In high school, after my best friend’s parents sent her away to boarding school and my parents didn’t, school became a pretty lonely scene for me. Not only because of her absence and my grappling with my lesbian identity in a pre- Gay-Straight Alliance world, but maybe even more so because I was a wanna-be intellectual in a population where, … Read More
Everyone makes mistakes, I have had my fair share
Learning, to me, is either the accomplishment of an earlier unknown task or a mistake made that leads to more understanding. We mainly improve from our mistakes. I intend to answer four simple questions about learning. When I began grade school, I soon figured that this particular school was not the school for me. In fact, it was the biggest … Read More
It's A Slow Fade
I think that people learn best when they go through personal situations. When I was 12, my dad got very sick, and doctors could not figure out what was wrong with him. As a family, for weeks they told us all they could do was keep him comfortable, until they figured out what was going on. Being 12, I was … Read More
Anonymous's Learning Story
When I was thirty, I had the great good fortune to attend my first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and thereby board what I think of as the great ship of AA, which was to carry me through the often-stormy seas of life, one day at a time, to today, 33 years later. AA is an extraordinary model of learning. There are … Read More
Gwendolyn Faulkner-Holley's Learning Story
I love teaching my students to write because there is no greater pleasure in my life than expressing myself. Over the years, as politicians and other folks push standardized testing, students resent the more formal writing and complain, refuse to participate or do a lousy job to prove how much they hate writing. Today, I explained to my students that … Read More
Paul Leather's Learning Story
Last summer, I participated in a graduation gateway exhibition of a young man, “Patrick”, at the Monadnock Community Connections School in Surry, NH. Patrick started MC2 four years ago with only one interest, his Supra car! He was able to build on that interest through four different internships and mentorships, to graduation with core academic skills. He graduated with 12 … Read More
