A School of Our Own: The Story of the First Student-Run High School and a New Vision for American Education
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A School of Our Own: The Story of the First Student-Run High School and a New Vision for American Education
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Overview
Samuel Levin, a teenager who had already achieved international fame for creating Project Sprout—the first farm-to-school lunch program in the United States—was frustrated with his own education, and saw disaffection among his peers. In response, he lobbied for and created a new school based on a few simple ideas about what kids need from their high school experience.
The school succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest expectations and went on to be featured on NPR and in Newsweek and the Washington Post. Since its beginnings in 2010, the Independent Project serves as a national model for inspiring student engagement.
In creating his school, Samuel collaborated with Susan Engel, the noted developmental psychologist, educator, and author—and Samuel’s mother. A School of Our Own is their account of their life-changing year in education, a book that combines poignant stories, educational theory, and practical how-to advice for building new, more engaging educational environments for our children.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781620971536 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | New Press, The |
| Publication date: | 07/19/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 291 |
| Sales rank: | 796,824 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
REALIZE YOU NEED ONE
I was pissed off. It wasn't the first day I had come home from school feeling that way, but it would be one of the last. I was sixteen years old, and I had just started my junior year.
I was actually doing fine. My grades were good. Although a lot of my classes sucked, and I had a few teachers I hated, I also had a few I loved — teachers I could really connect to and learn from. And that was just about enough. After all, this had always been the case: mostly not very good teachers, mostly quite boring classes, but one or two life preservers to keep me afloat.
And I suppose it wasn't that big a deal. My days were, by and large, good. I usually woke up at 4:15 to the pitch black, rolled out of bed, and yanked on some blue jeans and a few layers of shirts. I went into the kitchen, turned on the coffee machine, and packed my backpack. Often my mom had made me a lunch the night before, but if not I would throw a sandwich together. Then I put the coffee in a jar with lots of milk and sugar, shoved on my Timberland boots, grabbed a pair of sneakers, and drove ten minutes to the dairy farm where I worked.
I loved the farm. I was usually the first one there, and I loved sliding open the big red doors on their rusty tracks as the first light crept into the day. I loved walking deep into the back fields to find the cows wherever they had been lurking in the night, and I loved walking them back inside, moving at their plodding pace. And I was lucky to have a great boss. He was demanding but understanding, a good teacher, knowledgeable, and really, really funny. I loved listening to NPR while we milked, almost as much as I loved the mornings (and there was no discerning what mornings they would be) when my boss decided we would work in silence.
Most of all, I loved the cows — their smell, the way the heat came off them in the cold barn (as I worked, I would slowly shed the layers I had started the day with). I even loved, for whatever twisted reason, the way Dame tried to kick me every time I milked her. Whenever there was a quiet moment in the barn, when I needed a rest, I would lean up against Freckles, our biggest steer, and relax against his warmth for a little while.
I worked as hard as I could there and loved every second of it. We milked, made cream, hayed the fields, cleaned the barn, stacked bales, moved the cows, cleaned the dairy room, fed the calves, moved the shit, and started again. I always left promptly at 7:30 a.m. Halfway to school I pulled off onto a dead-end dirt road, parked, took off my manure-covered boots, and put on my sneakers. If my pants were shit covered, and they often were, there was nothing I could do. I was lucky I had had the same friends my whole life, because there was no chance of making new friends smelling like cow crap every day.
I'd get to school before the first bell and park where my car was least likely to get keyed (a hangover from a brawl my friends and I had been involved in the year before). Then I'd sit through the first three periods of my day, mostly bored, occasionally annoyed. In the classes that were the least boring, I tried to think of ways to make them more interesting. I'd translate words to binary, think of alternative explanations for data that purported to support a theory, design math puzzles. In the most boring classes, I just thought about other things. I planned science experiments, wrote stories, or daydreamed. During chemistry class I wrote a speech that I would later deliver to ten thousand farmers and chefs.
Then, in period four, I had a one-on-one math class with my favorite teacher. She was a brilliant mathematician, excited, enthusiastic, humble, and quick to admit what she didn't know. We'd cram as much math into the forty minutes allotted to us as we could. We'd search for better and better math books, more and more interesting puzzles, try our hand at original proofs, and then the bell would ring, always a few minutes too soon.
Lunch meant hanging out with my friends, on the lawn if it was sunny. That was also always too short — never enough time to complete our prank or hear Red's joke or slip into town to get doughnuts — but messing around with the guys provided fuel for the rest of the day.
The people and situations in this book are real, but we have changed the names for the sake of privacy.
After lunch was English, which was so bad it wasn't boring. I usually got too infuriated to be bored. I argued endlessly with my teacher, who seemed to not like books, or kids for that matter. The kids thing bothered me a little, the books thing a lot.
