Nowhere Better

(AVS President and alumna Melissa Randles wrote the following in response to viewing the movie Race to Nowhere, a documentary about the stress that conventional schooling inflicts on kids and families. Alpine Valley School will host a screening of Race to Nowhere on February 24, 2012. Click here for more information and to get your FREE ticket.)

I’ve always enjoyed telling stories: it’s one of several things I’ve loved consistently since I was very small. In telling stories I’ve always known that you start at the beginning and end at...well, the end. Knowing that, I’m going to break the rules a little and start this particular story with the end. Here it is:

Alpine Valley School did more to improve my life than all the therapy and self-help books in the world could possibly have done. Being part of a community that treated me as an individual with intrinsic worth and graduating from AVS are two things of which I’m supremely proud.

So there’s the ending of this particular story. Hopefully it will be incentive for you to continue reading even when things get uncomfortable. Remember, it all turns out okay.

Fifteen years ago, I had a great deal of difficulty imagining any sort of future for myself, much less a happy one. It was my fundamental belief at the time that I was worthless, stupid, useless, and generally unfit to walk upon this earth. I only continued to do so because I didn’t know what else to do.

(Can you see why I started with the end of my story? Let me say this before I continue: I write these things not because they are sensational or heart-breaking, but because they are true. That is how I felt.)

Of course, it wasn’t always like that. When I was little I was the friendliest kid you could ever hope to meet. When I was five and my family moved to a new state, I went door to door introducing myself to all the neighbors. “Hi!” I said, “my name is Melissa. I just moved in down the street.” I had no fear and no shame. I loved people and wasn’t afraid to let them know.

I also loved school, my favorite part of the day. What I recall is primarily playing, and if some learning snuck in along with all the finger-painting and puppetry, so be it. I didn’t think of it as learning: what I thought I was doing was reading, playing with Legos, and swinging upside down from the monkey bars. I made friends and learned what it meant to be caring and loyal.

At some point around fifth grade, school changed, big-time. My classmates and I were told that we needed to get serious, that life wasn’t about playing. We needed to prepare ourselves for a future full of competition and based on other people’s evaluations of us. I think that was the first time in my life that I really cared about what other people thought of me. It was terrifying.

School no longer felt safe. Rather than running around on the playground, we now ran around on the soccer field in some kind of formation; not only that, we were expected to win. Competition was fierce, and for a scrawny, uncoordinated kid like me the pressure was suffocating. The irony was, I wanted so badly to do well that my very desire kept screwing me up. The high point of my soccer career found me running the length of the field and kicking a beautiful goal—on the wrong side. The coach told me I was probably better off just hanging back in the future. “Don’t help,” he said. I can still feel the ache of those words in my chest, and hear my teammates’ laughter.

Okay, so sports weren’t my thing—but academics were. I could follow instructions, listen carefully and remember things. I was bright and grasped concepts quickly. This had always been a source of pride for me; the problems started when I affected the bell curve. I remember my sixth grade English teacher patiently explaining that she could only give so many A’s before she had to give out B’s, C’s, D’s and even (gasp) F’s. Like my soccer experience it wasn’t just about performing, it was about winning. And this was one particular area where I actually had a chance to win.

Most of the time I did extremely well. Teachers were impressed and I took home spotless report cards on a regular basis—until algebra came along. Now that I’m an adult, I’ve been able to look at the workings of my mind and understand why math doesn’t come naturally to me. I’m very visual, and math was just not something I could “see.” Also, it seemed that in math there were so very many ways to be wrong and only one way to be right, and that idea just doesn’t jive with me.

Of course, at the time all I knew was that math was hard, and I decided this was so because I just wasn’t smart enough. Unfortunately, my seventh-grade math teacher seemed to agree. Despite having graduated from Barnum and Bailey clown school, my math teacher was a humorless man who thought the best teaching method was public humiliation. He would make the kids that struggled with math the most solve problems on the board. When we got the wrong answer, he would ask the other kids to point out where we’d messed up. This was not a collaborative exercise where kids helped each other learn. This was my clown-college teacher asking the other kids to publicly stone us with their ridicule. It taught me nothing—except that math was terrifying.

Unfortunately my home life did little to counteract this. My dad has a master’s degree in math and is the smartest person I know. Those nights at the kitchen table with my math homework ended more often than not with me in tears and him with his head in his hands wondering how I could not grasp some basic concept.

Nevertheless, I tried my hardest. I worked on math night after night. I did extra homework. I literally read the textbook looking for the answers to this thing that was a total mystery to my young mind. I lost sleep worrying about my math grades. I started biting my nails. I developed a unique way of punishing myself for things that I deemed to be stupid. I had this big hardbound book in my room and I used to hit myself with it. Hard.

Then one afternoon I got my report card and was actually shaking as I opened it on the bus ride. Here’s what it said:

English: A

Science: A

Theater: A

Math: C

I cried the entire bus ride home.

There are a lot of upsetting stories that I could tell you about eighth grade, but I’ll pare it down to two that I think are the most poignant. The first happened a few months into the year, when this pretty, popular girl came up and told me she had something to show me in the gym, something really cool. This girl had literally only talked to me one other time, and that was to tell me that I was a “weirdo,” and so I was thrilled with this invitation.

When I opened the gym doors, I found the entire football team waiting, along with a few cheerleaders. I thought, for just a second, that maybe they were all there to see me, and I remember feeling so happy. Of course, they were there to see me, but not the way I had hoped. They quickly revealed the basketballs, volleyballs, and footballs they were holding, and in some nightmarish parody of dodgeball they flung these balls at me while I curled into a ball on the floor and cried. Eventually I came to my senses and ran for the door, bruised and sobbing, their laughter ringing behind me.

