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On Friday, March 23rd, Fairhaven School hosted a panel featuring three alumni- Pallas Bane (class of 2008), Thor Jensen (class of 2005), and Erin Gregory ( who chose not to graduate and left in 2005.) The 2011-2012 school year is beginning to feel like “The Year of the Alumni,” as we have enrolled a record number of returning students and we have begun to focus more directly on alumni as our most valuable marketing asset. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. Who do these students become? Finally, our illustrious alumni have chartered an Alumni Association, so look for more alumni presence going forward!
We videotaped the March 23rd presentation and will soon be posting it online.
For now, here is a brief interview with Thor Jensen reflecting on his time at Fairhaven School.
Parents, students and visitors were universally pleased and reassured by the panelists, as they embody so many of the qualities a Fairhaven School educations engenders. Like many of our graduates, Thor, Pallas, and Erin have become articulate, ethical, successful, and interesting people!
Stay tuned for the alumni panel in its entirety.
Mark McCaig
Fairhaven School
Last week, the Opinion Pages of the New York Times printed a compelling article about creativity and education. Yet again, a thinker (in this case writer and filmmaker Hanif Kureishi) has inadvertently argued for the efficacy of Fairhaven School!
In an education world increasingly intent upon systematizing conformity (even by medicating young people), truly our students remain free to cultivate their interests, to foster creativity, and indeed to allow themselves to be distracted by their very imaginations. Is this not their birthright?
Follow this link to read the article. Enjoy!
Mark McCaig
February, 2012
Reprinted below is an article the Sudbury Valley School journal published last month. It captures so well the reality of growing up in the twenty-first century, we decided to post it here. Enjoy!
“There’s More’n One Way to Skin a Cat”*
by Mimsy Sadofsky
We have a lot to muse about as we struggle to make ourselves comfortable in a world that seems to be mainly for people whose brains are more advanced than ours.
Who is we? Well, it is my generation, for sure. It is in no sense today’s generation, and the fact that my children (that middle generation; my kids are now middle-aged people) can manage to actually fit their limited brains into the 21st century reality, and make it their own, is impressive to me. Because they were not, as my son said once that his child was, born with a computer (you remember, silver spoon) in their mouths. Some of you fall into that middle generation.
Now, I know the difference; I know about this stuff at least in the abstract: I work at Sudbury Valley where it hits you in the face from 8 in the morning till well after 5 in the afternoon. Every kid can speak languages I know nothing of. Every kid knows worlds my parents would never have dreamt of. But how to discuss it abstractly is never clear, because what we are talking about is the material these kids have for building models of reality, and we are always on the outside of anyone else’s models of reality. What their mom and dad want to know is if they are going to learn whatever other 4th graders or 10th graders know. What they know somehow, each of these kids, is that the school lock-step curriculum is totally unrelated to how they develop their own brains.
On a December day, my 8-year-old grandson, Joel, who lives in Oregon, called and invited me to iChat. Of course he multi-tasks while he iChats—messing with apps, putting together Lego Ninjago pieces into new designs, etc.—while I…just chat. Anyway, he was kind of, but of course not really, home alone. His dad was at work, his mom in the shower. I recommended to him that he watch the movie “Home Alone” because it would make him laugh so much he would roll on the floor. He mentioned several possibilities for getting a movie—basically, any movie. Well, sure. No prob. Download it. Find it on one of the streaming sites. Or whatever you call them, you know, Hulu, Netflix, that stuff. But, think about it. Thirty years ago what were the possibilities? Go to the cinema to see something current, or hope that a cinema that was too poor or too pure to have current stuff would replay some old movie your grandma told you to watch. Basically, you had to catch the movie as it went by, or scour your TV set for some re-run if it was ancient enough.
I then asked about his gingerbread house. His dad, Seth, still always makes them each year, even though he left SVS 22 years ago! This was the first time Joel had really been able to do most of the work, and they had a blast together—although Seth turned out to be shocked at how many hours it took! That is a subject I surely know a lot about! I said I wanted to see it (of course, there were pictures on both of his parents’ Facebook pages, but Facebook is not my favorite venue and I had not thought to look); I said he should bring the computer to the house, knowing it was not bring-able. He said, “Well, we don’t have a laptop.” (I guess his dad’s iPad must have gone to work that day with his dad.) He decided to take a picture of it with his mom’s iPhone, and he did and brought it back to show me.
I said, “You are a real 21st century guy, Joel. Do you know what that means?” He said yes; it meant he was familiar with a lot of technology.
I was not quite satisfied with that answer, even though it was spot-on, but if you had asked me what a 21st century person was, I would not have had a much better answer. I would have said something dumb about multi-tasking, but the truth is that I multi-task a lot; we all do; so it isn’t quite that.
The next day I understood myself. I was working with Zoe, who has been going to SVS since she was about 11, on math for her SAT’s. I asked her why she knew so much. She said she had taken math in middle school quite a few years ago, before she came to SVS. I opined, because her brother went to SVS and was of a scientific bent, and I know her parents a little, that it may be genetic with her for math to come easily. She said she had always done terribly in math at school. I said, “But you understand the concepts (we were working on algebra) so well.” She said it had never been the concepts that tripped her up. It was the computations. (We always start working together with one or both of our iPhones open to the calculator function, but don’t use it much.) In conventional schools, no one cares, she said, and of course she is right, whether you get the overall ideas. It is just the nitty-gritty answers. She was not nervous about math—she was just doing it because she wanted good SAT scores. But she knew it meant nothing to her plans for life.
The confidence. The iPhones. The essential ordinariness of the subject matter. The infinite possibilities in Zoe’s brain. Of course. She knows that there are always a lot of different ways to get to your goal. She has that idea firmly in her world view; she doesn’t think about it, any more than Joel does. She just does it. And he was not worried for an instant about how to show me the gingerbread house. There is always a way.
It was one of the things that used to surprise me about even the mundane software that I can use: there are a lot of ways to do the same thing in any computer program I know. (Back in the 80’s, in our first computer life, there were maybe fewer.) Jean does it one way. Danny another. I do it a third. Others I am not so observant of, but I know that I don’t have to teach anyone the way to erase text. There are way too many ways! And basically, they are going to find them. Usually without asking. Sometimes someone wants to know an easy way to do something, but usually you have to ask a child. That doesn’t seem to matter until you realize that a 21st century person is always aware of possibilities. In software, maybe not infinite ones, but in life? There are so many ways to solve problems, to get to goals, to figure things out.
