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!