Square Pegs: Searching for Solutions, Part 1

Valuing our square pegs in who they are, looking to them in how they engage the school world, gives us the criteria for evaluating any learning environment meant for them to grow healthy and successful. Remember, the square pegs profiled, Charlie, David, Christopher and Jonathan, were all angry to the point of madness, very bright and willing to take responsibility for their own learning and the methods to learn and in possession of different ways of learning-otherwise called Learning Disabilities. Therefore, any appropriate environment should place the highest priority on emotional healing and wellness, fully allow for the differences among children and permit them to grow in their own way and in their own time, provide the greatest exercise of personal responsibility for what they learn and how it is learned, make available abundant intellectual resources and widest possibilities of companionship sparking creative engagement of the academic world, and offer the guidance, the understanding and the help to see to each child’s ability to achieve in his and her own way.

The purpose of this five part series, Searching for Solutions, is to look across the education field uncovering and reporting on learning environments meeting the criteria. The odd thing about this search is to have discovered that every one of the solutions to the challenges of our square pegs is in use in one school or another. So, I’ve taught in the kindergarten Open Classrooms and the mixed grade elementary classes of the Berkshire Hills Regional School District in southwest Massachusetts. I’ve seen enhanced student achievement in project based learning and in performance assessment through the advocacy and the practice of the schools of the New York Performance Standards Consortium and of the Big Picture Company. I’ve found effective integrative curriculum organization from the National Association for Core Curriculum. I’ve witnessed first hand the power of Simons Rock College of Bard to successfully challenge the minds of adolescents in their middle teens. I’ve observed play therapy’s ability to restore mental health to young children and Aspen Education Group’s Wilderness Programs to transform at risk teens.

The fly in the ointment, sort to speak, is that the solutions the series will spotlight are spread over many different schools in places other than Rockaway. Actually there are no schools taking whole any of these empowering environments on the Peninsula, in Southern Queens or in the rest of New York City. The schools closest to creating like learning environments are the private Brooklyn Free School, which is responsibility based, and the public Bard High School Early College in Manhattan which combines high school and junior college study. But even these schools implement only aspects as well, as the Brooklyn Free School accords light attention to intellectual development and Bard High School Early College, quite uniform, severely limits responsibility. So, in the end the solutions the series outlines at present exist out of reach of our children and do not a bit of good for our square pegs. But I’d like you to wonder what if all these solutions were in one place, in one school, right here for our children. Just imagine the lives made whole, the happiness and the eventual success in life brought to our children now being made mad by the uniform school.

As usual, comments are encouraged and can be e-mailed to me at ljfayhee@gmail.com.