Dress code

Zuleika, my roommate and co-intern, teaching a still life drawing class.

 

Building a pretty good branch fort in the woods across from school.

A nice adjustment for me in my new life is thinking about what to wear.  Those of you who went through UTEP with me know that the words "professional dress" can strike fear into any teacher's heart.  There is a certain pressure, especially in high-performing charter schools, to dress you like you work in an office as a way of showing you take your job seriously.  Of course, you also need to ensure you can bend over without your cleavage or lower back showing, raise your arms without exposing your midriff, and simultaneously stand all day in your chosen shoes without keeling over.

The Free School has a different implicit expectation about what it means to dress like you take your work seriously, and it applies to kids as well as teachers.  You need to wear clothes that could get dirty!  So everyone dresses comfortably, and I don't care about the kids seeing my armpit hair because they've seen armpit hair before and don't find it strange.  I still keep the cleavage under wraps I guess.

Playtime

Ramps and marbles - endless fun.

Mitch writes chords for a second-grader's song while others practice accompaniment.

Just dump the whole bin of duplos on the floor.

As a public and charter-school teacher I had to struggle and fight to squeeze time for play - both structured and unstructured - into a school day.  I worked at schools where core academic subjects were considered to be the most valuable use of time, and sometimes I agreed with that prioritization.  But the longer I worked with kids who had a hard time sitting still, struggled to get along with their peers, or couldn't easily improvise new ways to solve problems, the more I felt that play should be an integral part of school.

High-stakes testing tends to squeeze play out.  Primary and pre-school kids spend more time learning the fundamentals they need for literacy and math at an earlier age.  And I understand the urgency to teach them those skills, because as educators of low-income kids and children of color we realize that kids' success in school may give them a better shot at success in life when the odds are stacked against them.  And once kids get to fourth or fifth or sixth grade, we often don't even think about kids'
need for play.

At Amandla I organized an enrichment class called "board games," and I assured my administrators that we were playing educational games like scrabble and set.  But secretly in my mind I named this time "free time" and let the kids do pretty much whatever they wanted.  Sometimes that was an intellectually stimulating game of scrabble.  Sometimes it was thirty minutes of gossip in the corner.  Sometimes it was inventing weird fantasy scenarios involving monsters who destroy towers of dominoes.  All are necessary for kids development.

Let me say a little bit more about development.  I believe that self-directed play helps kids develop imagination, self-conrol, spatial skills, the ability to negotiate conflict, and many other important skills.  It is no coincidence that if you go to the elementary school in Winnetka, one of the most affluent suburbs in the nation, you will find kids playing in every classroom.

At the Free School play fills all of the nooks and crannies of unstructured time.  And there are many.  Time passes here in an unhurried way. It is not uncommon to see a kid who is six years old spend over an hour on a single activity, because each student marches to the beat of their own attention span.  Kids rarely express impatience for school to end.  When they are bored they get up and go do something else - boredom is not an outside force but rather something they try to solve themselves.  The sense of initiative they maintain is in my opinion the single most valuable thing about a free school education.

I am still worried about making sure everyone knows how to read and do math.  Maybe that anxiety is a leftover from my previous job, maybe not.  I do know that many of my current fourth-graders write some of their numbers backwards; on the other hand they are quick to recognize patterns such as the fact that all multiples of four are even.  One of the ways the Free School makes up for the time that kids don't spend in a formal class setting is a ton of informal learning - the low student to teacher ratio means that kids spend far more time each day talking to adults, and that rich environment of conversation gives them a leg up in developing their academic skills.  But it remains to be seen whether my new school is doing enough to ensure that every child gets the basic skills they need.  I will report back when I gather more data.

For those of you who are reading this who are, in the Karen Lewis parlance, "real" teachers, working in public or charter schools where you have a large number of needy students to contend with, working in play can be a real challenge.  I hope you keep at it.  You may not have ukeleles but you can still sing.  You may not have space for ramps and marbles but you can have a table with blocks sometimes.  You may not have endless hours for kids to be kids but I hope you can find a few minutes here and there.

Writing class

A kindergarten student's story about riding bikes.  

I tried to offer a poetry class yesterday but I only had one taker - Marina, who is five.  So, change of plans, she drew a picture and wrote a story to go along.  I started to write for her but she also wanted to add her own writing. I wrote "I was biking with my sister and my friends."  She added, "I love my friends." Pretty impressive for a student who is just starting kindergarten.

Cool as a cucumber

I watched an interesting interaction between two boys on the playground this morning.  Xavier, who is six, and Patrick, who is three.  Patrick was riding a toy car around the concrete area of the yard for a long time.  He left his car to go peer through a hole in the fence. Xavier came along and got onto the car. Patrick ran over and started screaming at him to get off, yelling that he wanted it back.  Xavier stayed calm and just said the most worst words in the playground lexicon, "you aren't my best friend anymore," and walked away. Patrick was devastated.  Of course, five minutes later they were playing happily together again.  What's amazing to me in this situation is that it isn't my job to intervene - even if Patrick is screaming and being unreasonable.  Xavier handled it himself and I think Patrick learned the consequences of being a jerk.

