February 8, 2009

A Look Inside A Place Like This

Seattle Girls’ School (SGS) is many things.  The obvious qualities are an all-girl population, the smaller class sizes, the use of computers by every student, and the creativity that lines the halls of the school in the form of magnificent artwork and unique projects. When families and guests take a tour of SGS, they see these observable characteristics as well as receive a detailed description of the school and its curriculum from staff and students.

While this is a great introduction to the school, it is only a beginning. What happens inside the classroom is often an experience shared by a limited number of people — the students and their teachers — and as hard as SGS may try to demonstrate the unique quality of that experience in their weekly tours, it’s difficult to get a grasp of what really goes on unless you spend a significant portion of your day or week observing the day-to-day rhythm.

Still, during any tour there is one common comment: I wish I could go back and do my middle school years all over again in a place like this. Why? What do visitors see, what do they feel when they walk through the hallways and classrooms of the school? How is this school different from their own education? In an attempt to understand, we off a narrative tour of a place like this through the lens of the 6th grade experience…

The day starts with the slow, sleepy parade of girls walking down the long hall to “Canada” — the nickname of the northern SGS building — where they haul their backpacks and bags, sporting equipment and lunches up the only stairway to their perch on the second floor.  While lockers have always been taboo at SGS, recently the Head of School succumbed to the demand and now “ers” (since there are no locks on the doors) line the tight hallway where the girls maneuver their belongings into their metal cubbies.  Some girls laugh, others yawn, and some complain about younger brothers and older sisters, or irritating parents and worrisome friends.

The day’s schedule is listed on a whiteboard cheerfully and colorfully scribed in blues, reds, and greens. No one seems to pay close attention to the agenda, but as the day progresses, it’s clear everyone knows where to go and what time to be there. The class is divided into sections or cores so no one class is too large or too small.  For some, the first stop is math with Sensi Hiro who has positioned large measuring scales at in the center of each table. The girls shuffle in, find their teams and arrange themselves at their work spaces with pencils at the ready. The goal for the day: To weigh and calculate the mean, median, and mode of Kit Kat candy bars. The sight of candy this early in the morning lifts the spirits of many a-groggy student and Sensi does his best to direct their excitement to the math lesson at hand.

From the moment the class begins, there is encouragement to exchange and explore — a conversation of sorts — to move through the lesson in a much more organic way.  There are no textbooks. There isn’t a list of problems to solve or proclamation of an upcoming test. Rather, there is a concept, a question posed to the students: Is the weight on the candy bar accurate?  As a class, the students must answer that question using math skills they’ve been working with throughout the year. But the questions don’t stop there. Once they figure out that no, the weight is not really accurate, they must speculate why.

“Wouldn’t it be hard to weigh each and every candy bar?” one student posits.

“They wouldn’t weigh each one!” another exclaims. “They’d have to take the average.”

“Which average?” interjects someone from the back. “The mean, the median, or the mode?”

“Does it matter? They’re lying to us,” adds another.

“Yeah, they’re selling us anorexic Kit Kats!” protests one student followed by laughter from her classmates.

And on and on goes the discussion until the girls come to the conclusion that the candy company does their best to stay within a range of weight– that while some candy bars may be smaller than advertised, others are larger.  Perhaps without knowing it, the girls have just used math skills and concepts to analyze a marketing problem many of them did not know existed before their day began.

Does this happen in other classrooms in other schools?  Perhaps, but this free exchange of analytical inquiry feels refreshing and to someone of an older generation, someone whose middle school education was top down (passed from teacher to student via a lecture or textbook), the lesson can make one long to relive those difficult teenage days in a place like this. But there is no time to dawdle for just as the students unwrap their candy bars (a reward for a job well done) they must gather up their belongings and head next door for another lesson in another classroom.

Next up, Ms. Brenda’s class where students spend the first few minutes writing in their journals.  A quiet falls over the room as pencils move across paper and eyes lift from the page to find inspiration on the ceiling or out the window.  The solace of the exercise is broken by Ms. Brenda’s gentle voice asking the students to put away their journals, pull out a piece a paper, and prepare themselves for a book talk by their fellow classmate.  A tall, blond, and lanky student rises with notecards in hand.  Her task is to share with her classmates a book she’s recently read, enticing them to perhaps read it themselves. Using a computer to project a small slideshow, the student proceeds to chronicle the life of Jane Goodall.

“Have you ever wished you could discover something no one else knows about?” she asks. “For Jane Goodall, this wish came true.”

