A School of Our Own

by Samuel Levin

  In the Independent Project, questions were going to be more important than answers. In fact, rather than peripheral, questions would be central. Because knowing how to ask good questions and how to use them to guide your search for answers was much more important than knowing a bunch of answers. And that empty saying about there being no bad questions was just wrong, another way to trivialize the importance of questions. (Imagine how a hardworking author would feel if you said there’s no such thing as a bad book.) Questions do differ in their quality, and learning how to construct a good one is essential to becoming a better learner.

  The game I designed was simple. One person leaves the room. The rest of the group agrees on something about that person (say, the name of his dog) that no one in the group knows. When the person comes back in the room, everyone else is trying to find out that fact about the person, but they can’t ask the question directly. The person is trying to find out what the others are trying to find out. If the group gets the answer (Rover) to their question first, they win. If the person figures out their question (“You’re trying to find out my dog’s name”) before they learn the answer, he wins.

  It’s a simple, fun game, but it served several purposes. One, questions were going to be important in the IP, more important than answers. In the game, the dog’s name doesn’t really matter; what matters is coming up with questions that are cleverly constructed to find the answer without revealing intent. The person who left the room is trying to sift through the questions being asked to find out the real question that they are circling. The more you play the game, the more you learn about questions.

  And that was the second purpose. Before then, we had rarely been asked to think about the construction of questions. But as we played, we were forced to think about the differences between what and how questions, about the value of broad versus specific questions, about how different questions lead to different answers. And finally, the game got us to start practicing the art of asking questions.

  When I tell people I study curiosity in childhood, I virtually always get the same response: “Oh, how fascinating. It’s so important. It’s the key to learning.” I’ve yet to run into an educator who says, “Curiosity is dangerous. It should be suppressed.” And yet, a close look inside most classrooms will show that curiosity is rarely encouraged. Often it isn’t even tolerated (“I’ll answer that later”; “This is not a good time to raise your hand”; “That’s not the topic we are discussing today”; “We don’t have time for questions”). As Sam said, even when teachers welcome a question, they see it as a door to an answer, or a nice reminder that some of the students are actually interested in the topic. Rare is the classroom where teachers treat questions as the topic, helping students learn the difference between the strong and weak form of a question, or between questions that can be answered with data and those that cannot (the difference between “Which political party is better?” and “Which political party has reduced the crime rate?”).

  Research shows that by the time children are preschoolers they are determined investigators—they use questions to get answers they desperately want about the natural and social world. But when they get to school they ask far fewer questions and receive far fewer answers to the questions they most care about. It’s safe to say that whatever they learned when they were three about how to ask a good question is the last time they get some guidance about how to inquire. Students who go on in academia must pick up where every three-year-old left off, figuring out the best way to frame a question and how to go about answering it. Why wouldn’t this be something we’d teach in high school?

  The Independent Project room looked like a photograph that had been desaturated, sapped of all its color. The room’s walls were drab beige. There was a drab beige table, with hard plastic chairs around it. There was a drab beige locker-room-tile floor. The lights were fluorescent and horrible. It was just really, really ugly.

  This drove Mirabelle crazy. She couldn’t imagine spending a semester holed up in this shithole. So she ordered all of us to bring in whatever decorations we could get our hands on at home. Dominic brought an old lamp; I brought a rug I found in my garage. Everyone brought in books from home so that we could establish our own library. Slowly the room started to fill with appealing, cozy objects and artifacts. Still, the decorations didn’t solve the problem of the world’s dullest walls. So Mirabelle decided we would paint a mural. Though many of us (the worst culprit being me) were terrible artists, Mirabelle, Sarah, and Tim were gifted enough and, regardless of mural quality, painting it was loads of fun.

  But it was more than just fun. None of us had ever had the chance to have a say over how our school looked. Maybe in elementary school we had been tasked with cutting out turkeys at Thanksgiving, which were then hung around the classroom. Or, in one or two truly exceptional high school classes, we were allowed to decide how the desks were arranged. But let’s be honest: that’s pretty minor. In fact, looking back, it’s funny to think that choosing our desk layout was ever a big deal to us.

  Now, in the Independent Project, we were being allowed to literally paint the walls how we wished. A small thing, perhaps, in and of itself, but part of something bigger, and something essential, which would only grow as time went on. For the first time in our lives, we had control over meaningful aspects of our education. And though it was taking a little while to get comfortable with, we were already starting to love it.

  Perhaps our best addition to the room was turning one of the walls into an object-based group journal. It was already decided, as part of our assessment, that everyone had to keep two journals for the entirety of the Independent Project: one for academics and one for Individual Endeavors. But someone during that first week suggested we should also have a collective journal. So we divided one of the walls into sections, one for each week of the semester. At the end of each week, everyone had to attach something to the wall that captured that week for him or her. I think it was Tim who coined the name: the Encoded Story Wall of Time.

