Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Further Adventures in the Education Wilderness


Yep, the Christmas season of 1995 found me with quite an array of instructional strategies but no place to employ them and no prospects of being invited to do so. By that time, I had extensive outdoor knowledge and nearly ten years of experience in the back woods and in teaching four season outdoor rustic living with the Boy Scouts as well as a keen understanding of Experiential Education theory and practice. Still, I could not translate that into any kind of school teaching position as there were very few outdoor school programs and what there were had no vacancies. Taking the hint, I searched for employment outside of education and found a sales associate position at the Broadway and Houston Street Eastern Mountain Sports store. I probably would have stayed on for quite some time, but the position was a holiday one which ended at the close of February. So, I increased my effort to connect with NCACS schools, but they remained well out of commuting range and with my wife’s career as an apparel designer here in NYC and she and it doing well, I could not realistically relocate. Besides, the pay at these schools was laughably low, limiting relocation to near ideal circumstances which were not available in any of the schools of my acquaintance. I finally finished the last of scuba instructor certification and began accepting students of my own and their tuition fees.  As I pointed out many times to as many people, I really enjoyed working with student divers both in the classroom and in the water.  Now, if only I could have actually made a living at that, but there was no real money to be had.  However, I calculated I broke even.


I remained removed from conventional school teaching, had not found an alternative and was doing well as the scuba instructor in 1997 when Karen found a really great job in southwest Massachusetts, Sheffield to be exact, and so we relocated to Ashley Falls, a hamlet in Sheffield.  I sought out private alternatives to the conventional and discovered a Waldorf institution, The Rudolf Steiner School, in a neighboring town, Great Barrington, shortly after we moved.  I inquired, but discovered Waldorf and its Steiner School were as adult directed and conventional as all other regular education schools.  I also discovered Simon's Rock College of Bard in Great Barrington.  Simon’s Rock is a conventional college course structured early college offering a Liberal Arts education. As it turns out Simon’s Rock’s claim to being alternative was in its being an early college, a combined four year high school-junior college for youngsters fourteen to eighteen years of age.  But in all other respects, it was as adult directed as any traditional institution. Still, I was looking to apply as an adjunct instructor teaching Communication and Media, but they were much uninterested in Communication/Media Studies, Media Ecology and me.


Since there were no private alternative schools in which I could be employed, I fell back onto the conventional public system and thinking we would be staying for a while and knowing that one had to substitute teach into a permanent position, I started substitute teaching in the home district, Southern Berkshire Regional School District, hoping that in time I would be given a full-time appointment in their high school and get a chance to do Developmental, Socratic, Experiential, Project Based and Cooperative Learning.  I was working nearly every day and I thought it bode well for filling the next Social Studies vacancy.  However, we didn't stay long enough for that to happen as the big bosses moved my wife’s division, and us, to their headquarters in Denton, Texas, only six months after I started in the School District. 


It was in Denton, of all places, where in early 1999 I discovered a newly opened private authentically alternative to the conventional school, The Backpourch School, just around the corner from where we lived.  The founders marketed it as an "Interest Based School".  Actually it was an attempt to do Democratic Education.  All children, Democratic Education maintains, have different gifts and talents which powerfully drive individual knowledge seeking, acquisition and use without the coercion to do so and without the severe negative effects of forced compliance visited on children attempting to satisfy adult demands in opposition to their basic inclinations, instincts, drives, capacities and innate curiosity. Indeed, the child’s individual neurological construction, abilities, interests, reflective capacities, communication style and rate of social, emotional and cognitive growth provide daily opportunities in Democratic Education communities to self-select what is learned, when it is learned, how what is chosen is learned, the scope and depth of learning chosen and the duration spent on individual aspects of learning ultimately creating a high quality individualized and emergent rather than a questionable uniform and mandated course of study for each over a term and over a school residency.


Yaacov Hecht (http://www.yaacovhecht.com/) developed the principles of Democratic Education in the mid-1980’s. In 1987, in Hadera, Israel, he founded the first Democratic Education school. To spread the word and to advocate for this model of formal learning he founded the Institute for Democratic Education (http://www.democratic.co.il/en/).


