The Celebration Chronicles

by Andrew Ross, Ph. D.

  Before the tornadoes touched down, the storm machines lumbering in from the Gulf cranked out an unbroken flow of lightning—enough to make the ground seem continuously floodlit from the night sky. My cats, Hamish and Molly, who are curious weather observers as a rule, nosed their way beneath the bed sheets (and spent days after in Zen repose, staring at their litter box for long stretches on end). We willed ourselves to sleep, knowing that wicked things must be happening somewhere. As the downtown bakery opened its doors in the morning, “Riders on the Storm” was being featured, inadvertently but bizarrely, on the Muzak piped into Market Street below. While Celebration was spared, many residents wondered how their homes, many of which had developed bad leaks during the long winter rains, would have stood up to a direct hit from the funnel winds. Typically, it was the poorest area residents, in manufactured mobile homes accounting for 20 percent of Osceola’s housing stock, who were hardest hit. Expressing her sympathy with the victims, one of my neighbors repeated the popular myth that tornadoes are somehow attracted to the thin aluminum dwellings of the trailer parks. Esoteric beliefs have always been attached to extreme weather. This one offers a pseudoscientific refuge for people’s remorse. The alternative—God’s mercy—got a good airing, too, in the aftermath of the storms. But a few months later, televangelist Pat Robertson cited God’s wrath as an explanation for Central Florida’s record winter rains, record early summer drought, and extensive brush fires. Disney’s Gay Days and the hanging of rainbow flags in downtown Orlando to acknowledge Gay Pride, were to blame for the end-days weather, according to Robertson: “I would warn Orlando that you’re right in the way of some serious hurricanes, and I don’t think I’d be waving those flags in God’s face if I were you.” More, he promised, would follow: “Terrorist bombs, earthquakes, tornadoes and possibly a meteor.”

  As with mostly everything in Celebration, the emotional core of the response to the tornado damage could be found at or around the school. Like the county’s mobile homes, the school had attracted and braved more than its fair share of storms and squalls since its doors opened, somewhat prematurely, in the fall of 1996. From the outset, the staff and their teaching methods had been besieged and assailed by vexed parents. In the course of the year I spent observing and making myself useful in classes, the number of riled parents and the volume of their discontent grew exponentially. By midsummer, the turbulence mushroomed into a general uproar and brought the long-simmering discord to a flash point.

  Built for battle: the Celebration School (William Rawn, architect). (Photo: the author)

  BUILDING FOR LEARNING

  On this somber February morning after the tornadoes, the drama, for once, was not turned in on the community itself. In its second year of operation, over half the pupils in the school were drawn by lottery from county areas outside of Celebration, and several of their homes had sustained direct damage. The atmosphere in Upper 3 (grades 8 and 9) was bluntly subdued. Jackie Flanigan, an ever-popular teacher (“learning leader” in the school’s often painful alternative jargon) in this multi-age classroom (“nurturing neighborhood,” in the same jargon) describes this group as “Hormone High,” with an adolescent energy mood “you can cut through with a knife.” Eric Nelson, the science teacher, characterizes his charges as “squirrely as heck.” This particular morning, the teen buzz is at ground zero. Sensitivity training is about to begin. Each of the four teachers in the 109-student neighborhood addresses his or her own quadrant, or “kiva” (an American Indian term), and then “grand kiva” is convened for the entire group. Flanigan recounts some of her own tornado experiences in Indiana and Kentucky, and advises pupils to go easy with the tornado humor.

  Twister stories are shared. An infant was found lodged high in a tree, trucks had been moved 250 yards and sustained no damage, a diving board was driven through a brick wall, and pieces of straw had been forced through a two-by-four. One student “has someone’s car in his front yard, and has no idea who it belongs to.” Mr. Nelson, also a Mid-westerner, from “the middle of East Jesus nowhere,” seizes the mood: “It’s OK to be amused and dazzled by force, because people are attracted to force, and the power of nature is awesome. We’re all looking around and saying ‘Wow, that’s really cool,’ but people lost their lives, so be sensitive.” Flanigan invites anyone who feels “more affected than they think” by the storm trauma to approach teachers discreetly in the next few days.

