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individual
projects |
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Projects
The backbone of
each person's individual work while staying at The Dream House will be a
personal project. You will choose your project the first week of the
session (or you may arrive already knowing what you want to do).
You'll be coached
to envision it (even if you arrive with a plan, you may want to adapt or
enlarge it after attending our visioning workshop), then to plan exactly
how to go about undertaking it. You may want to enlist the help of our
resource coordinator, and each member will team up with another member to
act as a "project buddy." You'll meet several times a week with
your buddy to check in and encourage each other.
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You'll also
enlist other members, staff, etc., to help you with your project. (Each of
us will contribute 10 or more hours of time to "the pot," so
that we can benefit from each others' skills. You might offer help by typing, coaching in a foreign language,
drawing illustrations or logos, or driving people to places public
transportation doesn't go. And you might take advantage of other people's
offers to design web pages, teach swing dancing, or help with grunt
work--collate a zine or post fliers around the neighborhood.)
Throughout the
session we'll have weekly workshops to help you break through obstacles
and keep moving along, on topics like creative complaining, asking for
what you want, using flow charts, re-defining projects in process,
etc.
The last week of
the session is largely devoted to sharing the results of these
projects--each person will offer a workshop related to his project (we may
open some of these workshops to local homeschoolers or other folks), and
present it in an evening banquet/talent show, and contribute one or two
pages to our "dream book" zine (a lot like Not Back to
School Camp bliss books). Some members may choose to plan group or partner
projects, instead of, or in addition to, individual projects.
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Though you may
choose additional projects and activities, we'll encourage you to focus on
one main project. We'll ask you to spend ten or more hours per week on it.
You may want to spend significantly more time, but we keep the minimum
commitment low since some members may want lots of time to explore the Bay
Area, get to know friends, hone their new cooking and gardening skills,
try out a variety of new interests inspired by other members and staff,
work on other projects, work at a job, etc. But if you’re not busy with
other things, we recommend that you spend as much as twenty or more hours
per week on your project.
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Projects need not
be (but can be) academic. They could be just about anything that feels
worthwhile, challenging, and interesting. For example, you could:
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produce a play--one you wrote, or Shakespeare, or your adaptation of a
fairy tale. Enlist members, or neighborhood kids, or the residents of
a nursing home, as your actors. |
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Using Oakland's wild, extensive parks, San Francisco's Golden Gate
Park, a nearby seashore, or just our own backyard, complete a
naturalist's journal (with sketches and field notes) and a labeled
collection of seashells, rocks, leaves, pressed wildflowers, feathers,
or bones. |
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apprentice to someone--a museum curator, costume designer, potter, or
chemist--and complete a project they suggest. |
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Volunteer or intern with an organization you like and work with them
to design a project that benefits them. |
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Write a short story, a poem, an essay, and a song. |
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Create a zine about one of your favorite subjects. |
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Interview
old people who've lived in Oakland or San Francisco all their lives.
Write up their oral histories and publish them on a web site, in a
zine, or as a book. |
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Photograph interiors and exteriors of a hundred interesting buildings
in San Francisco. Ask an architect to go over your photos with you and
point out interesting features. Make a scrapbook with architectural
notes. |
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Write a book. |
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Make a music video. |
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Learn to play the flute. |
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Choose an inspiring personal growth/self-help book, and work through
all of it, doing all the suggested exercises. Keep a record of them in
a notebook. |
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Design a routine for yourself and stick to it--yoga, meditation,
journal writing, running, etc. |
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Design a web page |
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Design and build a desk. |
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Learn to use a sophisticated computer program, such as Pagemaker, and
complete a project using it. |
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Learn a computer programming language. |
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Learn to speak Spanish, Cantonese, or Thai. |
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Learn capoiera, contact improvisation, trapeze dancing, or Skinner
releasing technique. Or ballet, or martial arts, or rock climbing... |
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Keep a detailed journal of your dreams. |
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Color the whole Anatomy Coloring Book, and visit a cadaver lab. |
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Build a cob bench. |
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Work through Math: A Human Endeavor, or All
the Math You'll Ever Need, or another good math textbook. Then
give a workshop for local kids and adults who are math phobic. |
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Make a comic journal of your life so far, or of your time at the Dream
House. |
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read Thomas Armstrong's Seven
Kinds of Smart and focus on developing your least developed type
of intelligence, by following the book's suggestions. |
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Read 10 Shakespeare plays, and go see live productions of some; watch
videos of others. Memorize and perform a monologue from one of them.
Read a few cricital essays about your favorite play. |
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Read 20 of the great classics, using Clifton Fadiman's Lifetime
Reading Plan as a guide. Enlist other members to read one book
each along with you. |
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Take a college level class in statistics, or calculus, or
anthropology, or... |
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Investigate 10 natural health professions and visit schools and choose
a field to enter. |
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Presenting
your project
At the end of the
session, we encourage each person to present her project to the group in
several ways:
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presentation during one of our closing banquets—a brief talk,
demonstration, performance, slide show, mini-workshop, etc. |
| teach
a workshop to the other members (and possibly local homeschoolers,
etc.) |
| contribute
a page or two to our Dream Book |
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your project culminates in something duplicable and tangible—like a
zine, video, research paper, CD, or collection of short
stores—we’ll ask you to leave behind a copy for our archives. |
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