A Day at Wichita Sudbury School

What is daily life like at a Sudbury school? That depends entirely on who you ask and what's going on in their lives! What follows is just one day, Tuesday, November 28, 2017, from the perspective of a staff member.

I pulled up to the school building at 8:45, seeing J at the lockbox beside the front door. He had just arrived, as well, and hadn't yet put in the code or gotten out the spare key, so he closed it back up and waited for me to get out of my car and unlock the door for him. We said hello, and he signed in, got a cup of water from the sink, and sat down on one of the couches in the main room with his journal.

I got out the binders of paperwork kept in the computer room and sat down at the art room table. Because both of our computers were down, I had had to take the November bills home the night before to pay using my home computer. I was able to pay gas, electric, and water online, so I three-hole-punched those sheets and put them away in the PAID section. I wasn't, however, able to put the rent in the mail because I had forgotten to grab a check. I made it out to our landlord, slipped it into an envelope, and attached it to the outside of the mail slot with a paperclip to be picked up by the mailman later. After administrative things were out of the way, I sat down on a different couch with my own journal for a little while.

Around 9:15, L arrived. She, as the Attendance Clerk, wanted to get started right away on her task--calculating attendance. When we first opened three months ago, I did all of the paperwork and administrative tasks. Now that the students have gotten more of a handle on Sudbury life, they've been picking up clerksmanships here and there. L still likes to have me double check her work, so I sat with her at the art room table. Besides, with the computers down, she still needed my phone for the time calculator app. I brought my Kindle with me but soon discovered that the e-book I borrowed from the library didn't actually hold my attention. C arrived and sat on one of the chairs in the art room after signing in, so I chatted with him until he wanted to watch something on his tablet.

I watched over L's shoulder for some time. She accurately converted times after noon to 24-hour time for easier calculation, subtracting the sign-in time from the sign-out time. Occasionally she became frustrated when finding that someone forgot to sign in or out. She called them over and had them try to remember what happened that day, noting down a likely account for them. A few times when someone couldn't remember, she sighed to herself and resigned to just give them the minimum 5 hours.

J went into the kitchen to fix himself a snack. A few minutes later, I heard a shout of alarm and the shattering of a plate. Rushing in, I found J holding his hand. It didn't appear to be bleeding, so he must have burnt it. I turned on the cold water and told him to put his hand under it while I cleaned up the shards of ceramic plate. While I swept, he cooled his hand in the water and ruminated on what happened, "I was getting the grilled cheese out [of the toaster oven], and I think I touched the top part." "Oh, the heating element. Yeah? Do you think it's okay?" I responded. He took a moment to assess, then responded, "Yeah." He turned off the water and got another plate to put his sandwich on.

I went back to the art room. L was finishing up one sheet, getting the weekly totals for each student. "Woah, C, you're up five hours this week!" I noted. "I am? I have five extra hours?" he replied. "Well, just for this week that we finished doing. We still have another week to do, so we haven't gotten the totals yet." "What? Why do you still have another week to do?" J asked from the doorway. L shrugged. "Lazy." She may have been feeling lazy weeks prior, but she was working hard this morning! She contemplated whether or not she wanted to start the next week or take a break. Finishing up won out, and she hunkered down with the calculator app and pen. J went into the computer room to see if there was anything he could do about fixing the computers.

At 11, when G still hadn't arrived, I messaged his dad to see if everything was okay. He replied that they were just running a bit late today and were walking out the door. J, L, and C contemplated a hiding game when G arrived. Half an hour later, when G's car pulled up, they darted into the supply room. L had taken the sign-in sheet with her to finish in the room, but when G realized he couldn't sign-in, he was flustered and near tears. It must have been a rough morning. He called through the door, and L replied that she would sign in for him. He said, "Okay," and sat down to pull dinosaurs out of his backpack. "I brought these dinosaurs because I wanted to add battle damage to them," he said, scribbling on one of them with a red crayon. "Oh, I see," I replied, watching as he began staging an epic battle. When he was finished, he showed me the scene. Aside from the warring group all posed mid-attack, there was also a collection of dinosaurs a little ways off posed naturally. "This is the peaceful group," he declared, indicating them.

