A School Named for Thoreau

By Karl Rodman

Our school is named after Henry David Thoreau. The property on which the school is located is Camp Thoreau, a childrens summer camp. It is also our year round home. What is more, the property is an old family farm which we try to keep in production.

Henry David Thoreau taught school himself for a few years. I would like to think that he might have approved of some of the things that we have done here, although I know he would disapprove of the folly of owning a property of this size. Thoreau believed that owning a farm is a type of slavery.

Thoreau left behind some good advice for writers of books: The writer, he said does not make books out of books, but he has been there in person. Hence this record of the four years in which I directed the Thoreau School.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Jan 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9781466904002

Karl Rodman

Since operating the school, Karl Rodman has gone on to receive a Doctorate degree in Comparative Education from Columbia University. He has taught at all levels, including New York State University at New Paltz, where he and his wife still live. Karl Rodman now operates an educational tour business and can be found at . The ideas which Karl Rodman examined almost thirty years ago remain fresh and challenging today.

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Copyright 2004, 2012 Karl Rodman.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

isbn: 978-1-4120-3700-6 (sc)

isbn: 978-1-4669-0400-2 (e)

Trafford rev. 09/12/2012

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Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

1   The Fox Went out on a Chilly Night

2   Starting A School

3   Mass Production

4   A Single Day

5   Maple Sugaring

6   Is it Work, or is it Play?

7   Earthquake

8   Ecology

9   The Well Sweep

10   Frustration

11   Learning Disabilities

12   Changes

13   Whales

14   Paul Revere and Abraham Lincoln

15   Stone Soup

16   More on Work

17   Dramatic Productions

18   Student Teachers

19   Planning

20   No grades. No tests.

21   How We Financed the School

22   Alternative Financing: How We Wanted to Finance The School

23   Reunion

Preface

Our school is named after Henry David Thoreau. The property on which the school is located is Camp Thoreau, a children’s summer camp. It is also our year round home. What is more, the property is an old family-farm which we try to keep in production.

Henry David Thoreau taught school himself for a few years. I would like to think that he might have approved of some of the things that we have done here, although I know he would disapprove of the folly of owning a property of this size. Thoreau believed that owning a farm is a type of slavery.

Thoreau left behind some good advice for writers of books:

The writer, he said does not make books out of books, but he has been there in person.

Hence this record of the four years in which I directed the Thoreau School.

I opened the school in order to try out some beliefs, and to seek answers to some unanswered questions. In the process I found that although I learned a great deal, every answer suggested a new question. Theory and practice kept getting confounded with each other. My educational beliefs suggested certain activities, but the way in which those activities turned out led to modifications of the beliefs, which in turn led to new activities, and so on.

Rather than organize the material chronologically, I have tried to select incidents, episodes and topics which will build a cumulative feeling or understanding of the school’s life.

There is an educational philosophy expressed here. Occasionally it is expressed. More often it is illustrated through practice. It is tested, and it evolves.

Some of the conclusions which I have reached are not necessarily the same as those which the reader will derive. That is fine. Feel free to disagree with any of my conclusions, they are certified to be tentative and subject to revision. But do draw from my experience whatever you find useful.

Please approach this material in the manner which Thoreau suggests when he says:

A truly good book is so true that it teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down and commence living on its hint.

Acknowledgments

This is an acknowledgment of the contributions made by my teachers, by those whose ideas and whose personalities inspired me and whose work suggested so much of what was worthwhile about our school. Also I acknowledge those institutions which trained me, and a few of those writers who excited me.

Foremost amongst my teachers were Norman Studer, whose Camp Woodland I attended from the time I was eight years old, and then, Grace and Manny Granich, at whose camp, Higley Hill, I worked for so many years.

Both camps grew out of a progressive education tradition exemplified by the work of John Dewey. And both camps grew out of a political/humanitarian belief that the world could be made into a better place for everyone. A corollary belief was that each child was worthy and deserving of respect.

I attended The University of Chicago, then bearing the stamp of Robert Maynard Hutchins: a firm conviction that the life of the mind was to be encouraged, that a liberal education consisted of an identifiable body of knowledge which the student should master.

