A School of Our Own

by Samuel Levin

  The evening Sam walked in churned up about his high school friends was not, by a long shot, the first time he had burst through the door practically levitating with a feeling or a thought. Even as a baby, Sam’s reactions had been intense. He startled easily as an infant, and when really upset, he’d open his mouth and take such a long pause for the cry to emerge that he’d periodically lose consciousness for a second. Even at four months, he was a man of conviction. When he was two he tried to peer under a large rock to watch the worms that lay in the dirt beneath. But his fat little hands couldn’t hold the rock, and it fell, smashing his foot, turning his stubby little toes to chopped meat. The orthopedist, looking at his tiny damaged foot, said Sam should really be on crutches for a brief time, if only a toddler could manage such a thing. Sam’s face lit up. Yes, he wanted them! The hospital provided him with teensy-weensy crutches, with which he tore around the house at fever pitch for the next two weeks. The foot pain was nothing compared to the thrill of the crutches.

  So I wasn’t particularly surprised when Sam flopped down on our couch one afternoon in the winter of his freshman year and said, “Guess what! We’re gonna start an organic garden. We’re gonna feed the school district.” “Nice, sweetie pie,” I said. “That’s a lovely idea. Honey”—his grandfather, a farmer, who had died the year before—“would be so proud. Do you have homework tonight, or you gonna watch TV with me?” Then he said, “The team is coming tomorrow to spend the day planning. Can you get some stuff for me to serve at lunch so that we can work straight through? And can we have the whole living room? We have a lot of things to figure out.”

  In the days and weeks that followed I learned that the day did not hold twenty-four hours, but instead about thirty-two: eight for sleep, eight for school, two for sports, two for homework, two for eating and posting messages on Facebook, and presto, somehow always another ten for planning his garden.

  Finally, I realized, Sam had stumbled upon something big enough, captivating enough, and complex enough to absorb him fully—something that he woke up thinking about and fell asleep thinking about. Something of his own. He still liked some of his classes, and, at least at first, he still liked being on the baseball and basketball teams. But all of that, really, was just background to the garden. In all of those he was an actor in someone else’s drama. He was the student writing a paper someone else had thought of, a point guard following the coach’s play.

  But in the garden, he and the other kids were the writers, the directors, the actors, and the stagehands. And believe me, there was plenty of drama in this drama. There were kids who didn’t show up for important meetings, fights about how big the first plot of tilled land should be, about how much help to get from the adults, and about whether they could or should feature a spit-fired pig at their first fund-raiser.

  Every decision seemed crucial, every detail important. Sam had never once asked me for help on a piece of schoolwork. But when it came to the garden, he pressed hard and constantly. Could I rent a rototiller and deliver it to the land? Could I take him to the printers to have the posters made? Could I make sure he got to the garden by 5 a.m. so that he could water early? Could he borrow all of our rakes and hoes so that the fourth grade could come help clear between the rows? Could I just spend a few days making pesto with all the leftover basil? Could he use my cell phone as I drove him to baseball practice so that he could call a farmer and make sure the pig would be big enough by the day of their benefit? Could I swing by the fabric outlet and pick up the T-shirts they had designed and commissioned?

  But it wasn’t just my own kid who seemed so thrillingly maxed out. That first May when the kids held their fund-raiser (and yes, it featured a whole pig, turning on a spit), I showed up nervously at noon, the start time. I had told myself again and again that even if only the families of the core team were there, that would be about twenty people. And what a great day we’d have, eating pig and potato salad, proud of our kids for trying this. The first thing I saw was a group of the A-wingers, so named because they took most of their classes in the vocational wing, or A-wing, of the school and were known as the lower ability, or less academic students. They were dressed in matching green Project Sprout T-shirts, happily, politely, and skillfully showing us where to park. And there beyond, under a tent, I saw another twenty kids, also in their green Project Sprout T-shirts, serving the food they had spent days preparing, to two hundred guests. I had seen all of these kids over the past six years, loping, lounging, scowling through the hallways. Often when I had passed them in classes or during a school event, they were gazing out the window or sitting slumped in their seats, watching their teachers with half-lidded eyes. These same kids, now a sea of green, looked so different. They were bounding around the parking lot, clear and certain about how to pack the cars in and get the guests to the tent. They looked excited to see that so many people had showed up. The ones serving food were explaining in cheerful voices where the potatoes in the potato salad came from and how the rhubarb had been harvested. They were calling out instructions to one another (“Bring out the extra pies”; “Yeah, the nettles need to be stirred”). Though every single one of those teenagers was familiar to me, they now looked different. And the truth is, they were.

  * * *

  So it was the garden that served as my breaking point. Because it was there that I saw the true potential of high schoolers, there that I saw what we were really missing in school.

  Here’s what I saw. One spring, we got behind schedule building the beds for the garden. The seedlings that we had started in the greenhouse needed to be in the ground by the end of May, as did our first seeds. It was the start of the first weekend in May, and we hadn’t built a single bed. So we had three weeks to build 150 beds, on top of all the other fund-raising and planning we were doing. Even for us, that was unrealistic.

