For the month of January, Fairhaven School hosted Monika Wernz, a visitor from a startup Sudbury school group in Munich. From the beginning, we have welcomed visitors from all over the world to our campus. On the one hand, we…
Two months ago, C., a twelve-year-old student, obtained permission from School Meeting to volunteer every Thursday at the nearby Clearwater Nature Center in pursuit of his Junior Naturalist certification. Two weeks ago, as a component of his training, he co-hosted…
Understanding Fairhaven School often involves what we do. To name but a few things I’ve seen this week, students here have been spending their days creating, playing, thinking, debating, reading, writing, running, dancing, swinging, acting, voting, drumming, climbing, and drawing….
The best book I read in 2010 (and one I’ve used in my Creative Writing class here at school) might just be expatriate poet Gustaf Sobin’s essay collection Luminous Debris: Reflecting On Vestige In Provence And Languedoc. In it the…
This post by Shoshona London Sappir appeared on the blog of Michael Sappir, a graduate of the Jerusalem Sudbury School. (Michael writes often on issues of education at http://sappir.net.) A few years ago my husband and I attended a lecture…
Some things don’t change. In an era of increasing homework, we are buoyed by this this quotation from 1860 reprinted as part of The Scientific American’s 50/100/150 feature: Against Homework “A child who has been boxed up six hours in…
Here are a whole batch of pictures from our Halloween party. Current students, alumni, and staff are represented. Enjoy!
We learned last Monday about the tragic accidental death of David Hepner, one of our 2009 graduates. He was riding in a truck with two other graduates, passing the home of yet another graduate. The news and suddenness has shocked…
From the top of the outdoor steps, behind the swing set, you can look down into the forest and see Mt. Nebo Creek passing through the school’s property on its way to the Patuxent River, the Chesapeake Bay, and, ultimately,…
Whereas traditional school environments rely on stability, predictability and routine, a Sudbury school environment like Fairhaven is characterized by change and variability. To be sure, we do have our routines and structures here: just today we convened our first School…
There’s a buzz on the internet this summer about New York high school valedictorian Erica Goldson’s thoughtful speech criticizing the educational system she’s just completed. One highlight: School is not all that it can be. Right now, it is a…
(Fairhaven School has just graduated five students. As a way to celebrate the class of 2010, over the next month, we will be posting the theses that they successfully defended. In italics below is a brief description outlining how somebody…