  When I heard about Tim’s “Encoded Story Wall of Time,” a crazy refrain kept going through my head, “Hmm, which do I choose? Encoded Story Wall of Time or SWiBAT Wall of Time? Or SWiBAT?” And each time I thought of it I wanted to laugh out loud at the absurdity of the contrast. For those who are not familiar with some of the newer techniques in schools across the country, SWiBAT is a common acronym, used to make sure that teachers and children stay on task, and that students understand what they are supposed to be learning. The acronym stands for “students will be able to.” The idea behind it is reasonable enough. One way to make sure teachers make good use of the time they have with their students is to keep them focused on specific educational objectives. Among other things, so the thinking goes, if they have a clear objective, they will know whether they have met it or not, and so will those who evaluate them. By the same token, if the day’s SWiBAT is written on the board (as it is supposed to be) then students, too, can zero in on a specific and attainable goal.

  It isn’t a crazy thought. Too often in the past, students had no idea why they were doing a particular assignment, reading a particular book, or practicing some strange—and to them meaningless—task. SWiBATs were introduced to get everyone on the same page. But in addition, SWiBATs supposedly tapped into an important scientific finding from the 1970s, namely, that one of the most powerful ingredients of intellectual growth is the ability to monitor your own thoughts and learning: metacognition. When Ann Brown first demonstrated through her experiments that the ability to notice one’s own mental processes greatly enhanced learning, teachers and principals embraced the idea. That is why, starting in the early 1980s, you would often hear administrators stopping by a classroom to ask students, “What are you trying to learn today?” They wanted to make sure that children not only were learning things but also could explain to others what they were learning. They thought this meant the children were using metacognitive processes. But being able to tell a grown-up wh
at you are working on is not the same as being aware of what you are learning and why it matters to you.

  Whatever the intention, in practice SWiBATs have little to do with metacognition, self-reflection, or any sense of ownership over one’s own intellectual processes. They simply turn every lesson into a rush toward a concrete and measurable goal. But Tim’s Encoded Story Wall of Time—the crazy name and the funny-looking twelve-foot-tall collage of students’ intellectual souvenirs—now, that seemed to me like one very exuberant, expressive, but authentic way to get students to think about what kinds of knowledge and skills they were acquiring, and how they were acquiring them.

  That first week was a lot of fun. But it wasn’t all fun. I mentioned that one of the exercises we did was to teach one another things. It was a great exercise and almost everyone was really into it, except for Erik. Erik, or Rix, as everyone called him, came from a family of non-school people. His older brother had dropped out. He himself, at his best, failed many of his classes or just scraped by. Teachers didn’t like him and he didn’t like them. At his worst, he cut class or didn’t show up to school at all. He admitted, later on, that when he first heard about the Independent Project, he thought it was stupid. Mr. Huron had to convince him to do it, because his options were running out.

  The day we taught each other things, he hung back, not engaging. The whole morning he had seemed a bit like a bully in the corner of the playground, with his backward flat-peak cap, his baggy pants, and his ultra-oversized T-shirt, looking on half with disinterest and half with disgust. I couldn’t help but feel, at times, like he was sending me a message telepathically: “I’ve seen this before. These corny exercises. You’re wasting my time.” And I started to worry that maybe I was.

  When everyone else had had their turn, Tim said, “Rix, what about you?” He grunted and stood up, and for the next five minutes he did teach us something. But considering we had a day’s warning to prepare, it wasn’t much. He taught us how to cut paper without scissors—basically an exercise in excessive folding. It seemed like something he thought of at the last minute, right when Tim asked him. Worse, it seemed like a dismissal of the whole exercise: “Look at how meaningless this is.” And again, I started to worry that maybe it was. Was I making the same mistakes I was trying to fix?

  Within two weeks, Rix showed me just how unnecessary my worry was—a story I’ll save for a later chapter. But I bring it up to make it clear that it wasn’t all rainbows and butterflies that first week. I had moments of severe self-doubt, bouts of fear, times when my stomach would lurch and I’d think, for the hundredth time, “What am I doing here?”

  Still, these moments of anxiety were far outweighed by all the amazing things I saw that first week. I came to school that first day terrified. And I left walking on clouds. I was elated, partly because of some of the stories I’ve mentioned here, because of some of the things that happened in the beginning that showed me a glimpse of what we might achieve in the coming semester. But mostly it was because we had survived. We had our first day of a student-run school, and we hadn’t burned the place down, we hadn’t beaten one another up, we didn’t even puncture any of the basketballs that took up a good chunk of our one-room schoolhouse. I think that’s what a first day is really about.

  At the very end of that day, we had a discussion about school up until then, and what we didn’t like about it. You can imagine that, with any group of high school kids, if they felt truly free to be honest, that discussion could get a little heated. And it certainly did. At times it was funny. “I mean, it’s just so ridiculous that we don’t get to have any say over what we learn. We’re seventeen years old!” said Mirabelle. She didn’t know why that made me laugh so hard and, of course, I couldn’t tell her what that teacher had yelled in the CSC meeting—how ridiculous it was to think that seventeen-year-olds could learn on their own.

