Welcome to 2020. It’s an odd time. You’re stuck at home, learning and getting graded via Zoom or something similar, probably doing the dishes and way more chores than you’d anticipated, and you’re a freshman in high school. What a weird way to start off your high school experience, huh?! We’re right there with you.
We’re writing a series to help guide you through how to structure some of your free time right now based on your grade. Freshman year is typically the year that we encourage our students to try absolutely everything that piques their interest(s), and then narrow from there. That proves hard in quarantine, when you don’t have extracurricular fairs to attend, sports teams to join, or formalized student government meetings to drop in on. But freshman year matters. So, how does one develop and flesh out interests and new hobbies while sheltering in place? We’d start the old fashioned way: by making a list.
Step 1: Make a list of your interests.
This might feel forced, but trust us. Making a list helps you group the things that you love to do by interests. Think about what sorts of things bring you joy (all of the time, not just right now, but also yes right now). Also the topics that cause you to run down those Wikipedia and YouTube rabbit holes. If we were making a (short) list, ours would look something like this:
Cooking (what a good time suck)
Feminism and race (this article piqued our interest)
Political statistics and economics (we read FiveThirtyEight twice a day)
Gardening (who isn’t contemplating starting a garden right now?)
Step 2: Choose 1 thing per 2 weeks or so to delve deeper into via a couple of online classes, research, and reading.
Make a plan. Two examples provided below. Make sure to include one book per week.
Weeks 1-2: Cooking
During this time we are...
Reading these books: The Omnivores Dilemma by Michael Pollan and The Third Plate by Dan Barber
Cooking our way through this list as best we can (or at least cooking something new every single day)
And taking notes along the way! What worked? What didn’t?
Watching Salt Fat Acid Heat (bonus points for reading it too) and Jiro Dreams of Sushi on Netflix.
Enrolling in and completing this course: PSYC123: The Psychology, Biology, and Politics of Food via Open Yale Courses.
Listening to episodes of Radio Cherry Bombe and The Splendid Table podcasts.
Weeks 3-4: Economics and Statistics
During this time we are...
Reading these books: The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 by Paul Krugman
Watching Inside Job, Moneyball, Too Big to Fail, and Freakonomics (again, bonus points if you read Freakonomics by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt too).
Enrolling in and completing this course: The Global History of Capitalism via Princeton Open Courses.
Listening to FiveThirtyEight’s and Planet Money podcast episodes.
Step 3: Rinse and repeat.
Once you find something you particularly enjoy, you can circle back and do it all over again. Or just keep switching it up. The point is to get familiar with a certain subject area and to delve deeper into it in an intentional way. Keep track of everything that you do on a Google spreadsheet because in two years you’ll probably forget a lot of what you did during this time!
Also, don’t forget to go outside when you can. We support you in wanting to start that garden. These are just some jumping off points for structuring the abundance of free time you now have, but let us know if we can be helpful in any way.
Please feel free to call or email us with your specific interest area(s) and we’d love to help flesh them out for you.