A School of Our Own

by Samuel Levin

  But my arguments fell on deaf ears. Almost no math was done that week. And everyone’s frustration and resentment trickled over into the rest of the school day. The group became surly and grumpy. Morale fell, and I noticed people working less on their Individual Endeavors. I felt the Independent Project slipping between my fingers. The teachers from the CSC were right all along. We were able to work hard for a while, but eventually kids would give up without an adult pushing them along.

  Dominic was particularly moody. I think he felt betrayed. Like, somehow, I had tricked him into doing this program, and for the first few months led him to believe he could actually enjoy school and be a good student, and then dropped this bomb on him. Like science was a honey trap for math.

  On Thursday morning, during check-in, when I brought up the fact that tomorrow was Friday and we were supposed to be teaching each other math stuff, Dominic lashed out. “I don’t want to. It’s bullshit. None of us want to do this.” I looked around, hoping someone would come to my defense, hoping that maybe Tim or Mirabelle would ask Dominic to buck up. But no one said anything; they just looked down in silent affirmation. And I finally lost my temper.

  “You know what? Fuck you guys.” Everyone looked shocked. Hell, I had shocked myself. But I was still angry. “You were happy to sing the Independent Project’s praises when it was going well for you, when you were succeeding, but as soon as we hit a little speed bump, you jump ship and bail on me. As soon as the going gets tough, you guys decide I fucked up and it’s not worth your time. I would have thought you guys would at least try. I thought the least you could do was give it a go.”

  I was a little embarrassed by my outburst. I left the locker room and went to see a math teacher in my school. She had taught me math since I was thirteen; she was a brilliant teacher, one of the early supporters of the Independent Project, and, most important, a good friend. I went to her hoping she could give me advice on how to overcome our math hurdle. Her best advice was to just keep trying, and try to help the other Indies find ways in which math could be interesting to them.

  The next day, at check-in, I said that we weren’t going to do any teaching that day. Instead, we were just going to help each other find math topics that might be interesting to us. I apologized for getting angry at them the day before. And to my surprise, they apologized back.

  “I hate math,” said Tim. “But the Independent Project has changed my life. I think I can give it a go, if it’s important to the IP.”

  By Monday, everyone had found something they were going to try. I had suggested to Dominic that he look into the math of poker because I knew he loved cards. It turned out he was fascinated by it. One by one, everyone found something they could explore. And week by week, bit by bit, people started working harder on their math.

  I wish I could pinpoint some clever trick I landed on that jump-started the group’s investment in their math work. But, truthfully, I don’t think there was one single thing, one turning point, and it definitely wasn’t something I did. Yeah, I think my outburst had an impact on them, albeit unintentionally. But that, on its own, would only have gotten them to work for a few days. They might have felt guilty and wanted to do it for me, but if that was their only reason for moving forward, it would have faded quickly. Instead, the Indies kept working on math for the rest of the semester, choosing new topics each week. Tim explored the math of music; Dakota became fixated on trigonometry; Erik returned to infinity and eventually cardinality (though he didn’t realize it, he gave himself a crash course in some basic set theory).

  I think the biggest reason things changed was that the responsibility was on their shoulders. In the beginning, the fact that there were no teachers, no one in charge, meant they could spend a week and a half doing nothing, with nobody around to enforce anything. But with time, that also meant no one was going to swoop in and come up with a clever way for them to get motivated. And no one could finally say, “Okay, fine, don’t worry about it, I’ll cut you some slack.” It was all on their shoulders, and they were either going to get on with it or not. I think as that slowly dawned on them, they realized they had nothing to push back against, no one to disobey, and so they just started working.

  One of my many weaknesses as a mom has been my compulsive need to solve problems and make things right for my kids. I always told myself, when they were little, that it was good to jump in and help them make things better, that they would learn from me that you don’t need to succumb, or settle, that when something is going badly, you can act! Maybe that helped sometimes. But it also meant that my sons didn’t often get to figure things out for themselves. Equally important, I robbed them of the chance to learn how to simply endure rough spots. So when Sam hit that math wall, I desperately wanted to help him figure out how to make math come alive. He seemed panicked, as if screwing up the math portion would sink the whole ship. I hated watching him panic, and I arrogantly, naïvely, always think there’s a solution to every classroom problem. But this time I knew there wasn’t one thing I could do to help. And for once, I realized that for him, the struggle over math was the best educational experience he could have. He thrashed around, trying to figure out whether to give up on math, bring in some cool new book, go back to basics, yell at them, or offer them more fun and encouragement. His relentless worry was a thing to behold.

