Meet Caitlin!

We are excited to introduce Caitlin Hogan, owner of Annex Training Center in Long Beach, California. Caitlin will be teaching fitness and nutrition with Rise Out this fall as part of our SELFIE program, which focuses on social and emotional learning and mental and physical health.

Caitlin has trained at the Olympic level in weightlifting and ice hockey, earning six national titles in weightlifting and three silver medals at Pan American Weightlifting Championship. In addition to fitness coaching and nutrition consulting, she has served as the head ice hockey coach for the Anaheim Lady Ducks, the largest girls’ hockey program in the western United States.

You do not have to be an athlete to join SELFIE! The main goals are to learn about the way fitness and nutrition impact mental health, to develop a healthy relationship with food and exercise, and to form a positive body image based on your personal health goals rather than media-driven aesthetics.

Caitlin writes:

““A good teacher can inspire hope, ignite imagination, and instill a love of learning.”

My dad always taught me to share my knowledge and passion with others. As a lifelong coach, I do this every day. Nothing brings me more joy than teaching the younger generation how to love movement. It doesn’t have to be lifting weights or playing a sport, it’s instilling an understanding that we have the power to move our bodies and to create change inside of them to be a healthier human being.

This year I start a new venture with Rise Out as one of three new online instructors in their SELFIE (Social & Emotional Learning for Independent Education) Program. Rise Out helps homeschooled children (this program will focus on 14-17 year olds) develop an alternative education plan that supports academic goals while leaving room for personal pursuit of activities.

SELFIE is a year long health and wellness initiative designed to help students understand mental health and the mind-body connection, develop an empowered and confident stance on sexuality and relationships, gain media literacy tools for today’s social world, as well as plan for college and careers.

My classes will focus on helping students recover a childhood joy for moving their bodies freely outside of a structured PE Program. I’ll help students learn factual information about how movement and nutrition can impact your mood and emotions while assisting in the development of a personalized plan for creating healthy relationships with food and exercise.”

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You can follow Caitlin on Instagram at @chogan25

Read more about the SELFIE program and the SELFIE team

High school students don’t need me? Oh well.

The Rise Out Independent Education Project has been going along swimmingly. We have nine dedicated students who are working in a diverse range of fields: music, coding, health and fitness, history research, and patent development.

When I first launched this initiative, my focus was on the word Project. What would students actually DO for a year? I spent an inordinate amount of time coming up with example projects, assuming that students would appreciate my suggestions. Yeah never mind. As it turned out, each of them already had a project in mind, or developed one during the first semester, something borne out of their own interests: a question they were grappling with, a problem they were prepared to spend a full year pursuing.

My secondary focus was on the word Education. All projects should be educational, right? How would I ensure this? Who defines what’s “educational”? What if a student proposed to watch nothing but hockey? Or write a report on the Kardashian family history? Would it be up to me to veto projects I considered shallow? What if I approved, but their parents didn’t? How would I handle that? I debated all this, in the privacy of my own brain, during the summer before anyone had even enrolled in the class.

In all that time, though, I’d given little to thought to what I now realize is the most important word in that phrase: Independent. It took a death in the family to make me realize its importance.

Two weeks before our final meeting before Christmas, I learned that my 21-year-old cousin had been killed in a car accident in Iowa. I sent a quick e-mail to the Rise Out students, telling them I wouldn’t be able to make our last meeting but encouraging them to go on without me, and then turned my attention to packing. I left Boston that same night, too distracted to think about anything but my family. Had the whole class collapsed because of my last-minute absence, I’m not sure I would have noticed. At that moment, my mind was elsewhere.

But then a remarkable thing happened. Something that made me realize why I like doing this work in the first place.

A few days before the group was set to meet, I checked my e-mail in Iowa and saw that I’d received a polite note from Alex, age 17, one of Rise Out’s student participants. He gave me his condolences, and then asked if I had a facilitator in mind for the meeting I could not attend. If not, he and his brother, Owen — another student participant — offered to organize it in my absence. Of course I agreed.

A week later Alex e-mailed me the notes from that meeting: the meeting I (naively) worried they couldn’t manage without me. I’m including it here, with Alex’s permission, because I think it wonderfully illustrates that once you have Independent in place, Education and Project will naturally follow:

“Hi Laura,

I hope you’re doing well! Friday’s meeting was more or less a success.

Matthew started for us. He’s been talking with various people involved with his internship. One of them explained to him that the MIT “Build Your Own Drone” workshop wants to follow his project and watch it, which is exciting. That was all he really had to say, but he did go over some math stuff with Eddy and Owen as well. The content of that talk is lost on me (as math is not my strong suit).