I used to think about the world as having gone from having a very finite set of possibilities of ways to earn a living, spend your time, etc., to one having a giant expansion of those possibilities. But I wasn’t quite getting it. And then I suddenly realized what made her a 21st century person and me a 20th century person trying to catch up: she knows in her bones, and has known for her whole life, just because of the amazing richness of resources in the world she was born into, that there are many ways to solve every problem.
I had to think about that. I grew up doing math, having fun with it I guess, always thinking that there was a right way and a wrong way. Or many wrong ways! In fact, I was criticized by teachers, as I bet most of you were, when I didn’t do things in exactly the “right’ way but found a different one. You had a history exam on the facts back in the dark ages when I went to school (and today). Never did I dream that the word “fact” was as slippery as an eel. Hardly anyone knows or agrees on what the facts are now about any events, or can prove the “facts” in the next generation. But I thought our books had the facts. No kid really thinks that now. The givens that governed life in the mid-twentieth century were much more confined than life could ever be now.
Zoe doesn’t have to do things one way. She knows she can solve problems; that is her strength. She seems shy, reticent, and perhaps unassertive, but it makes no difference: like Joel, she knows she is a 21st century person. (And like Joel, she has steely self-confidence.) Like Joel, she knows there is always another way to do something, another way to play something, another way to make art, and a constantly unfolding panoply of life’s riches. It isn’t a fan of possibilities as I used to think in the 70’s. It is an enormous, amorphous, n-dimensional grid. There are so many ways to skin a cat!
*Published in the Winter 2012 Sudbury Valley School Journal, Volume 41, Number 2. Reprinted with permission.
Last month, for the thirteenth year in a row, Fairhaven School’s Theatre Corporation staged a production. This year, they decided to host a dinner theater. Staff and students set up the room, and parents cooked the baked ziti and black beans. The mother of the murder “victim” baked bread from scratch! Our resident student pastry chef made scrumptious desserts. Cast and crew served the audience. As for the production, it was a hilarious send-up of the murder mystery genre. Highlights included the dowager in drag, the ditzy blonde, the Brooklyn gangster, and audience participation.
Bravo and thanks to all!
Go to the school’s home page to see photos or follow this link.
Sometimes the news we hear from alumni is just lovely. This just in, from the email Inbox: Fairhaven School alumna Erin Umstead, class of 2005, has just released her first EP of music, “The Norway EP.”
Please support her work, just another example of the interesting, creative lives our alumni continue to manifest. (Kudos also to Erin’s website designer Ben Umstead, current Fairhaven substitute staff and member of the class of 2001.)
Here is the announcement from Erin herself, with links:
I wanted to give the community information on my debut EP! It contains four original songs and is called “The Norway EP”. You can stream it for free or download it for $1 (or more) here: http://www.erinumstead.bandcamp.com
Some other sites for people to stay up to date with me on are:
Facebook “fan” page: http://www.facebook.com/erinumstead
Twitter: http://twitter.com/erinumstead
Blog: http://www.erinumstead.tumblr.com
I will also be playing the open mic at New Deal Cafe in Greenbelt tomorrow, January 5th at 7pm. Info here: http://www.newdealcafe.com
Thanks for the support!
Erin
We often hear students and families consider public school, so from time to time we post or link to articles reminding readers that you often get what you pay for with schooling.
This one comes from the Washington Post and is written by a guest and School Board member who took his District’s 10th grade test.
A successful adult, he failed the test! He has much to say about the disconnection between schooling and adult life.
At Fairhaven School, we administer no standardized tests, and allow students to pursue their interests freely.
(The following was presented by Fairhaven School staff member Mark McCaig at the 2011 Fairhaven Sudbury conference and then again last Friday for parents in the Chesapeake Room at Fairhaven School. The talk opens and closes with a video clip of former United States Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin reading a poem and answering questions posed by Bill Moyers.)
W.S. MERWIN: That must be “The Nomad Flute.”
You that sang to me once sing to me now
let me hear your long lifted note
survive with me
the star is fading
I can think farther than that but I forget
do you hear me
do you still hear me
does your air
remember you
o breath of morning
night song morning song
I have with me
all that I do not know
I have lost none of it
but I know better now
than to ask you
where you learned that music
where any of it came from
once there were lions in China
I will listen until the flute stops
and the light is old again
BILL MOYERS: “I have with me all that I do not know. I have lost none of it.” What — how do you carry with you what you do not know?
W.S. MERWIN: We always do that. I think that poetry and the most valuable things in our lives, and in fact the next sentence, your next question to me, Bill, come out of what we don’t know. They don’t come out of what we do know. They come out of what we do know, but what we do know doesn’t make them. The real source of them is beyond that. It’s something we don’t know. They arise by themselves. And that’s a process that we never understand.
***
So the topic that’s been inspiring me ever since I saw this interview is the very idea of uncertainty, what Merwin calls “what we don’t know.” This evening I just want to spend a few minutes looking at what we don’t know and what that might mean for us as parents and students at Fairhaven School.
This idea has been growing on me and in me for, well, about 49 years. When we started Fairhaven School in 1994, however, I wasn’t too burdened by the notion. In fact, I knew it all: I had read Summerhill, all the SVS books, I had visited Sudbury Valley, and I had been teaching for ten years by then. I knew everything I needed to know, and was happy to tell people how it would all play out in Fairhaven School just as soon as we could find a building.
Eighteen years later, and man has it been easy. A piece of cake. Thousands of JC cases, over a thousand admissions inquiries, thirteen staff elections, two dozen Assembly budget meetings, two buildings built, maybe ten school plays, one flood, one mythical cougar, hundreds of sharks teeth from the stream, I think five police cars on campus, one heart attack in the parking lot, one poisoned well, one Sudbury conference hosted, and now a grant for a poetry series. I stand before you tonight, somewhere on the other side of knowing, and that’s okay.
