A School of Our Own

by Samuel Levin

  I guess for a lot of people there was a mismatch between the idea of a school where kids were the authors of their own education and a school where they still had to do academics. That mismatch never occurred to me. As far as I knew, everyone in high school could think academically and enjoy academic work. I mean, we didn’t all enjoy memorizing anatomical facts, reading novels we hated, or solving quadratic equations. But we could all think scientifically, enjoy reading books we chose, and use logic.

  At least, that’s what I believed going in, and that’s why we designed the Independent Project the way we did. But it’s hard to convey properly what it was actually like watching the project unfold over the following months; what it was like watching a group of kids who had never been treated as intellectuals discover the joy of thinking, the pleasure of knowledge, and the satisfaction of working hard at things they were interested in. So here are three stories taken from many that emerged that semester, which I hope give an idea of what can happen if you assume everybody is an intellectual.

  The first story is about Rix. I mentioned my worries about him in the previous chapter. By the end of de-orientation week, I was concerned that the Independent Project might have its first failure with Erik. He had remained relatively disengaged, his chair always pushed back to the corner of the room, rarely saying anything, answering questions with grunts. I also mentioned that the Independent Project was a last resort for him. The deal with Mr. Huron was that he would try the Independent Project as a way to stick with school, and if that didn’t work, he could always drop out in the spring. That added to the pressure—if this didn’t work, we’d lose him for good.

  My fears were only made worse on the first Monday after de-orientation. Over the weekend, we were all supposed to think about what our first natural and social science questions would be. Now we were going around the circle, saying what our questions were, and having the group give feedback on the questions (in the beginning most of that feedback came from me, but week by week that grew until most of the feedback came from the rest of the group). Mirabelle said she wanted to ask why we cry.

  “Do you mean, what makes people cry?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, “like, why it evolved.”

  “Are you asking why it evolved as opposed to other emotional mechanisms that evolve?”

  “No, not really. More, like, what use did it have, what benefit did it provide that made it evolve?”

  “So it sounds like you’re actually asking a ‘what’ question. For example, what is the evolutionary function of crying?”

  We carried on like that around the circle. Dakota was going to see whether there was a pH difference between leaves at the bottom of a nearby mountain and leaves at the top. John wanted to know why Judas betrayed Jesus. Eventually, everyone had gone but Rix. We waited for him to say something, and when he didn’t, Tim said, “What about you, Rix?”

  “I dunno,” he said, the brim of his hat tucked low over his eyes.

  “Didn’t you think of anything this weekend?” said Mirabelle.

  “No,” said Rix.

  Great, I thought. This is it. The teachers are right. When the going gets tough, people will just slack off.

  “Come on, Rix,” said Tim again. “We all thought of questions. Isn’t there anything you’re interested in?”

  “No,” he said, still looking down. “Not really.”

  A surprising voice spoke up: Dominic. He and Rix were buddies, and he was the last person I would have expected to prod Rix into coming up with a question. I guess I was more small-minded than I realized, and suffered from some of the same handicaps as the teachers I had failed to convince on the CSC. I thought he would have backed his friend in taking the easy route. I was wrong.

  His voice as squeaky as ever, Dominic said, “I saw you lookin’ at Sam’s book earlier.”

  I racked my brain to think of what book he could possibly be thinking about.

  “The one with the stars and shit on the front,” said Dominic. And suddenly it clicked. At the time I was reading A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking. “You were lookin’ at that for ages, man,” said Dominic. “Musta thought that was interesting.”

  There was a long pause. “Yeah, I guess,” said Rix. “Infinity and space and stuff. That’s kinda cool.”

  I was hit with a wave of two different emotions at once. First, excitement that Rix said he was interested in something and, second, disappointment that it was something so impossibly complex that he could never make progress on it. For a split second, I considered encouraging him to bite off a smaller chunk. But then I caught myself. The point of this was for people to pursue their interests. I also decided not to push him into coming up with a question. I didn’t want to make him decide he wasn’t interested after all. “Baby steps,” I thought.

