Reedie at heart

My computer and internet are pissing me off. Yesterday after my first two posts I decided to take a nap (by decided to nap I meant that I passed out on my computer). When I woke up I found my computer doing its own very special version of a grand mal seizure. After hours of trying to get it to calm down I relented and let it sleep for the rest of the night. This morning I found him lively but my internet seems to have been taking lessons from Charles. Yes I named my computer (If you are the first person to correctly guess which literary character he is named after I will give you five bucks). Anyway I am still fighting Blogger.com to let me save and post and it is not very fun in my fragile state. Cough cough. On to the post.

The first school that I found was the Telluride Mountain School. There isn't much to say here, not that is entertaining anyway. It looks like the school has lots of outdoor trips that sound pretty cool. It started as a home school for about 6 kids and in less than ten years has expaneded to over 100. It is located in Colorado so many of the outings are for skiing and snowboarding which I find totally cool. The school is for kids of all ages preschool to high school. There seems to be am emphasis on service, project and experimental learning in lots of the same ways that Linworth is but I don't think that the older kids get as much freedom as we do. The older kids get more of a college-prep program than the younger children do. They also have a thing called an Immersion Project that happens once a year that seems to be quite like Interim but that lasts for much longer, about 8 weeks instead of just one. It seems to be a pretty nice school but its not a place I would like to go because it doesn't look like it would give me the freedom that Linworth does. Linworth is a place that I can fluorish, find my own way and keep my options open all at the same time. That is why I feel so lucky to be here.

The second school that I found I actually found my freshman year while searching for colleges. It is called Reed College and if you are around me enough you know that it is where I want to go to college. It is located in beautiful Portland, Oregon and is the "Linworth" of colleges if you will. There are no grades and all of the professors are called by their first names. The community is tight knit but very diverse. It is a college that is based on discovering yourself and your own ideas. Learning how to learn. It is an intellectual place and that is what I want most in a college. I want to be surrounded by people who love to learn and do it because it makes them happy, not because they think that they have to. It also has its own nuclear reactor (scary to think that I might be running it in a few years right?) It encourages students to get involved in political and social activism which I have recently gotten stuck in the middle of. It has its own cabin on Mt. Hood for students to stay at on the weekends to go skiing. There are too many fun traditions to name but one of the best is called paideia where people take non-credit courses for fun. Some examples are: juggling, tree sitting, teen angst movies, making balloon animals, catapult construction and swing dance. There are theme dorms like the French form, never never land and the mad science dorms. One thing that is quite like Linworth is Senior Thesis where seniors take most of their year to study what they want and write a thesis about what they learned. It is almost identical to Walkabout except they have to write a huge paper in addition to everything else. It is pretty much my school. I have visited and I love it so much. I am truly a Reedie at heart.

I am victorious! I beat you, you evil website!