L finished the attendance shortly after and brought it to me. She had gotten into a flow and completed that second week's page in about half the time it took her to do the first one! I logged the time on the Excel sheet on my phone and then wrote everyone's initials and attendance totals on the white board. Students are required to be in school for 5 hours a day, 186 days a school year. I multiply how many days we've been in session by five and compare it to each student's totals, giving them a positive or negative amount of time based on the minimum they need to have according to state. Some students are satisfied with their minimum time while others have been saving up extra time (the two hours a day extra that we're open) to have extended vacations. They gathered around to see their time after I had written it on the board. "What happened to putting it on the board in the art room?" C asked. The white board near sign-in is used for announcements and daily scheduling, so it gets erased daily. Last time we put the attendance hours on the board, they were erased the next day, so C suggested we put it on the white board in the art room so it stays longer. "Oh yeah," I remembered. I wrote the hours there, as well.

"I want to do some yoga," I said out loud. "Oh, yes!" L agreed. C had been doing yoga in the mornings, and I usually joined in when he did his. He had lost interest in it, though, it seemed, so I decided to start it back up myself. I waffled for a few moments between yoga and pilates before finally deciding to download a pilates app. I set up the first beginner level, and after a couple of positions, L joined in. It was a 13 minute long session, and the moves were, indeed, rather basic, but it was a good exercise for us. Afterwards we collapsed on the couch and drank some water.

"There are a lot of dirty dishes in the sink," L noted. "Yeah, it seems like people haven't been washing their dishes after they use them. Let's add that to tomorrow's School Meeting agenda." I retrieved the folder for School Meeting minutes and began to create the agenda.

1. Reminder from Holly (SM chair): Everyone needs to wash any dishes they use.

"Do you want me to add about the signing in and out, too?" I asked. "Yes, please."

2. Reminder from L (Attendance Clerk): Make sure you are signing in and out every time you leave or enter the school building.

"Oh! And we need to talk about the Ouija board," L prompted. "I thought you were going to buy that with your own money for yourself?" I asked. "Well, I decided that I wanted it for the school." "Oh, so you want me to put it on the agenda to get it for the school?" "Yeah." "And it was $15 on Amazon?" "Wait, let me use your phone to check again."

3. Proposal from L to buy an Ouija board with school money. $18 from Amazon.

"Would you be interested in reading?" L asked me when I was finished with the agenda. She and I had been taking turns reading Wonder by Raquel J. Palacio aloud. "Sure," I replied, and we sat down to read a few chapters. After a while, she decided to get herself some lunch. I turned my Kindle on, remembered that I didn't like the book I was reading, and sighed. I wanted to read more! "G, I want to read more, but I don't have a good book right now. Do you want to keep reading your Minecraft book with me?" "Hmm.. no, not right now," he replied. "Okay." I went to make my own lunch. G hesitated, then followed me into the kitchen. "You know, I think I want to change my mind about reading right now." "Okay. Let's do that." So he read a little to me while I ate my sandwich, then he cooked some ramen for himself and listened to me finish the chapter.

"Miss! Guess what!" J burst into the main room. At the beginning of school, I had asked him to just call me by my first name, but he still preferred to address me as Miss. "Hmm?" "I fixed the computer!" he beamed. "Woah! How did you do that?" "I don't know. I took off the side of the case, and there was a wire that was loose. So I reconnected it, and now it works!" "Huh! Well, okay then. Awesome!" I pulled out my journal to do some more writing as he headed back.

There was some scuffle coming from the computer room, and J returned to me. "Miss, I was using the computer, but L said I didn't sign in. So she signed in and got to use it." While the computers were working, they had created a rule in the School Handbook that students could use the computer for half an hour at a time after they signed their name on the computer sign up sheet. "Aha! She got you on a technicality," I lamented. "Yeah. It's like that story about the hen who's making the bread, except backwards a bit. She makes the bread even though no one helps her, but then she shares it with everyone. But I fixed the computer, and L took it from me!" I laughed, "True, but you'll get to use it after her time is up." "Yeah."

After L's turn on the computer, she came wandering into the main room and sat close by, curious about my writing. "I'm creating a safe space," I told her. She looked even more confused. "One of my friends told me that at her therapy, she learned how to create a safe space that's just in her heart and her mind. When she's feeling overwhelmed or upset, she can close her eyes and imagine her safe space so her heart and mind can become calm again. She said that your safe space is something personal, just for you, and that you have to create it when you're happy. So I'm creating mine now, and writing about it helps me be creative." "Oh! I see." She continued to sit with me while I wrote, enjoying the peaceful atmosphere, before going back into the computer room.

