ALUMNI:
PARENTS:
The span of my life that is normally called first to fourth grade was not normal. I attended a creative center of learning where the curriculum was very loose, so loose that grades, and tests, and any sort of organized form of schooling did not exist. My memory suggests it was all play and no work, but reality reminds me that there were official sections of time for writing stories (which was still play to me); math lectures I do not recall yet somehow remain knowledgeable in areas of instruction. We had long focus-studies on topics such as dinosaurs, rocks and minerals, or Native Americans - those things that spark excietment into all curious children - diversified with countless other learning experiences including art, Spanish, Friday-morning assemblies of singing, and a school-friend named Carol who would bring us artifiacts to go along with her stories and books. There was even the seasonal week which was just "play," called Workshop Week in which one could choose an y three offered workshops such as beading, mock trials, writing, or something fey and obscure but normal to participants, like making small gnomes and gnome necessities.
My years were spent in a small community surrounded by bright and fearless young thinkers, along with several kind, personable adult figures, whose surnames I rarely new and to whom I had no reservations in going for literally anything. It was a community in which one could bake cookies or cook waffles as one memory dictates, for a class consisting of peers and the year below or above. It was a society that I fondly look back on as the years in which I believed I was an alien, species name: Eb Jeb (which quickly turned into the many derivatives of of nicknames I still use as aliases today.) We fought evil, sometimes in the guise of characters from Brian Jacques' Redwall series instead. Life was so amalgamated that my teachers began to unconsciously adopt my alien name. Life was so sprawling that we could run screaming on the grounds or play soccer, dodge ball, four-square, go tent caterpillar hunting, or simply just hop around singing the songs of the latest musica l, my favorite being Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. And I still remember those Gilbert and Sullivan songs and the songs of the future musicals to come, still remember the adverse effects of tent caterpillars and pursue a love for science, and eventually I remembered how much I liked soccer, and started varsity to eventually become captain. My school was the place I first learned to be myself and to have the confidence to pursue research under strangers, debate issues I care for, and to write, despite my shyness.
To conservatives, the unconventional system of learning might have seemed helter-skelter, and I'm sure my parents, who tend to lean a little to the right in their moderate viewings it was a little more than strange. To this day, I'm not quite sure about the luck that landed me at the Newark Center for Creative Learning. However, without being there I have always felt I would have grown up a little duller in edge and in color. Skeptics of this method should know that NCCL still created a haven for education where children did learn despite appearances; instead of grades, knowledge was valued not chiefly but exclusively. I take in mind that memory is biased, but perhaps in some cases life in the past was idyllic. It doesn't mean that things can't still get better though; this is just the beginning of living.