Quite unfortunately, The Backpourch founders had no real idea of Democratic Education, of constructing a Democratic Education learning environment and of the movement of youngsters from being wholly adult-directed to being wholly self-directed which is a critical and necessary transition for youngsters to undertake to work well in the intrinsically motivated Democratic Education learning environment.  Essentially, they thought all that was required for youngsters to move from having others telling them what to learn to being self-directed learners was for the adults of the school community to completely refrain from any kind of directing.  Once the pressure to comply with adult demands was removed, the founders thought, immediately youngsters would choose academic content and be swept away to higher, deeper academic learning in the process.  These well-meaning folks did not understand that children having been so accustomed to the conventional adult compliant way of schooling, which all were, require a time to unlearn adult compliance habits necessary to live within their old school setting and to learn new self-directing habits necessary to live well in their new learning environment.  What the founders saw once their students were relieved of compliance to adult learning commands were youngsters playing with whatever was available and frequently being bored.  If they had known these behaviors were appropriate and a natural part of the transition, I suspect, they would have relaxed.  Instead, they panicked and began directing individual learning objectives whenever they could, ultimately, destroying what they wanted to do in founding an interest based school.


I was trying to persuade the founders to allow me to institute an Outdoor Education offering but the founders were too overwhelmed by the vast distances among their expectations of student decision making, of quickly demonstrating the efficacy of the school's approach to education and of the reality of an intrinsically motivated, self-directed learning community for them to accept an additional interest component. The school was floundering. And as far as we could tell, it closed shortly after we relocated back to southwest Massachusetts in 2002.


As it was clear that there were no private alternative teaching opportunities, I, again, fell back on the conventional public system and thinking we would be staying for a while and knowing one had to substitute teach into a permanent position, I started substitute teaching in two school districts, Denton and Lewisville ISDs, hoping that in time I would be given a full-time appointment to one of the high schools and get to implement all the strategies I had learned along the way.  However, I eventually discovered that Social Studies teaching positions were reserved for interscholastic athletic coaches and my having coached our son, Sean's, youth soccer team did not actually qualify me for being a soccer coach in such an athletic crazed state as Texas.  I also discovered that all teachers were pretty much doing the same thing across the subjects from junior to senior high: talking to, factoid on the board, textbook teaching/learning, test prep, test review, testing, testing, testing, etc.  I wondered, again, even if I were hired to teach if I would be allowed to use what I was now thinking had become "alternative to the conventional" instructional strategies.   Further, being from the heart of the North, from Brooklyn, NY, by way of Massachusetts, did not sit well with some in hiring positions. 


This time I took the hint and left teaching. I tried my hand at driving a cement truck which lasted less than two months as I could not cope with being exhausted all the time: the job was a twelve to fifteen hour, seven day a week commitment and I was no spring chicken at that point. I also tried being an office temp which I enjoyed but the only full-time position coming out of that was as a minimum wage beverage package quality assurance inspector having the responsibility of conducting two specific tests: the position was mind-numbing and I essentially gave-up on it after six months putting myself in the way of being fired (although at the time I did not think that is what I was doing, but in hind-sight I can see that I probably did just that). I did not pick-up any further employment, teaching or other, in North Texas after that.


Karen's North Texas job ended not too long after my quality assurance one and we moved back to southwest MA; this time to Great Barrington. I resumed substitute teaching in the Southern Berkshire Regional School District adding work in the Berkshire Hills Regional School District in the hope. But, I saw that the standardized testing regime newly being implemented as we left for North Texas really bit hard and had turned schooling upside-down.  Where once I saw a range of instructional strategies I now found only one, the usual talking to, factoid on the board, textbook teaching/learning. Again I seriously questioned even if I were to be given the pleasure of the classroom if I would be allowed to use what seemed to have become even farther out alternative to the conventional teaching/learning strategies. 

Nevertheless, I continued accepting substitute assignments and even applied for an opening to teach Public Speaking at Berkshire Community College. The Department Chair and his senior professor passing on my fitness thought my approach to the instruction of public speaking very exciting; however, since they had never seen a course so structured, since the course was to be scheduled for South Campus, away from the direct supervision afforded on the main campus, and since they had never seen me teach, they said that they were not going to take a chance on either the course or me.

Hint..Hint...Well, eventually the hint sunk in and I left teaching to hook up with a local bulk hauler, but, unfortunately, my aging kidneys couldn’t stand the beating and I had to quit having spent about a month bouncing all over Eastern New York and Western Massachusetts roads.


The start of 2003 found us still in southwestern Massachusetts: I had left school teaching, truck driving...and scuba instruction. Cervical spinal cord compressions and a surgery largely repairing them had forced me to completely stop all scuba activities by late 2001.  I was hanging out in our rented home in Great Barrington when on a late January mid-day listening to the local public radio I heard Jerry Mintz talk about the recently completed International Democratic Education Conference in Albany.

 

No comments:

Post a Comment