for learning languages called duolingo.com. I think six are offered so far. I'm taking Spanish, and I know there are also French, Portuguese, German, Italian, and English. It's free, interactive, and the graphics are great (and complete with cute little animated owls). They let you test out of material you already know, and when you're learning something new you go at it from all different angles: translating, matching images, and listening activities. The person who recommended it to me said it was better than Rosetta Stone. I haven't used it long enough to know, but it's certainly cheaper. 

I'm not involved with the website or compensated for this in anyway. It's just that when I find a valuable service for free, I feel that I owe it to the provider to pass the recommendation along.

If you're interested in learning a language, I recommend you check it out. ¡Buena Suerte!

Month in Review: January

My first month of teaching myself has been very exciting!

Here are the things I wanted to accomplish:

• Start this blog!  It's gone very well so far.  As of this posting, I've had 150 page views.  I hope to keep up the momentum.
• CLEPs:  I've taken two (English Composition and English Modular).  I did well on the first, and I haven't found out about the other one yet.
• Maintain my Spanish:  I found a cool website called DuoLingo (more on that later) and I've been able to work at it sporadically.
• Organize a literature class:  It hasn't started yet, but I'm very excited.
• Enroll in a personal finance class: check.
• Work on driving:  Erm, not so much.  In my defense, our car broke down and it took us a while to get a new one.  I'm still behind on that.  I don't like it, and should this blog ever mysteriously go silent, it'll probably be because I joined the Amish.
• Creative Writing:  Not much progress here either.

I also went to the Training Minds Ministry's For Action Conference.  It was an incredibly cool experience, and merits its own post.

Looking ahead:

• I'm going to take classes in sewing and quilting at JoAnn's.  Those are two skills I want to develop and haven't had the time to.
• My literature class will have it's first meeting.  I'm excited and a little nervous, so wish me luck.
• I'll take my next two CLEPs in US History and Biology.
• I'll try out the Khan Academy, and hopefully be able to take the College Algebra CLEP.
• I'll enroll in Straighter Line and get started with my actual courses.  SQUEE!
• I want to research the mysterious alchemy of blog promotion, and work on that.
• Keep driving.  Or, start mapping out the best bike routes to the grocery store and the library.
• Creative Writing:  I can dream.

Thanks to everyone who has joined me on the first month of my journey!

Coping With Writers' Block, Blimey Cow Style

Here's their latest video.  I liked it a lot, and thought I'd pass it along:  Enjoy!

Personally, when I have writer's block, I just post videos rather than create content out of my own, befuddled head.

What Alternative Ed Can Do for our Health Care System

Unless you've (very sensibly) taken shelter under a rock/in a lean-to in the wilderness/yurt in Outer Mongolia, you've probably heard about the various problems surrounding healthcare and attempted reforms thereof.  Now, this blog has no intention of tackling political issues, but this statement shouldn't be controversial:  Healthcare is expensive.  Insanely expensive.  I think that a significant root cause of this is our higher education system.

A big part of the cost of medical care is that doctors come out of school with massive debts, which then get passed on to the consumer.  I really think it doesn't have to be that way.

Now, I'm not advocating that doctors train themselves and keep cadavers in the refrigerator.  However, it would do a world of good if they spent their money only for classes that they need to be doctors.  Shakespeare is great, but he won't help you be a better doctor (if your doctor mutters "Who knew the old man had so much blood in him," run), and you shouldn't have to shell out hundreds of dollars per credit hour for content that you don't need/already know.  Credit by examination programs, such as CLEP or StraighterLine (more about them in future posts) could significantly reduce doctors' educational debts, thereby bringing down the cost of medical care.

Of course, there's a caveat to all of this (there always is).  Most brick-and-mortar schools don't want to help you out.  Why should they give you credit, when they can make you take the class for several hundred dollars per credit hour?  They might only accept a very few CLEPs, or let it count as an elective, or instead of English 101 and 201, you have to take 102 and 202.

The solution is that more people need to decide they aren't going to meekly follow the butt of the sheep in front of them.  Instead, people should consider schools that embrace credit by examination, like Thomas Edison State College, or Western Governor's University.  When mainstream colleges realize that they're losing customers to more flexible schools, it might force them to accept new ways of doing higher ed, and we'd all be better for it.

About Me...

If you want to know where I'm coming from and why I'm writing this blog, here you go.