  But all week long I worried. In the mornings, I’d see people dart off to the library or flip through piles of books. One day I saw Dakota talking animatedly to Mrs. Rawlins, the chemistry teacher, about pH, and the next day I saw her marching into the locker room with muddy boots and a bag full of leaves. John and I had an intense discussion, which occasionally crossed over the line into an argument, about the merit of historical work on religious texts. But every day, I’d see Rix hunched in the corner, in the same spot, looking at the very same page of the same book over and over again. It had a spiral galaxy on the cover.

  On Wednesday, I went and sat next to him.

  “How’s it going?” I asked.

  “I dunno,” he said. “It’s fucking confusing.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m on my second round through A Brief History of Time and I still don’t get it. You wanna talk about it?”

  “Nah, not really,” he said.

  On Thursday, I couldn’t find my copy of A Brief History. At lunch, he said, “Yo, I borrowed your book. That cool?”

  On Friday, we had our first, exhilarating day of teaching. I watched everyone stand up and teach us about their questions. I had never seen kids look so excited standing in front of a class. Dakota had demonstrations of pH kits, and she had come up with a hypothesis to explain the differences she had discovered in the leaves. John filled three chalkboards with notes about Judas, racing back and forth, trying to fit it all in during his allotted time (we had to fit everyone in on Friday, something I never considered might be a problem but turned out to be a real challenge). Tim told us about the college professor he talked to who had helped him understand how the brain responds to different kinds of drugs to form an addiction.

  I watched all of it, happy, excited, fascinated, but all along with a tiny pit of worry about Erik’s turn. After everyone else had gone, there was a long pause, and we all turned to look at him. With a kind of embarrassed smile, he said, “I guess I’m s’posed to go now, then, huh?”

  He reluctantly stood up, hiked up his pants (which were perpetually falling down), and walked to the front of the room. He tipped his hat down a little, so that we couldn’t really see his eyes anymore. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a rubber band.

  “So I’m gonna show you somethin’ called a Möbius strip,” he said. And if I thought I was surprised to hear the term “Möbius strip” coming out of Rix’s mouth, I only had to wait and listen. “You see,” he began, and for the next forty minutes not a single one of us moved a finger. If Rix hadn’t been talking, you could have heard us blinking (and we didn’t do much of that, either).

  He told us about Möbius strips, using the rubber band to demonstrate. He explained how they were useful for understanding curves in space-time. “Because, like, that’s what Einstein was saying, was that space and time are kinda one thing, which is hard to understand but makes sense if you look at a picture like this,” he said, showing us something in A Briefer History, which he must have found in the library, because I didn’t own it. He went on to talk a little about the Big Bang, and finally about the difference between a finite and an infinite universe. “That part’s real hard to
explain. I tried yesterday to my bro but it didn’t work, so maybe this won’t make sense, but there’s this hotel, and it’s, like, an infinite hotel . . .”

  I don’t know who started it, but when he finished we were all clapping. Erik seemed to lower his hat even further. “Sorry if that didn’t make any sense. I still don’t get most of it.” But underneath his hat he was smiling.

  I had heard about Rix weeks and weeks before I met him. In my mind’s eye, he was one more nice kid who had somehow been convinced, through life’s daily encounters, that he wasn’t curious, didn’t have academic interests, and couldn’t think well. That just infuriated me and pinched my heart. I’m a boy-mom. Even before I realized mine would be a boy family, when I taught elementary school, I felt more comfortable with the boys—even the difficult ones. I loved their energy and their straightforward take on things. So I imagined liking Rix right away and wondered why so many adults had let him down.