  And here’s what I learned watching Sam thrash around: we educators spend far too much time trying to clear away the problems that kids face. When they think something is boring, we either raise the stakes for not learning it (“This is boring or hard, but if you don’t do it, you’ll fail, stay after school, get a low grade, not get into college”) or we try to dress it up (“This is boring or hard, so we’ll add some pretty pictures, let you make a collage, hand out candy after the test, let you spend five minutes watching YouTube if you do your homework”). What we rarely do is sit with the problem and let them sit with it. Usually if a kid or group of kids is struggling with something, the struggle is meaningful. The kids in the IP stalled, backtracked, wasted time, and argued with one another, Sam as much or more than the others. He dove into the math problem, and ultimately they dove in with him. Whatever math they didn’t cover because he couldn’t quickly or easily solve the problem of their resistance was replaced by something that had a much more lasting impact—the experience of figuring out how to get unstuck.

  The first two examples of obstacles we had to overcome were not that unusual. After all, you might expect that in any school some students will struggle more than others, and the group will reach low points. But I want to give you one other example, one that highlights how quirky and unpredictable some obstacles turn out to be.

  You know now where the Independent Project’s home was: the coach’s office of the girls’ locker room. It had been hard enough acquiring any space at all; I never expected that we might run into problems with the space we did acquire.

  Fall was volleyball season, and every day when the final bell rang, we packed up our stuff as quickly as possible and darted out of the locker room. Once we were out, Coach Biggins would give the okay to the team, they would file in, and he’d head into his office. Apart from a few giggles from the girls’ volleyball team the first few times we vacated the locker room, it was all as smooth as could be.

  Then winter came and, with it, basketball season. Our school had a long history of successful girls’ basketball, and the coach was a real old-timer, who’d been coaching the team for nearly twenty years. I had known him forever—I played baseball with one of his relatives, co-captained the varsity basketball team with another, and played on a team coached by his nephew. So every day when I’d slip out of the locker room past him, I’d smile and say “hi.” He never returned the smile or the “hi,” and I figured he was just old and grumpy and focused on winning.

  But, slowly, it trickled down to me through the school rumor mill that he hated the fact that we had been allowed to use the coach’s office. He thought it was an atrocity
, a disgrace to the name of high school basketball everywhere. Soon I didn’t need the rumors to know he didn’t like us. I’d come in in the morning to find our books tossed into the corner of the room or someone’s papers shoved into the trash.

  Finally, I brought it up with Mr. Huron, who knew the family well and was a longtime high school coach himself.

  “I didn’t want to mention it to you,” he said, “because it shouldn’t be on your radar. But since you know, yes, he’s a little upset. He’s said that you leave a mess and move his stuff around, and he thinks you play with the basketballs.”

  It was true that every morning we moved the rack of basketballs into the corner of the room so that we had space to work and talk. From then on, at the end of the day, the group did a thorough cleaning of the room and moved the basketballs right back to where we found them. I assumed that, despite his continued grumpy greetings, the problem had been solved.

  That was, until Mr. Huron took me into his office one morning. “Coach Pacetti is making a request to have you moved. I’m not sure if it will go through, but he has some sway in the school, and I wanted you to know.”

  “I want to meet him, then,” I said.

  Mr. Huron didn’t think that was a good idea.

  “Come on,” I said. “If he wants us to leave, then he can at least tell me to my face.”

  Mr. Huron reluctantly agreed to arrange a meeting.

  Coach Pacetti was angry. He could barely look at me when we talked. He muttered something about us making a mess, and I promised him we would work even harder to keep ourselves to ourselves. He muttered something about the basketballs, and I promised him we didn’t touch them. Finally, he muttered something about his twenty years as a coach, bringing this school to the western Mass championship however many times.

  “Coach,” I said. “You know I respect you and the program you’ve built. But this is eight kids’ high school education. We’re not going to leave.” We stayed.

  This story highlights that you can never predict all the problems that will come up. People will doubt your school, those you expect to support it won’t, basketball coaches will wage war against you, parts of your curriculum will falter, and students will fail.

  But this kind of school lends itself to adapting to changes, dealing with problems, and inventing new ways for students to learn. The kids take the lead, and it becomes their responsibility to fix issues and overcome challenges. And in doing so, they learn key lessons and skills that are absent from traditional school.

  Problems, in your new school, become a part of the curriculum.

  8

  OPEN YOUR DOOR TO THE COMMUNITY

  It’s ironic that just as young people step across the threshold into the adult community, we separate them from it almost entirely. High school should be the bridge to the adult world, not the waiting room for it.

  Your doors should be open all year long. Bringing in experts from outside the school, engaging in apprenticeships, teaching kids in the lower schools, teaching adults in the community, collaborating with local businesses—these should all be a regular part of your school from day one.

  But you need something more as well—something that requires the whole group, and that has a significant impact on the community. In the Independent Project, this took the form of the Collective Endeavor, the last thing the students did that school year. We think it’s a good way to finish—a good last step. Doesn’t it make sense that the product of your education all year long would be the ability to come together with your peers and your community to achieve something great?