I graduated from Chicago, educated, but with no profession. New York University took a year to give me the credentials I needed to teach, And what a time it was to enter into the profession! As we tried to figure out what we were doing we were taken on a wild and wooly ride by the school reformers of the 1950’s. A. S. Neill (as well as Leo Tolstoi) told us that children could and should make their own decisions. John Holt showed us the mechanisms which children used to avoid the embarrassment of classroom failure. Paul Goodman and others told us that school was an implement of political oppression. Lawrence Cremin gave us the historical context of what we thought we were doing. The list goes on. It was a heady time. And towering above them all, of course, was John Dewey!

Then came my first job at Antioch College, teaching a combined group of forth, fifth and sixth graders; mostly children of faculty members. At Antioch the intellectual approach was at the opposite pole of what I had experienced in Chicago. College students spent half of each year in a work-study program, achieving hands on experience in as many fields as they had time to explore.

To a large extent my entire educational journey has been an attempt to bridge that gap between Chicago and Antioch; between learning and doing.

1

The Fox Went out on a Chilly Night

This was a day that made me feel good about our school and good about myself. It seemed on this day that we had found answers to some of our most basic questions. What do these children need? How should the day be structured? What succeeds? Every answer may have raised a new question, but that too is as it should be.

We already had two and a half years of experience behind us. Twenty seven boys and girls, first graders through seventh graders, were enrolled in our one room neighborhood schoolhouse.

Now it was midwinter. We were going through the longest spell of uninterrupted subfreezing weather that I could remember.

I pulled on a coat and a woolen cap and walked down the lane connecting my home to the school building.

When the building was constructed, one hundred years earlier, it was a farmhouse. Some years back we met the ninety-six year old man whose father built it for himself. When that man’s family gave up the property it became a boarding house. More recently we purchased the property, remodeled the farmhouse and turned it into the dining room, kitchen, and main house of our children’s summer camp. And now it was doing winter duty as a schoolhouse.

Liz Parenti, my co-teacher, drove up just as I was raising the thermostat. While we waited for the heat to come up from the cellar we found a warm place to sit where sunlight streamed in through the picture windows facing across the lawn and on to the huge, white, gambrel roofed hay barn.

We began to write our daily letters to the children. Our first job every morning was to write letters to each of the pupils. We often just asked how they were feeling and let them know what we were thinking about. Sometimes we gave them an assignment to do before morning meeting. The children were to read these letters as soon as they arrived in school. In the afternoons, before going home, they would write answering letters to us.

The children began arriving, some on foot, most driven by their parents.

This was not a good morning to play outdoors. It was too cold. And anyway the ice on the lake was no good for skating. There was too much snow on it, while the snow in front of the school had a crust on it which made it no good for sledding.

The children were not bothered though. Many of them were caught up in a chess mania which had been going on for several days already. The chess board had been in the classroom all fall, but no one showed any interest in playing. Eventually I carried the board and the chessmen back up to my house for my own use. Then, just a few days earlier, as an antidote to the weather which was keeping us all indoors, I reintroduced the chess set and chess fever erupted.

It happened this way: First Dirk asked me to play a game with him. Dirk was then a tough acting sixth grader. The public schools had given up on him and had recommended that he be sent away for residential therapy. But in spite of all his bluster Dirk was so unsure of his status in the class that he felt much more comfortable relating to an adult, hence his invitation to play with me. Dirk played well and we went through two games. Molly, another sixth grader, stood by watching and when I relinquished the board to her she and Dirk played a full game. Later that day Craig became interested. Soon Craig asked me to start a chess club. What he had in mind was for a group to stay after school one day each week. The logistics didn’t seem practical for that and instead Craig and I set up a chess tournament. Eight people entered it.

If we had delayed the start of our tournament for another three days perhaps as many as four of the younger children would have been ready to enter it. On the other hand, if we had held off for a week, perhaps there would have been no one who remained interested.

When the children arrived in school on this frigid morning two chess boards were immediately engaged in tournament play.

Alex, the smallest, though not the youngest boy in the class, asked me to teach him the moves. Alex is an irrepressible leprechaun, constantly in motion. But he paid close attention and in ten minutes he announced that he was ready to play chess with his friend Paul.

At nine-thirty we called everyone together for morning meeting. One corner of the spacious classroom (which in summer served as our camp’s dining hall) was set aside as meeting area. It was furnished with two couches, easy chairs, and a thick-piled blue rug. A free standing blackboard helped to define the area.

Our first topic of conversation was the cold.