There was another scuffle, something about name calling and writing each other up, indicating that the agreed upon rules in the School Handbook had been violated. J and L were both filling out complaint forms. "Holly, when can we have a JC meeting?" came a voice from the art room. During a Judicial Committee meeting, a jury of peers (in our case, the entire school population of four students and one staff member) reviewed a violation of the rules and decided what should be done about it. "Uh, tomorrow?" I replied. "Why? Why can't we just have it now?" J asked. "Because you're both upset, and I want to give you time to calm down." "Well.. I'm the JC Clerk, and I say we're calling a JC meeting right now," L declared. "Alright," I sighed, and resigned myself to joining the group in the art room.

Apparently J had "called G a 'b-i-t-c-h,'" which was declared a violation of Norms and Expectations #2, "Be respectful." There was a discussion, and as a result, JC decided to propose a new rule to school meeting: "Offensive words can be said to inanimate objects but not to people." However, J had done this because L and G were annoying him. Frustrated, he went back to the computer. "J, now it's time for your complaint," I offered. "Come and tell us about it." "No, you don't care, anyway," came the response. "I do care, and I want to hear your story." "No, just throw out the complaint," J called. "J, I care, and I want to hear your story. Come tell us about what happened." But he wouldn't return. Sighing, we threw out the case. I contemplated what to do and decided to add another bullet to tomorrow's agenda,

5. Discussion topic from Holly: Is the JC process working for us?

(This was an on-going dispute that lasted a few more days before being completely resolved.)

I went to the kitchen to make myself some tea, and C followed me. "I think I should bring something else to entertain myself," he told me. "I've been watching Ben10 on my tablet all day today, but maybe I need something else." I nodded, pulling my mug from the microwave and adding the tea bag. "Yeah. Are you not in the middle of a book?" I asked, recalling his love of fantasy novels. "I am, but it's at home. It's in the Gameknight999 Minecraft series. Maybe I'll bring that tomorrow. Or maybe I'll draw," he mused. I smiled. "Sounds like a plan."

L and G emerged from the supply room with two long, slender, plastic poles that looked like they might be used in plumbing or something. "Can we.." L started hesitantly, "take these outside and joust?" I didn't know where they came from or any reason why we would keep them, so I agreed. "Sure? Stay away from the cars in the parking lot, of course," I reminded her. By the time they came back in, they had perfected some sort of JROTC-looking synchronized pole maneuvering dance. "It's called Quartet. How do you spell quartet?" she asked. "I'm not sure. You made it up, so I think you get to decide how it's spelled." "Alright, well, I'm going to spell it.. Q-A.. 'cause I know in English the 'q' and the 'u' are married, but since I'm making it up, they're getting a divorce. Q-A-U-R-T-T-E-T. Qaurttet."

Remarkably, for once, everyone's parents showed up around the same time, 3:45-ish, so in a flurry of activity, everyone left rather quickly. I gathered the trash and took it to my car to throw away at home.

What will tomorrow bring? Who knows! The students whims are leading them, but they are constantly learning. It's amazing to watch where their creativity takes them, and I'm so excited to be a part of their journey.

DIY Notebooks and My 2016 Take on PBL--Individual Study

Sometime right before winter break in my second year of teaching high school English, I got this idea for a do-it-yourself notebook. You see, I have this specific something instilled in me that's part environmentally-friendly, part OCD, where I don't like things to be wasted. I've been saving paper that's only been used on one side since high school (and, boy, did I get teased because of it!), and I've amassed quite a stack of it. I encouraged the third-graders I taught to draw and color on the blank sides, but the practice never quite caught on with teenagers. I'd been taking notes and doing daily writing on them, but the stack was growing ever taller, regardless.

It was around this time I started thinking that I should just carry some of this scrap paper around with me. Like a notebook.

But... more like a 3-ring binder because, as much as I like having the pages in a notebook securely attached, I enjoy the flexibility of being able to reorganize, add, and remove pages as necessary.

But... full-sized sheets are so large and cumbersome. I'd definitely need to cut them in half to be a good size.

But... one thing that's awesome about 8.5x11 pieces of paper is that.. well, they're a standard size. So when you put them in the hole punch, one of my favorite toys, all the holes are in the same place. There's not a standard hole punch for 8.5x5.5 papers.

Wait! What an excellent critical thinking opportunity with real world application! I offered my students some extra credit and gave them 20 minutes to come up with the best solution.

