personal curriculum: spring semester, 2026

things i'd like to learn about this season

Source: @yussiss on Pinterest

When I returned to Substack after some time away, my feed filled with a trend I hadn’t seen before — the personal curriculum. I stumbled upon all sorts of overviews and approaches to self-study across an astonishingly wide variety of subjects, and I found myself enjoying reading what others want to learn about!

Turns out, Elizabeth Jean is the TikTok creator behind the “personal curriculum” term, but I think this trend (as a response to the rise of generative AI, perhaps?) was a long time coming. I just read a thoughtful article that makes a point that the concept “harks back to the studia humanitatis of the Renaissance, when studying the arts in one’s spare time was simply the done thing.”¹

Immediately inspired, I started making lists of things I want to study. While I didn’t make any real New Year’s resolutions last week, one of them very well could’ve been have my nose in a book more often.

My hope is to keep this as analog as possible. With the exception of language-learning (I use an entirely audio-based lesson program called Language Transfer... but I wonder now if lessons could be burned on CDs to play on my Discman or in the car!), all of my materials will be screenless. Coursework won’t require YouTube videos or online articles — I want to make lots of trips to the library instead!

Here’s my personal curriculum for January—May!

---

Subject: Language — Spanish

Materials:

• Language Transfer (audio)

• The Berlitz Self-Teacher (book)

• journal

Sometime around the middle of 2025, I decided that I’d like to seriously study Spanish and stick to it. My partner is from the Dominican Republic, and I dream of communicating better with his lovely family! I’ve been slowly learning bits and pieces since then — studying on my own, practicing with him, and listening to his family’s conversations — but I’d like to take it up a notch and devote more time to it.

I took two years of Spanish in high school during the pandemic, but I retained next to nothing from those classes, unfortunately. (On the other hand, I remember a lot of Latin from the other two years — one of the foundational pieces of the Language Transfer teaching method — and it’s been an enormous help in learning Spanish vocabulary!) Now, I want to add The Berlitz Self-Teacher book to my lineup. Of course, the most helpful way to learn has just been talking to my boyfriend and asking questions (especially for the Latin American and Dominican-specific ways of speaking)!

Subject: Literature

Course: Gothic Classics

Materials:

• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

• Dracula by Bram Stoker

• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

• Beloved by Toni Morrison

As I’m writing a novel that would be classified as gothic fantasy, I’ve been excited to backtrack and read the gothic classics I missed! I actually really struggled to narrow this list down from 15+ gothic novels on my TBR list, but I wanted to be realistic about what I’ll have space for, especially since I hope to continue reading a few other novels at the same time.

During and after reading, I will annotate and take notes on things that stood out to me. Maybe, if I have the time, I’ll write an essay or two worth sharing.

Subject: Music

Course: Piano

Materials:

• John W. Schaum’s Piano Courses (books)

• notebooks

I took a few piano lessons as a kid and then again for a while in high school. However, my music-reading skills are severely underdeveloped, despite how decently I can play by ear. I already spend ten or twenty minutes a day playing for fun, usually memorizing my favorite film or video game soundtracks. Now, I want to return to the foundations to get a better grasp of reading music to keep at it!

Subject: Art

Course: Printmaking

Materials:

• Speedball block printing kit

• printing blocks

• inking plate

• sketchbooks

A few years ago, I fell in love with an art style that ended up being pretty particular to block printmaking, and I’ve been fascinated by the process of this medium ever since. In 2024, I even got to participate in a little printmaking workshop where I pulled a print of another artist’s work! Last year, I bought a kit and all of the materials I’ll need to try it out on my own, so here goes nothing.

---

If you’re building a curriculum of your own this year, I’d love to hear what’s on it — let me know in a comment below!

---

1. Marks, Rebecca. 2025, October 7. Setting Your Personal Curriculum, The Culture Dump. https://culturedump.substack.com/p/setting-your-personal-curriculum

Setting your 'Personal Curriculum'