After we left my grandparents’ house and moved to a small city, my mother was concerned that the school system wasn’t up to par, so she looked into other options. The winning candidate was an alternative school in the area and at the tail end of 2nd grade, I tried it out and finished the school year.
The philosophy was simple, children should be encouraged, not forced, to learn. This was intriguing to me, someone who had never been *forced*, per se, and always enjoyed learning. But it was explained to me that we would be encouraged to learn what we wanted, when we wanted, how we wanted. Sure, I thought, I’ll give it a try.
Almost immediately I had my reservations. I was shunned by my peers for not wearing the right clothes. At SEVEN fashion was an issue there. There was a clique of 3 girls my age who had known each other practically since birth, two of their mothers worked at the school and they were accustomed to power. They didn’t like me. I wasn’t from anywhere they knew, I was from the other side of the country and that was weird enough for me to be shunned.
In most situations, this wouldn’t be a terrible thing, but in my age-range there were fewer than 10 kids. It wasn’t even that I was losing the "popular" or powerful ones, it was that, without having done anything at all, I had lost a third or more. After having already withdrawn into myself, after years of losing everyone I forged a friendship with and became close to, it was going to be even more difficult for me to find my place in this new town. To this day, I’m not sure that I ever really did.
So, yeah, the start of it all was less than positive, not just socially, but in terms of my getting to know the culture and operation of this very different schooling situation.. The most important rule in the school was the "Stop" rule, meaning that if someone said "STOP", you had to stop. If you didn’t, then a council meeting could be called, halting all activities and bringing the school together in a problem solving council. I had become meek, though, and after the months of bullying that I had just come out of, was resigned to just take it rather than set myself up for confrontation.
This was unacceptable to my teacher, who was also the founder of the school. I don’t even remember what prompted the overall incident, but next thing I knew this old woman had thrown me to the floor and was sitting on me, with my arms pinned over my head – in front of my whole class. I think it lasted an hour before she got (apparently) bored and decided to have every kid in my class take a turn sitting on me until I would say stop. The problem was, I didn’t know what she wanted from me and I didn’t understand why I was being singled out like this. The first of my peers to sit on me leaned in and said "All you have to do is to say ‘stop’ and we’ll stop." He took pity on me, which was something I needed. Through my tears, I stammered "W-w-will you p-p-please s-ss-stop?"
I think our teacher hadn’t heard me and probably would have found that way of asking to be unacceptable. She was looking for a forceful STOP, not a simpering, crying, polite request, which was really all I was capable of. At that point, it was lunchtime, so she sent everyone upstairs to eat.
But I wasn’t hungry. In fact, I felt very, very sick. I dry-heaved in the bathroom for a while, then decided to sit in the library and find comfort in books. This, it turned out, was a big mistake. My teacher came looking for me and was livid when she found that I had defied her orders to go upstairs and have lunch. She pulled me off the couch, threw me to the ground and sat on me again. "I told you to go have lunch!" I tried to explain that I was feeling sick and wasn’t hungry and her response to that was to use my own hands to hit me while she sat on me, all the while shouting "STOP HITTING YOURSELF! STOP HITTING YOURSELF!"
Eventually she lost interest and went away. I don’t really remember what happened afterward, but I was mortified. THIS was what my schooling was going to be about?
It wasn’t all bad, though. I did learn a lot and I had many experiences that I never would have had in a more mainstream school. We visited the farm in Massachusetts, we saw numerous plays and attended events. To learn math, we learned cooking and undertook carpentry projects. To learn geography we made maps and studied other countries. The opportunities were endless and fascinating, but the problem solving, when it came to things that took place outside of the school, rarely worked well for me.
My brother and I would walk home from school together. It wasn’t a very long walk, but we had to cross several busy streets and my brother was not the most mindful of children, often running from me and unsafely running into the street. The school’s plan for dealing with this problem was to put my brother on a leash. I still think that this is one of the worst ideas to come out of that school that I have ever personally experienced. My brother prided himself on being weird. To be put on a leash simply gave him an opportunity to show that weirdness to the world at large. He got down on all fours and pretended he was a dog. We made it about halfway home before running into a friend of our parents’ who drove us home.
It wasn’t easy for me. I never really got to a point where I felt that I actually fit in. Eventually two of the core group of three girls left the school, leaving the one alpha female on her own, but while we were able to form something of a friendship, I never really felt that I had made it there. Even when a new girl came to the school, and she was considered quite desirable as a friend, the final decision of the council meeting was that she was only allowed to play with me – the one person who hadn’t been vying for her affections. All that did, from my perspective, was to further ostracize me. I had been put in a position where I had "won" what all the other girls were fighting for, simply by not fighting, and it made me the bad guy. I was, by decree, the new girl’s only friend, so even the invitations to play with the other girls meant that I would be leaving the new girl alone and with no one to play with. I often felt set up.
Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t trade the education that I got for a different one. All the negatives that I went through served to make me a stronger person, but they also made me more confrontational and a lot more cold and closed off than I might have otherwise become. In addition to becoming outspoken and, yes, abrasive, I had to put up walls to stop people from hurting me.
When I was 10, my family moved to the country. My mother was working at the school at the time, so I was given a choice. I could go to the public school in the area (a very *good* school district) or I could stay at my current school. I chose to switch to the public middle school, loathed the experience and went back after a year and a half of being mostly a social pariah.
Going back to my school at 12 and 13 proved to be a very good decision. The older kids in the school would take a huge trip near the end of the year for the National Coalition of Alternative Community Schools conference. The first one we went to was at The Farm in Summertown, TN. The second was held at a Girl Scout camp out in Oregon. The latter is notable because it was the conference where I met my future (ex-) husband and the father of my child.
And that’s as g
ood a place as any to stop this post. That alternative school only went up to 8th grade, so I would be heading to public school for high school. But this is only about the school aspect of those years. There was a lot more that went on that had nothing to do with my schooling…