I finally settled for one offered by two of my juniors--If you align the papers at the bottom of the hole punch, like usual, the holes are awkwardly positioned. Same for if you align them at the top of the hole punch. It's not so awkward if you turn the hole punch to the right side, flip the pages to the back so that the used side is showing up, align at the top, and then punch! It took some getting used to, but it totally works! I was so happy to offer that opportunity to my students, and even more so to let them see me use a design they helped come up with on a daily basis.

A few months later, I decided that size wasn't right for my needs. I needed an even smaller size, a quarter size, to fit inside my purse. That was a bit of a struggle to design, as well! Eventually we decided that this one wouldn't work if aligned at the top or bottom; we just needed to center it between two of the holes. The pages weren't exactly the same size, which is what I was afraid of, because I cut several pages at the same time in an inexact method, but it really didn't matter. All that mattered, after all, was that the holes were a standard distance from each other. Neat!

Alright, switching topics, just a little. I knew I wasn't coming back to work the following year about half way through third quarter. That being said, I really wanted to go out with a bang. I wanted to give my students something they would really learn from and remember, something important.

At that time, I had a sophomore who was teaching herself Russian in her spare time, which I was immensely proud of. It reminded me of teaching myself Japanese when I was younger, and that spurred an idea I had been considering after reading Summerhill School.

It had a basis of Project Based Learning, and that's how I sold it to administration, but in reality, I just wanted my students to realize that they live in the digital age. Literally ANYTHING they want to learn is at their fingertips. Mostly, I wanted them to have more control over their learning, to have more ownership of their own learning.

Thus, it manifested like this: Individual Study. Once again, I threw the entire curriculum out the window for the final month of school, telling my students that we were going to be doing something more important--focusing on whatever they wanted to learn. I stressed how important it was to follow your passions, not let anything come between you and what you want to learn, and turn hobbies and interests into viable options for study and bettering yourself. I reminded them that this is what it means to be a 21st century learner.

But being a public school teacher, I still had to enter grades into the computer, unfortunately, so.. Remember those journals I had the students help me on? We made more, and they became logbooks.

This is what I told students I was grading on:

This hastily-hand-written-and-then-photo-copied sheet became "conference sheets," and students were to keep them to use as a reference every day. We discussed the entire sheet at length together, but also during conferences. I'll go through each bullet here like I did then.

1. Logbook
I. Participation - Are you filling out your log book every day?
II. Legibility and neatness/organization - Can someone else pick up your logbook and understand what you're doing without context?
III. Completion - Does each entry have everything it needs? Include the following:
i. Date
ii. Pre-planning with signature of approval
iii. Reflection - What do we mean by that? Here are some examples:
a. Self-exploration / meta-cognition - Thinking about your thinking. What are you learning about yourself during this time?
b. In depth explanation of process and findings - What path did your thinking take? What problems did you come across, and how did you solve them? What were the answers?
c. Analysis of findings - What do you make of what you found? What can you generalize or apply to other areas? What does it all mean?

2. Presentation of findings
I. Communication of ideas - Can you explain what you did in a way that everyone else understands and learns from, too?
II. Advocating for self - Are you enthusiastic about what you're learning? If someone is critical of you, do you stick up for yourself and what you're doing?

3. Weekly conferences

As you can see, the logbooks were the backbone of the project. It was a difficult line for me to address because I wanted to demonstrate to other teachers, parents, and administrators that this plan could work. I wanted them to be a physical representation of students learning on their own with minimal guidance, but to do that, I had to set a secure infrastructure. I wanted to leave enough room for the students to explore and be able to come up with their own, innovative ideas, and I knew that involves being able to fail. It's so much to learn in just a month. I knew it wasn't reasonable, so I built myself a safety net. I started a spreadsheet of what I noticed the students doing each day.

The truth is, I hated keeping this. I felt like I was judging my students on something they shouldn't be judged on. Isn't that all grading in a nutshell? Yet this felt worse, somehow.. Like I was giving them false freedom. Like I was keeping secrets from them. It felt like judgement, but it never entered into how I graded. It's just what I had to do to ascertain that I was still doing my job as a public school teacher, and I still hated it all the while.

It did, however, free me from keeping unnecessarily close tabs on the logbooks. Once they were created, I let the students conduct their business in whatever way they wanted and only asked them about their process during conferences. Thus, they knew what the expectations were and could choose to act on them or not, hence the pages being kept for reference and being revisited during conferences. They knew that the expectation was they kept their entries dated, for example, and could decide how much not doing that counted off of their own grade.