  One Friday afternoon, as we were leaving school, I told Adrian, my buddy and fellow gardener, how I felt. I was frustrated, and I was disappointed. “I can’t see a way to get back on track,” I told him.

  “Well,” he said, “I guess we only have one choice. Start digging.”

  So that’s what we did. We went down to the garden and started working on a bed. At some point, a car pulled up, one I didn’t recognize and certainly hadn’t seen at the garden before. The door opened, and out hopped Riley McLaughlin, a popular soccer player at our school. I was surprised to see him there—not his usual territory—and figured he needed a favor or something.

  Instead, he said he wanted to help. “Track was canceled today, so I don’t have anything to do until my doctor’s appointment in a couple of hours,” he told us. “I thought I’d lend a hand.” We told him thanks, but it was fine, we weren’t really having a workday. “Got nothin’ else to do!” he said.

  So we handed him a shovel and explained how to build a bed, and he started digging.

  But at some point Adrian and I remembered we had to pick up the posters for our upcoming event before the print shop closed. We told Riley we had to leave, and I went to grab his shovel.

  “You know, if you don’t mind,” said Riley, “I’ll just keep digging for a bit. It’ll pass the time.”

  So we left him there, went to town, picked up the posters, and went for a coffee; the time passed, and we completely forgot about Riley. I think we both assumed he dug for another five minutes and left. But when we returned to the garden a few hours later, there was Riley, at the other end of the garden, head down, digging his tenth bed.

  The next morning was Saturday, our community workday. There had been a big party the night before, so the volunteers were few and far between. “Oh well,” I thought, “at least Riley got us a head start.” We might even get twenty-five of our beds done, if we stayed late. But around 10 o’clock, Riley reappeared, and this time he brought the rest of track team, still in their uniforms, fresh from practice. I don’t know when, but at some point I looked up and there were seven guys in baseball uniforms too. Around noon I realized t
here were more people in the garden than there had been at the party the night before. An hour before our normal stop time, the 150th bed was finished, two weeks ahead of schedule.

  The thing is, the kids who worked in the garden weren’t paid, didn’t get school credit, didn’t get any external reward whatsoever for their work there. And yet, they woke up at 5:30 in the morning on school days to harvest for the cafeterias, stayed late after school, skipped holidays, and even gave up beloved sports to commit more of their time. They woke up at 7 a.m. every Saturday for community volunteer days. Saturday mornings! Nothing gets high schoolers up on Saturday mornings!

  And that was it. That’s what really started to wind me up. I began to wonder, why couldn’t kids wake up at 7 on a Saturday morning to read Kafka, or do a science experiment, or solve a math puzzle?

  Well, I began to think, maybe they could. I began to think that if high schoolers could shift mountains to grow a garden, they could do it for their education, too. But for that to happen, I knew some things had to change.

  So the story doesn’t end with me laughing and eating a bowl of cereal. Instead, when my mom said, “Why don’t you start your own school?” there was a long silence at the dinner table. And then I said, “Okay, I will.”

  * * *

  Sam’s first step is your first step too. Come home one day and say, “This is not acceptable.” Whether you’re a student, parent, teacher, principal, or community member, starting a new high school begins with realizing you need one.

  If the school you attend, the one your child attends, or the one where you teach is working well for most students (weak and strong, in-group and out-group, college bound and not), you don’t need to read any further. You don’t need a new school.

  If you’re a kid who dislikes school, one option is to put your head down and get through as best you can. Those of you who do well will tolerate the boredom and irrelevance and focus on getting really good grades so that you can get into a good college. If you are barely passing, or you get in trouble a lot, you can try hard to slip by. Look for easy courses, stay under the radar, and keep your eye on the calendar. Summer is not too far off. You, too, might not want to read further.

  But, as a student, if you look around and realize that there are a lot of people your age who seem to have a huge amount of energy when they are doing things they care about with people they like, or are bursting with life when they are not at school, who have shown at some point (on the basketball court, in the soup kitchen, or at their weekend job downtown) that they are smart, capable, funny, and resourceful, but seem glazed over with boredom or submission when they are at school, you should consider starting a new school.

  If you are a parent, teacher, or guidance counselor and you have seen how many young people seem to be biding their time, or working hard simply for the sake of future success, without any sense of meaning in their day, then you should encourage them to start a new school.

  If your kid has ever come home with the same look of tumult and dissatisfaction as Sam had that day, then instead of just accepting that teenagers are stormy, consider that all of that passion and adolescent energy can be directed toward building something new.

  The first step in starting a school is to realize that there is a need. All that means is that you think the young people in your community could be much more involved, much more engaged, and much more in charge than they are now. Don’t wait for kids to say they want such a school. And don’t wait for teachers or parents to say they are ready for something different. The idea may be so foreign to everyone that they can’t even imagine something new. Some of the kids (and teachers) who ended up most loving the Independent Project didn’t think it was right for them in the beginning.

