Hi. 🔗

My name is Andrew—that’s a pen name. I’m a current high school student, a writer, a musician, and a cyclist. I also like to mess around with computers and programming on occasion.

School 🔗

I’m in a unique position regarding school, and that’ll be one of the main topics of this blog. I went to public school for kindergarten, but for a number of reasons which I’ll talk about in a later article, my parents decided to pull me out of public school. Then, for first and second grade, I went to a private Christian Montessori every Monday, while being homeschooled for the rest of the week. It did recently come out that said Christian Montessori was run by a pedophile, but that wasn’t why I stopped going. I had severe anxiety as well as panic disorder as a child (which I still have, just not as bad), and neither public school nor the Christian Montessori were able to properly support me. After that, I was completely, 100% homeschooled from third through eighth grade, taught by my mom, who is a licensed teacher. I’ll also talk a fair bit more about her in a later article.

I am fairly certain that I kicked the pedophile in the nuts, which I’m unreasonably proud of.

Finally, in the summer after my eighth grade year, my parents got divorced. That’s a complicated situation which I might talk more about in a later post–or I might not. I’m not sure. Anyway, my mom was always our teacher and in charge of homeschool, and for one reason or another, my dad decided he didn’t like homeschool. I don’t know much beyond that, other than that I’m now in public school.

This leads me to my position on school and education in general: I am a strong proponent of Self-Directed Education, or SDE. In short, SDE is exactly what it sounds like–students directing their own learning. Not teaching themselves, but deciding what they are taught and how they are taught it. (For those of you who know about some alternative education systems, Sudbury falls under SDE. Montessori and Waldorf do not.) SDE will be one of the main topics of this blog, so there will be plenty more to hear about it.

Writing 🔗

I’m a reader. I always have been. After I spent years of my early life reading, this morphed into my desire to write. One of the wonderful things I’ve discovered about writing is the vast number of different kinds of writing. This means that, actually much like reading, it’s the kind of activity where even if you think you don’t like it, you likely just haven’t found the right style for you yet.

Personally, I’ve recently taken to academic and argumentative writing, which is one of the main reasons I started this blog: to practice argumentative writing. I’ve tried plenty of other forms, and while I’ve enjoyed many if not most of them, argumentative writing has been my favorite—at least as of late.

Music 🔗

I’ve been surrounded by music practically since birth. My parents both love music, so it was nearly always playing at home or any time we got in the car. However, there was a turning point when I was around 9 or 10: I got my own iPod. I started listening to more and more music, making my own playlists, finding artists that I liked, and so on. At some point or another, my family got Spotify, and that’s when my love of music really took off: I could finally listen to whatever artists I felt like, without having to worry about buying individual songs or albums. While this comes with some drawbacks (especially for the artists), it sure is convenient.

For years, I begged my parents to let me start learning an instrument. Originally, I was planning on starting out on piano and moving to guitar, because that’s what my parents said I had to do. But, one early christmas morning, when I was 11 years old, I woke up to a red Fender Squier Mini–a gift from my grandfather. A friend of my dad’s had told him that if I wanted to play guitar, I should just play guitar, because I’d have fun learning instead of being bored out of my mind—and I’m glad he said that, because if he hadn’t, I probably wouldn’t play an instrument now. A couple of months later, I started taking lessons. I was lucky to find an incredible teacher from the very start, who is actually the teacher I still do lessons with to this day.

A couple of years later, in the summer of my seventh grade year, a friend of mine who plays drums, along with my brother, who played bass, decided to start a band together. Members have come and gone, my brother quit playing bass altogether a year or so ago, but we all think we finally have a good group. We’ve been together for three years now, practicing, playing smaller gigs and open mics, writing, and making demos; and we’re hoping to be able to release our first album soon.

I’m not going to put the link to the band here for my anonymity’s sake.

Cycling 🔗

I love to ride my bike. I could spend hours every day on a bike, but unfortunately, school prevents that. I also do many different styles of bike racing, including Cyclocross, BMX, grass track (AKA grass velodrome), and road. I also casually mountain bike. My favorite by far is definitely cyclocross.

Computers and programming 🔗

I’m a massive nerd, about all sorts of things. I legitimately enjoy technical writing and nerding out about grammar and citations (to a certain extent, of course). I have considered creating a tool to allow you to fork playlists and create filters so that if you add a song to one playlist, it automatically gets added to another one. I write this blog… which y’all will discover might be one of the nerdiest places on earth. But the thing I’m the nerdiest about is definitely computers—by a wide margin. I use Arch Linux (btw), and my system is set up almost completely custom. I enjoy various different system administration tasks, as well as programming. Most of the cool stuff I’ve done can be found on my GitHub.

Conclusion 🔗

I believe I have a unique experience with education, and therefore a unique perspective. I hope to use this perspective and my writing to fight for a better education system in the United States and across the world.