Two years ago, I was unhappy. I was enrolled in the local Public School System, and hated going to school every day. I had had friends in my class, but every single one of them had left, either for a different school or for a different class. They had been my only academic peers as well. I was without friends and not being challenged. Also, it was my teacher’s first year teaching, and she was assigned to a class (mine) in the second year of a class loop. This meant that all of the kids, having been together previously, knew each other from the previous year.Unfortunately, much of the class had very little respect for our new teacher. So my parents, knowing that I went into a class everyday, where the teacher could not control the students and I was learning very little, took me out of school.
Legally, I was homeschooled. What “homeschooled” meant was that I went every day to a school-like facility that the staff there called CSCL. At CSCL, or the Center for Semi-Conducted Learning, I could do whatever I wanted. It was run by 5 adults in their late twenties, and there were about fifteen students enrolled. The “teachers” taught a few classes every day, and you could go to them or not. At CSCL, I could learn whatever I wanted as fast as I wanted to whatever extent I wanted. Over the course of my time there, I learned computer programming, a good amount of math, and wrote a bunch at home. Even though I really liked CSCL, last summer I made the decision to give up this experience and went back to the public school for seventh grade.
This decision was not made quickly or easily. When my parents suggested that I go back to the public school, I was unsure. I had been much more happy at CSCL than I had been at the public school, and did not want that to change. After some thought, I decided that seventh grade would likely be very different from sixth. One of the reasons for this decision was that I would be in a class with different kids and would not be stuck all day with a teacher I didn’t like. Also, I felt that middle school was an important experience too, one that I didn’t want to miss. Moving around between classes and having more than one teacher would help to prepare me for high school. The worst case scenario, I thought, was that I didn’t like the public school and could just go back to CSCL. So, by the time school started up again, I was signed back up for the public school.
Before and after school started, I had missed feelings. Before the first day, I was unsure that I had made the right choice, but also excited about this new experience. I was unhappy that I would not see my friends from CSCL as much, and I would have less freedom to pursue and learn about whatever I wanted then I had had the previous year. But my lack of experience with middle school made me interested and curious about this new experience and how it would be. Once school had started, I was pretty content. I made new friends, liked most of my teachers, but was not quite as happy as I had been at CSCL. Even so, I was sure that middle school was an important experience to have had and that this decision was a good one.
In sixth grade, I was not happy at all, nor was I learning. The shift to CSCL let me learn whatever I wanted as fast as I wanted, but it also gave me more chances to do nothing, and less chances to interact with people that are less like me. When I went back to the public school for seventh grade, I made new friends, learned more than I did at the public school in sixth grade, and was sufficiently happy. From this experience, I learned something important; that giving something good up can result in something else good.
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