Mom couldn’t start her car. said Brenda. We had to hitch hike with the Liptons.

Several children had stories about the cold. Then I said My announcement is a sad one. Last night a marauding fox got into the animal enclosure. He killed most of our ducks and one of the white geese. It was a regular slaughter.

I fully described the carnage which I had discovered on my way to school that morning. Then Liz sat down at the piano and led us in singing the folk song, The fox went out on a chilly night.

The song makes sense. I said, as we finished singing it. Of course it happened on a chilly night. Even the stream is frozen hard by now. Most winters it never freezes. There just wasn’t any open water for the poor ducks to escape to.

Our morning meeting was adjourned and the next half hour was spent in reading groups.

Then Liz and one of the parents, who had volunteered her station wagon, drove the older children into town, ten miles away. Liz had given them all research assignments and she wanted them to make use of the Public School library. Between my Dodge van, which Liz drove, and the station wagon, driven by Walter’s mother, we could transport most of the class.

That left me behind with only seven of the youngest ones. They were all second and third graders. We didn’t have any first graders at that time. I sent the four boys outside with instructions to see if they could catch the surviving ducks and geese. If so we would then close the birds up in the barn, where they would be safe from a return of the fox.

Dawn had to use her time to complete her travel poster. Everyone, in all of the grades, had been asked to make a travel poster, each from a different country. Dawn’s poster was beautiful. It showed a veiled maiden standing in front of the pyramids. Candy and Holly had already finished their posters, but they helped Dawn crayon hers so that the three of them could then be free to play with puppets.

I opened the front door to listen for the boys. Right away I knew that I had made a mistake in thinking that they could do the job I had given them. From the whoops and hollers coming from the animal pen it was clear that they needed help and organization. They were frantically running around in the snow, all four boys, shouting and confusing one another as though they themselves were the fowl that needed to be caught.

I put on my coat and hat and went out to join them.

It was a beautiful morning. The temperature climbed from zero up to fifteen degrees and the air was crisp and clean.

I climbed over the steel gate, into the animal enclosure. A few small pools of open water remained in the otherwise frozen stream. On one of these pools was the white goose, honking loudly. Her dead mate lay nearby. On the banks, a few feet away were three mallard ducks; two brightly colored males and a drab female. The ducks were attempting to get away from Paul, John and Stuart. Little Alex was a short distance behind the other three boys. He was dancing around and shouting encouragement. A short distance beyond were the headless bodies of four more ducks, strewn there by the fox.

The goose was too frightened to move. She remained in the center of an open pool of water which was scarcely bigger than her own body. It was no trouble to grab her by the neck and to slide her off of the ice.

Once the boys got themselves organized they trapped the female duck by driving her into the willow bushes. Paul picked her up and wrapped her tightly in his arms. John caught one of the males the same way and only when he lifted it up did we realize that it had been badly hurt. Its neck hung loose and we feared that it was close to death.

The other male led us a merry chase. He skimmed along on top of the snow while we wallowed through drifts. Finally he took refuge inside the sheep shed where we cornered him and grabbed him. Then we carried all four birds down to the barn where they were enclosed in a chicken coop.

Triumphantly we returned to the classroom!

The three girls were still coloring Dawn’s poster. They didn’t seem at all interested in our exploits.

John had yet to finish his poster, so he took off his coat and went to work on it.

Paul had sentences to write; eight sentences using his eight spelling words. Paul had already managed to spend much of the past two mornings dawdling over this assignment so the night before I had asked him to complete the work as homework. When he arrived in class that morning he said he had done the work but I left it home.

I sat down with him once more, for the third time, to compose the eight sentences. This time, to my surprise, he did the job quickly and well. Apparently he really had done the work the night before.

Thank God! I thought. After three days Paul has finally completed what should have taken him just fifteen minutes.

There I was, getting upset about Paul’s inability to settle down and write a sentence. But one year earlier I had been just as concerned about his inability to speak a sentence aloud. This was Paul’s second year in our school. At home he is called Little Paul to distinguish him from Paul, his father. This name is in spite of the fact that Paul has the build of a young bull. One of Paul’s joys was to come up behind me and give me a bear hug. It hurt! What’s more, Paul shared his father’s love of tinkering with machinery. His only problem was that he couldn’t read. Paul is the youngest of four children and apparently he had taken the role of baby to heart, at least insofar as his school work was concerned.

