Alternative Education

~ "I began to envision alternative teaching back then because I didn’t see any reason to think that the systems that we knew were perfect cuz' they looked so outdated." ~

I am an educator so I have always been involved since I first came back. I got my masters from Brown and then I taught for a year in New York state.  And then I came back here to marry John and I quickly got involved with Community School down the street.  Our children all went to Community School and I was able to teach them all at some point.  So Community School was like the proper cross between home schooling and regular school per se.  I was able to be involved and there wasn’t any disconnect between the way we thought and the way we were schooling our children.  If we had sent them through local school, I probably would have not had time to farm and would have spent all my time ranting and raving at the school board.

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I think I am gonna use my husband’s favorite analogy and it will make the website more interesting. Alternative appealed to me because, it’s an expression of my cat’s behavior.  In other words, if everybody else goes one way, my natural inclination is to go the other way. So that’s what he would say, it's a natural problem. But I don’t know exactly where this comes from.  It’s sort of an intrinsic/elitist position for me. 

For me personally, its that I don’t like group activities…I don’t like tour buses, I never have.  I always think there is a better way. I have never thought that the institutional model of education was very good.  I didn’t think it was very good when I was going through it.  I thought St. Catherine's was a better model…I hate bureaucracy and again that’s a sort of native/elitist position, I don’t know where it comes from but there it is.  I hate red tape and that’s again is sort of cat-like.    What I do like to do…is to see change happen and have the ability to do that…and you really can’t do that in bureaucracy. 

Yeah I am every involved parent and an alternative parent both in my lifestyle and my choice of work.  I am now the Director of the Community School High School which is an alternative high school.  Actually we can look back on that now and realize how important and significant that was…On the front end it just was natural since I was an educator that I work and got involved in alternative education because it matched the way I thought traditional education doesn’t match me.

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 I hate tests! have always hated them. I have always worked in alternative schools that are usually non-graded. I do give tests but I don’t do standardized tests, if I can help it.  Well I guess hating them is not fair:  smart people do well on them but plenty of smart people don’t do well on them.  So you can count on people that do well on them to be clever, but you can’t count on people who do poorly to be stupid.  My children never test well and my oldest was Phi Beta Kappa in her Junior year at Tech.  And my son is an Ehols Scholar at UVA.  I  think my children  liked alternative teaching and really valued the education they got at Community School.  They all look back on in at as a much better style and they enjoyed the social life.  When they went off to public school, they thought the way they were being trained intellectually was stupid.  So they all took courses at Hollins and at Roanoke College when they were home.  We made it possible for them to do that so they could actually learn.

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