Staff - 2008 Oregon Session 1
Advisors
Advisors do lots of things: teach workshops; lead games, sports, hikes, fieldtrips, and other activities; help out with logistics; and other stuff. But most essentially, they connect with campers--individually and in small groups. Each advisor meets daily with his or her group of 11 or so campers, and is generally available for support, hugs, and conversation.
Reanna Alder, 26
Vancouver, British Columbia
The Alder Dynasty Returns!!
I was a camper from 1997 - 2001. All three of my younger brothers, Cory, Robert & Sam have also attended camp. Since the last time I was at camp I have graduated with a degree in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria, worked as a high rise window washer, interned at Drawn & Quarterly (comic book publisher), spent a year traveling in Australia, been in love and out, dragged myself out of the blahs, bought a house, helped skin and eat a roadkill raccoon, been features editor at a short-lived start-up newspaper (Tooth and Dagger), moshed to Think about Life and Japanther on sweltering nights in Montreal, lived in the Rockies and the Yukon, dabbled in trapeze and acrobalance, worked out at the gym till I was buff (and then stopped), taken painting and drawing classes, and gotten back into rock climbing.
My current projects include renovating my house (with lots of help), writing about comics for a BC newsblog (TheTyee.com), working for the Vancouver Folk Music Festival, gardening, rock climbing and otherwise trying to keep my spine strong and healthy. I'm excited to be returning to camp this year!
Zen Zenith,
Menlo Park, California
Advisor, Session 1
Zen is a teacher and mentor at The Riekes Center in Menlo Park, California, a non profit organization that helps students explore and achieve their goals in Athletic Fitness, Nature Awareness and Creative Arts. There he teaches guitar - which he went to school for in Hollywood at The Musicians Institute with friends and former campers Spike and Matt Henson. His current focus is to make a living and save the world through the creation and performance of original music with his band Please Do Not Fight. Please Do Not Fight (also featuring former campers and unschoolers!) released their - and Zen's - first album this past November which he is extremely excited and proud of! In fact Zen performed his first song in front of people as a camper at NBTSC, Session 2, 1999, entitled "The Sensitive Song".
Zen has missed being part of the Not Back To School Camp community - not having been since his stint as Night Owl in 2003 - and is super excited to return this year! He loves the opportunity to educate and to learn more about himself by learning about other and can't think of a better place to do just that than at NBTSC.
Brittney "Maori" Andrews, 23
Savannah, Georgia
Advisor, Session 1
Maori attended over 11 different schools and traversed much of the US while growing up, but her mainstream, suburban lifestyle couldn't quite satiate her appetite for adventure and wonderment. She is thankful for the day that she found herself entangled in the powerful words and substance of the Teenage Liberation Handbook. Its beguiling notion of teenage liberation prompted her to defy conventional logic, and she quit school to homeschool through her senior year. Wanting to try new things, she attended Not Back To School Camp and found it brimming with inspiration and an unparalleled sense of aliveness. The experience led her implement major and subtle changes in her life: she adopted a more active and enthusiastic approach to learning and began to unearth and cultivate more meaning and beauty in her life.
At age 18, Maori started college as an Interior Design major, but she found it to be a little too vinyl-clad and fluorescent-lit. She left after one semester. Then Maori took a Natural Building apprenticeship at The Farm in Tennessee, where she first learned about Permaculture (something she loosely defines as a design philosophy, which seeks sustainable ways of living by observing and emulating natural systems and patterns). In March of 2008, she completed her Permaculture design certification at Maya Mountain Research Farm in Belize, Central America. Through Permaculture, Natural Building, and Environmental Psychology (the interplay between humans and their surroundings) Maori has been able to discover the deeper, more personal layers of design that had originally sparked her interest in the field. This fall she will study green Interior Architecture at the Academy of Art University where she plans to earn her BFA.
Currently, Maori enjoys spending time outside, working at an organic plant nursery, tending to her two little garden patches, caring for her little goat (Santiago), life-guarding at an outdoor pool, watching the sun set in Georgia, and continuing to work with Not Back to School Camp.