  All that semester, I was immersed in the day in and day out of the Independent Project. I was listening to Dakota teach us about the properties of cellulose, watching Mirabelle present about the origins of art, and following Dominic as he showed us the edible plants around the school. We had an animated discussion about the end of Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan, tried to understand Dominic’s odds with each hand in a game of poker, and listened to Tim act out his one-man play response to The Importance of Being Earnest. We were reading the first draft of John’s new novel and watching a rough cut of Tim’s film (which made Mirabelle cry), and I was fussing over the final zombie fight in my novella, Exit Sign.

  For a period of time, however brief, we fell in love with school, with learning, with ideas, with working hard, with teaching one another.

  There was just one more element we needed—to reconnect students to their community.

  We had set aside the last three weeks of the Independent Project for the Collective Endeavor. The only requirement for the endeavor was that it had to be truly collaborative, and it had to have a positive impact on the community. That community could be the town, the county, the country, or the world, anything broader than the school itself.

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the driving force behind including a Collective Endeavor in the Independent Project was Project Sprout. It was there that I learned what happens when a high school really connects to the community around it.

  Project Sprout couldn’t stand on the hard work of high school students alone. We needed shovels, seeds, compost, mulch, rakes, and wheelbarrows. We needed volunteers, fencing, sheds, and expertise. We needed money, guidance, and building commission approvals. We needed people to come to our events, bring their kids to our garden, eat our tomatoes. We needed somewhere to start our seedlings in the winter, metal stakes, a water catchment system, and a restaurant to host our pig roast. And all that had to come from the community.

  In four years, I saw the community rally around the garden, and saw the school, the kids, and the people around us all benefit from it. By senior year, it was hard to get into a good flow digging beds, because so many of the cars that drove by the garden would honk.

  So it was in the garden that I learned how valuable it was for a school to connect with its community. Project Sprout would have been literally impossible to maintain single-handedly. There were two acres of cultivation to look after (in addition to school and sports and a job); there was an annual budget of $20,000 that had to be raised; there was coordination with the cafeterias, scheduling deliveries, organizing events, arranging classes, teaching after-school programs, building sheds and greenhouses. Like many worthy endeavors in life, it could be achieved only by really successful collaboration.

  And finally, it was through Project Sprout that I saw how valuable it was for a group of high schoolers to work tirelessly to make their community a better place. The people who served on the board of Project Sprout went on to Yale, Stanford, Middlebury, Cornell. Every single one of them is now working, either in college or as graduates, to do something good in the world. I think that is one of Project Sprout’s most important impacts—the effect it had on those of us who were caretakers of that garden for a few brief years. In short, I learned more than anyone could ever expect to learn in high school about working with other people to achieve a goal. And, it seemed, a Collective Endeavor could offer some of that to the Indies.

  I had no idea what the Independent Project students would choose as a Collective Endeavor. I floated Project Sprout as an example. We had only three weeks in the IP, so we wouldn’t be able to do anything that expansive in scope. But we could do something similar, on a smaller scale, to a similar effect. We could come up with a plan to clean up the local river, and even start executing that plan. We could improve food distribution among local shelters. We could draw up designs to make the school carbon-neutral. We could build a new jungle gym for the park in town. Anything, really. The options were endless.

  During Sam’s years with Project Sprout, he learned “more than anyone could ever expect to” about how to work with others. I would put it differently. I think he learned more than most teenagers in our culture are ever allowed to learn about working in a group.

  We’re so sure they can’t that we never ask them to. And part of that is because it’s not the side most adolescents show us. They seem to swim in a bath of self: “How do I fee
l?” “What do I seem like to others?” “Why are they doing this to me?” “Why do I have bad luck?” “I’m so awesome, everyone is noticing me,” “Not enough people are noticing me.” You can see this on any street of any small town in America, where teens seem completely oblivious to everyone but themselves and the other teens they are hanging out with. When they are delighted with themselves, they laugh and dance down the street as if no one has ever been so cool, so funny, so impressive, and so powerful. When they are low, they spread their gloom around them as if shooting it out of a fog machine, as if the whole world stinks because they feel bad. Their apparent self-absorption can be incredibly frustrating for parents, irritating to older brothers and sisters, and unacceptable to employers. Years ago, psychologists began to describe it as the second toddlerhood—a time of intense egocentrism.

  And though teenagers do love one another with a kind of fervor not seen during other phases of life, that doesn’t mean it’s good for them to be separated from everyone else. Yet you wouldn’t know that from looking around at where we put our high schools. By and large, we build separate buildings for our teenagers, placing them as far as possible from the center of the villages and even from the elementary and middle schools. Though schools in cities are often close to other buildings, the barrier between what happens in the school and what happens in the rest of the community might as well be two miles long. I know there are some sensible reasons for this: they need playing fields and parking, and it’s best not to tempt them to skip class. But it also means that they are spending most of their days exclusively with kids their own age. The only adults they see are focused almost totally on guiding them, instructing them, and disciplining them. They are not around younger children whom they might help care for; they are not around preteens whom they might mentor. They are not around adults who might just be friends. We’ve created a teen ghetto, which isn’t good for anyone.