My sense is that all of the elements of our school rely upon a certain agnosticism: a not-knowing. Our bedrock commitment to academic and intellectual freedom springs from not knowing what is best for each of our young people. Likewise, although it is dependent upon ground rules of procedure and process, our commitment to democratic decision-making is ultimately also a commitment to not knowing how things will turn out. The age-mixing of students? We support that because we do not presume to know who should associate with whom as they grow and develop.
My experience as a staff member at Fairhaven often feels like the more I know, the less I know. How do people grow and develop, really? A former colleague likened the process to alchemy. Brain chemistry, nutrition, psychology, genetics, screen time, mammal behavior, divine intervention: people are studying education and human development more than ever, but still so much remains a mystery. Thank goodness. The inexact nature of people is surely why we defy the curriculum-driven model churning out students all around us. I submit also that life itself is suffused with uncertainty, and letting our students become comfortable in an atmosphere of relative uncertainty is our overarching gift to them. Now I say relative uncertainty because, of course, our schools are democratic, not anarchist. That’s a whole different, and very interesting, topic. So far, we have agreed to the relative uncertainty of democratic process.
I’m going to interrupt this vague look at uncertainty for some analysis of what we do know. With apologies to anybody with mathematical training or inclinations, here are some axioms to underscore what we do know:
Twelve Formulae
1. Trust +Time = Increase In Trustworthiness/x. The longer students are here, the more amazing they become. In your mind’s eye, compare long-term students to the one and dones. There is usually a significant, qualitative difference. The x factor is parents, so all positive growth in students can be divided by parental concerns.
2. A Rise in Number of Students = Positive Growth in School Culture
3. Corollary One: One wrong student (what someone called Johnny Toxic from a previous Sudbury conference) can exponentially decrease growth in school culture. Corollary Two: one wrong staff member decreases school culture on another whole order. Think poisoned well.
4. The number of students who say they’re not coming back next year is not equal to the number of students who are actually not coming back. This formula has considerable variation, but is so far always true, especially in February. (On a side note, can we just strike February altogether? At least here, it seems always to be cold, gray, and wet, with giant heating bills, JC busier than usual, School Meeting referrals, and plenty of students and parents grumbling about not coming back. On a side note to my side note, here’s all you really need to know about education philosophy: (I know some of you have heard this before from me) barometric pressure is the number one short-term indicator of school culture. If I were a data person, I’d have already run a program to cross-reference number of JC cases as compared to low pressure days and high pressure days. I can guarantee some synchronicity.)
5. In terms of formula: The higher the barometric pressure, the lower the number of JC cases.
6. The lower the barometric pressure, the higher the number of JC cases.
7. Staff/Student ratio at Fairhaven School is not a real number. Often, classes are one-to-one, maybe three-to-one. A Capture-the-flag game can be 30 to zero.
8. The number of budget meetings is infinite, because you can (and will) always add another one.
9. Boys + electronics at school= worried parents.
10. Number of student feet minus the number of shoes worn is greater than zero, often much greater than zero.
11. Number of students embracing freedom at Fairhaven School is greater than the number of students embracing responsibility at Fairhaven School. Fortunately, this number is never fixed, as students are taking on more responsibility daily.
12. Number of people who completely get Fairhaven School is, thus far an empty set. Myself included.
And this is precisely because of the uncertainty factor…
Here lately, the economy is also an enormous unknown. Ditto the environment. Given these enormous questions, what do young people need to know in order to become successful? We think they must, first and foremost, know themselves. Each student becomes an expert, by way of experience, in their strengths and their weaknesses. As they grow here, they deal with both. If they’re an artist, they get to improve their art. Bakers bake more. Writers write, and musicians play. Likewise, if they have gaps, they work on them. Math a problem? Darned if they don’t eventually work on their math. Can’t throw a frisbee? Get in the game and improve. Trouble keeping friends? They learn the complexities of relationships through trial and error. Shyness holding them back? Slowly they come out of their shells. The blank slate of Fairhaven enables all of this, driven by burgeoning self-awareness.
Sometimes the temptation for parents is overwhelming in all this uncertainty, and nowhere does that manifest more than on the touchy subject of classes. To be clear, we are not anti-academic here. classes at Fairhaven can be amazing. Still, our experience has been universal: students do best when parents resist the natural impulse to reduce the uncertainty and suggest that their children take classes. Maybe just one…In my classes, I can almost always tell when a student is there because someone else wants them to be there. The difference between students who are taking a writing class by choice and students who are taking the same class because of coercion is unmistakable and qualitative. The reminder here is to trust the process. The more we let go, the more our young people assume responsibility. Is it difficult? Yes. Does it matter? Absolutely.
My colleagues and I come into work every day not just for what we know, but for what we don’t know. Think about it: all those students—what will they do today? School Meeting, JC, all of these components having “play” in them. Here at Fairhaven, we had our largest graduating class ever, a remarkable class of calm, solid citizens. Who will fill the gap when students leave? Remarkably, as happens every year, new students have filled the gaps our graduates left.
Back to poetry, before I embraced Merwin’s not knowing, I used to lie awake in bed planning out a poem: how bad those poems always turn out! So I’m talking here about the value of letting go. My friend Linda Jackson says that staffing at these schools qualifies as an art form, and I believe there is a certain agnosticism regarding any art: the creative process remains thankfully unknowable. Does anybody know the term “negative capability?” The late Romantic poet John Keats wrote the following in a letter to his brothers, dated December 21, 1817:
I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason –
Sometimes I wish people still wrote and talked that way. Beats text messaging in my book. But I digress…So we’re not talking about anything new here. Aristotle and Plato attacked poor Heraclitus and his skepticism, clear in their position that everything is know-able. logic, reason, the laws of nature. Let me be clear, I am not advocating a position against logic, reason, mathematics or the laws of nature. These are the bones, maybe even the musculature of day-to-day life here on campus. But what constitutes the nerves, the emotions, the humor? What makes this place this place? I think it has a lot to do with what Keats calls negative capability, with what I’m calling “what we don’t know”: it’s the mystery, the play at the synaptic center of all the things we value, especially things that involve creativity and imagination.
Keats, by the way, does not use the concept of negative capability to support art that is sloppy, slapdash, or slipshod. Of course there are things to learn, and ways to improve one’s art. As a poet, I do workshops, I revise, I read other poets, etc. As much as anything, though, I must spend time actually in the creative process. Likewise as a staff member, I constantly look to improve my performance. I talk with staff members from Sudbury schools around the world, I read what they’re doing, I listen to feedback from parents, students and colleagues. We all work hard at it, and we learn how to do this work every day. Students undertake the same process of questioning, talking and learning every day, and they work hard at it as well. Imagine the energy they expend every day just by being in charge of themselves. Agency is hard work.
