A School of Our Own by Samuel Levin

Author:Samuel Levin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620971536
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2016-08-18T04:00:00+00:00

The Independent Project room looked like a photograph that had been desaturated, sapped of all its color. The room’s walls were drab beige. There was a drab beige table, with hard plastic chairs around it. There was a drab beige locker-room-tile floor. The lights were fluorescent and horrible. It was just really, really ugly.

This drove Mirabelle crazy. She couldn’t imagine spending a semester holed up in this shithole. So she ordered all of us to bring in whatever decorations we could get our hands on at home. Dominic brought an old lamp; I brought a rug I found in my garage. Everyone brought in books from home so that we could establish our own library. Slowly the room started to fill with appealing, cozy objects and artifacts. Still, the decorations didn’t solve the problem of the world’s dullest walls. So Mirabelle decided we would paint a mural. Though many of us (the worst culprit being me) were terrible artists, Mirabelle, Sarah, and Tim were gifted enough and, regardless of mural quality, painting it was loads of fun.

But it was more than just fun. None of us had ever had the chance to have a say over how our school looked. Maybe in elementary school we had been tasked with cutting out turkeys at Thanksgiving, which were then hung around the classroom. Or, in one or two truly exceptional high school classes, we were allowed to decide how the desks were arranged. But let’s be honest: that’s pretty minor. In fact, looking back, it’s funny to think that choosing our desk layout was ever a big deal to us.

Now, in the Independent Project, we were being allowed to literally paint the walls how we wished. A small thing, perhaps, in and of itself, but part of something bigger, and something essential, which would only grow as time went on. For the first time in our lives, we had control over meaningful aspects of our education. And though it was taking a little while to get comfortable with, we were already starting to love it.

Perhaps our best addition to the room was turning one of the walls into an object-based group journal. It was already decided, as part of our assessment, that everyone had to keep two journals for the entirety of the Independent Project: one for academics and one for Individual Endeavors. But someone during that first week suggested we should also have a collective journal. So we divided one of the walls into sections, one for each week of the semester. At the end of each week, everyone had to attach something to the wall that captured that week for him or her. I think it was Tim who coined the name: the Encoded Story Wall of Time.

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