Hey guys! My name is Daniel Spencer. I’ve been homeschooled my whole life, I love to read, et cetera. But I’ve already told you this in every single introduction video I’ve made for a Williamsburg class, ever. This time, I’d like to go a little deeper

 

I’ve been homeschooled my whole life. To begin my education, my parents taught me to read at the tender age of three. Ever since then, I’ve read everything I can get my hands on. I can’t fully explain why I love reading so much, but I come close when I say that I can almost see the events of the book’s miniature world unfolding before me.

 

When I was five, I was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a kind of high-functioning autism. The downside: I would have difficulties reading body language and other social cues. Thus, I would have some problems making and keeping friends. The upside: I had the mindpower I needed to be able to learn anything I wanted to. That was just the motivation I needed to throw myself into my education with everything I had. I decided to learn everything I could about everything I could.

 

Several years later, I took some online classes for a program called Leadership Education Academy. I was twelve, and I hadn’t blocked my love for learning. I was having fun, but I wanted more. This was when Dallin Flake introduced me to Williamsburg Academy, and told me that they were starting a Junior High. I’m very thankful for Dallin. He gave me just the opportunity I’d been craving. My first (and only) year in Williamsburg Intermediate was a dream come true. I learned more in my year at WI than I had learned in any other year that I could remember.

 

I went to Elevation for the first time in the August after my year at WI. Not only was it a cool camp, it was also a life-changing experience. I learned so much about myself as I was helped along a path of discovery by the coolest people I’d ever met. They didn’t just accept me, as others had done for a time, they EMBRACED me, which was almost a foreign concept to me; even among my group of fellow Homeschoolers, I had usually been the outcast or the ignored.

 

But more was yet to come. My first year at Williamsburg Academy was the coolest school year I’d ever had. I was so sad when summer came! I hope I wasn’t the only one who was DYING for Elevation to come so that I could see my friends and mentors again. And come it did. Every year of Williamsburg and Elevation has changed me, but none shifted my perspective quite so much as my second year. In my second year, embracing others wasn’t quite as unknown to me, so I was able to find the courage within myself to reach out to others. It felt so worthwhile, I haven’t stopped since.

 

The last two years of Williamsburg have flown by. I’ve changed, helped others change, and then I’ve changed some more. Williamsburg has helped me get a step closer to my goal of learning everything, but it’s also changed my goal: I still strive to learn for myself, but now I put just as high a priority on embracing others for who they really are. The senior motto this year is this quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no path and leave a trail.” I took the rather unconventional path of homeschooling, and the still less known path of Williamsburg. Because of my time in Williamsburg, I’ve seen that there’s more out there to learn than five-year-old me thought was possible, but because of my path-making friends at Elevation, I’ve seen that I find just as much happiness in deep, powerful relationships as I find in learning about the world around me. They took me at a critical crossroad and dragged me into the better path for me. I do believe that I’ve followed their paths more than I’ve created my own, but if everyone took a completely different path, we wouldn’t be able to find any common ground. Only as I stand on the shoulders of my friends, the giants at Williamsburg, can I see how far I’ve truly come.