Paradoxically, I’ve learned that another element that supports my writing is also at play here on campus. Just like our students, I must waste time. Here’s a quote from one of my teachers, the poet Mary Ruefle:
To write poetry, one must waste a good deal of time, one must simply “be,” one must wander around with no particular aim, and it is precisely from such a lacuna that poetry arises. It is hard to explain, like most important things. But in today’s world it has become harder and harder to waste time. Artists are desperate for the simplest thing on earth: being.
Although I think both Ruefle’s and Keats’ notions ring true for students’ lives here at Fairhaven, I think they can also inform staffing. There are many, many elements that make a strong staff member, and that has been written and talked about for years. Work ethic, sense of humor, integrity, respect, passions….the list goes on and on. At Fairhaven, though, some of my most important moments as a staff member arise when I plunk myself down in a chair somewhere and “waste time.” I remember Hanna Greenberg wrote years ago about what she called “the art of doing nothing.” When I just hang out, or play a game. When I completely give in to the uncertainty of the moment. Conversely, I know I’m not staffing my best when I’m always on task, when I’m unavailable to just be with students.
And although certitude is at times a vital element of the equation, today I’m suggesting that time spent in uncertainty is also a core element to being at Fairhaven. This can mean time spent at a Sudbury school, and I think it’s a reason why former students can make such wonderful colleagues. Perhaps also it can be time spent in the creative process. Surely, sometimes artists have become very solid staff members. Ultimately, I guess a comfort level with uncertainty can mean time spent here on planet earth, and this underscores why we have identified the value of life experience itself as an essential to successful staffing.
Wildlife biologists will tell you it’s the edges that have the most activity and diversity: where reefs meet the ocean, where watering holes meet the savanna, the shoreline where the sea meets the land, even the simple thicket between filed and forest. That’s where life tends to be thickest. Of course all of these places are dynamic, changing places. Places of uncertainty. Edges tend to indicate what we know, and what we don’t know, don’t they? Isn’t this fluid delineation the edge that schooling should walk? Isn’t this lush uncertainty the very demarcation of growth and development?
Anything that’s fun seems to have a “not knowing” element. Take baseball. Six months out of the year, I listen to baseball games on the radio. Here’s this intricate game on a lined field, a game obsessed with statistics. These days it’s not just batting averages, earned run averages, RBIs and hits anymore, by the way. There are whole new categories of geekdom out there for baseball fans. “OPS: Onbase plus slugging percentage” “WAR: Wins above replacement”. Then there’s fantasy baseball, where you pick your own teams and apply their statistics. But what keeps my attention is the play at its core: will the batter get a hit or not? Will the pitcher throw a curve or a fastball? I read the Washington Nationals box score the next day—all that certitude in black and white—, but it’s the uncertainty that keeps me tuning in the games. Same for all of the play that happens here on campus Dungeons and Dragons (still alive and well here at FHS, thank you very much), Super Smash Brothers, Zombie games, writing in a journal, playing the piano, swinging, facebooking, just taking with your friends. What we don’t know keeps us coming back for more.
There’s nothing quite like arriving at Fairhaven School early in the morning. It’s quiet, and the light slants into this room. Who knows what the day will bring? New students in the email Inbox? A JC referral? A conversation with a student when suddenly they’re firing on all cylinders, where they’ve arrived. Maybe an alumni visitor with stories of success? Each day starts like a blank page. Take yesterday. Who knew that a student would bake apple scones? Or that another student would paint a duckling swimming in a teacup with cattails? Who knew that the JC would investigate only one case and then listen to Lady Gaga on an iPhone? Who could have predicted all of the colorful buttons people made at the Art Corporation fundraiser? Or that my creative writing class would get to critique a remarkable eulogy for one of our former students?
Of course, all of the religions rely upon uncertainty. Even atheism in its own way. What’s it all about? What happens after we die? Physics, too: chaos theory, string theory, dark matter in the universe. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. What is at the heart of things? And is it measurable, or name-able? Is it the holy spirit? Is it dark matter? Is it a whole lot of nothing?
The good news is, we don’t have to answer these questions tonight. At least we can ask them, and we have a place where our young people can ask them as well. We do have to accept that the questions exist, and that this uncertainty, this what we don’t know, this is our chosen habitat, particularly as parents, staff members and, most importantly, as students. Thank you, parents and students, for your commitment and support, for trusting the school and yourselves in this amorphous process. Tonight, I suggest that we must embrace the uncertainty, we must reassure our fellow travelers that “it’s all good,” and we certainly should enjoy the ride. I do know that much.
Back to Merwin…
***
BILL MOYERS: And that’s true of poetry.
W.S. MERWIN: That’s true of poetry. All the — I think poetry always comes out of what you don’t know. And with students I say, knowledge is very important. Learn languages. Read history. Read, listen, above all, listen to everybody. Listen to everything that you hear. Every sound in the street. Every bird and every dog and everything that you hear. But know all of your knowledge is important, but your knowledge will never make anything. It will help you to form the things, but what makes something is something that you will never know. It comes out of you. It’s who you are. Who are you, Bill.
November, 2011
Last week in between cases in Fairhaven School’s JC (Judicial Committee), a student restated Stephen Hawking’s theory that time stands still inside a black hole. “Although a watch would probably explode in there, if it didn’t, he thinks it would stop recording time.” The school year is back, and the best forum I know for conversations about ideas is also back.
This student, who’s also an elected JC Clerk, set me to thinking while we waited for the principals for the next case. Although it’s not a black hole, Fairhaven School does have a different relationship with time from other schools. Time does not stand still here, but it sure does soften. Take the student who spend untold hours last year chilling under the fairy tree. He was new, and we checked on him from time to time. “I’m fine,” he’d say. And so we he took his time, decompressing from former schools, regaining his sense of agency. This year he’s fully here, even serving as a JC alternate clerk. Or take the gaggle of young girls who reserve the Lounge every day for their complicated games of house or school or whatever the latest variation of imaginative role-playing is. They do check the time for their room reservation sheets, but otherwise they seem to lose track of time. Exemplars of this timelessness manifest all over campus, and seem to be one of the hallmarks of Sudbury education.