NBTSC history: camper at the first-ever East Coast session in West Virginia in 2002, junior staff in West Virginia in 2004, logistics goddess in West Virginia in 2005, logistics goddess in Oregon 2006, 2007.
Maya Toccata Lester, 27
Joshua Tree, California
Session 1, Advisor
Session 2, Cook
(photo by Maggie Levin, 2002)
In her former life, Maya lived in Eugene and ran Grace's office (Not Back to School Camp, plus other stuff) for about 5 years. After camp in 2005 she and her husband Damian moved to Joshua Tree, California, where she now tries to stay hydrated while she rides her bike around the desert, and tends to her garden, fruit trees and cute chickens. She's passionate about growing, preparing and eating food, and sometimes does that for money. (As of this writing she hasn't found anyone to pay her for eating food, but folks seem to enjoy paying her to grow and cook it.) Mostly though she makes money by working in her local health food store.
Maya grew up in Vancouver, Canada and still loves rain very much. She's done some learning about counseling, conflict resolution, and general empowerment and loves those things too. She loves most things, actually.
unschooling history: Maya went to school until she was 13, when she read the Teenage Liberation Handbook and quit. She then proceeded to learn about hats, hardware stores, Anne Frank, traveling solo, rock climbing, newsletter editing, self defense, and life.
camp history: Maya came to camp for the first time in 1997, and has been present every year and almost every session since then. She came so many times, in fact, and was so cute and smart and nice and peaceful and competent that eventually Grace had no choice but to hire her as a junior staff person (in 2000) and then (later in 2000) as the year-round office manager and, starting in 2001, the logistics goddess of NBTSC. Grace finally realized at camp in 2004 that the term "logistics goddess" no longer fully reflected Maya's role at camp, and renamed her "assistant director." While she no longer runs the office or officially holds the AD title at every session, Grace (and probably everyone else) still thinks of her that way.
Vanessa Filkins, 27
Austin, Texas
Session 1 Advisor
Vanessa says: I grew up in upstate New York, unschooled by my school-teacher mom and electrical engineer/salesman dad. I "graduated" from high school in 1995 and spent some time living in Central America on my own after that. I moved to Austin, Texas for a job in 1999, and have lived here since, only leaving once for an 8-month stint in St. Louis, Missouri.
I've been a professional nanny, a household manager, manager of a small law firm, and I have started a small business. I currently run my photography business, Common Good Photography, full time and also work part-time at a law firm as a Client Coordination Specialist.
I love music, art, dancing, design, logic, philosophy, and getting in touch with my inner child (I know she's in there somewhere). I love to learn about the Law and I like to talk about Ethics a lot.
In the past, I have led workshops about Finding Answers to Questions, What It Means To Be Smart, How To Get What You Want, Organic Visual Composition, Dancing the Samba, and Portrait Photography. This year I plan on leading as many workshops about photography and visual composition as possible. It is my biggest passion and I love to learn new things every day. I have also volunteered for the Education Empowerment Project, which puts on the annual Quo Vadis gathering for self-educated adults and their allies.
NBTSC history: Advisor, 2005-2007
Evan Wright, 26
Seattle, Washington
Session 1 Advisor
Vermont Advisor
(photo by Vanessa Filkins, Quo Vadis 2004)
One of Evan’s defining characteristics isn’t obvious at first, although it has a long history. When he was ten years old, he decided he wanted to “stay underwater” and built a diving bell out of an upside-down garbage can, a length of rope, and 75 pounds of weight; he is a creative problem solver. After a decade developing experience as an autodidact, he is very much at home using the tools of stubborn curiosity, independence, and unconventional approaches to arrive at surprising and innovative solutions to problems.
