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.