There is no one alive that is youer than you. . .

The eighth grade girls painted this Dr. Seuss mural during the first two days of school. 

Activities!

The activities board shows the schedule for the week.

The week started with an activities meeting, which happens first things every Monday morning.  Someone calls the meeting to order, nominations are taken for a student to lead the meeting, we elect a meeting leader, and then the leader calls on people to share their ideas for activities.  Some of these are classes, like my Junior High math class which will happen first thing every morning, a schedule I agreed upon with the students prior to the meeting. Other activities are trips like a field trip to the art center or a wilderness class at the nature center.  Other activities are one-time events like collaging the covers of notebooks to use in a gardening class.  Sometimes the kids request activities - even from other kids: today a second-grader asked a fourth-grader to offer a songwriting class that was offered last year.

Most of these classes are open to anyone, while some are for a specific age group such as a fifth/sixth geography class.  And you can see that there is a still a lot of open space in the schedule.  A few activities have a sign-up sheet because there is limited space - after the meeting students clamber for pens to sign up.  The activities board stays up in a prominent place in the Big Room.

Our First Community Class

Trying to pass the hula-hoop around the circle.

The Stop Rule

So far, one of my favorite things about working at the Free School is that I don't have to give punishments or consequences for students' behavior.  There are two reasons for this.

First, the Free School is non-coercive, meaning they don't make kids do things.  There are a few exceptions - council meetings and community class are mandatory and I will tell you more about those in later posts - but for the most part activities are chosen by kids and are completely optional.  So no one is punished for not participating, not doing an assignment, or not attending a class.  Students do what they are motivated to do, and as you saw in my previous post about Melody, they are actually motivated to do quite a lot.  In our first few days I saw students spontaneously begin art projects, paint murals, request a teacher to help them make a stop-motion movie, and of course, demand math lessons.  Students were so eager for their first social-studies lesson that they requested homework!

Day two of the math class Melody demanded - she brought friends this time.

Impromptu painting time on a Friday morning.

The second reason I don't have to give punishments or consequences is that the Free School empowers students to resolve most interpersonal conflicts themselves.  The centerpiece of this is the "stop" rule.  If a child is bothering another child, the child who is being bothered can say "stop" and the person bothering them has to stop what they are doing.  The kids are really good at enforcing this rule on each other.  So if a child pushes another child on the playground, my first response is not to intervene but to watch closely.  Usually someone says, "stop," the pusher stops, and that is the end of it.  If a child comes to me with a complaint, I say, "did you tell them to stop? Go tell them to stop" and send them back to deal with it.  Or I might add, "tell them you don't like that."  For the most part, kids respect each other enough to listen.

If telling someone to stop doesn't work, kids can ask an adult to help mediate.  The adult is not there to dole out punishments or say who is right or who is wrong, but really to listen to both parties and help them come to a resolution that they are okay with.  The kids don't come to me for this yet because I am brand new, but I have overhead Caroline, one of the most senior teachers, talking to a first-grader and a second-grader.  The second-grader is new and I think she expected that Caroline would take her side, but Caroline merely encouraged her to think about how her behavior had upset the other student.  A tough message but an important one, and it means that by the time the kids get to be a bit older, they rarely need adults to help mediate.

If mediation still doesn't solve the problem or it persists, a child can call a council meeting.  In a council meeting, the whole school gets together to talk through a problem.  We haven't had a council meeting to resolve a conflict yet but when we do I will tell all about it.

Update

A few minutes after my previous post, Melody, a sixth grader, came up to me as I was sitting on the couch and said, "are you the math teacher?" She wanted math.  I invited her to join the junior high group but she hesitated so I offered to form a group for her with the fifth and sixth graders.  I asked if we should start next week and she said, "sooner," so we went to the white board in a nearby classroom and started doing exponent problems, at her insistence.

The First Day of School

Our first council meeting started with nominations for students to lead the meeting.

Students played outside at the beginning of the day.

Here we are on day one. I feel pretty useless - our day has been devoted to reviewing the rules, creating teams to do lunch cleanup, and catching up on our summers. Unlike previous first days where I ran everything on a tight schedule, here the kids take charge and time flows at a leisurely pace. The kids are far more interested in each other than they are in me. All around me chaos reigns, but it is a cheerful kind of chaos. I know that at my previous schools this much noise and disorder with no real direction would have made me nervous, but here the kids seem to get along. As eager as I am to "get down to work" and dig into learning projects, I am also relishing being in the background just watching.