Evan began his practice of self-education after reading The Teenage Liberation Handbook at 15. His curriculum included unlearning many of the unspoken lessons from school and re-establishing his own direct personal relationship to learning. He explored the British Museum, worked at a London soup kitchen run by nuns, raised harbor seal pups, disentangled sea lions from fishermen's nets in Mexico, and assisted in research of 5 ft. long green sea turtles in Costa Rica. Without school he studied the life of Albert Einstein, assisted with research on whales, and explored the writing of educational visionaries and critics. In response to his own struggles and uncertainty, he sought out philosophical works dealing with themes of despair, suffering, freedom, choice, responsibility, the absurdity of existence, and the art of carving out “meaning in life.”
As an adult, Evan has specialized in creating projects that bring people together. He enjoys facilitating connection among challengingly diverse groups of people and fostering community among those who may not fully appreciate what they have in common. He has worked within the gay community in Seattle to create a positive, healthy, social space for people to build community outside of bars and is currently planning similar projects through one of his businesses called Congress Events. He is the founder of The Education Empowerment Project (an unschooling organization) and for five years was the director of an adult unschoolers event called Quo Vadis. Evan has participated in Not Back to School Camp for a decade: for many years as an advisor, and as a camper before that. He is a total dork and is honored to share a week with one hundred home and unschooled teenagers.
Evan has led or co-led workshops and discussions on: Marine Biology, How to Build an Underwater Robot, How to Change the World in 90 minutes, Stone Sculpting, Investing, How to Make Homemade Pasta, The Life of Albert Einstein, How to Begin a Project or Event, The Supreme Court of the United States, Barn Raising (a networking activity), Blues Dancing, Quo Vadis, The Effective Unschooler, and How to Get What You Want.
Gabriel Lester, 28 
Eugene, Oregon
Session 1 & Vermont Advisor
Session 2 Cook
(photo by Gayatri Janine Banks, NBTSC 2006)
Born to a large family of musical unschoolers, Gabe grew up in the wild Mojave desest. He received a mixed educational experience, unschooling at home and attending conventional school when his curiosity took him there. When he was 17, he attended NBTSC. He describes the experience as an eye opener. Meeting so many brilliant unscoolers helped him see the potential for his own growth and learning. Inspired, he took on new adventures such as snowboarding daily, traveling by bike, living in experimental communities, and attending silent meditation retreats.
He now lives in Eugene, Oregon where he continues his practice of meditation. He also has a regular practice of hatha yoga, and in the past year became a certified Bikram Method yoga (hot yoga) instructor. He now teaches 4 classes per week at the Bikram Yoga College of India in Eugene. Relying mainly on human-powered transportation, he has happily ridden his bike for day-to-day purposes for 7 years Musically, after twelve years of playing the guitar, he has focused in on the drums. He now has a lot of fun drumming for a band called May Harpoon. He also continues to work with his brothers on music for Abandon Ship, their band of several years.
Unschooling history: Gabriel grew up in a famous homeschooling family, the Lesters. (They were famous mainly because of musical tapes the family produced, and also because their mother, Darlene, was an early and significant contributor to Growing Without Schooling magazine.) Gabriel went to school but quit when he was 15, and attended camp at 17, which fueled his interest in unschooling. Since then, he has continuously been inspired by his participation in NBTSC.
Camp history: Camper in 1997. Supervised dishes 1998-2005, with a brief detour in 1999 to be on junior staff. Advised in 2005 and 2006, advised and cooked in 2007.
Abbi Miller, 23
New York City
Advisor, Sessions 1 & 2
Project Leader Session 2
Assistant Cook, Vermont
I came into this world one particularly brisk morning in November of 1984 (Year of the Rat), with dark curly hair, shrieking my lungs out, and demanding to be fed. I believe that description is still undeniably accurate.
I was pulled from a Montessori school at age 8, by a mother who was sick of volunteering all of her time there, just so she could see her own damn kids. I have an amazingly patient family who suffered through long evenings, while I inundated them with queries, "I don't even take tests! How will I learn anything!?". But as I've confessed earlier, I am a hungry girl. And we all know that curiosity = learning.
Since falling into the land of unschool-dom, I have had a swell time creating my life and the adventures that any true Scorpio dreams of. I have worked at a raw foods restaurant, been in national commericals, given haircuts on the beaches of Maui, hopped a boat to Indonesia, tap danced on the Eiffel Tower, and attended the NBTSC!
