Blog Archives

Getting to the Goal, Without Imposed Curriculum

6/24/2014

I had a conversation this morning with a person who’s always been skeptical of the Sudbury model.

She said, “I have a perfect example of why your schools don’t work. My granddaughter had to write a term paper for one of her first college classes, and she had NO IDEA how to do it! If she’d gone to a regular school, she would have had four years of training in writing.”

At our schools kids get training in problem solving and in being resourceful.

“What happened?”

“She had to go in to the professor and explain that she had never written a term paper, and he gave her a bunch of materials and some reference books, and she wrote it.”

“How did she do?”

“She got a B+.”

Lisa Lyons, Staff Member, Fairhaven School
Reposted from The Sudbury Valley School Featured Articles page
July 2014

0 Comments

The Last Day of School

6/12/2014

0 Comments

Imagine the last day of a public school before summer vacation. Most of the kids will be quite happy. Giddy, even. They’ll be so exuberant that they may well act out and cause problems for other people. The entire last day is a barely contained celebration.

Now look at the last day before vacation at a Sudbury school. You’ll see sighs. You’ll hear complaints. Kids will wonder why they can’t go any more and try to figure out ways to do over the summer many of the things they’d been doing during the school year. Not to mention how bored they’ll be without school.

It’s amazing the difference in a culture without coercion.

0 Comments

Growing...

6/11/2014

0 Comments

The nice man is just trying to be friendly. “So you two girls go to The Circle School…What’s your favorite subject?”

The young girls are a little nonplussed. “We only take classes if we want to.”

“Oh. Well what do you do at school, if you’re not in classes?”

Brightening, the girls are now on familiar ground. “Mostly we like to climb trees.”

Now the nice man is confused. “How can you learn things like history if you’re climbing trees all day?”

The girls’ turn to look confused.

“Do you know what history is?”

“Sort of…”

Now the nice man is trying to help, to teach the girls something useful. “What do you think history is?”

“It’s like… things that happened…” the older of the two girls trails off.

Desperately trying to think of a polite rescue, I blurt out “I think you’ll find they know lots of history, even if they can’t define it.”

Now the man is in full-on teaching mode. “I see. So, do you know who was America’s first president?”

Both girls brighten, and the younger one smiles broadly: “George Washington; everybody knows that!”

“Well, how did you learn that? Can you learn that by climbing trees?”

Much dimmed, she murmurs “I think my mom told me.”

To my great relief, the conversation is interrupted by the arrival of the person we had come to see.

Some version of this painful exchange happens all too often when our students try to represent their experience with adults who are new to The Circle School. I think it highlights a very deep philosophical gulf between those who have experienced the magic that is The Circle School and those who have not. In simplest terms, most people associate the word “school” with teaching, while we associate the word “school” with growth and development.

The nice man (and he really was well-intentioned) isn’t even aware that his view of education is limited to a very narrow range of life experiences. Given a list that includes crucial and difficult assets like time management, teamwork, responsible self-reliance, critical thinking, civic engagement, and emotional stability, the comparatively simple subject of history falls far down on my list of essential skills for a well-rounded education.

But history can be “taught” (though not as easily as it can be learned) whereas those other assets simply cannot be taught in a coercive school environment. They must be struggled with, by learners, on their own time and in their own way. Easy stuff, like history, arithmetic, and literature, come along on their own – a side effect of an active life in a free community. The reverse, picking up emotional stability as a side effect of listening to a teacher talk about the presidents, ain’t gonna happen.

Yes, it is not only possible to know lots of history without taking a history course, it is very common at The Circle School. For us, school is a place where people explore their worlds, inner and outer, freely and responsibly, in a diverse and supportive community. Where the entire range of human skill, knowledge, creativity, and endeavor is available for striving and achievement. Where kids live their lives, growing and learning every day.

Most schools are about teaching. The Circle School is about life.

Reprinted with permission from the author, JD Stillwater

Please read more of JD's blog entries at the Circle School blog:

http://circleschool.org/2012/12/growing/

0 Comments

Math!

6/4/2014

0 Comments

I went to a traditional public school and hated almost every year of it. I didn't understand the math after 5th grade and many years later realized that most math is written in code and I was never given the book that broke the code. I am a right brain learner, I recognized as an adult ,and math, in my day, was almost entirely taught from a left brain perspective. No one ever explained what terms in a word problem mean add, subtract, divide, or multiply. No one took the time to explain that a quadratic equation is shorthand for a lengthy mathematical statement.

If I had been fortunate to attend a Sudbury school I would have been able to seek out someone who could teach in a manner that I understood or have at my disposal the teacher's textbook so I could figure out for myself what it was I was trying to learn. I could also have opted to make the math relevant to my own experience. I could have measured my own bedroom to figure out the square footage, determined how long it would take to go to my grandmother's if my dad drove at a certain speed, or calculated what percentage of the grocery bill was allocated to dairy products.

I was fortunate to attend a middle school for about a year that did teach from a right brain perspective. Our math teacher had us doing tax returns for fictional families we designed. I was excited, engaged, and successful at comprehending the concepts and making the correct calculations. Unfortunately, that one year was followed by 4 years of torture in which my confidence in my ability to do math was eroded. To this day complex math causes my emotions to lock up my brain and send me into a fit of frustration and avoidance.

If you want your child's education to have real meaning in their present and future, trust them and send them to a Sudbury school where they can learn in a manner that allows them to clearly understand the material and make it relevant to their lives

Louise Thiessen MFT
Retired Family Therapist
Member of the Founding Team of Mt. Laurel Sudbury School

0 Comments

Meaning in Education...

6/4/2014

0 Comments

If you want your child to get an education that will really mean something to THEM in the future, that they can call on every day of their life, that will prepare them for the realities of the world outside, send them to a Sudbury school where freedom, responsibility, creativity, problem solving, and learning how to be self- directed are just a few of the skills they will have the opportunity to learn and to live.

Louise Thiessen MFT
Retired Family Therapist
Member of the Founding Team of Mt. Laurel Sudbury School

0 Comments

Getting to the Goal, Without Imposed Curriculum

The Last Day of School

Growing...

Math!

Meaning in Education...

Author

Archives

Categories