That is how we sometimes thought of Paul. At other times we said Perhaps he is governed by some internal clock which tells him that it isn’t time yet to learn to read.

But these were only suggested explanations. We were neither willing to let him baby himself, nor to accept the final authority of any imagined internal clock. As a result, Paul’s non-reading was a constant preoccupation for us.

John meanwhile was finishing his travel poster. It depicted one of the university buildings in Mexico City. On the sides of the building were lavishly colored murals. John seemed to be enjoying the task.

John was in the third grade. This was his second year with us and he too had started out the year as a nonreader. Like Paul, John had a hard time concentrating on his school work. But he lacked Paul’s mechanical aptitude. Playing out of doors, alongside the stream was more his style.

More than once, after I had been sure that John had daydreamed his way through a lesson or a discussion, it would happen that his mother came in the following morning, thrilled to repeat the exact words used in class, which John had brought home to her.

We rarely gave homework assignments, but whenever I got exasperated at John’s slow pace I sent him home loaded down with incompleted work. And invariably he came in the following morning with a superb product. Once I got upset by the slow pace at which John read to me from an easy storybook. So for a while I required him to read two pages a night, at home. And always, on the following day, he was able to read his two pages aloud without any difficulty.

Like Paul, John too had been unable to get his eight sentences completed during either of the previous periods he had devoted to the task. So I had sent him, as well as Paul, home with that assignment. In the morning John appeared, brought me his notebook, rifled through the pages, and informed me that he couldn’t find his papers.

If you can’t find it you will have to redo it now, I said, before you go out to play.

He scowled and walked off with his notebook. A few minutes later he approached me with his hands clasped behind his back and with a slight grin on his face.

I’m not going to do it! John said.

Oh, I countered, I’m glad that you found it.

And what he produced from behind his back was a small masterpiece. For example, one of his spelling words was flag. John had written The flag is a piece of cloth with a field of blue, and with white stars on it. The other sentences were equally complex.

Now even if it were to turn out that John’s mother had composed those sentences herself and that John had copied them, simply getting that quantity of neat, accurate writing out of John in any one school day was far beyond our ability.

That is what I meant when I said that every solution leads to new questions. What was going on? What were we doing wrong? Or what was John’s mother doing right? An answer must be looked for.

It would still be a while before Liz brought the older children back from the Public School library. I sat down at the potter’s wheel and practiced the difficult art of centering the blob of clay on the spinning plate. If the clay isn’t perfectly centered the emerging pot begins to wobble and then it suddenly collapses under your very fingers.

The potter’s wheel had already been in the classroom for several weeks. It was rarely used. Liz had suggested that if I would work at it and offer a few pointers from my limited skill, then the kids might become interested. She was right. It turned out much like the chess story. The children just needed a nudge at the right time.

While I was practicing at the potter’s wheel and the three girls were making stick puppets, Paul and Alex sat themselves just behind me and became totally immersed in a game of chess. Now Alex had just learned the moves that morning and Paul, as far as I knew, didn’t play at all. But they were doing the best they could and enjoying themselves immensely. Alex kept talking about the proper way to move his faun. Paul finally corrected him.

There is no F in it, Alex. It’s called a pawn!

I couldn’t believe what I had just heard. Paul was aware of the relationship between letters and sounds!

Liz returned with her group of older kids and we took a recess break.

Emerging from the kitchen with a cup of coffee in my hand I found Molly busily working at the potter’s wheel and Alex walking around in a grim sulk. It appeared, from what he told me, that Craig, our oldest and biggest student, had suggested a move to Paul which had ended the game between the smaller boys. Then Craig took over their board. It seemed that Craig had thrown his weight around in order to play his own scheduled tournament game. But throwing his weight around is something which I had never known this gentle person to have done before.

I made Craig and Timmy give the board back to Alex.

After recess the half hour remaining until lunch was spent working in math groups. This week I had been working with six of the younger kids. On this day I asked them to do some drills in their workbooks. In general I have a long held aversion to the use of workbooks or texts. I feel that I am able to write out my own examples effectively enough. The problems I set are more closely attuned to the immediate needs of particular children, not because I am particularly skilled in developmental arithmetic (I am not) but because of the feedback involved in working directly with a child and being able to sense what is needed. Whenever I assign drill in a workbook I feel that I am doing it primarily to meet my own needs. It is a case of relaxing and abdicating responsibility; of letting the text take over. I can rationalize my behavior by telling myself that the kids need the practice of unthinking repetition. But I don’t really believe it. Too often I have seen a child do a whole page of division problems, shut the book, and then when I put a problem of exactly the same type onto the blackboard he will have no idea of how to approach it.

