January

Students learn about mental disabilities during community class.

Student learn experience visual impairment during community class.

Students attempt to read lips to simulate the experience of hearing impairment.

It has hovered between zero and twenty degrees all week.  The playground is deserted and field trips are few.  So, how do Free School students pass the time in the depths of winter?

If you are four, your main obsession currently is play-dough.  We made a basket of dough fruits and Lilibeth, who is our substitute teacher while Bhawin is away, led us in reciting the names of the fruits in English and Spanish.  The four-year-olds are also enjoying many dance parties (limbo, freeze dance, cha cha slide) and demanding a lot of piggy-back rides.

If you are five, you spend a good deal of time with Legos, letters, dragon stories, and ooblek. Mariana enojoyed sitting in my lap dancing to Whiteney Houston's "I Wanna Dance With Somebody," and everyone loves playing number bingo and counting model animals.

If you are nine, you spend some of your time arguing about math word problems.  Which cell-phone plan should the hypothetical Tim get?  The pay-as-you-go plan is a better deal but the unlimited plan is better because, well, it's unlimited. There are also English workbooks, snowball fights, scrabble, and learning to crochet.  Oh, and a whole day when everyone drew on a fake mustache.

If you are 13, a good hobby is downloading an iPhone app the inserts ghost images into pictures and using it to scare the crap out of little kids.  There are also handstand competitions, Adele songs on the piano, lending your gym shoes to younger boys who forgot theirs, and folding origami dragons.  Not to mention having a contest to see who can draw the best right angle and trash-talking during an angles relay race.

Everyone loves trips to the gym, pancakes for lunch, and making a giant mess.  Everyone loves to argue and get on other people's nerves - three council meetings in the last week and another in the offing for sure.  No one reads all that much on their own, to my eternal frustration, though they all seem to enjoy reading stories as a class.  A number of kids are thinking about applying to other private schools next year, and aside from the obvious issue that those other schools are very expensive, I wonder if they know what life is like in January at other schools.  

Here are some things we are not doing: test prep drills.  Detention.  Uniform checks.  Walking in lines.  Sitting quietly.