  Then one day I came to school for a basketball game. I was talking to Sam in the hall, and along came a bony kid with scraggly hair, looking slightly feral. Not appealing at all. The kind of kid who puts adults off, a little neon warning sign blinking on his forehead—“Don’t Bother.” Sam turned to the boy and smiled, “Hey, Rix. This is my mom. Mom, Rix.” This was Rix? The truth is, if I had been his teacher and seen him skulk his way into my classroom, I wouldn’t have taken to him at all. I would have assumed he hated me, hated school, didn’t want to try, and wasn’t going to contribute anything to class. I would have thought the very same things most of his teachers had thought all along.

  But here’s the kicker. Rix, like all kids, was born an intellectual. Virtually every single person starts life eager to find things out, ready and able to learn, alert to new experiences. Most little kids (barring serious kinds of illness, disability, or trauma) are curious, inventive, interested in testing their hypotheses. In other words, almost all of us begin life with a formidable capacity to learn (even those deemed dull at school are able to learn to talk, navigate their neighborhoods, acquire the vast and subtle rules governing their family life and friendships). But it’s not just the capacity to learn that is robust in early childhood. Nearly all young children have a taste for thinking. A wide range of studies shows how eager children are to figure out why things work the way they do, what underlies surprises and mysteries. Early in life children are natural scientists, anthropologists, storytellers, mathematicians, and philosophers.

  It’s true that as we grow up, we naturally lose a little of that open-minded thirst for knowledge—or rather, we trade it in for expertise, focus, and long-term goals. We give up our insatiable need to know everything in return for the ability to navigate everyday life. Maturity tends to tame our natural zest for knowledge. But that just means that as we get older we are slightly less voracious and slightly more cautious in our eagerness for knowledge. It does not mean that our minds shut down, that we lose all of our thirst for knowledge. A two-year-old will tinker with nearly anything; a twelve-year-old will tinker with only some things. A three-year-old asks nearly one hundred questions per hour; a teenager asks questions only when the topic really interests her. Age makes us a bit more picky about feeding our intellectual appetites. However, it is not inevitable that most teenagers will lose interest in having far-ranging discussions, solving problems, or exploring new concepts. That happens only if school teaches a kid that he or she is not capable of deep or careful thinking. School is meant to nurture the life of the mind, not kill it. And if there were ever an age for thinking about life’s most intriguing mysteries, it is the age of adolescence. Teenagers long to think abstractly, to tangle with moral dilemmas, to seek various forms of truth, to make and absorb art.

  Rix is a perfect example of how this well-worn story unfolds. He probably didn’t come across as an intellectual kid. He spoke in unpolished tones. He dressed like a slacker. Perhaps he was rude or didn’t pay attention to the teacher when he was young. He might not have grown up among talkers and readers, and maybe others in his family hated school, so he expected to hate school. When students like Rix chafe at the bit or struggle with straightforward (boring) tasks, like vocabulary tests, sheets of math problems, or book reports, they begin to feel they’re not academic material, and so do their teachers. They are put in the slow classes. Or teachers give them simpler work, with the understandable notion that it would be better for a boy like Rix to succeed at an easy task than fail at a difficult one.

  But this notion, however well intentioned, is based on a common misunderstanding—that kids who are not “academic” are also not intellectual. One of the worst mistakes schools make is to think that just because a kid has trouble learning or doesn’t seem academically inclined, he or she isn’t drawn to interesting ideas. The vocational and college prep courses are often sucked dry of the very material that might engage teenagers and get their minds going. No matter how much a kid doesn’t like school, that kid wants to talk about big ideas: infinity, love, justice, truth. Just listen to their songs and to their conversations when they are not in school. A-plus or F, privileged or impoverished, kids like to use their minds and they like to think about interesting things.

