A School of Our Own

by Samuel Levin

  And in the end, it wasn’t me who decided something needed to be done. Around two-thirds of the way through the semester, the group spoke up. At that point, Sarah often missed Friday teachings, missed school altogether, spent the day in the art room, sat silently in the corner. She chose our second book, The Importance of Being Earnest, but then didn’t read anyone else’s. So one day, when Sarah had once again missed morning check-in, Tim spoke up. We were all sitting around the table when he said, “Listen, Sam. We’ve been talking. We want to have an intervention with Sarah. It’s really not fair to the rest of us that she doesn’t do any work. She’s bringing the whole program down. We don’t want the IP to fail because of her.”

  I was surprised. I had been so focused on Sarah, I hadn’t thought about how the rest of the group might feel about it.

  “Does everyone feel this way?” I said.

  They nodded. Clearly they had talked about it already. “It’s not just what Tim said, though that’s part of it,” said John. “It’s also not right for us to let her just throw the semester away.”

  I had no idea the group was so upset by her lack of commitment. But they were. They took it as a personal offense when she didn’t do her work. So Mr. Huron and I talked about it, and we decided that we would have an intervention, as long as we could all agree on certain ground rules. No character assassinations. Focus not on the way she was, but on what she had done. And focus not on her, but on how it made each of us feel. The group agreed. And actually, I was amazed by how tactful, honest, and direct they were when talking to Sarah.

  She cried. She told us how much we all meant to her, that all she had ever wanted to do was impress us, that she felt like she always let us down and that nothing she did was ever good enough for us. Several people in the group were touched and felt really bad about the whole thing.

  But Mr. Huron and I experienced it differently. We saw a side of Sarah neither of us had seen before, or at least had ever been willing to admit was there. She was deceitful and manipulative, and it worried both of us. It was a turning point but, as I said, one that came too late. We started to realize how much of what she had told us wasn’t true. Many of her lies started to unravel. Her art teacher said she had barely done any work. We decided it was time to confront her about her Individual Endeavor, and she admitted to having done nothing.

  When it finally came time to do our public presentations of our Individual Endeavors, she sat onstage and talked about her life and about how even though she hadn’t succeeded in doing an Individual Endeavor, by failing she had learned a lot about herself, more than she had in the rest of her life. Many members of the audience were clearly moved, impressed by her honesty, courage, and boldness. But the other Indies and I were embarrassed and frustrated.

  Mr. Huron and I talked at length about how to handle it.

  “We need to fail her,” I said.

  “No,” said Mr. Huron. “That wouldn’t be right. If we fail her, Oberlin might revoke her acceptance. We don’t want to ruin her life.”

  “But if we pass her, it will be a kick in the face to the other Indies. It will undermine the whole program,” I said.

  “We can fail her,” he said, “with the option of gaining a partial passing credit if she presents us with a completed Individual Endeavor.”

  It didn’t totally make sense to me, because the IP wasn’t just about completing an endeavor. She couldn’t make up for months of not doing work, of not doing the academics, of lying to us. At the same time, I didn’t want her to not go to college because of the IP. That would be backward. In the end, she gave us a binder full of partially completed scenes of a play, and we gave her partial credit.

  Like I said, I still don’t know what went wrong, not entirely. The fact that she was a senior, had all her credits, and was accepted early decision into college halfway through the semester all turned out to be bad things, not good things. But that’s not to say seniors could never do the IP, because someone else could have made the most of that (after all, I was a senior). It was a mistake to let her do the independent study, I think. But I have no way of knowing for sure. And it might have been better if her Individual Endeavor had been related to the thing she was already committing so much time to, but again, who knows how it would have played out.

  Mr. Huron has always stood by the fact that he’s glad she did the IP her senior year. She had coasted through high school, making up excuses, skirting around failure using manipulation and deceit. And the IP was the first time she had to really face it, had to let failure sit on her lap. He thinks that it will have a good impact on her life, much more so than another semester of coasting through independent studies. I’m still not sure.

  One thing I do know for sure is that I don’t believe her story means that the Independent Project doesn’t work. I don’t even think it reveals a certain “type” for which it will fail. Another kid fitting her profile could have succeeded. I think it points out that no school will ever work for everyone, every year. That’s just impossible. And rather than being afraid of addressing failure, like I was, we should have tackled and grappled with problems like this head-on, from the beginning, because if we had done that, we could have helped a lot more.

  Sarah first trickled into my awareness somewhere in early September. Sam’s first stories about her sketched a jubilant and articulate young woman, brimming with the kind of enthusiasm that seemed a perfect fit for the Independent Project. But the Sarah anecdotes soon shifted. She came late, he said. She hadn’t answered her science question that week. She changed her mind about her Individual Endeavor. She cried. Hearing these bits and pieces, I wanted to come to school, find the girls’ locker room, give Sarah a good pinch, and leave. I’ve been teaching adolescents for a long time. I know a young diva when I see one.