So, once upon a time, I was little and cute and went to preschool.  The teacher recommended that when I went to "real school," I should be in some kind of gifted program.  My mom researched it, but found that it was in a state of turmoil and underfunding, and decided to homeschool me, using the classical approach.  And thus, I became the only five year old in the state who could use the word "nomad" correctly in a sentence.  Oh, Story of the World.  The memories.

When I was halfway through Kindergarten, my mom had to go back to work, and I went to the local parish school for a year and a half.  It was a pretty good experience.  Then, we moved to Kansas, where we live to this day.  I tried the parish school there, and it was a disaster.  It was much bigger than my old school, and I came in second grade, which was basically the catch up year for the kids who hadn't learned to read yet.  I was reading The Chronicles of Narnia.  My teacher, not being overburdened with tact, pointed my advanced reading skills out to the other kids.  Unsurprisingly, this had a detrimental effect on my social life.  However, my math score was a few points to low to get into the gifted program.  Also, the girls acted more like seventh graders than seven year olds.  Overall, it was a disaster.

Because I'd been home schooled before, I knew there was a better option for me.  In third grade, I started homeschooling again, which was great until seventh grade.  Seventh grade is crummy for just about everyone, but my circumstances were a little unusual.  Since I'd started to homeschool, I'd gone to the oxymoronic, one day a week, "school for homeschoolers."  It was a chance to get out of the house and participate in messy projects, or things you needed a group of kids for, and it gave the moms a breather.  However, it ended after sixth grade.  The rest of my classmates went on to another program, that was more of a "cafeteria style" system, where you just pick what classes you want to take.  I tried it; it was an unmitigated fiasco and a whole 'nother story.  All the other kids were getting more and more consumed with whatever they were interested in, and much harder to keep up with.  At the same time, my mom was having phantom medical issues, my little brother hit the Terrible Threes, and I did a fair amount of babysitting.  As an extra bonus, we also had both a fire AND a flood in our basement.  (TIP:  Should you ever have a fire, vacuum up the extinguisher powder BEFORE fanning the smoke out.  It'll blow everywhere and be impossible to clean.)  The one good thing about that year was that we finally abandoned the pretense of studying Latin.  Yippee!

Suffice it to say, I was ready for a change and I started Freshman year at a fairly small Catholic high school.  I'm going to preface this by saying that I think it was a best case scenario high school experience.  I didn't encounter any of the usual nastiness, and I met a lot of nice people.  Now, back to the story:  Freshman year went pretty well, but Sophomore year I started to burn out.  A full honors course load, my overachieverism, and a sense that I had to be academically perfect because I wasn't good at anything else started to take a toll.  I'm an introvert with a weird energy cycle, and the school day was exhausting.  Because I was a good student, I was starting to have a lot of college stuff shoved in my face, but it just didn't seem right for me.  The summer between sophomore and junior years, I started to do some research into alternative higher education, and it finally clicked that I didn't necessarily have to play Their game Their way.  The first semester of junior year, I spent finalizing my decision.  I went on a few college visits and did some more research.  By December, I had a plan and was pretty confident with my decision to pull out and start my dual enrollment/accelerated/distance learning adventure.

And that takes me up to the present, and I'll be sharing the rest of the journey, and the knowledge I've picked up, as I go.

Thanks for reading!

Hilarious video: "College Might be a Waste of Your Time"

For those who don't know, Blimey Cow is a fantastic YouTube channel created by former homeschoolers.  This video, "Five Reason College Might be a Waste of Your Time" pretty much says it all.  Enjoy!

Welcome to the blog!

Hello readers!  I'm going to tell you a little about myself and this blog.

This blog is for anyone interested in learning more about alternative forms of higher education.  What does that mean, exactly?  It basically means anything other than this: marching directly from graduation to college, through four years of all-nighters and bad beer, to arrive at last at the World's Most Expensive Piece of Paper (your diploma), which you will spend the next several decades working to pay off, just in time to start saving for your own kids to repeat the procedure.

If you choose to rebel from this, you can save years of time and boatloads of cash, which you can invest in practical work experience, starting your own business, traveling, or doing That Weird Thing you've always wanted to do.  Heck, you could even buy borderline-palatable beer!

As for who I am:  I'm supposed to be a junior in high school, but I've set out on a homeschooling/dual enrollment/advanced placement/distance learning/credit by examination journey that I'll be sharing with you.

On this blog, I'll be sharing the information that my family and I have dug up, valuable resources, my experiences on this adventure, and a fair amount of snarky commentary.  (You're welcome to skip the latter).  I plan on posting at least once a week.

Welcome aboard, and here we go!