Comments from Visitors

I took the names out. Also note that these are on such a bunch of various and sundry topics and for so many reasons -- you kind of have to skim to find some you are interested in. It's kind of a random selection from the emails I've gotten from people who have visited my web page in the past several years. --pc

thank you for your quick reply. I have indeed chcked out your homepage now (I am on a server which for some inane reason refuses to allow me to delete, so enjoy my spelling!) -- although I haven't read ll of the stuff, I have gone crazy qith the printer, and saved stuff for later note-taking, etc. It was indeed practucally just what i needed! (all of my writing goes donw hill without the delete) rather than ambarass myself with revelations of bad typing (or frustrate you...) I shall sign off... but I just wanted to say thank you and I will probably write to you and ask you some more questions in some fine daylight hour..ok well so it's snowy here. There's still the idea of a daylight hour. (do escuse the informal tone, but having seen your webpage I feel sort of like I have met you.) bye,

** Reply Requested by 12/23/1996 (Monday) **

Dear Chris,

Franklin Watts is doing a children27s library book, *Researching Colleges on the WWW*, and would like to download and re-print whole screen images (including pull-downs, icons, address and web site) to accompany the text. We would like to use two shots of your web page.

Are these images copyrighted? If permission must be obtained, we ask that you grant us the necessary rights. If we don*t hear from you, we will assume permission is granted, or that the images are copyright-free. Franklin Watts publishes non-fiction, elementary through high school, school and library books with a press run of approximately 4,000. The images will be used for one-time, non-exclusive, editorial use only.

Please send your permissions to canderson40grolier.com, or, if you like, at 212-951-2654.

Chris...I stumbled onto your web page. I too have started a school. My two sons are 7 and 11. They do not attend public school, they never have. They receive an "alternative education". They are home schooled. Most of the home schoolers in East Texas do so for religeous reasons. We home school because it's fun!...Some of the material on your web page has clarified much of my thinking and philosophy of education. You said it better.

We are currently obsessed with a project that has been ongoing for several years now. We are shooting film/video interviews with principals connected with the JFK assassination. We have acquired footage of one of Jack Ruby's Dancer's...The man that drove the ambulance that carried John Kennedy and his wife from Parkland hospital to the plane...the man that "fingured" Lee Harvey Oswald at the Texas Theatre...and more. Both of my boys work on the project...sometimes one shoots while the other runs sound...sometimes we edit...sometimes one shoots stills while the other gaffs (lighting). But basically, it's fun. We have been writing class proposals and evals for years now...sometimes it's a bust but usually we just follow the Tao and we feel that we all have grown/learned. And that thing you said about frustration being an important aspect of the learning process is certainly the case.

I received my MFA from Stephen F. Austin State University in film and video production but I am teaching art history and art appreciation at a community college in the piney woods of East Texas. I fight college admin in an attempt to present alternative methods of learning but it's "up hill". I did not realize there were colleges like yours and others...that's where I need to be! Later...Reg

On a different, although not totally unrelated note, I am currently looking to transfer to a new school. Hampshire is in a preliminary round of possible colleges, but I need more information. Could you provide any additional insight into your experience at Hampshire? Criticism, comments, whatever, I want to know.

Thank you for asking hard questions, for not accepting the status quo and for putting your ideas into action. You are an inspiration to this frustrated student in Oregon. Good luck in your pursuits,

hello!

