Homeschooling Myself

This morn­ing, walk­ing the kids to school, I had the most gor­geous brain­storm!  I’ve got a lot of basic course­work to make up, and the admis­sions depart­ment encour­aged me to do the catchup work else­where.  Basi­cally, it would be a good idea not to prej­u­dice my profs against me by start­ing off from the very bot­tom of the rung.  If I showed up able to place higher in math and physics, in par­tic­u­lar, they’d show me more respect.  As it is, I’m to expect a cer­tain amount of bias because of my age and human­i­ties degrees.  I’ve been try­ing to fig­ure out how to get the money and time to do a Prince­ton Review type course, or go to a com­mu­nity col­lege and take courses to get ready to go to Big Girl School.

Such an obvi­ous solu­tion was star­ing me in the face.  I’d been twist­ing this idea around, inside and out, and the easy thing to do is right there.  I’ll home­school myself!  So, for the next quar­ter, I’m back to school, but at home.  Since my brain is really kind of fried right now, I fig­ure this will be a good way to ease myself into the whole rig­or­ous world  of acad­e­mia once more any­way.  I’m really excited, hon­estly, but I also know I’ve been absent­minded and foggy lately.

I fig­ure I’ll start with the basics and work my way for­ward.  If it’s easy, then I’ll just fly through it.  Thrift stores around here should have text books that will do me well, on top of what I find online to help me. A friend of mine referred me to a Cliffs Notes home­work help page to help me brush up.  I’m try­ing to ignore the spec­tre of Dr. Vance who is in the back of my head yelling, “These are ter­ri­ble.  They con­tain fac­tual errors!”  Another friend pointed me in the direc­tion that lead to some free online Aero­nau­tics and Astro­nau­tics courses and lec­tures from MIT and St. Peters­burg Col­lege.  I’m try­ing to remain hope­ful that these will be of use to me.

The main thing, though, is the sched­ule.  The struc­ture of my typ­i­cal day is nonex­is­tant.  I just do what I need to do, when I feel like doing it.  Right now, I really need a more rigid sched­ule.  It doesn’t have to be iron­clad, but I keep try­ing to drift through life.  If it weren’t for that cof­fee addic­tion that I’m cul­ti­vat­ing, I don’t know what I’d be doing.  I con­sid­ered get­ting a part time job, because of course more money would be nice, but I know that I would use that as an excuse to keep from doing this.  To that end, I have worked in plans to address the money issue in other ways, with­out going out and get­ting a boss.

I’m so excited; I have a real plan!  It’s a very sim­ple one, and doesn’t address much more than the next few months.  I’m aware there will be dis­trac­tions, or times my deci­sions will be all wrong, and I’ll have to rethink every­thing. The impor­tant thing right now is that I’m moving.