I still shriek and scream, but found a way to make money while doing so. I've lived in NYC for many years, enjoying a profession where people pay you to be someone else. I was cast in a play last year for my laugh alone. I am still deciding if that was a compliment or insult. As an actress, I've worked in: Colorado, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Illinois and in an International Broadway Tour of Grease that went all over southeast Asia. I've done the hand-jive more times than I care to admit.
I've been a dancer since a young age. If you like to dance, come find me and I will promptly join you, as I'm a fan of shakin' what yo' momma gave ya. My most recent dance endeavor was performing with a Chicago-based Modern company in a cavernous, vacated mansion! (No I did not meet any ghosts.)
A few years ago, my physical approach to learning led me to a beautiful thing called Yoga. Upon taking my first class, I was instantly smitten, and consider it one of my favorite things to do. I recently completed my certification to teach children and teens, at Karma Kids Yoga, in NYC.
Assuming that I've already eaten and am well coiffured, here are some things that I like to think about: getting more dark chocolate in my diet, how I can live more consciously, playing guitar, what songs I want to sing in the shower, dissecting Anne Sexton's poetry, reading about natural health and fertility awareness, geeking out on music theory, convincing people to give me a back rub, and finding ways to travel.
Which leads me to my VERY important closing statement: Come travel with Blake and me in our unschooler adventure trip. Check us out: www.BlakeBoles.com/arg2008.
Cathryn Wozencraft
Advisor, Session 1
I may have always been an unschooler. My mother and father have been “outside-the-box-thinking-hippies” for as long as they can remember. I was raised on a farm outside of Austin. We grew our own food and tried our best to live, as my mom refers to it, “beyond the sidewalks.” I would have been an only child, but my family branched to include dogs, lambs, chicks, ducks, kittens, a skunk named Penny and a pig named John. Ask me sometime about all of the animals we shared our lives with.
At five years old, I became a part of a homeschooling organization. We had art days, music days, soccer days, park days and anything anyone could think of days. Belonging to the Austin Area Homeschoolers meant that I didn’t think of my life as unusual – we were all different and that was “the norm.” I homeschooled from kindergarten through high school graduation, so it wasn’t until college that I truly understood, and yes, appreciated what my childhood had been like. Why was I the only student to talk to the teacher one-on-one, or to thank them for the interesting class? I had respect for them, but I seemed to lack the us/them mentality that the other students innately understood. But, as such, I have enjoyed great friendships with my professors.
My mom is an artist, my dad is a musician. Everything seems to begin with a creative outlook. I have a passion for pottery and am teaching myself guitar. My longer term goals include finishing college with a psychology degree and then I would really like to go to med school. I would love to open an alternative healing center with herbalists, massage therapists, acupuncture, macrobiotic eating practices and as many other healing modalities as I can pull together. I have lately gotten interested in reiki healing after I went to massage school.
Currently, I work as a nanny while I put myself through school. I care for a family with four children ranging from five to fourteen years old. It is incredibly rewarding to be a part of influencing the next generation. They are funny and challenging and they teach me things everyday. I still love animals and have two dogs and two cats. I would have more, but I’m not on the farm anymore.
My interests include but are not limited to: meditation, music, clay, singing, yoga, good conversations, gardening, getting back into dancing, reading, writing, photography, feng shui, learning about Tibetan and Buddhist culture,. I am looking at the reawakening that I feel humanity is destined for, and have my own plans formulating on what possibilities could evolve beyond the sidewalks.
Camp History: I was a camper in 2001 (the last day of camp was 9/11) and 2002.
Heather Loo Jaggers, 38
Colorado Springs, Colorado
Mama Bear and at-large staff person, Session 1
I left school when I was 17 and ventured from Idaho to my Grandmother's place in Colorado. There I was able to indulge my love of animals from milking goats to raising orphaned raccoons. Those experiences encouraged me to explore the veterinary world where I became a technician. I still work at the vet clinic a few times a month and enjoy my time there--especially during puppy season.