  If you’ve reached the end of this chapter, and you, too, feel like you’ve had enough with school being subpar, that there’s a need for something better, then that’s where you begin. But as we said at the start of this chapter, this is just the first step. Next, you must think long and hard about what a good school is made of.

  2

  DESIGN IT

  You’ve realized you need a new school. What happens next? You need to design it. To be good, a new school has to build on an idea. If the first step came from paying close attention to what students (or teachers or parents) around you were feeling and thinking day in and day out, the second step requires you to stand back and think about what the goals of your school should be. You may want to ask others in the community what they think the purpose of a high school education is. You may read through the pages that follow and decide that our goals are your goals. But you must have a clear and vivid grasp of what an adolescent should experience or acquire at school.

  This will allow you to come up with the specific activities, rituals, requirements, and opportunities you offer in your school. Without such thinking, you run the risk of repeating the same misguided practices that have been used and misused so many times in the past. You may come up with ideas that sound exciting or new, but have no real heft to them and don’t lead anywhere intellectually or personally. Don’t repeat mistakes, and don’t do things that are simply novel or cute.

  This is you thinking clearly and carefully about your idea. This is also you letting your mind wander and your imagination run wild.

  The next nine months of my life were filled with endless discussions. I had decided to start a new school, and now I needed to design it. The best way I knew how to go about that was to talk to people.

  Some of these discussions were with teachers: What do you find engages your students most? What do you wish you could do in your classroom but feel you’re not allowed to? Some were with my friends: if you could change one thing about school, what would it be? But most of these conversations took place at the very same dinner table where it all started.

  For the rest of my junior year, I would come home from school, sit down at the table, and talk to my mom about education. How should the day be structured? What should students spend their time doing? How much of it should they decide and how much should be woven into the fabric of the school? What role should teachers have?

  Figuring out where to start was easy. I just thought about all the things that didn’t make sense to me about the way things were being done in the current system, and then I thought about how I might change them to make them better.

  The first, most glaring, most obvious thing missing from schools, it seemed to me, was autonomy. Students have absolutely no ownership over their own education, no real ability to choose what they learn or how they learn it. Sure, we got to choose a project here and there, or decide between modern Euro and American history, or between geometry and trig, but these are superficial choices, set within a fairly narrow and rigid box. You couldn’t choose between math and ballet, sculpture and history. Further, within these courses, the curriculum was largely set in stone. Each assignment, direction, focus, topic was laid out in front of us like a set of Google Maps instructions. There was rarely, if ever, a sense that we were learning things that we had chosen to learn, or pursuing paths that interested us.

  Something my best friend, James, said to me toward the end of that year really stuck with me. It was a Friday after school; the whole, unbroken, unfettered, glorious weekend spread out in front of us. We were sitting on the fire escape behind my dad’s toy store, having an ice cream, planning out our night. Suddenly he turned to me and said, “Oh, by the way, I’ve been accepted to do a WISE project next year.” WISE was a program at my school that allowed seniors to pursue a project, a high school thesis of sorts. Though I secretly hoped James would actually be one of the first students in my new school, at that point I still had no idea whether I’d ever actually have a new school.

  “Cool,” I said. “Congrats.”

  “It’s crazy,” he said, chomping down on his ice cream cone. “They said I can study whatever I want. I mean, really, I can learn whatever I want. How crazy is that?”

  It seemed crazy, all
right. But what really boggled my mind was that we could have an education system in which a seventeen-year-old feels like he’s just discovered life on the moon when he has a chance to choose what he learns.

  It made me want to find THE PEOPLE IN CHARGE, the all encompassing THEY, the ones who MAKE DECISIONS, grab them by the collar, and shout, “How can you ever expect me and my friends to learn if we aren’t engaged? And how can you expect us to be engaged if we have no authority over what we are learning?”

  But the choice—having a say over what we learned or how we learned it—wasn’t the only thing that seemed out of whack about the lack of autonomy among high schoolers. Just as egregious, it seemed, was that students had no real responsibility in high school either. Say this to any high schooler—hell, say it to my sixteen-year-old self, and I would have just gawped at you. No responsibility? What about my endless homework assignments, my need to keep up my GPA, my college applications, the final exam?

  But how sad, how frustrating, that this is what it means to have responsibility in high school. This isn’t responsibility. At best, these are duties. If you pause to think about it, all the responsibility is really on the shoulders of the teachers. They decide what kids learn, how they learn it, how to measure whether they’ve actually learned it. It’s their job to determine how well the students do, to make sure they’ve completed their work, to make sure they’re focused. All the responsibility is actually on them.

  An important note: choice and responsibility are related but distinct. You could give students choice (choose your topic, choose your method of study) without giving them responsibility (it’s up to you to ensure that you get a good education). We were getting neither.

  I started to think about this all the time during my junior year. Because when I realized that, from the ages of fourteen to eighteen, teenagers have almost no real responsibility in school, I was genuinely shocked. How can we expect kids to emerge from high school as responsible adults if they never experience real responsibility in school?