i arrived at your website by way of your AHEN site. I was really intrigued - i guess it was empathy/understanding that got me (as it always will/does/is the only thing i sometimes think): I'm a senior in (a beastly) high school (private school) who has just finished applying to Hampshire. I'm also allegedly giving a seven minute speech (a required senior speech) on education reform (my vague(sp) hypothesis, that nothing but radical reform will do). I was supposed to give it in november, but missed the deadline. i have a hard time with deadlines because they are part of school, and part of others telling me what to do, and part of others thinking i need them to tell me, and because i am incredibly bitter about going to a place i hate 5 days a week, 7 hours a day, and because there is so much i want to read, but it is so immense, and 7 minutes isn't enough, and i want to do a good job, but not really because i'm just sick and dead from being there.....So your story struck a really giant, synonymous chord. Sorry for the ghastly complaints/short bio - i don't even know you and i'm complaining to you (i tell myself complaints are the recognition factor of reform, maybe, i hope so, i think so ). You were talking about a "tip of my tongue" thing that makes for really great stories/philosophies/books...even the "tip of my tongue" thing of yours was a "tip of my tongue" thing for me - a friend and i have termed it (incredibly over-righteously, since that's just how we seem to be feeling lately) idea plagerism...but a really good feeling b/c less lonely - the "hey, that was my idea," but "hey i don't have to explain it to you because you already know and are on my side." I guess i am at a point right now where i think my ideas are pretty decent (but then i worry - how can know, the whole self-observation bit, never being able to be completely objective, i guess an impossible dillema but one like the universe that we want to figure out) but where everything seems awful and stagnant because i am so overwhelmed by my situation, school, family. And empathy is so amazing and honesty, and even for a second feeling connected. thank you for putting so much of yourself out to be discovered and for believing so much in truth and being an idealist (i suppose circumstance has made me a somewhat cynical idealist at the moment, but an idealist none the less, what else is there to be?). Honesty and truth and a lack of appearances are such incredibly rare things in my family, at my school, it is really nice to rediscover their persistance in friends, in folks, in words. So much to learn, so little time! Your book lists and internet links have been so helpful. Here is a book that i read recently...i liked it a lot, probably mostly for its confidence and boldness and bitter cynicism with regards to your avg educational institution, and also probably because it was one of the first blatently "tip of my tongue" books i came across w/ regard to this subject.... i am sure you have read it, but i'll mention it anyway, "Teaching as a Subversive Activity" by Neil Postman & Charles Weingartner. its slightly dated, but nice and revolutionary. here is some more stuff about me that i am not sure why i'm writing here but just because i feel like i should. I really love writing, i was pretty sure i loved it for a long time, (i used to sit on the bus and write books in my head while staring out the window, really just personal nonfiction narrative, i guess, something), and always did ok in school, and then my junior year i just couldn't do anything at all. especially meet paper deadlines, and there are i guess a ton of factors, that i felt like every work we read merited a hundred pages and not five but i could't write a hundred because there wasn't enough time, school is about doing a little of everything and nothing thouroughly, and because i didn't feel like writing any pages because there was so much to sum up and where as before picking the perfect words had been satisfying, and wonderful, and a sort of harmonizing, only with language, now it was/is an impossible attempt at impossible perfection. so i just didn't write them. So it was also just hating to be told what to do (i could do it so much better on my own, i would, i hate they think that i wouldn't) and hating living in fear of deadlines and stupid, meaningless point deductions, and hating that somehow staying up until four in the morning once a week got misconstrued into a healthy sort of learning. and hating everything about them. so there was that, and i've just never been good at adapting/resigning/dealing with anyway. so. but mostly overwhelming - so much and i can't bring it all together and wrap it up in a volume and say here, this is what i think, this is what i know...but wanting to do that because i think that is expression and art and human- - - to want to define and express and find empathy and offer new thought or more thoughts on old things just to give something concrete [all the things i've written in my head and forgotten - wouldn't a sort of on-all-the-time recording mechanism for one's head be great?! just so you could catch the really excellent stuff?!] but just being overwhelmed always. so that is part of me. I am interested in a thousand things, but lately its been a little visual art stuff and activism and things - really i guess its just a huge lists of words to look up, or def. of words recorded, and people who i don't know anything about but who sound interesting, and hundreds of books to read and web sites scrawled in a million places, trying to figure out how i can now what i don't know, etc., and thinking a lot about how beastly school is and sometimes feeling really hopeless about everything, but every now and again knowing (or kind of always knowing, subconciously) that hopeless isn't the answer, and trying is the only way....So my english teacher gave me a d even though she said last year i wrote brilliantly and was creative and a good interpreter (really just someone who hasn't managed to die in school, yet, i hope) (and so, though good for my ego, that was taken with a grain of salt) and she seems a really excellent person, and almost cries talking about the human spirit, and human sagas (who doesn't) but it is all the much harder when it is someone who thinks about stuff like that all the time can't hear and see what a weird thing the kind of system their involved in is, and so i went to talk to her and i said apples, and she tried to understand, but all she could come up with was "celery," and i said i apologized because i just wasn't articulating it well enough, and she said i was feeling inadequate (by then i was). And she takes it sort of personally that i got a d in her class, but she just doesn't understand that i couldn't write those papers, it was me (well, it was her too, but really just school, too). So. Also if you have not read it i really recommend "Cosmos" by carl sagan, because the universe is so bloody amazing! (you've probably read it already). The hard back version has amazing pictures. It is the best book for making one feel in love with knowledge and humans and nature and worlds and immensity and understanding, and absolutely everything. Thank you for reading this, i'm sorry it wasn't very coherent and there may be spelling errors - if i go back and read it it will be icky i think so i'll just go now and not regret Thank you : )

I'm a high school senior aimed at being a freshman at Hampshire next year. Quick question (I think). . .

The only word I can think of to describe the way I've felt is compelled when it comes to Hampshire, particularly because I believe in a newer, more innovative (alternate, if you will), way of educating. When I started reading about the EPEC program I wasn't confused, but I suppose I thought Hampshire was designed to be what EPEC is designed to be now.

Something in one of the sites I visited talked about EPEC being the result of students needing something other than Hampshire's focus on academic conditioning. . .am I wrong?

(My point. . .I get there eventually.) I guess I'm curious as to just what lead to EPEC, because THAT is the type of involvement I feel like I'm looking for, which is what led me to Hampshire. . .or what led Hampshire to me :), but that's beside the point.

Maybe I just haven't looked enough through the posted materials. . .there's a lot of information to wade through out there.

Anyway, sorry if this note is just mailbox clutter. I'm genuinely interested in what's going on, hopeful that I can do a little shaking up of my own once (if) I get there :). It never hurts to start making connections early, and you present yourself as one of the Genuines.

Take it easy.