I can't remember the last two periods. And then the final bell would ring. The next three hours of my time would be spent at school (not playing basketball or baseball — I had already given those up by junior year — but I'll get to those three hours later), and then I'd drive home. The first thing I'd do was go down into the basement, where I had constructed a makeshift lab. I had four lentic water tanks and one river tank, which I had bought with money from a grant I had won the year before. One of these tanks was usually covered by a black cloth; the others were under bright lights. The tanks were occupied by caddisfly larvae, on which I was experimenting. I'd spend an hour doing what needed to be done — dissecting the larval cases, marking the individual caddisflies, photographing their constructions, blinding them, and so on. And then it was dinner, and then a couple of hours of homework, and then some Simpsons before bed with a glass of water and a good Stephen King novel.
So I guess you could say I didn't have that much to be upset about. Sure, there were long stretches of boredom in my day, and several moments of frustration, but there was also the farm in the morning, that stellar math class to break up my day, and the larvae awaiting me in the basement at home. Who was I to complain? I should have been happy, or at least content, but certainly not pissed off.
And yet, by the time I came home that day, I was furious. That's because it wasn't just about me. It was everyone else. It was what I saw all around me.
By the time Sam was in eleventh grade, his older brothers, Jake and Will, had finished college. I knew how easy it was to think teenagers needed a guiding hand at every turn. I had watched, intruded, kibitzed, meddled, admired, fretted, and engineered as they groped their way from puberty to adulthood. Part of this came from the fact that it was hard to step back from the kind of constant care younger children need. It took me a kid or two to get comfortable with my new role. But it was also true that I was painfully aware, like other parents, of the pitfalls of adolescence. After all, there are so many ways for kids between the ages of fourteen and eighteen to screw up. It would be hard not to quake at the potential disasters that lie in wait for the teen who goes astray. Many parents and teachers in our culture have a deeply rooted sense that if we let go of the reins for more than an hour, our teenage children will lose their homework, get a bad grade, stay out too late, have sex without a condom, make the wrong friend, drop out, turn to drugs, waste their time, get bad test scores, not get into college, and before you know it become homeless and jobless. In other words, all hell will break loose. Which may explain why we've drawn tighter and tighter circles around high school students.
The paradox here is that most parents and teachers readily agree that by the time our kids are somewhere around twenty years old, it's imperative that they can make wise decisions, use their time well, choose worthwhile pursuits, and take good care of themselves. In other words, we want them to be independent. Yet, strangely, as Sam began to notice during his junior year, we want them to acquire all of those skills without giving them much practice at any of it while they are in school.
In Patterns of Culture, the anthropologist Ruth Benedict noted that many cultures lead their youngsters toward maturity by gradually giving them more autonomy and accountability. But our culture, she pointed out, did not. In fact, she argued, our society was notable for the disjuncture we create between childhood and adulthood. We baby them for a very long time and then fling them into a free fall toward adulthood.
That's just as true today as it was when Benedict wrote her book, in 1934. We tell kids what to do every moment they are in school. We don't even trust them to keep track of time, ringing a bell whenever they should get up and begin moving to the next class. If you've spent time in a public school, you'll know what I mean. The students sit, slouch, or fidget in their seats. Then suddenly, from nowhere, a loud, ugly chime sounds, and everyone jumps up (even when the teacher or another student is still talking, or a film is showing), puts their books in their backpacks, and begins shuffling toward the door. There is absolutely no decision making involved. They each begin moving, like sardines on the conveyer belt, toward their next destination, another classroom in another hall.
And it's not just their time we control. We tell them what to learn as well. For the most part adults decide what topics are essential to study, what books they should read, which math they should learn, and what kinds of experiments they should conduct. Teenagers are typically treated as if they have no clue how to choose what to apply themselves to, what they are interested in, or how to go about pursuing those interests. We also tell them how to learn the topics we have selected: what material they should study, which skills to practice, and the best way to prepare for a test. We even relieve them of any responsibility for deciding when they actually know something well enough. Instead, we tell them, usually with a test score.
Yet suddenly, when they hit their eighteenth birthday, everything changes. By then we have given them license to drive a lethal weapon and smoke as much as they want and have invited them to help select the nation's president. During times of war, we send them off to protect us, to kill, and to make life-and-death decisions, all in a foreign country. We expect them to make a decision that will shape the rest of their lives by choosing college, work, or the army. Now they can get married if they want to. Last but not least, having kept them powerless long beyond puberty, we demand that they quickly become self-supporting. We ask them to leap from childhood into adulthood. But of course, though our society treats this transition as a leap, the truth is teenagers don't leap: they stumble, jump, skip, slide, and trudge their way into maturity.
In describing this gradual and winding path toward maturity, the psychologist Kurt Lewin said that the teenager was "the marginal man," standing outside, caught between two worlds. Teenagers have left the pleasures and freedom of childhood behind but do not yet have the responsibilities or autonomy of adulthood. It takes time to travel this sometimes circuitous and often difficult route. Yet our high schools have functioned less like a path from dependence to independence and more like a holding pen with a diving board at the exit gate.