  Nelson, in standard Celebration gear—casual, green, short-sleeved shirt and chinos—clearly is itching to explain the science behind the tornadoes. On a revolving stool, he sets up an experiment that will generate a baby twister. A lump of Sterno—gelatinous with an inflammatory core to produce a slow burn—will be lit to provide the warm air conditions for a mini-tornado to develop inside a makeshift cardboard armature. But first Nelson demonstrates with his own body. He starts to gyrate, simulating the circles of wind formed by a supercell storm, and quickly gathers speed. “Soon you’ve got a Ho Ho of air going. Instead of a wall of air, it’s being bent like a coat hanger, and this log of air is beginning to spin in on itself. The air is running around in a tight circle,” he brays, and at this point, so is he, hurtling around the room, his blond hair swept skyward. “Are we safe? Are we insured?” queries Flanigan, who likes to offset Nelson by presenting herself as the most “anal, logical-sequential guy on the team.” Nelson charges ahead, “When you multiply two forces, you create a new force at right angles,” and he is now a whirling dervish, almost out of kilter, his arms windmilling like Pete Townshend on a wayward guitar riff. The Sterno is lit, and the stool is abruptly rotated. The flame flexes into a loopy vortex and funnels upward, arching hopefully toward the top of the chicken wire that encloses the experiment. No one has said a word for twenty minutes. I have never seen this group of students in a more attentive mood, with the exception of Sex Ed classes, and even then they cut their questions with bittersweet cool: “How many calories do you burn during intercourse?” (Answer: 65–70 cals) “Why do old people still do it?” (Answer: Sheer pleasure). Today, they seem more impressed by Nelson’s antics than by his would-be tornado, which never really amounts to much. Their patience is finally exhausted, and, with the first rowdy hubbub of the day, they set off, in Brownian motion, to occupy each sector of the sprawling space that Upper 3 occupies.

  These multi-age classrooms are immense, 6,000-square-foot omnibus environments that contain a variety of different spaces, some open, some self-contained. A central “hearth area,” evocative of the family living room and large enough to congregate all 100-plus students, is furnished with couches, often facing each other like a hotel lobby. The hearth bleeds into an open “wet area” and a multipurpose work-study area, and is surrounded by a couple of traditional, enclosed classrooms, one or two smaller conference and group rooms, a teachers’ planning room, and two unisex restrooms. Each neighborhood is customized, in consultation with the students (the spaces of Upper 2, my favorite, are remapped as The Beach, Atlantis, Coral Reef, Riptide, Octopus’s Garden, and the teacher’s planning area is the Burial Grounds). The furniture is all movable, except for the banquettes that line the walls, keeping company with the “old media”—sparsely stocked bookshelves (textbooks are rarely used) and the world globes (even less used) perched on top. Boom boxes and TV monitors are more central, and computer terminals are ubiquitous. Without having to trek to a separate computer room or media lab, students can call up media resources or make Internet links from all over the neighborhood (“computing anytime, anywhere”), using one of scores of data ports and video connections.

  The neighborhood, like all other spaces in the school, is clearly designed for optimum flexibility. It can host integrated team teaching and traditional whole-group instruction, cooperative learning in groups and individual study and research. In fact, its builders say this is the first school in the country to be physically designed with the needs of progressive educational methods in mind. The design team, led by Boston architect William Rawn,
included educators who had worked on the learning design for the curriculum. The result was a building that would make it easier for teachers and students to meet the demands of one of the most nonconformist schools on the national education map. Improbably for a town built to evoke old-time values, this school has been frontloaded with every last bell and whistle from two and a half decades of progressive educational reform.