Here's an example of what one looked like. Again, the sophomore teaching herself Russian. (She chose to use the backs of scrap paper, as I did in my own journals. Other students used lined paper.)

The presentations were a little difficult to get started, my students all being hesitant to talk about themselves and having been instilled with a fear of the word "Presentation." My Juniors, however, were extremely grateful to realize that they didn't have to be formal presentations and arranged themselves into a big circle on the floor on presentation days. They went around the circle describing what they were learning and answering questions from the others. It was informal and pleasant, and it went so well that the biggest struggle we had was the time limit because of the bell system.

My favorite part of the entire project were the weekly conferences. I met with each student in their own space, joining them on the floor or in the desks, and let them flow through the Conference Sheet at their own pace, expounding on whatever they felt most important. I got to hear their genuine voices during these times, how they thought and what interested them. I asked them questions about their work and process, and then asked them what they would grade themselves, which was an incredibly interesting undertaking. Some students were hypercritical of themselves while others weren't as much, but, regardless, I always asked them how they would improve during the following week. It was an honest, authentic conversation, and one in which I felt like I was doing my best work as a teacher. This speaking quietly with students in a relaxed environment, listening as they explain what interests them and how they can and are growing as humans, while the other students work and play conversate and live around us.. This is what teaching is about for me. <3

I know this was a unique experience for my students, and I hope that they got something out of it. My biggest hope is that they will remember these four weeks at some later time in their lives and that it sparks some sort of renewed flame in pursuing passions. Teaching is sewing seeds of inspiration that won't grow into anything noticeable for years. I have faith that in 10 or 15 years, this one month will make a difference in the lives of some of my students.

And as for now.. I may have found another transformation for those logbooks in a new project of my own... more on that later!

Ownership of Learning in a High School English Classroom

The most difficult thing about being a public school teacher in 2016 is that the students have given up all autonomy in their learning. Especially when they get to high school, they're completely accustomed to being fed lectures, work, problems, solutions, and techniques for every part of their day. By that point, they're even accustomed to being beat back down, and quickly!, every time they try to rebel against the system.

During my second year of teaching high school English, I wanted to give my students just a small taste of actual control.

I had designed my curriculum schedule for second semester very quickly. I probably only spent about 20 minutes on it at most. It looked like this:

My four grades each still had seven unite left, and it worked easier for me to teach the same unit with all four classes, just using different materials. My OCD found it much more manageable that way. However, for the sake of my students, for the sake of something I knew they would benefit from, I relinquished control. I gave them the opportunity to redesign the curriculum schedule.

Now, at this point, I knew giving them complete control would be too much. They wouldn't be able to handle that sort of shift suddenly, so I'd have to decide what was on the table. I gave them each the list of seven units, and they decided how long each should take and how to order them. It was extremely interesting watching how the problem solving discussion evolved differently among each class!

Here's what they came up with:

 Freshmen

Sophomores 

Juniors 

Seniors

After our discussions, I transferred all the calendars to separate sheets of paper. At first I thought we could hang them on the insides of different cabinets and open them during the appropriate class, but with the flexible classroom, I had students sitting against the cabinets every hour. Thus, change of plans, I moved them to a pillar at the front of the room. It was a rather inconvenient spot when I lectured, but I tried not to lecture so much, anyway. Plus, I think it was more convenient for the students to be able to see their schedule at the front of the room.

And the results?

First, yes, I was a little bit crazier not having everyone on the same schedule, but it was definitely worth it. When my students have more autonomy, I can deal with a little OCD-related anxiety. I own that, and it's mine to deal with.

It was also very important to me to listen to my students likes and dislikes. I gave them all a suggested time frame of how long I thought each unit should take, but then we discussed and compromised. My freshmen collectively hated poetry. They had taken 8 units of poetry in their school career thus far, and they knew their preferences. Even though I had planned to spend two weeks on that unit, we realized together that one week would suffice. This was helpful to them because they got to avoid more time with something they already knew wasn't their favorite, but also helpful to me because I learned that they had a very limited attention span for that unit. I would need to pare it down to just the most important highlights because if I included anything remotely boring, I'd lose them.

