Self Education

It’s officially back to school season. Target and Walmart are having sales on pencils and notebooks and within the next two weeks every hyper child, indifferent teenager and stressed college student will be back within the establishments of learning, whether they like it or not. I’ve always liked this time of year. Who doesn’t love a good fresh beginning? And that’s what the beginning of a new school year always felt like to me. It was the time when I actually felt the most excited about school and learning, because after a long summer break it always felt fresh and new, like I could recommit myself to working harder, being more organized and getting better grades (even if those goals were short lived, it was always exciting to make them.)

At the beginning of the summer, I graduated from the Digital Media program that my husband and I embarked on together over the past year. We invested our money and our time into this program and while I believe I learned a lot from it, I haven’t even scratched the surface of everything I want to learn about. While I may not be enrolled in college officially this time around, I feel that I’ve truly come to realize what subjects of learning are most important to me and what I want to spend my time focused on.

Being homeschooled for the majority of my life taught me to be self motivated, and to be very used to working on my own without a whole lot of supervision. It’s my default mode, the way I’ve always automatically functioned, and I’ve recently decided that I need to put it to better use! I love my current job, and honestly wouldn’t trade it for anything, at least not right now, but it provides a lot of downtime, especially recently. I’m young, and I’m eager to learn, and I want to make the best use of all this free time while I can, because I know I won’t have it forever. Which is why I decided that I’m going to homeschool myself.

The first step to schooling myself is to create a curriculum, which is currently still in the works, but I have decided what subjects I want to focus on for this “semester”, and have written down a few outcome goals for what I want to achieve. My main focuses are going to be: Reading, Writing and Yoga. I decided to just stick with three things for now, and maybe at some point expand it, but for right now I want to make sure my workload is manageable and that I don’t burn myself out. Plus, these three subjects are truly my most passionate ones at the moment, and I don’t see any point in not focusing on what I’m truly passionate about (because let’s be honest, if I’m not passionate about my goals they don’t last very long.)

1. Reading– 2020 has already been a delightful year of books for me. My goal at the beginning of the year was to continue educating myself through reading great writing, to improve my own writing by reading other authors, and to rekindle the love affair with books that has been going on my whole life, but that had been in a slight relapse in the past year or two. I feel that I’ve already achieved my goal, at least of the latter and I don’t want that to stop now. I plan to make up a master list of books that I want to read, continue picking two a month that speak to me, and continue reporting on them here on the blog to work on my critical examination of literary works. My next task is to make the list so I can start making sure I’m picking books that are truly beneficial to my education, and not just reading whatever sounds fun.
2. Writing– As I’ve mentioned several times before, this summer I finished the first draft of my novel Light My Sky, and I’m now in the process of editing and trying to figure out how the heck to get it published. My writing “curriculum” is still very much in the works, but I do know that I want it to be well rounded. I want to include new writing projects that will keep my passion and excitement alive, but that will also allow me to keep working on the ones I want to polish. I want it to include poetry, as it’s been a sadly long time since I’ve worked on my poetry writing skills, and I also am going to include a lot of editing of other people’s works on Critique Circle, the online writing community that I joined at the beginning of the year. By editing and reading critically, I hope to improve my own skills, as well as get feedback from other writers on the site.
3. Yoga- This is something that I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned on my blog, but I’ve recently fallen back in love with the beautiful art of yoga. I first discovered it’s amazing powers when I was about 16. Throughout the last half of high school I had a pretty regular at-home practice (thanks to YouTube), and it got me through all sorts of drama and emotions that I don’t know how I would have dealt with otherwise. Since then, I’ve had a somewhat on and off love for all things yoga, but in the past month or so I’ve been doing yoga almost every day. I’m finding myself irresistibly drawn to it for so many reasons, and I’m determined to continue a daily practice to strengthen my body and my mind. I have this dream of becoming certified and being a yoga teacher and working at a cute little studio. My goal is to start on the path of becoming certified in 2021, but until then I want to work on my practice and improving my flexibility and strength every day. I’ve already created a curriculum for a daily practice, and each day of the week has it’s own theme to help me stay balanced. If you’re interested in learning more about how I practice yoga and my schedule, I’d be happy to do a whole post on it!

So there you have it, my 2020 “back to school” curriculum. I wanted to write about this as a reminder to anyone who may be reading that you never have to stop learning! Whether you’ve graduated from college, or you haven’t and you don’t even know if college is for you, and anywhere in between, you have the ability to take your education into your own hands and commit to consistent self improvement. Let’s be on this journey together ❤