Nita's guest post: Teens reading books about teens!

Today I have the pleasure of introducing the fabulous Nita of The Back of the Bookshelf, fellow aspiring novelist (check out her work on Inkpop under the name WePlayedPirates!) and teenager.  You can also follow her on Twitter @weplayedpirates, and I highly recommend that you do!  I'll let Nita do the talking  herself from here on out.

Hey y’all! It’s Nita, joining you all the way from The Back of the Bookshelf.

I’m going to be a Junior next year (Woohoo! Two more years ‘til freedom!) which means waaaaaayyy more homework for me (not to mention Girl Scouts and play rehearsal.) It also means new books to read in English III!

English has always been one of my favorite subjects in school. Especially in high school, where we actually get to read. But I do have one complaint: I do not like the books they force us to read.

Let me explain. Some of them, like To Kill a Mockingbird and Night were, and always will be, amazing. But some of the other books were just so difficult to get into, and relate to, that I didn’t even finish them (this coming from the girl who tries to finish every book she picks up.) And I can say with confidence that none of my classmates finished Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad, would it have killed you to indent when starting a new line of dialogue? Really?)

But my point is, classics are good—some even great. But if you want to get kids actually reading, why not give them a selection of books that they’ll actually enjoy and can relate to? Some of the more modern-yet-still-kinda-sorta-classic books that they can read? Books that deal with issues that we go through, with main characters who are around our age! Why not let us read Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, or Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, or really modern stuff like John Green’s Looking for Alaska? Even the classic The Catcher in the Rye (which is usually required reading, I know). Give us books about actual teenagers! More teens would read and be more inclined to pick up other books, even if they are about *shudder* sparkly vampires.

At the very least, give us something where the author indents for a new line of dialogue.

Thanks for the post, Nita, and I couldn't agree more! =)

Jaclyn Dolamore's guest post: I CAN get into college, but do I want to?

I was so excited when fellow unschooler and now published author Jaclyn Dolamore volunteered to write a guest post for me about her experiences in college as an unschooler - and yes, I mean that Jaclyn Dolamore, author of Magic Under Glass and its forthcoming sequel, Magic Under Stone!  If you'd like to learn more about Jackie, check out her website at www.jaclyndolamore.com, her blog, and her Twitter account @jackiedolamore.  She's also an amazing artist who loves to sketch (if this is not the word to use here, please forgive an art ignoramus) her characters and sometimes run contests where you can win her work, so if you love art, she's worth a follow for that, too! =)

I'm a 28-year-old professional writer without a high school diploma. Or even a GED. College? Nope, skipped that too. My "formal" education consists of one year in elementary school (2nd grade).

I was largely unschooled. My mom would sometimes give my sister and I a little structure, especially when we were really little and learning basic skills (reading and writing was not a problem for me--I was writing stories and keeping a diary by age 5, although the one thing I really did learn in 2nd grade was not to write in all caps...but math was more difficult). But for the most part, she left us to our own devices. I spent hours upon hours playing complicated pretend games in my story worlds, writing stories, drawing, reading very widely in fiction and non-fiction, and all sorts of other creative pursuits. 

One question invariably asked of homeschoolers is "But can they get into college?"

(For the record, most homeschoolers I know did go to college and had no trouble with it.)

It's a fair question from people who are not familiar with how unschooling works, but my problem with this question is that I feel it sort of implies that the end goal of unconventional schooling is to join the conventional school system at the end, fall in line with everyone else, and prove that our methods were successful. We are now as smart and sociable as everyone else and we can go get a degree and a good job. 

I have no problem with college, mind you. There are plenty of jobs for which you definitely need some hands-on learning and experience with teachers; besides that the college experience can be a lot of fun. I visited a friend of mine at the University of Toronto once, sat in some classes and met the people in her dorm, and came home with serious college lust. I was in my early twenties at the time and not doing anything with my life, at least from the outside world perspective. Writing was what I loved, but I just didn't fully believe I could follow that dream, and I didn't want to go to college and take on debt without a serious reason.

When I was 23 I was considering going to school with the end goal of a library science degree. But while I accumulated college catalogs, researched scholarships and took the SATs (I scored very respectably in math, by the way, despite fairly sparse math study as a teenager...I just spent a week refreshing before the test), I couldn't shake the feeling that I wasn't really doing what I was supposed to do. I loved libraries, but I really loved was WRITING books. I decided to give myself four years, the usual length of a bachelor's degree, to sell a book, before I went to college. With some serious budgeting skills, I could pay the bills while only working 25-30 hours a week, leaving me time to treat writing like it was my full-time job, or my college.

During my entire adult life, I had endure various encounters with skeptical people questioning my dreams and asking why I didn't go to college and what was I going to do with my life and did I really think I could write novels for a living? The day my novel sold, three years after my vow to focus on writing, the skeptical people shut up. 

It was a huge leap of faith for me to believe that not only could I sell a novel, but I could keep selling them, and for as much as I was making at my retail job and more. I'm not sure I would've done it if I wasn't used to living an unconventional life. Our society teaches kids that test scores are more important than happiness and true knowledge, and it teaches adults that the amount of money you make is more important than happiness. Unschooling gave me something even better than facts and figures, it taught me that learning is a joyful thing, and personal happiness is more important than impressing other people. I resent the implication from the Good Morning America article that unschooling must make kids selfish. When you value joy and true knowledge more than test scores or money, you aren't more selfish, because that kind of joy is unlimited and can be endlessly shared.

 

My life path wouldn't be for everyone, or maybe even for most people, but if it is for you...go for it, and may you see the day when the skeptical people in your life shut up too.

Thank you, Jackie!  This post inspired me, and I can't wait to pick up Magic Under Stone in the (very) near future! =)

P.S. Happy Fourth of July to all of my readers in the U.S.!  As you read this I will have probably just finished my Estructura midterms at camp, so please wish me good grades from afar! =D