(Work in progress...)

I started school at my closest magnet school, Cheviot Elemetary in Cheviot, Ohio, at age 4. It offered bilingual education and employed a number of native Spanish speakers from Puerto Rico, Mexico and the Dominican Republic. From kindergarten until grade six I stayed at Cheviot Elementary and even learned some subjects entirely in Spanish. For the grades seven and eight I attended Gilbert-Dater Junior High School in Covedale/Cincinnati, Ohio where I chose to study Latin and entered their Double "A" program. I mainly choose Dater because it offered college prepatory courses and was close to home.

I later became interested in attending Walnut Hills High School (also in Cincinnati) and attended after Dater. It didn't last as it was too far from home and many aspects were pay to play, which many people couldn't afford. Walnut Hills was a blessing for me because it was the place to go and be nerdy. The entire school was a public, college prepatory school. There was something in the air, when you were on the grounds there suddenly is a certain level of respect for learning and intelligence. Experimentation was also welcomed, in many forms - in my second year there was controversy, not from the students, about a boy wearing a dress.

At Walnut Hills I followed my heart and went back to learning Spanish and picked up art and social sciences.

I took the hardest art class one could without prerequisites upon entering and was in for it. It was a lot harder than I thought but I really came away from that class with this: "You can do anything. The body is a muscle that needs to be trained to act." The art teacher espoused ideas that even classic art was easy to do once you practiced. Not taking no for an answer, sometimes to the point of screaming, she turned young doubtful children into adult art masters who produced work that was truely beautiful. My favorite story about her was the fact that she treasured people's interests. A certain substitute who was the butt of many jokes was interested in dolls, and not your Barbie variety, but dolls from around the world. We were forced to watch a slideshow of her collection but after about five minutes you realized that you were actually learning something you would hear no where else - it was like watching a National Geographic documentary on the subject. The substitute was never good at expressing herself and her classes resorted to pre-school, but we saw another side of her. Even her harshist critics were delighted in her collection, people who seemed to have no empathy - the "art nerds".

The academic studies I selected included American history, one class where I was outspoken, and Archeology & Anthropology. During Anthropology we had to take a trip to the zoo which wasn't a fun as we thought. We studied every primate the zoo had to offer and answered over 500 questions about them all during our trip. The worst part, the questions were not grouped like the animals were so a missed question cost you about 20 minutes of walk time.

(sorry I must finish this later, JoeHenzi 10:24, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC))

• Tybee Island, Georgia - I started on this one and never got back to the history, added the lighthouse history and more.

These changes are also mine