from Life Learning magazine, May/June 2008
Daring to Drop Out
What this teen is learning by unschooling her senior year of high school
by Monica Chen

“Sorry but that doesn’t make any sense,” responded my high school friend when I shared with her my intention to homeschool my senior year. It was a response I heard over and over again as I talked to my guidance counselors, teachers and fellow students. “You’ve been in this system for 11 years!” they exclaimed. “Just jump through this last hoop!”

Undoubtedly, they had a point. I had been cramming and stressing for a long time. To just leave my senior year seemed to be throwing all that hard work away. I had near perfect grades and an above 4.0 grade point average. I was the online editor for the school newspaper, goalie for the varsity field hockey team, actively involved with several community service clubs and singing onstage in the spring musicals. Both of my college counselors were satisfied when they saw my potential college resume.

But I wasn’t. In fact, I wasn’t even convinced I should pursue my education after high school. Every day, I received college brochures highlighting incredible travel abroad opportunities and numerous potential majors, but nothing sparked my interest. Nothing sounded even remotely appealing.

Somehow, my regular regimen of grade grubbing with teachers, memorizing facts and struggling to ace tests had festered a loathing for most subjects. I wrote off the entire field of chemistry after a year of chemistry honors. I despised the prospect of learning any foreign language because Spanish class had not been my forte.

In truth, however, my “disastrous” B represented the one time I’d had a competent Spanish teacher who mandated mastery of our conversational skills. It represented the one class where I had worked harder and learned more than ever.

If I’m honest with myself, all those As my counselors and peers respected me for do not mean much. They do not imply that I ever retained any course material 40 minutes post-exam. They don’t show any initiative on my part to create a project or pursue a subject with greater intensity. They don’t even mean that I enjoyed learning. . .

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Monica Chen has experienced life as a student of public, Waldorf, Montessori, Challenger and single-sex education schools. This year, she has been unschooling as a twelfth grader, and now loves learning again!