  As her behavior got more outrageous, Sam seemed more beside himself. And hearing the fragments that came my way, I wished Sam would come down hard on her, and sooner rather than later. I fumed that Mr. Huron wasn’t stepping in. I couldn’t understand why the group was so forbearing. But I was on the outside, a mere spectator. Sam waved off my unsolicited comments, explaining that it was a process. I had to pipe down. But I ground my teeth, tapped my foot, and imagined myself striding in there and setting her straight.

  I have never been consistent in my views about teenagers. I love their vibrant energy, their outsized claims and hubris, and their endearing uncertainty. But I hate how self-absorbed they can be, how shallow they can seem, and how taken they are with their own sorrows and grievances. I have very little tolerance for brattiness. I hated watching this petulant girl not do what she was supposed to.

  Somewhere in those early days, when Sarah’s storminess bubbled up and became a serious problem for the IP, I remembered something from forty years before, when I was a girl. My own brother had been a turbulent teenager. Smart, energetic, talented, and engaging, he was also manipulative, resented rules, and had an overpowering hunger for nearly every possible sensation. He got into all kinds of conflicts and jams. That was the sixties, and in a family like mine, it was never clear whether rebellion was a sign of strong-mindedness and political courage or just a sign of trouble. At some point, when my brother was flunking a course at his elite boarding school, my father said, in a lofty and confident tone that impressed my mother (even though they were divorced), “Failure is not an option.” Everyone in the family nodded. Good response. Failure is not an option. Only, a few months later my brother got kicked out of that school, mid-term. My father was wrong. Failure is always an option. And for many teenagers, school failure seems less awful than whatever is plaguing them.

  One approach for dealing with students who fail in one way or another, championed by some psychologists, policy makers, and school principals, is to hold all kids to exacting codes of conduct. A student hits another kid? He’s suspended. A student doesn’t do the work in a class? She flunks and retakes the class. A student is rude to her teacher? She goes to detention. A stude
nt has trouble learning the material? He flunks and retakes the class. A student skips class on a regular basis? She goes to detention. A student has trouble making friends and gets into fights? He gets suspended. A student has a drug problem? She gets suspended. See the crazy pattern here? Very different kinds of problems are all funneled through a narrow set of solutions. The real catch, however, is that they’re not actually solutions. They’re just consequences.

  When I stood back and began to think about that somewhat limited set of options, used all across the country, I realized what they all had in common was that they entailed excluding kids from the very institution we had created to guide them through a vulnerable and pivotal moment in development. Even the solutions that don’t appear to involve banishment, like giving an F, often end up having the impact of pushing kids toward the periphery of the community. One of two things is likely to happen there at the periphery. Either kids begin to dis-identify with high school or they form a new community with all the other kids at the periphery. Neither is an ideal outcome.

  And yet, what are schools to do when kids screw up? The problem facing Sam, the other IP students, and Mr. Huron was no different. Should Sarah fail or be supported? Should they work harder to draw her in, or should they kick her out?

  Dennis Littky fervently believes that the more trouble a kid is having, the more included she must be. In the public high schools he founded in Providence, Rhode Island, kids who screw up are given even more one-on-one time with a devoted teacher, lots of encouragement (and pushing) to follow through on projects, and lots of support (and pressure) from their peers. Littky’s teachers call kids at night to see what they’re up to, drive them to the grocery store, get to know their families—each and every one of those teachers is instructor and social worker.

  Littky isn’t the only one to have used this approach. In almost every town there are devoted teachers and guidance counselors who live by that same principle: that the more trouble a kid is having, the more time and attention that kid needs. Often that attention is part friendship (“Let’s shoot some hoops after school”; “I brought in this CD I thought you’d like”; “Why not stop in here and eat lunch with me?”), part practical support (“I’ve arranged for you to take the late bus so you can work on the school newspaper”; “I called your parents—they agreed to let you try out for volleyball”), and part stern taskmaster (“You’ve been wasting my time and yours—get with the program”; “I’m disappointed in your work recently; what’s going on?”). When a kid really likes a teacher and wants to be liked in return, she is much more likely to respond well to admonishments, consequences, and expressions of disappointment.

  But there are two drawbacks to Littky’s approach. One is that teachers who throw themselves so fully into the lives of their students burn out or cannot possibly help every kid who needs it. The great advantage of the Independent Project was that for every kid in trouble, there were seven other kids who could push, cajole, support, and chastise her.

  But the other problem with the Littky approach is that not every kid who screws up in school comes from a difficult family life or is hampered by poverty, immigration problems, addiction, or undiagnosed learning disabilities. Some kids, like Sarah, behave badly for other reasons. They don’t know how to persevere. They don’t yet feel they need to. They are self-indulgent and no one has ever insisted they buckle down and do what’s required rather than what they’re in the mood for.

  A pause here, to talk about what might seem like a contradiction. A core idea behind the IP is that students will get a better education if they have a strong voice in what and how they learn, and have the chance to study things that are interesting to them, things that they feel matter. So you might be surprised to hear both of us suggest that Sarah shouldn’t have been allowed to do whatever she wanted. The disparity between what we are advocating and what Sarah did that fall may seem slight, but it’s not. It’s an ocean of difference.