Anyway, for whatever the reason, that morning we were using workbooks. Except that seven year old Dawn couldn’t find hers. I told her that it had to be around somewhere and she should spend the period looking for it. Then I promptly forgot about her, until twenty minutes later I looked up and saw a sad-faced Dawn crossing the room with twelve year old Molly bulking over her, a pudgy arm draped comfortingly over her shoulder.

What in the world are you two doing? I asked.

You told me to find my book. Dawn was losing her struggle to hold back her tears.

Did you look behind the piano?

Molly accompanied Dawn as she looked and found it there. The math books were kept on top of the piano so that it seemed to me to be the first place where they should have looked.

During lunch Alex went around gleefully telling everyone that Craig had quit the chess tournament. It had been Craig’s idea to hold the tournament in the first place. But apparently he was sulking because of the incident in which I had made him relinquish the board to Alex. I sought out Craig and told him that if I had misinterpreted what had gone on and had been unfair to him that I was truly sorry.

Yes, he said, You were wrong. And thus mollified he rejoined his tournament.

Story time followed the half hour lunch break. We were then reading Swiss Family Robinson. The kids were enjoying it, but Liz and I may have detracted from the excitement of the tale by questioning some of the attitudes expressed by the author and by his heroes. Our first question was where in the world was the most likely site for their shipwreck? The castaways had discovered such a variety of animals on their island, all of which they had domesticated, eaten or skinned, that we found ourselves speculating that they had probably landed somewhere within the Bronx Zoo. Also, we were astonished at the book’s attitude, which seemed to say that all animals are there for people to exploit. If it moves, shoot it, and then figure out what use you can make of it. This seemed to be the Robinson’s attitude. The kids agreed with us that if the book were to be written today, the author would probably have modified this view. They continued listening with one ear open for further examples.

After story time Liz had a writing lesson prepared. She divided the class into small groups. Each group was to produce a story, written as a joint effort. The following words were written on the blackboard:

Snow storm

accident

look out!

These were to be incorporated into the stories. The group product was then to be read to the rest of the class. Liz asked me to work with four of the youngest children who would not be able to handle the task without a teacher’s help. They were John, Paul, Alex and Candy.

The five of us sat down at one of the round tables. I wrote down an opening sentence and then we just went around the table, adding a sentence at a time, each person going in turn.

The boys enjoyed the game, even though they found it hard to develop new ideas. At one point John offered The boy fell into a hole.

Oh, said Paul, You took my idea. But then Paul added He was afraid.

Then it was Candy’s turn. She clammed up completely. She sat there afraid, looking blank. I tried to explain again what we were supposed to be doing. No response. I reread our story to her, through to the point where the boy fell into a hole. He was afraid.

This time, after a moment of silence she manage to whisper He was afraid.

Nothing was to be gained by frightening poor Candy further. We went around the circle a few times, skipping her each time. Then she began to loosen up a little bit. Eventually she made a couple of hesitant contributions. My memory went back to the times, two years earlier, when Paul’s response would have been the identical mystified and terrified silence.

After a while we all assembled in meeting area and read the stories aloud. They were fun to listen to, despite all the tragic events which had been suggested by those key words.

Half an hour still remained before clean up and letter writing time.

I asked the class to choose a game which they would like to play. Several suggestions were put on the blackboard. A vote was taken and sardines was selected. Sardines is a version of hide and go seek. But in this version whoever finds the hidden person hides with him. This goes on until the whole class is secretly and silently packed in somewhere like sardines, together with the original hider.

Liz volunteered to be the one to hide somewhere within the big schoolhouse. While she was disappearing, so that we shouldn’t see which way she went, we played another game; bears hibernating. This is my favorite classroom game. I invented it when my own children were very little and were tiring me out with their incessant play. To play Bears Hibernating you stretch out on a soft rug, with the warm sun coming through the windows, and you remain motionless, silent, with your eyes closed. You try to remain that way until Spring. Invariably children keep interrupting the game by asking Is it Spring yet? We never have manage to hibernate as long as I could wish, but the