Some students admitted to me a few weeks or a month into the second semester that they were really surprised I followed through with the curriculum schedules they came up with. When I asked why, they told me that they thought it was a gimmick I was trying to sell them to get them interested in class but would eventually go back on. I was sad that they had that impression, but even more glad that I had made the decision to go forward with this idea. A month or two into the new schedule, as everyone realized I actually was serious, my juniors even came to me with the idea to replace their Shakespeare play for that year with Beowulf! They convinced me that it was a piece of fiction with arguably more historical significance, and I agreed. The unit was changed.

Some students listed designing the curriculum schedule as their favorite part of being in my class that year in their evaluation survey, and that makes my heart sing. <3

Universal Basic Income and Its Potential in the World of Education

Today's adventure begins with a foray into the world of economics, with short stops along the way into politics and humanitarianism. We'll get back to education before the end, I promise, so bear with me, even if you can't see where I'm going with all of this. It will make sense in the end.

Five Thirty Eight, a data-driven news blog, recently posted an article on Universal Basic Income, an idea than every citizen be given a no-strings-attached living stipend. It's a philosophy that I've heard in passing before and agreed with, despite my lack of knowledge on the subject. The article is a little lengthy, but well worth the read. For the purposes of THIS article, I'm going to assume you've read the Five Thirty Eight one, so go ahead. I'll be here when you get back.

Interesting stuff, right? To learn more, check out the thorough Wikipedia article, Basic Income Earth Network's website, including their YouTube video playlist, and Techdirt's podcast episode with Albert Wegman.

The proposal has been touted as something that everyone can get behind, from socialists to libertarians, Martin Luther King Jr. to Milton Friedman. It supposes that once everyone has their basic needs met, they can participate more fully in society, and that if they aren't struggling to survive, they can focus on more important things. That is, if one isn't forced to work a meaningless job because "it pays the bills," they can, instead, focus on making their lives better, a la, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

I can hear the collective gasp in response as I type this. There are a number of reasons why today's American society, if not the entire world, would balk at the suggestion. The one that I've heard most frequently when I've brought it up in the past (and one I'll discuss to day, as the others have well articulated responses in the links listed above) goes, "If no one had to work, they wouldn't. They would just sit at home, and nothing would get done! Productivity would go out the window!" I'm here to posit that that just isn't true. 

As Rutger Bregman puts it in his TEDx Talk, "If I asked each one of you in this room, 'Would you stop working? And I'll give you, you know, about 1,000 euros a month,' about 99% of you would say, 'Of course not. I've got dreams. I've got ambitions. I'm not going to sit on the couch, no.'"

Andrew Flowers of Five Thirty Eight backs this theory up, as well. He writes, of the Negative Tax Income pilots in the US, 

"Unsurprisingly, work effort did decline. Some NIT recipients cut back their hours, but the declines were modest: no more than 5 to 7 percent among primary earners, and a bit more for secondary earners.
But participants quitting altogether didn’t happen ... 'Some of the experimenters said that they were unable to find even a single instance of labor-market withdrawal,' wrote Widerquist in his 2005 paper summarizing the studies."

And I concur. Perhaps it comes from my belief in humanity. Yes, perhaps some individuals, Bregman's 1% of the audience, might choose to stay at home and relax unproductively with their stipend, but I choose to believe that the majority of humanity would do something with their lives, even if they didn't "have to." I believe that the natural curiosity and instincts inside each of us would push us to pursue our passions. I know I would still be working in education, regardless of pay, and my husband has said that he would still be in software development. Humans want to do things and feel productive. They want to feel like they're making a difference.

(I might also remind the reader that we don't know the stories of those individuals that would choose not to work. Maybe they've been working harder than the rest of us and actually "deserve" the respite. Maybe they're suffering from an unseen mental illness and would use that time as healing. Their lives are not ours to judge.)

Flowers conveys an idea of venture capitalist and author Albert Wegner's, "[He] wants less time spent on tasks that could be automated and more time spent on issues he thinks are insufficiently addressed: fighting climate change, exploring space, preventing the next global pandemic." Or, you know, bringing about the cessation of war. These are the real issues of our age, the serious problems that need to be settled, the ones we currently don't have time or funding for. I believe that humanity can solve these issues, and moreover, that we want to, we have a drive to. I believe that, given the opportunity, there would be an insurgence of people rushing to solve the world's most pressing issues. Right now, without the agency to do so, we've just become apathetic.