  At times it was unsurprising. There were plenty of the usual complaints. “It’s just so frickin’ boring.” “I feel like half the teachers just don’t even like us.” “We have so much homework, it takes all night to do it, so they force me to choose between school and the things I love, like filmmaking.” At times people shocked me, bringing up things I had never thought of. Dakota said, “I’ve taken the top English classes all through high school. And in three years I’ve only read two novels. What the hell’s the point?” Mr. Huron chimed in at one point to say, “You know, every day in my office, and down at the garden, I see the potential that exists within these walls. And often, even though no one means to do it, that potential gets squashed.” And, at times, it was really upsetting. Dominic, who was slow to open up that first day, finally said, speaking to the floor, his head almost in his lap, “I’ve just been made to feel stupid for the last couple years. I’m not stupid; I know I’m not. But whenever I walk through those doors, I feel stupid.”

  Finally, after two hours, the conversation petered out. We had all vented our frustrations with school. And it felt good. We felt purged. We laughed at ourselves a little. “Wow,” said Tim, “I just blacked out for the last hour. What did I say?”

  Then I told them the real reason for the discussion (other than having a satisfying vent). “Okay,” I said. “That’s it. We’ve complained now. But no more complaining this semester. Because there’s no one to complain to anymore. Your education is now in your hands. If there’s something you don’t like, fix it. If you can’t fix it on your own, come to the group and ask us to help you fix it. There’s no longer anyone who can swoop in to save you, and equally, there’s no one else you can lay the blame on if you’re not learning. For the next semester, it’s all up to us.”

  The final bell rang, and, amazingly, no one jumped out of their seats. Mr. Huron smiled and said, “That one you should still listen to.” Everyone packed their bags and started to shuffle out of the room. We didn’t have much time to spare, because the girls’ volleyball team and their coach would be moving in any minute. But as we left, Tim turned and put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Sam,” he said, “this was the best first day of school ever.”

  When you plan your first day, there are two opposite things to keep in mind: it matters a lot, and it’s okay if you mess up. Typically, teachers use the first day to deal with logistics and to clarify expectations and rules. The implicit assumption is that their audience must stay for the whole show, so if things are tedious, or simply procedural at first, it’s no big deal. But actually, beginnings are pivotal and will affect the middle and the end.

  It’s important to set the tone, to make sure students begin the way you hope they’ll proceed (active, engaged, interested in one another, in charge of their own education). Ordinarily, this involves students being told what school will be like (what they’ll be learning, what the structure of the day will be, what the goals are). In your school, you need to put your money where your mouth is.

  At some point every young writer hears the advice, “Show, don’t tell.” The same is true for your school. Don’t tell them what they will experience during the coming term or year. Give them their first taste. Think up activities that bring the core concepts alive. It might not be reading a book or finding the classroom, but whatever it is, it’s essential that the students are doing, not being told. In some cases you will want to think of activities that simply turn things on their head. Again, some advice borrowed from writers: make the familiar strange. Help students rethink some things they thought they knew well (like the idea that teachers have all the answers, or that reading is dull). You don’t need to cover everything. In fact you don’t need to cover anything. You just need to get started.

  Which brings us to the second, seemingly opposite point. It’s okay if not all of the first day goes well, or if some activity is a flop. To begin with, if nothing else, students will begin to discover that learning is based on making mistakes, not avoiding them. And it’s only the beginning. Everyone will have plenty of time to retool, try alternatives, and find their way.

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  ASSUME EVERYONE IS AN INTELLECTUAL

  One of the great missteps of high school education has been the idea that only some kids are intellectuals, or want to be. That only some students can grapple with complex ideas, and the others should be given the boiled-down versions of those ideas. That only some kids will be interested in abstractions, and the others should be taught through real-life applications. That only some children will be engaged by things that have no utility in their own lives, and the others need to be taught via contextualization that fits their backgrounds and futures. That only some can love books, or enjoy reading, and the others just need to be taught their ABCs, or how to read a job application.

  If you’re going to follow this path—to treat only some kids as if they’re capable of serious thinking for its own sake—then your school probably isn’t worth starting. All students have a right to become better thinkers in school. And all students have the ability to be intellectuals, to thirst for knowledge, to participate in a thoughtful community, to grapple with complex problems. This chapter is about how to act accordingly, and what happens when you do.

  Since that first year of the Independent Project I’ve had a lot of chances to describe it to people. If it’s the right audience, I see people nodding enthusiastically. Yeah! Power to the kids! Autonomy! Engagement! Then at some point I get to the part where I say, “So for the next semester, in the mornings, we focused on academics; the natural and social sciences, English literature and writing, and mathematics.” And I see people’s eyebrows bunch up, like, “Huh?” Sometimes, someone will come up to me afterward and say, “Really cool idea, love it, but . . . if you had the freedom to let the students do whatever they wanted, why did you force them to do academics?”