This immobilizing has other bad consequences. By directing them through every waking moment, we all but guarantee that they are unlikely to feel much zeal or drive for what they are learning and trying to do. In the early 1980s the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Reed Larson wanted to get a detailed, vivid picture of adolescent experience. They gave teenagers in Chicago small beepers to take with them everywhere, and a packet of questionnaires. For more than a week, each teenager in the study was beeped at random times. When the subjects in the study heard the beep, they would take a moment to pause and answer a host of questions about where they were, what they were doing, who they were with, what they were thinking about, and how they felt (they had a chance even to sketch pictures of their moods). The study offered a gold mine of information about how teenagers spent their time and, more important, provided an amazingly intimate and gritty picture of what it felt like to be a teenager. The answers made it vividly clear that most kids feel listless and disengaged for most of the school day. But there were places and times during the school day when the opposite was true — when kids reported a sense of focus, energy, and excitement about what they were doing. When did those moments occur? When the students were doing things they had chosen: whether it was during a class or not, kids felt much more alive when they had some say in their activity. Sadly, however, these moments were the exception, not the rule.
What I saw around me, what made me so mad, was that most of my friends were struggling. Many of them were getting bad grades. Sometimes it was because the work was too challenging. But most of the time it wasn't. They didn't care about anything they were learning. They weren't engaged in their classes, because the subject matter often seemed dry, boring, irrelevant, and unrelated to them. And this meant that when they got home, they would usually choose hiking, basketball, making out with their girlfriends, or reading good books over anatomy homework. And I didn't blame them. Most of what we were learning was boring. Or even if the subject matter itself was interesting, the way we learned it turned it into something lifeless and dull. I'd sit in class thinking about how vapid geometry was. Then, at home, I'd read a book in which the characters were shapes discovering other dimensions, and I'd become totally enthralled. But I'd grow annoyed at the same time, knowing that my friends wouldn't get a chance to have the same experience. They'd just go on struggling to memorize the Pythagorean theorem.
Even worse, some of my friends were doing fine, doing really well even, but were just as disengaged as the friends who were struggling. The problem was, the nature of most of our classes meant that you could learn the material well enough to get good grades without ever really engaging with it in any meaningful way. We would learn the periodic table — something I now know to be elegant and fascinating — by memorizing the abbreviations and their places in the boxes. So you could sail by on a test without ever knowing how the periodic table might save lives, or how you would use it to go about designing an experiment to find a new element. So the friends who were getting straight As were doing it without ever becoming passionate about their work or about learning itself.
The truth is, no one liked school, or at least not the part of school that was supposed to be education. And the result was that pretty much everyone around me was unhappy. Maybe this sounds perfectly normal, like school isn't supposed to be something kids enjoy. But why? We go to school not just once or twice a year, but seven hours a day, 180 days a year. Why should kids be unhappy so much of the time? Maybe if all of my friends were becoming really thoughtful, enlightened, well-educated people, I might have overlooked the unhappiness (maybe). But that wasn't the case at all. No one was learning anything either. It was all intertwined — the disengagement, the unhappiness, the lack of real learning — and it all tied together in a vicious feedback loop.
Nothing unusual happened that day, sometime in September of 2009, when I came home pissed off. It was as good and as bad and as banal as the other days. I went to the farm, Dame tried to kick me; I sat through several boring lessons, had a great argument with my math teacher about prime numbers, had a bad argument with my English teacher about the merit of excerpts, and eventually came home and changed the water in my aquariums. There was no sudden outrage, no particular offense. But clearly it had been slowly accumulating, like a poison leaking into my system, all the letdowns, all the frustrations, all the disappointments, all the failures of our system, and, most of all, all the misery around me. It was all swirling around in my head as I drove home from school.
And when I sat down at the dinner table with my mom, all that frustration just burst out of me. "Mom, I'm sick and tired of my friends being unhappy in school," I said, my head in my hands. "I'm sick of my friends not learning, sick of them being disengaged. So much of the way school does things doesn't make sense. I can't take it anymore." Like I said, it wasn't the first time I had come home feeling that way, and it wasn't the first time I had vocalized these feelings either. Even if there was a little more venom in my voice this time, she had heard it all before. Which is why, perhaps, I was surprised by how she responded.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A School of Our Own"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Samuel Levin and Susan Engel.
Excerpted by permission of The New Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
1. Realize You Need One,
2. Design It,
3. Build It,
4. Your First Day,
5. Assume Everyone Is an Intellectual,
6. Require Mastery,
7. Overcome Obstacles, Together,
8. Open Your Door to the Community,
Postscript,
Appendix: Extra Nuts and Bolts,