The class listens intently, writing notes about the book and formulating questions they wish to ask at the end of the presentation.  “When you say,” one student queries, “That Dr. Goodall lived with the chimps, does that mean she like lived in trees?” The class giggles, but the presenter answers authoritatively. “No, she lived in the jungle in a tent, but she spent each day observing the chimps in their natural habitat.”

The dialogue continues and if you were on a tour of the school and stepped in right at this moment, you would see that the teacher, Ms. Brenda, is involved, but not in a typical fashion. The students in the class know what is expected of them and as the question and answer period continues, their natural curiosity about Dr. Goodall and the book presented engages the students in a lively discussion about science and women, chimps and their connections to humans.  Ms. Brenda clarifies when needed, but she is not the keeper of all knowledge. Rather, she is the referee as the girls banter and volley what they know, what they think they know in a give and take that rivals the kind of discourse you’d find in a college class.

After a break where students congregate in the hallways and classrooms eating pretzels and yogurt, sipping from juice boxes or sharing string cheese, the students move to their next classroom where they are greeted by a jovial Ms. Rosetta.  Her laugh, an echo of joy, precedes her well-known phrase, “Well, the thing is…” followed by a thoughtful discussion about chickens.

Yes, chickens. In another session during the previous week, Ms. Rosetta asked her students to formulate an argument in support of or in opposition to the dissection of chicken legs.

“Ultimately,” she told them, “There’s no perfect answer. If there was, I would have already figured it out and I wouldn’t need your advice. Remember,” Ms. Rosetta adds, “Ew is not an acceptable argument for not doing the assignment.”

During that previous class, students discussed the advantages and disadvantages, the moral issues and the “ick” factor and after much deliberation, they advised Ms. Rosetta that yes, they’d like to dissect a chicken leg though if some students wished to be exempt, they could take part in an alternate assignment.

And today,  the raw chicken legs lay before them ready for their scientific hands to explore and analyze. After a lesson in safety and cleanliness, the girls begin slowly, lifting the wrinkled skin and cutting away the connective tissues.  Ms. Rosetta moves around the room, squatting down next to one girl who can’t seem to lift the skin from the tissue.

Throughout the dissection, Ms. Rosetta inserts lessons they’ve learned about anatomy. “What’s the muscular system for?” And the class responds in unison, “Movement.”

“Move the leg bone. See what happens,” she advises and then adds, “Remember the rubber bands and the skeletons?”  She refers to another lesson the previous week when the girls used rubber bands to simulate muscles on human skeletal models.  Lifting and arm or moving a finger required an elaborate system of rubber bands stretched from one bone to the next.  As they move their chicken legs, the students share their observations with others at their table.

“Try moving it this way,” one girls tells her partner.

“Wow, look at this. What is it?” asks a teammate.

As Ms. Rosetta comes over to take a look, another student pronounces, “I would like to dissect a human body,” her angled metal prod scraping away at the white flakes of chicken bone, “It sounds so cool.”

“Really?” another student asks. “I don’t think I could ever look at another human body again if I did that,.”

“Will you look at a chicken differently after this?”

“Yeah,” she answers, “I’ll think it’s pretty cool after this.”

Again, if you were on a tour of SGS you’d be impressed with the lesson, but what’s behind the lesson — all that preparation about muscles and morals — is perhaps even more impressive and unless you came to SGS every day, you’d miss the depth of the learning.

After chicken dissection there is lunch and then an afternoon of Spanish and Adventure and Wellness (a modern day physical education class). By the end of the day, the girls return to their lockers to gather up their abundance of belongings. They talk non-stop about plans for the afternoon, homework that needs to get done, permission slips that need to be turned in, and Kit Kat bars and chicken dissection.

“Maybe we should dissect candy bars,” a student jokes!  Her proposition is met with laughter and enthusiasm.

SGS isn’t just about facts or assignments. Sure these mainstays of education exist at SGS, but they aren’t the only parts of the school. What makes SGS a place many of us would like to redo our middle school experience is a complicated formula of inquiry and confidence, experiential moments mixed with unexpected observations. It’s being given the chance to take a risk surrounded by a safe community of teachers and peers, of funny moments and surprising ah-has.

Learning, for lack of a better metaphor, at SGS is like a river. When you take a tour of SGS, you are invited to stand on the shore and observe the water of education flowing by.  While it looks impressive from your perspective, you’ll never know its full force until you wade right in and feel the current of a place like this.

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