I spent some
time thinking about the kind of school I’d open if I could, drawing from
current frustration and thinking large thoughts—easier to do when I know I’m
close to the end of the job I have. The exercise of imagination was itself so
energizing, intellectually and spiritually, that its act of blank-slate
creativity became, in message, louder than the interesting thing I’d
envisioned.
It is a potential
match to burnout.
Question: If
you had the resources and were unbound from the structures and oversights,
schedules, expectations, and institutional weights and routines, what might
school do and look like? This allows me to ask even bigger questions, such as
this one: What is school for?
What is school
for?
I think: joy
and excitement, curiosity, and civic engagement, community and belonging. I
think school prepares us to live in neighborhoods, jobs, families, friendships,
country, world, selves, and also, schools should and can also do fundamental
work shoring up human dignity and love of neighbor.
A response to
burnout is going to our largest questions and forgetting, for a moment, all the
stupidities and obstacles that are an overwhelming reality every day. I believe
that, were I to play this game with others, some of the ideas and energy that
filter up in excitement and joy may actually be practicable, even in our
suffocating present realities.
This is the
widespread reality for many teachers: We are not given time for real
collaboration; we are not honored with what it takes to plan and invent; and when
we are spread thin, a frequent solution to our grasping or fatigue seems to be
to hand us units or to lessen our curricular reach by narrowing what we teach.
But the result of not allowing us this imaginative, intellectual richness and
the excitement and purpose of building together is a dullness and
just-getting-through-it-ness.
The school I
was thinking of is likely not sustainable, but what I was imagining gets
exactly to my hunger for intellectual and communal engagement.
I was thinking
of a grade 6-12 school without strict curricular bands around age and terms that
reset every trimester or semester around a singular, organizing subject: The
whole community—students, teachers, parents, partners—for one week build
lessons and experiences and assessments around that single theme.
Examples of
ideas around which to organize for a term: Chocolate. Flight. Hamlet, housing,
or happiness. Garbage. Soccer. Weather. Snakes. Seattle. Utopias. Bicycles.
Games. And the very first term, the subject, I’m thinking, is school.
For one week before
each term, everyone brainstorms and researches in service to what’s possible,
and looks for field trips, projects, speakers, needed lessons, units. The
school would have math specialists, science, literature and writing, history
and geography, arts of various kinds; and these specialists would imagine the
kinds of lessons and cross-curricular projects that might draw from and apply
their specialties.
One week
planning is certainly not enough time to build from scratch an entire set of
curricula for an entire school, but in my idea, that’s part of the point: We
tap Paulo Freire’s ideas of teachers being learner-teachers and students having
leadership and knowledge building and sharing roles too. Adults should have
lots of wisdom and lessons about how to tap resources and with what trust, but
everybody learns together, and students see their teachers at work and play.
I see some
traditional structures for the school. Outside of whatever schedule supports
such adaptive cross-curricular work, projects, and opportunities in the school
like teachers and out of the school like field trips and apprenticeships, I’d
like to see foreign language and math teachers meeting daily. I do see a role
for grades. I’d like to lean on a standardized test to let us and families know
how we’re doing—probably the Programme for International Student Assessment
(PISA) for our 15 year olds. But as for the grades, what I imagine is our
different teacher specialists developing field-specific skills that they would
want to call out and communicate, so that families can be shown one of two
scores for each of them: Developing appropriately or Focus and support needed. And
I’m not interested in the traditional grade level classes: Given that we shift
our content every term, it’s more important that we batch the groups in rough,
wide, and inclusive developmental groups than by age.
I find the idea
of collaborating around an idea every term exciting. But I’m sure it would
quickly feel like too much. And when I started actually looking at office space
in empty skyscrapers downtown and Stephanie asked what I was doing and I told
her that maybe starting a school is what I do next, she said, That’s a terrible
idea, and I remembered some of our friends broken starting schools, and I said,
Oh, yeah.
But it helps me
think about what happens without the stress of re-building, too: We can cope
with our ridiculous jobs; we can go one step at a time, go through the motions
and just get through; but it’s ultimately deadening to do so. As a teacher, I
am stretched very thin and my job has little time or room for invention and
depth of collaboration. This is a real cost. The job is worth something in a
closed-door classroom, but too often, it’s just a job and my soul is flat and
fallow.
Teachers need
more trust and need more time to reflect, research, collaborate, and plan, full
stop. The job is such a human endeavor. And humanity can be a delight.