For what is freedom if not ownership of your time? This is the great gift we give our students, and perhaps the biggest challenge for our parents. We’ve heard the rejoinders, often a version of this: “but the ‘real world’ runs on time!” So does Fairhaven School. JC happens at noon every day. Classes start on time. School Meeting? Wednesdays at 1. Kitchen Corporation meets like clockwork Fridays at 11:30. And so on. When students weave themselves into the lattice of structured activities here on campus, they find it resembles the rest of the world, with deadlines, clocks, and, crucially, responsibility.
But how fast will a rose bush grow? Which gardener succeeds with force? Here, we wait. A little water, sunlight, and soil, then watch the growth and development. Thank goodness nobody pushed Mr. Hawking in his theorizing. Can you imagine, “Okay Mr. Hawking, we need that black hole theory by the end of the day today. Actually, we need it by the end of this class.”
The clerks called JC back to order soon. Time unfurled. Students came and went, their pace similar to the leaves turning, to the acorns falling to the metal roof: right on time.
At Fairhaven School we think all people have the right to dictate the pace of their lives. And for a fourteenth year, they are doing just that again.
Mark McCaig
September, 2011
(Fairhaven School graduated seven students last June. As a way to celebrate the class of 2011, over the next month, we will be posting the theses that they successfully defended. In italics below is a brief description outlining how somebody earns a Fairhaven diploma, followed by the third thesis. Enjoy!
Students who have spent at least three years at Fairhaven School may earn a diploma by defending the thesis that they have prepared themselves to become effective adults in the larger community. Diploma candidates must declare their intent to graduate and answer questions at a special winter Assembly of parents, students, staff and public members. They also meet with their individual graduation committees, and defend their written theses before a Diploma Committee made up of three experienced staff members from other Sudbury schools. A majority of positive votes from the Committee is the final requirement of the diploma process.)
Aryeh Y. Grossman
3/31/2011
What’s my label now?
These are my life stories as best I can remember; each of them is part of what has helped to create who I am and hopefully has prepared me to become an effective adult. Becoming an adult happens regardless of effectiveness; but becoming an effective comes from being someone who positively evolves from their experiences along the way.
Beginning
When I was young I was labeled with learning and physical disabilities. At age four my parents were told that I would never amount to anything. I would never be capable of properly communicating, writing, biking, and learning. I was put in a learning disabled class. These years were filled with frustration due to people not knowing how to deal with me. It took me longer to learn how to read. In 4th grade I entered a special program called GTLD, gifted and talented learning disabled. It was a very small group of people about 5 to a class I had great teachers. I started gaining more of the confidences I needed. By 5th grade I was learning at grade level just a little slower. My teacher encouraged me to pursue my interests. When I was interested in African art she gave me several college level books about it. Being labeled has never been allowed to stop me. I, according to this doctor, should have never been able to write this much.
Fairhaven
When I was twelve, I came to Fairhaven. Within my first few weeks of attending school I discovered the school’s freedom and trust. For me I discovered it using a knife. When I first came to school we were allowed to carry knives. I had had a knife since I was four. My Abba (Dad) gave me my first, an old Camillus Cub Scout knife that had been his as a kid. I almost instantly got certified and started dabbling in whittling, which led to my first write up. Leo, a former staff person, wrote me up for not cleaning up wood shavings. A couple of months later pocket knives were banned. When I was told about this I was outraged. I had been completely safe and because of other people’s actions I had my right to carry a knife taken away. After discussing this with Mark, I decided to bring a motion to school meeting to informally discuss my problem. That meeting ended with no progress on the knife issue.
This series of events might seem inconsequential to some people, but it taught me a lot. First, I was forced to deal with the consequences of my action in the school’s Judicial Committee (JC), one of the most important tools of the school for teaching about responsibility. Second, I went to School Meeting and spoke for the first time. Third, I was confronted with the loss of my rights. To me, there is nothing more important than maintaining our rights. As a result of this belief, I have clerked JC several times, chaired School Meeting for a year, serving as Assembly President this year, and have become a more conscious individual. For me, taking these experiences, learning from them, and using the lessons to grow and make change demonstrates how I am becoming more effective.
I used to know what I wanted to do. I was going to own a business. I was always toying with different ideas from the presumption that people would always need grave stones and coffins to coming close to buying a vending machine. Around the end of my first year at Fairhaven, I started selling ice pops with a friend. We were making pretty good money but the partnership fell apart. One day he took the money home with him and lost the list of people who had IOU’s. None of the people came clean and we lost money. He wasn’t being careful with money or labeling the products which left me doing most of the work. This resulted in me throwing a bag with 50 pennies in his face and effectively ending our business partnership. I took over the business.
The next year the only other student who had a business graduated, leaving a void. Several other students stepped up, including my friend who took over the soda part of the business with another partner. I never intended to take over selling sodas from him, but he and his partner didn’t do a great job. They didn’t keep well stocked, shop around for good prices, or manage their business well. I had been keeping a case of sodas around for myself and people started asking to buy them because they couldn’t purchase from the actual business. I started casually selling my sodas on the side when people inquired. To insure that I didn’t steal any of his business I charged $1.50, twice his rate. I genuinely didn’t want his business to fail because he was still my friend. It did fail, though. The business fell right in to my lap. I found a cheaper source and sold my sodas at fifty cents. I had the strongest business in the school and I was on top.
We all learn from mistakes. I had never really been involved in theatre at Fairhaven, but I agreed to be Sir Toby Belch in an unabridged version of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. I didn’t read the script before accepting my role and neither did the director who gave me the part. I had never done a play before and over one hundred lines had to be memorized. I worked hard because I had agreed to do the play. When I agree to do something, I do it. Several other students ended up quitting, most of them older them me. On the night of the performance, I was told that I was going to have to wear makeup I freaked out, resulting in me being slapped by two very stressed out directors. We managed to pull it off and it taught me that I could do what I set my mind to.