I've taken all sorts of classes in human medicine and someday I'll decide where I want to go with it. I met my husband (a firefighter/medic) while I was doing clinical hours on an ambulance.
Over the years I've become involved in the community here in various ways. I started a local Greens (political) party and worked on several environmental issues. When I ventured with my friends in opening a natural foods market I was fortunate enough to work with local farmers in developing an ecolabel that required higher standards of organic farming. Currently I am learning sign language (ASL) with my two year old and have plans to advocate the use of ASL in preschools and early education. I try to balance my productive hours with reading, gardening, crafty nonsense, dancing, and playing in the water. My most favorite pasttime includes catching frogs. My big sister is an advocate for unschoolers and has written a book or two on the subject. She was my biggest support system when I got brave enough to rise out of the machine.
Kitchen coordinator
Nicole Martin, 27
Albany, New York
Kitchen Coordinator, all sessions everywhere
Nicole's been on the NBTSC staff since 1997 as both cook and advisor. She is full of energy and creative ideas, has a magical way with food and is a sought-after chef/caterer, and comes as a set with her fabulous daughter Lou. Nicole is one of the most physically vital people you'll ever meet -- she surfs, does Capoeira, dances, and is at home in her body in a most inspiring way. She's also an accomplished singer and guitarist, an artist, a devoted activist, and a passionate mother.
Cooks
At camp, our fabulous cooks prepare 3 meals a day, harmonizing with each other and with the many campers who help out in the kitchen. Food at NBTSC definitely does not happen in a factory atmosphere; while making dinner, the kitchen crew is liable to sing together and to discuss life, the universe, and everything--or garlic, blackberries, and pizza crust, which often amounts to the same thing. Anyway, because they have so much interaction with campers we consider them unofficial advisors and hire them with that in mind--they are advisor-caliber folks who can also make magic with potatoes and other miracles of nature.
Rachel Klein, 22
Portland, Oregon
(originally from Arizona, by way of Minnesota)
Cook, Sessions 1 and 2
When I was 13, I convinced my parents to let me unschool (or rather, the TLH convinced them better than I could). For the next five years, I spent a lot of time reading books, messing around in the kitchen, volunteering, writing poetry, learning languages, wandering the desert, thinking about God, expanding my horizons by Greyhound, and studying Ancient Greece. I will always be thankful that I had the time and space to pursue my passions as a teenager, and I followed these passions to Carleton College, a liberal arts school in Minnesota.
Life at Carleton was kind of like four years of camp: intensely amazing and amazingly intense. One of my best learning experiences was cooking, living, and working at the Dacie Moses House, a place where community members can bake and cook at any hour of the day or night, gather for brunch every Sunday, make music, and just hang out. I was also lucky enough to study abroad in Greece and volunteer for a summer in rural Panama. And through classes, I came to know a little bit about bellydancing, ecology, Spanish, swing, linguistics, computer science, and much more... oh yeah, and a lot about Ancient Greek and Latin, which is what I got a degree in. Keeping my unschooling spirit alive helped me learn from whatever came my way.
Now I'm starting a new life in Oregon, which I first got to know through camp. I'm still figuring out what I want to be when I grow up, but I'm ready for fun and adventure wherever no matter what. I'm excited to share as much as I can with all you amazing camp folks. Things I would enjoy exploring with you: communal living, the value of homemaking, ancient stuff, where words come from, what makes poems good, religious and spiritual questions, funky things languages do, different kinds of knowledge, vegan nutrition, how to get along in foreign countries, the glory of diversity, how best to love people... basically everything.
NBTSC history: Camper in 1999 and 2000.
Rosa Oesterreich
Minneapolis, Minnesota
cook, sessions 1 & 2
photo & bio coming soon.
