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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (78314)	10/24/2003 11:11:20 AM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

We hadn't gotten to the level of critical learning at that point -- I'm not sure you can get every person to do critical learning, though I would have to think about it. We were concerned with some more basic character aspects. For example, we realized that many students were going through school focussed on only one aspect of their personality -- the academic. There are other important things in life. So we designed the curriculum in five blocks each year. The first and last blocks of each term were academic for all students; the middle three blocks the students were divided into thirds and rotated among the blocks. Three blocks were academics. We agreed with the basic concept of immersion, so we had either two major, or one major and two minor, subjects per block. Of the other block one was devoted to intensive full time work in some mechanical skill area. Eight or nine weeks of it. We felt that students would be more confident in life if they had learned some manual skill that first would give them confidence that they actually could do things with their hands, and give them confidence that they could learn mechanical things even if they thought of themselves as klutzes. And they would learn, we hoped, to respect manual skills in others if they really understood how much was involved in doing such work. So, for example, we had a teacher whose summer job was working maintaining canvas and cedar canoes in a wilderness canoe camp. So he took a group of students each term and starting with a pile of lumber, a roll canvas, and nails, paint, etc., they each created a wood and canvas canoe. The last week of that term was a canoe camping trip down a local river. At the end, they could either buy the canoe for the cost of the materials, or sell it, reimburse the school for the material cost (which wasn't all that much), and pocket the remainder. Another section each term rebuilt a car, stripping it totally down to the basic nuts and bolts and rebuilding it. It was amazing to see the first day a bunch of students who had never even opened the hood of a car who by the end of the term were confident in their ability to change an engine, repair brakes, take apart a door panel and unstick a window, etc. Another group would go out to an abandoned house that the city had condemned and, under the tutelage of several crafts people, repair the house -- structural, electrical, plumbing, you name it. The only things they didn't do were roofing and one or two other more dangerous tasks. The final block was community service. Every student had to spend the term -- eight or nine weeks usually -- working full time for a nonprofit organization dealing mostly with poverty issues. Not being a docent at a museum, but working in a soup kitchen, a free clinic, a shelter for battered women, that sort of thing. This wasn't your traditional volunteer to help cook one meal and feel good about yourself that some schools promote; this was really coming to grips with the basic issues of poverty, homelessness, learning to know these people as people. Since we had three consecutive terms with three groups, we were able to give these organizations a lengthy chunk of time that really made a difference. And to see these students come back to campus after their term out there was amazing. There was lots more that we changed, including making a serious commitment to student government and expecting the students to live with the consequences of their decisions, without totally abandoning our responsibilities as adults, but that curriculum change was the most visible change we instituted, and it worked wonders.