Work & Achievement · A Decembers list
Every school that ever had your name on a roster
The cloakroom with everyone's coat on a hook. The smell of the cafeteria at eleven-thirty. The teacher who called on you when you hadn't raised your hand.
This is the list for all of them, first grade to the last diploma. One school a line, and more when a place earned it.
Free to start. Private from the first word.
Where this list lives
This is a list in Decembers — the place a life gets written down one question at a time.
Decembers asks the questions no one thought to ask, keeps the answers in one permanent Chronicle, and holds them on one Timeline that reads in order. You answer. Decembers does the writing.
- Lists
- A list for every kind of life, and every turn one takes. Pick one and start answering.
- Timeline
- Your answers arrange themselves in order. Seeing a whole life laid out this way is something else.
- Inner Circle
- Not social media. The few people you name are the only ones it is ever shared with.
Begin with one list. The rest follows.
One line is enough
Name one school and the rest come with it "" the walk there, the friend who saved you a seat, the door you went in the first day and out the last.
A transcript records the grades and the dates. It says nothing about the substitute who read to you after lunch, or the year they tore down the old wing and built the new one, or the bus route that took forty minutes because it looped through every farm road in the county. Those things live nowhere official. They live in you, and only for as long as somebody writes them down.
So you write one school at a time. What it was called, where it stood, how big it was, whether you started there scared and left it sure of yourself or the other way around. A book about your schooling would never get started. A line about the first one will, and the next one is easier, and by the end there's a record no registrar ever kept.
How it works
- 01
Pick this list
It’s waiting, already written. There is no blank page to face.
- 02
Fill in what comes
A year, a line, a photograph. Five minutes or an hour.
- 03
Invite who was there
They add what you forgot. You decide what stays.
- 04
Share it, or don’t
One quiet page for your Inner Circle. No link, no feed.
The schools that come up first
The first classroom
The one where you learned it was possible to be somewhere all day without your mother. Maybe it was a two-room country school, maybe a big brick building with a flag out front. You remember the coat hook, the reading circle, the smell of paste and pencil shavings.
The middle years
Junior high or middle school, when you changed rooms for every subject and had a locker for the first time. Bigger, louder, and full of kids from schools you'd never heard of. This is where you learned who your real friends were.
The last one
High school, trade school, college, the service course that gave you a certificate, night classes for the job. Whatever the final one was, it's where the schooling ended and the rest of it began. Some people are still in touch with the people they met there.
Level by level
- Elementary
- Grades one through six or eight, often the closest school to home, sometimes small enough that the principal knew every name.
- Junior high
- The awkward stretch of seventh and eighth grade, changing classes and pretending you knew where the gym was.
- High school
- Four years, a class of a few dozen or a few hundred, a mascot you'd still defend and a diploma with the date on it.
- Trade & technical
- Where you learned a skill with your hands "" welding, cosmetology, drafting, nursing "" and walked out able to do the work.
- College
- A campus you either finished or left, a major you kept or switched, a roommate you may still call.
- Later courses
- Night classes, correspondence courses, training the company paid for, a class you took just because you wanted to.
Other lists you may like
Start with any one of them. Every answer lands on the same Timeline.
Begin
A record of every room that ever taught you something
Start with the first one "" the name of the school and the street it stood on. The rest of them are waiting right behind it.