When I was twelve I took on my first major responsibility. I started volunteering as a shadow for a 4 year old that had Familial Dysautonomia at Adat Shalom Religious School. He was unable to speak, unable to feel pain and had a tube in his stomach for feeding. My primary job was to keep this child emotionally and physically safe. I was there to watch him and advocate for him. If he got hurt, I had to be there so that people would know what happened, because he could not process the pain for himself. I bonded with him at once. I knew him I could communicate with him; he was very perceptive. I could talk to him and he would answer with hand signals for yes and no. This has affected how I look at other people who some might ignore or dislike just because of behavioral and physical inparement.
Illness
This is the blurriest segment of my life and I have pieced it together as best as I can.
Headaches came out of nowhere, debilitating headaches. At first doctors couldn’t figure it out. My family had never been huge on conventional medicine; however, sometimes you’re left with no other choices. At first they thought it might be me just not wanting to go to school and that it was all psychological. My parents have always been fierce advocates for me and they wouldn’t accept that answer. They finally sent me in for a CAT scan and they found an arachnoid-cyst in my brain the size of a cue ball. As my headaches were getting worse I stopped going to school. I was bedridden from the pain. Because the kind of cyst I had didn’t usually need surgery, the doctors just tried to manage the pain including a stay in the hospital. But they weren’t dealing with the source. My parents got me in to see one of the world’s most predominant surgeons, Ben Carson. He agreed with us that the cyst was putting too much pressure on my brain.
I had to have a brain surgery called a fenestration to drain it. There was a 3 in 10 chance that it wouldn’t succeed and that it would require a second surgery to place a shunt. We decided to risk it even with the possible complications a shunt can cause. I had to spend the first 24 hours after surgery in ICU and then several more days in the hospital. A couple of weeks later, the pain in my head was back and was so intense that I ended up in the ER. After a CAT scan, I learned that the cyst had grown back and I also had a hematoma from the surgery. I was in too much pain to be crushed by this. I spent another week in the hospital. Hospitals aren’t a place to heal. You go and you get fixed hopefully, but you still have to recover from simply being there.
I had over 30 staples in my head and had to sleep almost sitting up once I got home. I went back to what had been but now it was worse, I now had scars from the failed surgery and the pain hadn’t gone. Doomed to waiting, I sat in my bed taking painkillers and drugs every couple of hours. My parents didn’t give up. No one wanted a shunt. We found a new surgery being done. Only two doctors in the world would do this very specialized surgery, one in California and the other in South America. It was a laparoscopic surgery through my eyebrow to remove the cyst completely; however I could not have it done immediately because of the hematoma in my brain that had to be resolved. It took three months and we even considered doing surgery just to relieve the hematoma, but it went away on its own.
The plane ride was the worst of my life. Then, we spent the first couple of days in a crappy hotel, going back and forth to the hospital doing pre op tests. I was at my most depressed state ever. We were blessed when a couple of family friends came by, but it was still really hard to deal. I was in pretty horrible pain all the time. They went out and got me 2 Grateful Dead albums which were a calming force. The day of surgery came and we went early in the morning hours to the hospital. I broke down when they wanted to give me an IV. I was tired of all the poking and prodding. I refused. I wasn’t going to put on a hospital gown or submit to the needles. The doctors, nurses, and orderlies ganged up on me and forced me to have the IV and the anesthesiologist went ahead and put me under.
The next month was a blurred existence. I remember the first time I woke up from the surgery vividly. I still had the respirator in my throat and I was tied down to the bed. They put me under again. After I was released from the hospital, we spent the next few weeks at a friend of my mom’s house because I was not yet ready to fly. A few sketchy details are what I remember not coherent memory: no cable TV, a lot of Everybody Loves Lucy, a fruit basket and I don’t even like fruit, Tommy the rock opera, and my addiction to lollypops began. I don’t even remember my flight back to Maryland.
Healing was torture. My headache was only replaced. The incision site from the first surgery was hurting and it seemed as if almost nothing had changed. More doctors were the name of the game. I have no ideas how many different doctors I’ve seen. After searching for the right pain management specialist for months, we finally found one who could help. I was put onto a new drug that suppressed the misfiring nerves in my scalp. It still took more time to find the proper dosage and bring me up to it.
Recovery
For me it was all about my return to school. I had missed so much, yet I was not behind. One of my first steps when I returned was reestablishing my business. On one of my first days back at school I learned that another student had been selling sodas in my absence. He had been charging twice what I was and selling off brand lower quality soda. He had a total monopoly on the school and his prices reflected that. I let him sell the rest of his stock and went back to selling name brand for sodas for 50¢ each. I started seeing my business as more of a reflection on how I treat other human beings. At the beginning of the school year I came in the first day. I was fully stocked with 50 dollars worth of product. People perceived me differently. I was brain surgery kid. I was in the shop hanging with Leo when a new staff member barged in. He said,”Hey I heard the brain surgery kid came today. Where is he?” This was a big personal realization of how people saw me. I ended up missing the next two days of school because I was still was recovering. When I came back, my entire inventory had been stolen. I wrote it up. I ended up missing the next couple of weeks as well. Lisa Lyons came by to visit and she informed me that JC had caught the people who had done it and I would be compensated. This was the first time JC had done anything about thefts for me. I had problems sporadically over the years. I believe they only did this because they felt they had to watch out for brain surgery kid. This was something that would just take time for people to get used to.
It took time acclimating back to school. One of the places I got involved with was School Meeting. I started attending when I did manage to make it to school. I got to understand the school more thoroughly by attending. So few people attended it was usually five or so students including the chair and secretary. The only thing that got people to come was the controversial issues. I found it frustrating how few people attended school meeting. I enjoyed being at school meeting. I was there and ready to be one of the few voices conscious enough to makes sure they know what was going on.
There were two major events that took place that represented my transformation from sickness to health. The first was when my meds had finally kicked in and I was capable of attending school regularly. My Imma (Mom) had wanted to throw away some of my get well cards and this seemed wrong to me. I didn’t want to just throw away good intentions but I also didn’t want to hold on to the energy of me being sick. So I decided to burn them. I got permission from school meeting to have a small bonfire at school and burn the cards. It felt like the right place to do it to end the sickness at the place it had kept me from. I gathered up all of the cards. It must have numbered over five hundred cards and lots of unneeded paper work. The day of the burning we brought 3 boxes filled with just paper. My Imma came in and we went to the back of the old building and said a prayer that had been written for me. I can’t remember what it said anymore. It was the first thing we lit.
