About Me & My 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.

Here's where I'm coming from.

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 follow the butt of the sheep in front of me.  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.

I'm working towards a business degree from Western Governors' University, getting my gen-eds through CLEP and StraighterLine, and sharing the rest of the journey, and the knowledge I've picked up, as I go.