Owen presented some work in Python that he had been doing lately. This included a program he calls the “Cracker”, which generates a random 3-digit password and then sets about trying to find the password. The Cracker did not quite work as intended though, because upon finding the password, it would continue to search and wouldn’t stop. Owen and Matthew looked at the code itself while I conveniently avoided that by talking with Eddy about Sebastian and about the difficulties of writing sheet music.

Then it was my turn. I displayed a video I had made, featuring a song of mine set to a slideshow. Upon its completion, I gave Eddy and Matthew a small questionnaire I had made, asking for their general opinions on what I do and asking if they know any artists that I could try to create cover art for my album with. With that, I had nothing more to add and so I ended my turn far ahead of schedule.

Finally, Eddy’s turn arrived. It turns out, he has built a large, clunky model of his invention. Also, upon plugging it into his computer, he could use a program made in Visual C++ that would display the results of the measuring. At this point, a small coding debate broke out because Matthew considers the Visual version of C++ as cheating, while Eddy and Owen defended the system. It was a civil debate, but then Eddy’s computer ran out of battery so his turn also came to an end.

The last 30 minutes of the meeting were filled up by Eddy asking Matthew an intense math question. The idea behind it seemed to be that Eddy needs to make a robot and wants to know if there’s a way to program it to go in an arc towards a destination. This seemingly simple question was not as simple as one might think, and it took about 30 minutes to even come close to an answer. I meanwhile tried to stay awake (trigonometry is boring, what can I say?). Upon reaching 12 PM, Eddy and Matthew dashed off, talking about math, leaving Owen and I to put all the chairs back (not that we minded, of course).

So that, therefore, concludes this report of the meeting. I hope you enjoyed, and have yourself a merry little Chri… Umm, I mean, Holiday Season!”

— Alex LaRosa

I’ve been teaching for over a dozen years, and never have I felt so gloriously irrelevant. The stated goal, in all my professional development workshops, is that we, as educators, do our tasks so well that we work ourselves out of a job. A wonderful goal! But one we never really expect to happen.

Yet here I am. Convinced yet again that as adults we give ourselves too much credit.

Rise Out’s first students take different paths to college

Rise Out’s Indiegogo campaign has come to end. Thank you so much to everyone who contributed. Having a scholarship fund has helped us get off the ground as a new organization, starting with the support of two talented students.

Rise Out’s very first student has started taking college classes as she finishes her last semester at an alternative high school. She plans to become a teacher in an area of Boston that has had difficulty retaining qualified educators. She is already an advocate for children and the arts, as well as for girls and LGBT students who face bullying and gender stereotyping in school. I’m excited that she’s been working with us, because the country needs more smart teachers who love learning for its own sake, but who also understand that there are many valid reasons that students might disengage with school. She’ll be applying her personal experience with non-traditional education, concretely and directly, in her future career, thus paying forward the contributions of everyone who supported our summer campaign.

Rise Out’s second student moved across the country in the final semester of her senior year. Her new city offered few solutions for credit recovery; she was told that she needed to re-enroll in high school full-time and start her senior year all over again, even though she was only one credit shy of her diploma. By working with Rise Out, she was able to get approval to take one self-paced course online and transfer it back to her old school, allowing her to graduate much sooner. She’s now exploring her college options, as well as work and study opportunities abroad.

Two different students, in different circumstances, with different future goals, but both have been able to benefit from an individualized approach as they transition from high school to college.

Rise Out is launching!

Once just an idea, then a Tumblr account, then a Facebook group, Rise Out, Inc. is now a nonprofit organization incorporated in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. We will be launching on July 1, 2012. Very exciting!

Rise Out will provide academic counseling to Boston-area teens who want to leave high school (with or without a diploma) in order to create their own individualized, self-designed, one-of-a-kind education — an education where learning is paramount, but school is optional.

We’re currently filling out approximately sixteen thousand tax forms, which we hope will impress the kindly folk at the Internal Revenue Service. If they approve our nonprofit mission and grant us 501(c)(3) status, we — like Gandalf and Yoda before us — will be able to provide sage academic wisdom at no charge to students with financial need, and we’ll be able to give scholarships to students who want to take classes, workshops, or participate in activities around Boston. We’re also setting aside some money to give to financially strapped students who want to design projects of their own, like starting a business, or setting up a home art studio.

Rise Out, The Nonprofit Organization (as opposed to the less impressive Rise Out, The Tumblr Page) is made possible through the generosity of a donor who liked our idea and has agreed to pay our start-up costs. However, we’ll still need to do more fundraising to cover the cost of scholarships. We’ll be starting a crowdfunding campaign soon, but in the meantime feel free to visit our Support page and donate. Even small gifts make a difference!