As soon as the bonfire was over and the cards and medical records were turned to ashes, I knew that a segment of my life had ended. We drove to Target and I bought $70 dollars in get well, sympathy, and thank you cards to send to others.. Even though I had burned the ones sent to me, I wanted to find a way to pass on the positive energy by being able to support others.
My family and I held a celebration of life party. At first my parents thought of it as me getting my life back, but I stood firm. It was not just my life we were getting back, my whole family had lost a lot during my time sick. I decided it was not my party it was our whole family’s party and we were going to celebrate all of our lives.
Normalcy
After this my life changed. I started going to school with regularity. I got elected to school meeting chair and finally overcame one of my original outrages. I brought a motion to school meeting to allow students to carry pocket knives. I had to create comprehensive rules pertaining to the certifying and use of knives at school and extensively research law pertaining to this. It took six weeks of going to school meeting to get all the new procedures passed. After 5 years of no knives some students are allowed to carry knives again. I became a certifier for pocket knives, so that I could over see the rules that I had put in place and teach proper usage.
The school’s rules have always been a strong interest to me because I always loved the philosophy of personal responsibility in the school. I had always been pretty well versed in the rules and JC procedure but never allowed myself to clerk due to my poor hand writing at the time. I joined a writing class, mostly for grammar but each class opened with small writing exercises in long hand. After a few months I was proficient enough to take on the writing part of being a clerk. I have now been an alternate clerk a handful of times and clerked twice.
My business, one of the few constants throughout my career in Fairhaven, started to take on a different shape. One of the main reasons I held on to it so long was to keep student business at school from becoming a monopoly. I was not in it strictly for the profit anymore. I find the challenge of it fun. I started having to lock things up to prevent theft from happening. Before, people had just grabbed the stuff and looked for me to pay. They started interrupting everything I was doing so I could unlock it for them. So I started hiring someone to sell for me part of time.
I also had to start making choices about deeper human morality. I learned about the slave trade used in chocolate. Thirty seven percent of the world’s supply of cocoa comes out of the Ivory Coast where approximately ten thousand child slaves are used and another two hundred thousand or so child workers. This outraged me so much that I quit the sale of chocolate. However this one little act is not nearly enough. I struggled with what the next step was. At first I started by going after the people who were buying it and selling it. I tried to educate them but usually got angry when they responded that they didn’t care and I called them out by personally letting them know that they were no better than the slave traders themselves for choosing to do nothing. This put people off as I should have expected but I was blinded by the passion.
I changed tactics, I started bringing up just the facts whenever I could and simply say I would not support the sales based on facts. This is when things started to change. People became more conscious. Without me having a direct hand in it a motion came to school meeting to forbid the sale of slave chocolate at school. There was a lengthy conversation in school meeting about the issue. Even thou the motion had failed it was a success to me because people were talking about it. Since then two different fundraisers at school have used fair trade chocolate in there events because of what I have said.
Plans and Personal philosophy
As I said I used to know what I was going to do. I would run and own some sort of business. It was a strong pull for me, but as I have gotten older, it has grown less clear. The difficulty in running a socially responsible and competitive business at school is overpowering. For me though, there is no other choice but to be socially conscious in business. Being socially responsible is so essential to the core of who I am that I am beginning to think that owning a business outside of school would be a challenge that might too difficult to consider taking. On the other hand if I found a good opportunity, I would absolutely consider it. I just don’t know where my life will ultimately lead. In the short term I plan on going to community college for a year and working during the summer as a camp counselor. Then I will spend a year in Israel and taking an ulpan, which is an intensive Hebrew emersion program. From there I don’t know exactly, but that gives me 2 years to figure things out.
What I do know is to feel decent about myself, I have to stand up against what I know to be wrong and volunteer in the community. I have gone to a Darfur rally and plan to go to another in the future. When there was threat of a Koran burning I was trying to figure out how to go down to Florida to protest this most disgusting act and ended up attending a small rally in DC against it. When I learned of the child slavery in chocolate, I made my household purchase fair trade only and will continue to educate people about these problems for the rest of my life
As for community, I am always ready to do what I can. I am a ham radio operator, call sign KB3WTF. I have worked on the course of the Marine Corp Marathon looking for downed runners and radioing for help. I am also looking at volunteering at equal exchange, a nonprofit that verifies that workers are paid and treated fairly. In addition this philosophy has lead me to much of what I do in the school, including being Fire safety clerk, elections clerk, Assembly President, and repeatedly serving as JC clerk.
For me, being an effective adult is being someone who can positively evolve from their experiences. My experiences in life made me evolve to be the conscious and action oriented person that I am today. From my earliest days dealing with being labeled and more recent years dealing with brain surgeries, I have gained perseverance and fortitude. My time in the theater began shaping my work ethics, while my business has sharpened my work ethics and helped hone my action oriented philosophies about human impact from every action. My time with Eli has altered how I perceive other human beings with physical or mental disability. Recovering from illness and re-assimilating back in to the community has changed how I look at myself and the world around me. Being School Meeting Chair, Assembly President, and JC Clerk has shown that I can work with people and oversee a process. Dealing with theft and my chocolate revelations has taught me to adapt to different situations. I hope that by showing you my life experiences and my frame of mind, I have demonstrated to you that I am ready to become an effective adult in the larger community.
(Fairhaven School graduated seven students last June. As a way to celebrate the class of 2011, over the next month, we will be posting the theses that they successfully defended. In italics below is a brief description outlining how somebody earns a Fairhaven diploma, followed by the second thesis. Enjoy!
Students who have spent at least three years at Fairhaven School may earn a diploma by defending the thesis that they have prepared themselves to become effective adults in the larger community. Diploma candidates must declare their intent to graduate and answer questions at a special winter Assembly of parents, students, staff and public members. They also meet with their individual graduation committees, and defend their written theses before a Diploma Committee made up of three experienced staff members from other Sudbury schools. A majority of positive votes from the Committee is the final requirement of the diploma process.)
HEADWORK
My name is Ginger Engel, I’m sixteen years old, and five of those years have
been spent at Fairhaven School. It’s been five years of ups and downs, highs and
lows, and too many experiences to tell. It’s been quite the adventure and
although I’ve enjoyed it, I’m ready to start a new adventure; an adventure
outside of Fairhaven. But I didn’t become ready overnight. I’ll start at the
beginning.