  In this light, Nelson’s gyrations were not the usual antics of the resident whacko science teacher. One of the steadfast principles of this school is to base teaching and learning methods on performance and exhibition. This is a flat rebuttal of the passive methods of the traditional classroom, and the rote memorization of facts and digestible info bits that passes as preparation for the constant diet of tests forced upon students these days. “We’ve got better things to do,” observes Charmaine Gabel, Upper 3’s math instructor and teachers’ union rep, “than preparing students for tests.” (In addition to national tests like PSAT, SAT, ACT, and NAEP, the state requires FCAT, the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, Florida Writes! and HSCT, the High School Competency Test.) As an alternative to standardized testing, students here are assessed “authentically”—that is, more in line with how they would be judged in a real-world context. Grades and test-oriented curricula are eschewed (along with student desks, textbooks, period bells, daily schedules, report cards, and other ritual features of traditional education). The preferred methods of evaluating student achievement draw on a variety of activities—problem-solving tasks, community-oriented group projects, content-based portfolios, and public exhibitions and performances. Some part of student learning is self-evaluated (the most authentic form of assessment), while a written assessment appears in narrative reports prepared by teachers.

  Later in the day, Flanigan introduces a new project to her Human Expressions class (or “domain”). Students will be using Hyper Studio, an Apple presentation program to build an autobiography along the lines of “This Is Your Life.” The completed work will be presented orally to peers, parents, and mentors later in the spring. Recent projects included “Homeless and Alone in the Great Depression”—where students were given $20 a month to survive and wrote a diary that demonstrated credible emotion while highlighting the historical causes of the Depression. And the Cassini project, in which NASA’s controversial space probe (with plutonium on board) was the topic of a forum between students assuming the roles of scientists and officials from the EPA, agents of Florida state, stockholders from corporations invested in the space mission, and NASA employees.

  For “This Is Your Life,” as for every project, students are asked to create their own rubrics for the evaluation of their work. “What do you expect to achieve and demonstrate through the project, and how do you expect it to be assessed?” The idea is for students to have a clear sense of their individual goals before they begin. They break up into groups, spontaneously but adroitly selected by Flanigan to match personality and skill levels, and begin to learn the computer program from the most technologically savvy pupil in the group. Cooperative learning, another of the school’s methodological principles, is now being put into action. Instead of competing against each other, students are expected to learn from, help, and motivate their peers.

  Methods like authentic assessment and cooperative learning are not exactly new, but for many Celebration parents—trying to make sense of the school’s full deck of nontraditional methods and the accompanying mouthful of educators’ jargon—they could just as well have been lifted from a therapy manual for psychiatric counselors. I quickly learned that virtually everyone in town felt he or she had some bone to pick with the school’s innovative learning design. But it was clear that the teachers’ opposition to grading and test preparation—cramming and drilling in the “basics”—was the chief source of parental discomfort. Later in the week, another one of those many mediaseeking national surveys appeared, showing American pupils testing worse in math and science than almost every other industrialized nation. Another weary round of hand-wringing and doom mongering commenced among politicians and pundits of every persuasion, long addicted to the seductive but irrational habit of equating school test scores with the nation’s ability to compete in the global economy. Captains of industry squeezed out dire warnings about the decline of standards in our schools. Around town, the school’s critics (dubbed “negative parents” at the outset and “concerned parents” as time went on) took heart. Their distress, it seemed, was shared by the country’s political and business elites, if not by the teachers of their children. “Who,” they were asking, “knew better what their children needed to get on in the world?” The most successful achievers in the nation, or a group of lowly paid public schoolteachers in the rural South, tipsy from swigging at the faddish brews of reform?