  Sam did not carry on his shoulders the burdens of the professional public school teacher. He couldn’t have cared less about helping the other students succeed on standardized tests. He didn’t have to answer to anyone about whether Rix had “covered” the content specified by the school district or the state. He had only one goal: to get Rix interested enough in an idea or topic that he would have a genuine question about it. Even so, he wavered when he considered urging Rix to try something simpler than Hawking, more accessible than infinity. For that moment, Sam was tempted by the same illusion that sinks so many teachers—that a person can’t delve into complex matters until he’s learned certain building blocks, that intellectual work is a ladder students must climb up: first they acquire information and preliminary skills, and only then, when they’ve mastered those basics, can they tangle with big ideas or develop their own. My hunch was that Sam thought Rix would be daunted by difficult material—that it would turn him off. But the mind is not linear. In fact, it’s hard to get interested in the kind of content and skills that are found at the bottom of the ladder. Who wouldn’t rather think about infinity than learn about the number line? Better to get hooked by infinity and have that become your impetus for learning about the number line than to start with the number line and never want to learn anything more about mathematics.

  When Sam told Rix that he didn’t get A Brief History of Time either, he shifted both their intellectual worlds, without realizing it. Because in that casual remark he embodied the key to making school a place where everyone becomes a thinker: that you don’t need to get it totally. You just need to jump in. Kids like Rix and Sam were schooled to think that the goal of school is to know things. But in reality the goal of school should be to rediscover the pleasures of wading into the unknown.

  When Rix explained the Möbius strip to the other students and then admitted he still understood only a little of it, he was, at least for that brief period of time, an intellectual.

  The second story is about Mirabelle. I never had to worry about her with the sciences the way I did in the very beginning with Erik. She was, from the get-go, enthusiastic, energetic, open-minded, and eager. Though she came in to the Independent Project thinking of herself as a “non-science” person, her excitement about the program made turning her into a science person a cinch. She picked new questions each week, dove into them headfirst, was quick to seek help within the group, among teachers, and outside the school whenever she needed it, and was always ebullient when teaching us on Fridays.

  She wrote in her journal, “It’s a shame science was never properly defined for me until my junior year of high school. I had always associated science with test tubes, molecules, tectonic plates, and formulas. . . . [But] science is a method, plain and simple. It’s almost impressive that through all my
years of schooling no one ever told me that.”

  She went on to write, “Frankly, I have never enjoyed science class and felt that I never really would. If you had told me that I would fall in love with Stephen Hawking for two weeks I would have laughed in your face.” That was referring to the weeks where Erik taught us about space and time. “Setting the preconceived notion aside that I was not good at science and a lot of help from a peer I found myself fascinated. . . . As much as I may want to throw scientific evidence to the side and say ‘what do these people know anyway!’ I have come to really appreciate how much stronger an argument (no matter if it has to do with art or mirror neurons) is when science is a factor.”

  It was quick and easy to turn her view of science around. As she points out, all it took was being encouraged to set aside the idea that she was “artsy,” not “sciencey,” and to work with peers who were excited about it. And the result, on top of becoming better at asking questions and using rigorous methods to get answers, discovering what it was like to be fascinated by what she was learning, and finding dozens of new interests, is that she is now a person who appreciates scientific evidence. If we had achieved nothing else in the Independent Project, I would have been happy with one student learning to appreciate the value of science. And as I said, it was remarkably easy to achieve.

  But it was a different story when it came to math. When we switched to the languages halfway through the semester, Mirabelle did an about-face.

  “Sam,” she said that first day, “I’ve been super motivated this whole semester. You know I’ve given my all to the IP, but I just can’t do math. I don’t want to, either, but even if I did, it wouldn’t matter. I am literally incapable.”

  “Okay,” I said, “fine. But before you quit, read the book, and then we can talk again.” The book was Flatland, by Edwin Abbott Abbott, and it was how we were going to start our work in mathematics. When we switched from the sciences to the languages, it meant we were starting work in the mathematical and English languages. For English, each week someone would choose a novel for the group to read, and on Friday we would have a book discussion, and everyone would read aloud a piece of writing, fiction or nonfiction, they had done in response to the book. But there weren’t enough weeks left in the semester for everyone to choose a book, so I opted out and instead chose a math book to read alongside our novel that first week.