When I was twelve years old I was enrolled at Fairhaven with nothing to
lose, really. I had no real direction in my life and no idea what to do with myself.
Fairhaven seemed like a good place to figure those things out. I spent the first
week or so of school mostly just watching people. The only other person I knew
was my older sister, so I had to make new friends, something I’d never been good
at. But after spending so much time just watching people I fell in with a group of
people that I still call friends today. I spent the rest of the year trying to get
better at interacting with people.
My second year started off much like my first, talking to people, hanging
out, and trying to figure things out. During that year I learned how to crochet (a
type of craft, similar to knitting, which involves a single thread and a hooked
needle). At the time it was just a hobby that I did in my spare time. It wasn’t
really a big part of my life. In the spring, Fairhaven held an arts and crafts fair that
my friend and I registered for. We sold pillows and stuffed animals, all of which
were hand sewn. We made a considerable profit and it was a lot of fun. That’s
where it all really started.
The following December I registered for a craft fair at a church with my
mom and sister. I didn’t sew anything this time but I had gotten good enough at
crocheting to make scarves and hats to sell. The fair was successful and I really
enjoyed it, but crafting still seemed like a hobby more than anything else.
It wasn’t until almost two years later that I considered being a crafter to
make a living. Fairhaven held another Spring craft fair, which I was quick to sign
up for. That’s when I decided to start entering craft fairs on a more regular basis.
That same year in late August I registered for an ongoing fair in Silver Spring called
The Fenton Street Market. This turned out not to be the best idea, it being back–
to-school time. In October I registered with The Fenton Street Market again and
got a better turn out, but still not great.
That December I registered for a fair at the church that I had registered
with years before. I wasn’t able sell anything I’d made. But I met the person who
I now think of as my only role model, despite the fact that I don’t know her name
and she’s about 60 years old. I met her when I was walking around the fair to
look at the other vendors. She caught my eye because she and her husband were
selling crocheted scarves and gloves. I walked over and she and I started talking.
She told me about how she loves to crochet and it’s what she does with most of
her time. But it was two words she said to me that still stick with me. “Keep
crocheting” she said. I’d never felt that kind of support and inspiration from
anyone else. I decided to keep that bit of advice and keep crocheting no matter
what.
After the fair in December, it occurred to me that fairs may not be the best
place to try to sell crafts. So I decided to start selling online. I’m signed up on
Etsy, a website that hosts crafters. Right now the specifics are being worked out
(payment methods, shipping costs, etc.) and then I’ll be ready to sell. I’d like to
eventually have my own website to sell my wares on but I think Etsy is a better
place to start. I’m taking my time with the online selling though. When I do
something I want to do it right. I don’t want to rush into a totally new
environment without knowing what I’m up for first. Walk before you run, right?
Being at Fairhaven has taught me a lot of things, like time management.
This year I ran for JC clerk for the first time. About three years ago I had been a JC
alternate and I didn’t enjoy it in the least. But I figured that it was 3 years ago and
my opinion of clerking may have changed. So Matteo and I ran for clerk
unopposed and, as you can imagine, got the job. There’s quite a bit of time
management needed to clerk because you have to factor in the time it takes to do
the sentence list, whether you need a sub for anyone, getting a runner, finding
missing JC members, and take into account that JC may run anywhere from 20
minutes to 2 hours. I feel I fulfilled my role as a clerk pretty darn well. I’m still not
sure how much I enjoyed the experience though.
Another lesson came up with a write-up that involved a few friends, a
buried time capsule, and a total lack of permission to dig it up. It didn’t really
occur to us to go to school meeting or ask the grounds clerk or anything like that.
We just started digging. Although I always feel people should do what they feel is
right, it’s important to go through the right portals to do it. Then maybe you
won’t end up getting sentenced to three grounds jobs.
There are some things I learned at Fairhaven just from being around other
people. One valuable lesson I learned was to not be afraid to ask questions. When
I was a kid and I didn’t understand something, I wouldn’t ask anyone to explain or
at least not immediately. I was really shy and didn’t want people to think I was an
incompetent fool. So I kept quiet. Which never worked out very well. Because
then I would eventually have to ask someone what to do and I’d feel twice as
foolish because I’d waited so long. When I got to Fairhaven and started to hang
out with people who seemed so comfortable with themselves all the time, I
realized that it’s better to ask questions now rather than later, even If it does
seem silly.
I also learned how to interact with people who are significantly older or
younger than me. The first time a student who was older (about five years older)
than me said hello to me, I was so startled and didn’t know how to respond. I
thought maybe he wanted something from me but I couldn’t think of what he’d
want. But he just wanted to say hello. After I got over my strange fear of older
people I actually became friends with that particular student. On the other end of
the spectrum are younger students, and Fairhaven has plenty of those. I used to
find small children rather irritating and would try to avoid talking to them. Then I
remembered what it was like when I was seven years old. I wasn’t all that
different from the kids I was trying to keep away from. Now when approached by
kids I try to remember myself at that age and I’m able to have a conversation with
them. A lot of them are pretty cool in fact.
There are also some valuable (if not simple) lessons I’ve learned outside of
Fairhaven, but with people from Fairhaven. Like checking the train schedule for
the Metro. That way you don’t miss the last train out of Washington, DC and end
up having to call your dad at 1:00 in the morning to have him pick you and your
friends up. Or remembering to bring tip money when you go out to a restaurant.
That way you don’t feel like a total jerk when you only have enough money for a
two dollar tip. I still have a hard time with that sometimes but I’m working on it.
I believe it’s all of the experiences somebody goes through that makes
them an effective adult, an effective person, a person at all. I haven’t mentioned
all of my Fairhaven experiences since there are too many for me to remember
and some may be lost in the back of my memory. I’ve mentioned things that I
believe to be most significant. I believe that these are things that make me the
person that I am, the effective person that I am, and the effective adult that I’m
becoming. If there’s anything that my sixteen years have taught me, at Fairhaven
or otherwise, it’s to never regret anything. Realize your mistakes, learn from
them, and know you’re better because of it.
Headwork: n/ mental work or effort : THINKING
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