Alex Rhue, 20
Cook, Oregon Session 1
Advisor, Oregon Session 2
Dish Queen, Vermont
Growing up, partially, in the middle of rural California was the most instrumental chapter of my life to date, I believe. For it was there that I discovered how, and why, to be curious. I would spend my days and evenings wandering through the forest near my house, with a small pickax, in search of fallen trees, natural springs, and the ever elusive Banana Slug. I think that my parents' unbridled willingness to let me spend quite literally every waking moment in the outdoors, galavanting, conversing with animals, and just... Breathing - is to this day one of the things I am most thankful for. That and the flavor of watermelon. Ennui was not an emotion I knew until my progression to Northern Michigan, acquiring a television, the invention of the internet, and puberty ( a malicious event in life that refuses to be supportive of you while you're around attractive people). Although, Michigan was the great state that introduced me to acting, being the home to the first play that I was cast in - Aladdin, I believe it was. I played a cloud. Now, surprising as though it may seem, it was not love at first sight. My older brother was actually the one interested, I merely followed in his footsteps with a little stiff handed prodding form my beloved mother. Much like my first year at camp, my mother had to bribe me with some unnamed culinary delicacy, or perhaps the promise of less chores if I would simply try it. I was, and remain, a rather shy child. After becoming enthralled with the fantastical ways of the stage, I spent the next 8 years learning lines, playing soccer, riding over the international bridge to get to rehearsals and ALWAYS being terrified of both the U.S. And Canadian customs officials, and playing more soccer. If I hadn't found my spark acting, then that's probably what I would be doing. Playing for the USA Olympic soccer team and trying to create some sorely needed dignity that the mens' league never had.
I moved out of my house at 19, to another, slightly more racially and culturally diverse city in Michigan, called Ann Arbor. I attended a very nice community college for one semester, before I abandoned higher education for the second time (but not the last, I assume) to pursue two "day-jobs" and begin writing what I only recently figured out to be a mildly fascinating screenplay. I then moved to New York on a whim (a proposition was made, with an expiration date of 20 minutes), where I divide my time between another increasingly ill-fated day job and writing down snippets and plot advances for several different screenplays and short films.
I can't wait to get to camp and have the audacious privilege of cooking in a full kitchen. My pancakes and frittatas have been known to make even those not eating them cry.
Dish Queen
Dave Thomas, 21
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Dish Queen session 1, visitor of some ilk in Vermont
I was born in 1987 and was loosely homeschooled until I turned sixteen, attended NBTSC for the first time, and essentially took things into my own hands. Our TV only got PBS and a couple network stations. My brothers and I watched The Simpsons with a religious fervor not since exhibited by yours truly. For the longest time the only movies I ever watched were Stop Making Sense, (the Talking Heads concert video), U2: Rattle & Hum, and a bootlegged VHS of a Neil Young concert in Berlin during his "Trans" period. Occasionally I watched Romper Room, borrowed from the local library.
So, right there, it can be seen that - from the get go - I was being reared on pop culture, and nothing lame like Power Rangers either, only the best for little Daveroo. I studied music early (starting around the tender age of six), learning time signatures through the Orff technique before moving onto reading music and studying theory in fits. I played the recorder classically, blasting through high level symphony scores with an amazing little quintet.
When I was 12 years old I decided it was high time I learned how to rock out, and probably a smart move to put down the recorder. You'll have to remember that I was 12 years old, girls were entering the picture. The recorder is not what Maxim magazine would call a "chick magnet." It was the electric guitar, that thrumming tool of sheer rock'n'roll brutality, that I would make my own.
Unfortunately, my doting mother was not thinking in terms of "chick magnets," and "sheer rock'n'roll brutality." This is simply not how (most) moms think (Courtney Love is a great woman). My mother laid out the rules: if I wanted an electric guitar, then I had to take classical guitar lessons, at least for a little while. One thing that both she and my father always instilled in me was that what modern artists do (be they painters dotting enormous canvases with three flecks of acrylic paint, irreverant noise musicians playing their guitars with drills, or stoned beatnik writers typing poems that are novels and novels that are poems) is only worth paying attention to if the artist knows how to work within the confines of the system they are bucking. Thus it was that I began to study classical guitar at the age of 12, which I continue to do to this day (having stopped for a year to do some soul searching). Mind you, I do play my electric guitar with a drill, but not out of a lack of traditional musical education. My parents' rhetoric went deep when it rippled the surface of my thinking, and in the last few years, as I've delved deep into the art of writing, I've read traditional narrative fiction as well as bizarre and constrained works from the experimental camps.