  THE PIPER’S PAYMENTS

  Like most science teachers everywhere, Nelson protests that he is strapped for resources and so is always on the lookout for an extracurricular laboratory. Using the Winter Olympics events as a prop, he offered physics lessons through the town’s community TV channel for two exhausting weeks, and currently has an eye on a role in the Animal Kingdom, Disney’s new theme park, where he will be presenting “random acts of education.” After the tornado traumas subside, he leads Upper 3 on a long-awaited field trip to the Magic Kingdom, where basic principles of energy and gravity will be demonstrated on some of the park’s rides. I am to accompany the students as a chaperone. The evening before, there are numerous UFO sightings all over the county. A farmer claims that twelve of his chickens have mysteriously expired overnight, but no radiation burns have been detected on the dead fowls. I conclude that the mood is surreal enough for a visit to Mickey’s own backyard.

  Early on a chilly winter morning, columns of mist are coursing up from the theme park’s tepid lakes and swaddling the walls of crenellated châteaus and palace hotels. We enter the Magic Kingdom well before it is open for business. Without the busy throngs (paying customers in the parks are called “Revenue Units”), features of the park’s design are all too visible in clean detail. From certain angles, it does seem to resemble a townscape more than an empty amusement park, or is it that townscapes more and more resemble Disney World? In a small amphitheater off to the side, a fully garbed Pinocchio and some other cast members from his story are rehearsing their swaggering moves. I know that they are probably lucky if they are being paid much above the minimum wage and that Pinocchio’s nose grows longer with each quarterly statement of profits issued by the corporation (which amassed $22.5 billion in revenues for 1997). But for a brief moment, without the mass of visitors and hawkers, it is possible to imagine this jolly boy-toy and his bulbous friends having the run of the park, as if it really were their own playground, the way it should be and never is.

  “This is the ultimate classroom for me,” interrupts our guide for the day, Michelle Thomareas, a profoundly perky teacher who left Celebration School after the first year to work in Disney’s Youth Educators program. But education through Disney does not come cheap. At $30 a pop, it is a pricey outing for the students and several have been unable to afford the trip. No one is in line at Space Mountain—a rare sight at the most popular ride in the park. We are to brave the roller coaster twice, once with all the lights on and once, as riders ordinarily do, in the dark. The aim of this is to test our powers of observation and deduction when our sensory perceptions are altered. Students are asked to collect their observations and estimate the average speed of the car, the highest drop, and the time traveled during the ride. For Nelson, Space Mountain is also a grand opportunity to illustrate the difference between two types of energy. Sitting behind me in the car, he bellows “Potential Energy!” as we start to ascend the slopes, and “Kinetic Energy!” as we hurtle down. “Work! Work is being done!” By the end of the day, after repeated demonstrations on different rides, even the least attentive in our party will have grasped the distinction. Later, horizontal and vertical gravity are measured on
the Big Thunder Railroad ride, and for an optics lesson, we go behind the glass screen in the Haunted Mansion to see how the images of the ghouls in the banquet scene are projected. It turns out to be nothing high-tech, just the old stage trick of Pepper’s Ghost gussied up on a grandiose scale. But the euphoria of being behind the scenes is palpable.

  In common with all the pioneer parents, teachers like Nelson had expected that Celebration students would enjoy regular field trips like this to Disney World, as well as daily access to the educational resources of EPCOT and the Disney Institute. As it happened, today’s outing is a rare event, and no special privilege at that. Any school in the region can participate in this program if parents are willing to pay for it. This was not what had been promised to Celebrationites. The original blueprint for the school had envisaged far-reaching Disney input. “A Day in the Life of a Celebration Student,” a promotional video from July 1996, just months before the school opened, shows Eddie, a model Hispanic student, visiting and learning from the EPCOT staff’s environmental experts as part of his personal learning plan. Eddie’s day also included a lesson, beamed by satellite from Paris and delivered in French, on the mathematics of medicine, a video seminar on African contributions to American music, and participation in a series of cross-age interviews about the psychology of physical injury. The blueprint stipulates that Disney experts in animation and film and video production were to be master visiting faculty, serving as career mentors in the performing arts and entertainment business. Disney “teachers of the year,” from Florida and around the nation, would be on staff, and the EPCOT facilities would be easily accessible to students like Eddie.