One concern of mine is that, as we have seen in the past, further half-hearted studies will ruin the name of Universal Basic Income. The most likely, in my opinion, is that a short-term study will determine that this proposal doesn't work--that the majority of people don't pursue their dreams, that they do buy alcohol and junk food and "waste" their time at home on the couch. The short-term studies will "prove" what everyone has been thinking all along.

Only a serious, long-term study will demonstrate the true strengths of humanity, their resilience and curiosity and passion, because here's another belief of mine: Humanity has a certain structure at this time. We have a schedule and a time table and someone telling us menacingly, "Do this or else." Without those things, we WILL take some time to explore our new-found freedoms. We WILL excitedly go to the store to pick up some "free" junk food and go home to relax on the couch and watch some shows. So if that's all the time the study allows for, yes, that's what it will find. However, if the studies give us more time and patiently sit back to watch what happens, after a while we will sit up and say, "I'm bored. I don't want to watch TV anymore. I want to do something fun!" And THAT'S when the good part will begin. THAT'S when we'll start to explore what we can REALLY do with ourselves.

We just have to be given the chance. And, as Flowers demonstrated in his article, there aren't any sufficient studies to yet prove one way or the other.

Alright, still with me? Now it's time to turn this train around and head back to the world of education. This is where it gets difficult for me because I'm about to discuss an issue that I am entirely too attached to. I feel vulnerable letting people see it because I don't want anyone to hurt it. But my opinion is a fortress, and I know that letting it out will either strengthen it or knock it down, and what do I want with a fortress that's too weak to withstand a little criticism, anyway? Thus, I welcome the criticism because I want the best ideas for my students. If this is not one, so be it. If it is, let's strengthen it and make it the best that it can be.

While I was exploring the world of Montessori, the philosophy that stood out stronger than the rest was, "Follow the child." Perhaps we might all have different takes on what precisely this means, but to me, it means, "The child is best suited to learn whatever he is most curious about," and, "The natural curiosity of a child is his key to education." Dictating what a child must learn and when will only serve to frustrate him, make him rebellious, and turn him against the idea of learning all together.

And I've taken this idea almost to an extreme, it seems to some people I know. When I explain this to others, the most common response I hear is, "But children will never learn if we don't make them."

Aha. Sound familiar? Thus, I return to my previous point: Yes, they will. 99% of the children in the room, if given enough time and started at the right age, have the natural curiosity and instinct to pursue their passions and make something with their time. And that means learning along the way, REAL learning. Not memorizing multiplication tables or the order of the presidents, because that information can be "automated," or in this instance, easily referenced. What learning would they do instead? I'm guessing the same learning that adults would be doing: "fighting climate change, exploring space, preventing the next global pandemic." Or, you know, bringing about the cessation of war.

But again, we can't expect this to happen in one or two years, especially, as I'm learning currently and will discuss in a later post, not starting with high schoolers. If I were to tell my high school students, "You don't have to go to school. Go learn anything you want on your own," the majority of them would excitedly go to the store, buy some junk food, and then go home to sit on the couch and watch TV. Only after they've had their fill of that would they say, "I'm bored. Eh, okay, let's see what else there is to do." But I'm assuming that many of them would be too far down the wrong path and struggle to get back to the right one. I think that's because they've been shoved into the current model so long, it's the only thing they know. 

But if we started with four- and five-year-olds, it would be a different story. If we asked them, "What do you want to learn about?" each would be bursting with their own answer. If we begin with the excitement of the young child, allow them to pursue their passion, patiently sitting back to watch what happens, I believe he will retain that passion throughout his life and eventually turn it into the solutions to humanity's real issues.

NSFW: A First Attempt at Magnetic Poetry with High Schoolers

Last summer I found a set of Magnetic Poetry at a garage sale that I was excited to share with my students. I set it up on the side of a filing cabinet like so (click to enlarge):

I started off with a poem of my own:

I set small sticky notes near by in case they wanted to create by lines as I had demonstrated, but no one ever did.

I didn't directly address the area of the room or create any rules for it, and it took most students quite a while to realize it was even there. Some students noticed it right away, however, and went over of their own accord to play, and I generally left them to it. Most of them had the sense that it was an "after-I'm-done-with-my-assignment" type of activity without me even mentioning it.

I documented every creation that was left after the students left the classroom. As shouldn't actually be surprising with teenagers, some poems got quite vulgar, so I'll include our adventure after a jump. Be warned, teenagers are very creative! They're exploring their sexuality and can put words together in ways I would never have expected. Most of their creations are Not Safe For Work, and a couple of them made even me blush.