  Sarah tended to believe that whatever impulses or thoughts seemed pressing to her on a given day should guide her actions. In contrast, the IP was asking students to make deliberate and considered decisions about what to work on and what goals to set themselves. Once they had made those decisions, there was enormous collective pressure on them to see their goals through to the end. IP sought self-governance; Sarah seemed drawn to self-indulgence.

  Sarah was bright, talented, and appealing. She grew up in a loving middle-class family (her father was an educator). She just didn’t think she needed to toe the line. She loved taking center stage. She wanted drama. For her, puberty had just amplified her personality, exponentially.

  Watching the drama of Sarah unfold, I began to think that there were two kinds of failure among high school students, and they required two kinds of responses. Kids like Sarah should be brought up short. The Independent Project was supposed to be appealing—an educational opportunity to be relished. If a student didn’t value what it offered—choice, autonomy, responsibility, learning from peers, intellectual depth—she should return to the more standard options.

  The other kind of failure was not really failure—it was struggle. A student like Dominic wanted to succeed but stumbled over some of the steps. He had difficulty focusing, was inexperienced at following through, and feared tackling complex material. Those were problems the group should embrace and work with.

  The award-winning journalist and historian David Halberstam often told the story of getting fired from his first job writing for a newspaper, and the winding path it took him to get his second job writing for a newspaper. The way he told it, getting fired was a setback, not a failure. He never wavered in his desire to become a newspaper writer—he just had trouble navigating the steps that would get him there.

  Sarah didn’t face a setback; she screwed up. And she should have been forced, much earlier in the term, to choose whether to stay and work or leave. Kids like Dominic and Rix, who periodically struggled with specific features of the program, faced setbacks and needed help and encouragement to forge ahead, like David Halberstam.

  My hunch is that programs that seem so rewarding to most kids, even when they falter (like Mirabelle, Dominic, or Sam), don’t need to focus too much on punishment. Most kids will do what Halberstam did. They’ll persevere. And when they falter, they’ll have peers to shore them up. Leaving would be the worst punishment, and they’ll do what they have to in order to stay in the project. The kids who would just as soon leave, like Sarah, should leave.

  I talked earlier about Mirabelle’s struggles when we switched from the sciences to the languages. What I didn’t say was that, compared to pretty much everyone else, Mirabelle’s switch was smooth sailing. In the first two weeks of the languages I thought I might be watching the death of the Independent Project.

  By the end of the sciences, the group (with the exception of Sarah, of course) was energized, passionate, engaged, and working really, really hard. Everyone agreed that they had finally discovered what it was like to love school and love learning. I was happy, excited, and enjoying school more than I ever had before. And then we started the languages.

  The literary portion was great. We read seven novels and a play. I had taken honors and AP English all through high school, and in that one half semester I read more novels for school than I had in the rest of high school put together. Two of our members read more novels that semester than in their whole lives. No, it wasn’t the English language that was a problem. It was the mathematical one.

  It turned out that the one thing the whole group had in common was a pure hatred of math. We started with Flatland. That part was okay. People liked the story. We had some good discussions about it. But I had hoped that Flatland would provide a segue into the rest of mathematics, that it would serve as a vehicle for demonstrating that math could be interesting and fun and not just about calculations and procedures.

  That didn’t happen. The problem was that a very specific approach to mathematics (memorizing formulas and
mindlessly carrying out calculations) had become so ingrained at that point that the rest of the group didn’t see any connection between Flatland and math.

  And despite my arguments otherwise, they couldn’t be convinced. So on the following Monday, when I said, okay, everyone should pick a topic in math to explore this week, they all groaned.

  “This is bullshit,” said Dominic. “This is just like regular school all over again.” Everyone seemed to agree. By forcing them to do math, they said, I was making the same mistake that I had criticized so heavily in traditional school. I tried to argue that it was different. I had criticized the long list of required specific and arbitrary content. But everyone believes some things should be required in school. We might disagree on what those things are, but we all have something in mind that every kid should learn.

  “Okay, yeah, fair enough,” they said. We all agreed that kids should learn to read in school. Most people thought that everyone should learn about specific atrocities of the past, like the Holocaust. I tried to make the logical next step to math.

  “So, I designed the Independent Project, and I believe that everyone should learn how to think like a mathematician. I’m not prescribing specific mathematical knowledge, just the ability to use logic, and appreciate how problems can be solved using math, and maybe get a glimpse at what it’s like to describe nature with the language of mathematics.”

  The group didn’t agree. “That’s just ’cause you like math,” said Tim. “The rest of us don’t see why it’s important for us to learn it.”

  Mirabelle tried to be helpful at this point. “You mean because of, like, shopping for groceries and paying bills and stuff? Like, I guess it’s important for all of us to be able to use math in our lives.”

  But that wasn’t the point. “I don’t care so much about you using math because it has a practical purpose. Being comfortable with numbers is probably really helpful in life, but I doubt you’ll learn that in half a semester. But I think, at the very least, being able to appreciate how math is used, understand how those who use it do it, and having a go at the kinds of thinking involved in math, is all really important.”