I became afraid of other kids after that. The little girl who had rung every doorbell in the neighborhood became the teenager who prayed no one would notice her. I slunk along the wall at school, making eye contact with no one and hoping I could just get through the day without anything happening to me.

The second story involves athletics. By this time I had pretty well decided that I sucked at sports. I told my gym teacher at the new school this, and I’m pretty sure that was when he decided he would make an athlete out of me yet. Similarly to my clown math teacher, he seemed to think the more public humiliation piled on a kid, the more they would be motivated to improve.

On this particular day in gym class we had to run a mile in six minutes. For the kids that played football or soccer this was not really a concern, but I hadn’t really run since I was a little kid. I protested in my meek, quiet way, but the coach insisted. So I ran as fast and hard as I could, and about halfway through I started feeling dizzy and sick. I slowed down, and the coach ran up and started yelling that I could do it, I just had to keep going. I said I didn’t feel good, and he said he didn’t care. At one point I fell to my knees and threw up on the grass. Kids around me started screaming and pointing. Others stopped running so they could stand and watch. Humiliated and crying, snot pouring from my nose, I looked at my coach and asked if I could go back. He looked at me stone-faced and told me to keep running.

Finally, it was my withdrawal that made my parents really take notice. Once incapable of shutting up, now I would come home from school and lock myself in my room. I didn’t play with my brother and sister. I didn’t talk to my mom. And I didn’t tell my parents about the bullying, mostly because I learned that things only got worse the more you reported the problem. So here I was, shut up in my room with my pain and my growing sense that I was a failure. I was thirteen years old.

Sometime during that school year my parents discovered Alpine Valley School. My mom flew to Colorado and visited the school, coming back energized and determined that this was the place my siblings and I would go. Personally, I didn’t really believe anything my parents were telling me about this magical school where here were “no classes” and “no grades”, but I wanted nothing better than to get the heck out of Nevada so I didn’t really care.

My first day at AVS I walked in the front door and was overrun by people wanting to meet me, wanting to know who I was. A young man about my own age grabbed my arm and said, “Come on, you can help us with this project!” (The project, it turned out, was calling local businesses and seeing if they would donate pots and pans to the school’s kitchen. They had no idea if I would be any good at this particular task, but they handed me the phone anyway and I jumped right in.)

The thing I struggled with most at AVS those first few weeks was not having any system by which to judge my own performance. Remember, I had obsessed about grades to the point of sleeplessness and now, POOF, they were gone. So I resorted to the only standard that I knew: the approval of teachers. I spent a great deal of time just following around the staff, asking if I could do anything and trying to tell whether or not they liked me.

Eventually this got boring, especially when compared with games of laser tag or baking cookies. I was swept up in the wave of activity, and I stopped caring whether or not I was doing well. I started, instead, having fun. I played a lot that first year. My friends and I made believe we were knights and princesses arguing about whose pet dragon spat bigger fireballs. We ran around the playground and dragged a rug out into the sandbox so we could wrestle on it. I played tag and climbed trees and didn’t think at all about how this was the kind of thing I had been telling myself for years I couldn’t do.

At AVS this girl who had curled in on herself opened up like a flower in bloom. I found that buried friendliness within me, and I let it flourish. I opened up to my parents again, and when I saw my little brother at school I would hug and kiss him to an embarrassing degree. People around me respected me, they listened to me and they told me that what I was saying was worthwhile. Better yet, sometimes I believed them.

The week after I started at AVS a boy my own age came for a visiting week. He wore his sunglasses constantly, but even so I could tell that he was cute. He stood out in the courtyard and juggled nearly all day the first day he started at the school. I pretty much loved him immediately.

I attended AVS for five wonderful years, a richer time than I could possibly say. I took on leadership roles, tried things that were scary and succeeded. I also failed sometimes, and I learned not to punish myself for those moments but to love them just as much. I fell in love with that mysterious juggling boy and was absolutely astonished to find that he loved me too. I made deep and lasting friendships, most of which I continue to cherish today.

More than anything else I found the space and time to truly understand myself. I learned Japanese, I learned how to make pizza, I learned how to mine for gold (from a five year old, no less). Even when I was doing things that were seemingly pointless (arguing about dragon powers, for example), I was learning the most important thing I believe any of us can ever know: who I am. I learned that I have a voice, and that when I speak people will listen. I learned that I love organizing things, bringing people together in synergistic situations where creativity bursts forth.

More concretely, I learned through the kind reflection of the staff that I am a worthwhile, insightful, good person. Almost ten years after graduating from AVS, the thought of how much I grew and developed during those years still brings me to tears. I feel as though I got myself back, my authentic self, and I strive every day to ensure that I continue living those principles I learned at Alpine Valley School.

Who am I today? I’m a twenty-seven-year-old woman working as a project manager for a high-tech company. I have been in a loving relationship for thirteen years (yes, with that boy I first saw juggling at AVS). I spend as much time with my family as I possibly can. I am happy, productive, thoughtful, and joyful. I make aggressive goals for myself and I achieve them—or not. Oh, and here’s the real kicker: I’m an athlete. Okay, I’m not running marathons or anything, but I snowboard and I dance and I love my body in a way I never thought I ever would again. 

I have one more story for you. I recently changed departments at work and was assigned a desk in a different section of the building. After moving in all my stuff, I got up and went to the desk of each of my neighbors, knocking on their little cubicle walls and introducing myself. “Hi!” I said, “my name is Melissa and I just moved in down the row.”