I attend university in brief spells, often long enough to confuse myself even more by thoroughly enjoying an advertising course, leading me to scratch my chin and think to myself, "advertising, hmmm..."
I was told at a rather young age that Jack Kerouac (mind you, I had no idea who this man was) had never hopped a durn freight train in his entire life; this deeply affected my idea of what storytellers could do when retelling their personal histories. I still don't know for sure whether or not Kerouac did the things he said he did. I don't think it really matters. My favorite Ben & Jerry's flavor is Chubby Hubby.
Night Owl
In early camp years, we had a few vigorous staffers--the most memorable was our beloved Billy (Upski) Wimsatt, also the author of a couple marvelous books--who tended to stay up all night right along with campers. More recently, as our staff aged and wrinkled, this niche didn't get filled as automatically, so we made an official position. Now, at each session somebody sweet and strong stays up late--until 2 or 3 a.m., depending on when most campers have nodded off--to be a reassuring and attentive adult presence.
Bowie W. Sessions, 23
Sacramento, California
Session 1, Night Owl and First Aid
(photo by Jason Barnett, Brisbane, Australia, 2006)
Born in San Francisco in 1984, fittingly just a day from Labor Day, Bowie Sessions was a proud Virgo and a trouble to his entire family from his inception. Plagued with a questionably severe learning curve, young Bowie delighted in fantasy, physically dangerous activities, abject literalism, infantile forms of capitalism and talking about himself in third-person narrative. His mother, Rane-Eir, had trouble coping with the difficult child, and endured watching her youngest son be put through that agony that was the public school system which as a social institute didn't compute with her son, and as an educational institute didn't supply for his vast learning curve.
After being diagnosed with a dozen sets of mental handicaps that were all apparent labels, and questionably settling on a form of autism, his mother determined school was not the right place for him - reaching out, she found the Teenage Liberation Handbook among several other unschooling materials. Embracing this, as well as later on the teachings of Reggio that led her into becoming an influential alternative-education font of information and change in the United States, she took her son out of school, had him read the book himself, and let him live his life without the constraints of standardized education.
Eventually Bowie ran out of encyclopedias to read, and desperately vied for more human contact; to the rescue came Not Back To School Camp, an organization that really reinforced all his lingering doubts about the Unschooling principles, and taught him how to wash dishes. And dress in drag (a concept which surprisingly had not come up yet to the San Francisco native).
Bowie eventually received a GED, went to college, dropped out of college, and went to war, where he served in the US Army as a Combat Medic for four years and two harrowing tours in Iraq, with his sole intention of making a difference in human lives on both sides well achieved. Suffering from the effects of it, Bowie has settled now into a quiet life in Sacramento with his brother, sister-in-law, their dog, a brain-sucking job at Target and a final return to school.
He enjoys comic books, roleplaying games, anything by Joss Whedon and writing.
Camp history: camper 1999-2000
Junior Staff
The junior staff does all kinds of logistical and grunty stuff that frees up the senior staff to focus on caring for campers directly--they scrub lots of pots and pans; supervise bathroom cleanup, the dish-line, and other chores; wake people up in the morning; count heads twice daily; cook; and do all kinds of other important stuff. We really appreciate and love our junior staffers! Their week on jr. staff also enables us to get to know them in a different context and find out how we think they might do in the future as potential senior staff, and it helps them see what being on staff entails. (Lots of fantasies are dashed, actually, when people discover for themselves how hard the staff works, so not everyone ends the week begging to join the senior staff!) Almost always, junior staffers are 19-21 year olds who have come to NBTSC previously as campers. Once in a while, they are folks completely new to our community. (As a bit of historical trivia, Nicole, Damian, and Jasmine all made their first appearances at camp as junior staffers.)
The Session 1 Junior Staff team is Emily Guerrero, Bean Metcalf, and Matt Sanderson.