Subject Matter
In the beginning our New Practicals catalog threatened no one. Despite its newness, despite its never being seen before in an adult educational institution, people were not shocked, were not appalled, weren’t even suspicious, at first. The courses were “accessible.” Our students—all men and women choosing to continue their education after obtaining their BAs and BSs and settling into careers and families—remarked that we should have taught these subjects all along. One such New Practical offering—SWT/110: Staring at Walls and Thinking While Seated—was a smash hit. Within days of its appearance on the website, the course had filled. We scrambled to find an additional instructor to teach a second section. The fact that this course was not offered at any community school, that it did not fit into a traditional pursuit—English, Music, Biology, or Business—did not bother anyone. Yes, we saw it as a gimmick. Yes, we understood that there was no traditional academic value in sitting and staring at walls and thinking. But we saw that folks in the community were struggling with the undertaking of Staring at Walls and Thinking While Seated, and as educators, if we could provide an expert to teach us—yes, us, we live here, too—then we have a responsibility to the town, to the community, to help, to educate.
The classroom set up of SWT/110: Staring at Walls and Thinking While Seated was remarkably similar to any other course one would have taken. We did not experiment with the form or presentation of the class. Certain traditional elements were yet present in those first mild experiments. There was a classroom. Rows of desks. A chalkboard. An instructor, who paced back and forth, sometimes making notes on the board, sometimes sitting at a desk, sometimes struggling with a DVD player and television on top of a rolling stand. Students doodled in margins. The class met in the school’s main building. There was a bell. The only unique ingredient, then, was the content. There was a growing demand for less academic and more useful offerings. The students were assigned an hour of staring at a wall in their home offices, then their dining rooms, then their bedrooms. In class, groups of students would observe ten to fifteen minutes of one another staring at the wall with the chalkboard, then the opposing wall with affixed pencil sharpener to compare and contrast differing results. Our critics chuckled to themselves, figuring we’d go by the wayside. But after Staring at Walls and Thinking While Seated, we created more New Practicals: Looking in the Mirror While Depressed; Developing Personal Superstition to Provide Irrational Hope and Dread; Walking Aimlessly in Known Locations; Improper Memories of the Dead; Novel Reading Without Paying Attention. All of these courses remained in the schoolhouse. We heard some ponder aloud: “Is this really school? Are these legitimate ‘classes’?” But many accepted the offerings, showing up to the institution’s building for particular classes that met at particular times with particular expectations.
It is not our mission to “take over” the town, as some in the media have suggested. Our mission, as we stated from the beginning, which everyone at first appreciated, was, has always been, is, and will continue to be to educate the citizens of this fine community, of which we are fiercely loyal members. We are proud educators. If our practices have changed, if our offerings have deviated from “the norm,” this is in no way intended to harm anyone or the community as a whole. To the contrary: we aim to educate and help, yes, help everyone in this town. Some critics have decided that we are now aiming toward a revolution, but we are humble. Revolution has never been our pursuit. We love where we live and would change not one thing about it. We simply wish to offer, to those who desire it, the best education we can provide in whatever field they choose. It is not “radical” to create curricula suited for the chosen ambitions of so many of our citizens. If we were harming individuals, then we would see a drop in enrollment. However, we see only demand and gratitude. It may sound as if we are defending ourselves, and to some extent we are, and to some extent we are resentful at having to do so. And although we refuse to apologize for creating just what we have a need for, the staff, board, faculty, and loyal students of the Community School feel pressured to clear their names. We never thought anyone would label what we do “increasingly dangerous.” Our critics claimed that there was nothing to learn from our courses. They claimed to not need these lessons. They believed that they were all fine, believed themselves to be well, believed they had nothing to learn. Our opposition leveled accusations that Our New Community School was creating a new “class” of dissatisfied people. Honest people. But we are proud of our brave students. We will not go away, as some clearly want from us. We will not hang our heads. But we will, also, not pretend to be unaware of the vicious opinions that are circulating.
Form
There is a difference between who we are on the inside of this wall and who we are when we walk out the sliding glass doors of the main entrance, to the other side, to the sidewalks. Within these walls, we are a dedicated and passionate group of educators and students. On the other side, we are people living lives, having successes and failures, squeezing avocados at the market, all on our own, without a mentor. But this division was an impediment to some courses. We have a policy at the Community School of allowing any individual associated with the endeavor, from board member to night security guard, to make suggestions that improve our level of education. One such suggestion from our web manager, Keith, for a New New Practical in Achieving Geographical Disorientation in the Modern World, we believed to be a breakthrough, the kind of idea that seemed so incisive that we were shocked not to have thought it before. Keith requested to teach a course outside the main campus. He noted that wisdom could be imparted in the classroom, but many of his insights came to him in the alleys of our town, out in the park, in the sunlight, or during a rainstorm. If he could have students meet in the park, where they could, for the allotted time, wander and disorient in a natural environment, the students’ appreciation and advancement would accelerate. We sought real-world application of our most important subjects, a chance for students to learn not only the academic but the applicable. To do so, we ventured out of the classroom. After content, we experimented with form. It didn’t make sense, in most cases, to meet in a white-walled classroom with desks and air conditioning units and fluorescent lights humming. The very essence of a New Practical course is to prepare students for the intellectual lives they will someday lead. And almost nothing is applicable in a classroom on the third floor of a schoolhouse. The classroom is a vacuum, a space where information flows most easily and the actual application of information proves impossible. We reassigned our Encountering Scents to Conjure Unidentified Nostalgia class to meet at scheduled class times in gardens and kitchens around town; our Feeling Small in the Scope of History course to meet amid the ruins of centuries-old forts and barracks; our Cultivating Irrational Fear class to meet at the hospital; our Observing Art While Lamenting Why God Did Not Bestow Upon Us Talent class to meet in museums and galleries; our Acute Regretting of the Cheap and Ruinous Affair courses in bars and cafés and motel rooms. Students initially showed up to the forests and museums of our town with their backpacks and satchels, looking for numbers on doors. They were stressed when finding the meeting places, often asking museum patrons if they had seen a group of students. But eventually, the students settled. They reluctantly gave up their notebooks and pens, their books and desks. They eased into it. The instructors were patient, allowing students several more minutes to arrive than they usually would in the classroom setting. Over time, everyone realized that learning did not happen solely in the classroom, that education could be refreshed, that meaning could come through in more and more environments, in these new forms. We razed all buildings on campus but the main schoolhouse. Our very first traditional courses—the poetry, the computer science, the history—with their dwindling student numbers, continued to meet in white-walled classrooms with a window slightly cracked, letting a sliver of the outside in.
Structure
Empowerment and confidence are the most useful things to gain from a course. If a student feels comfortable with his or her own ideas, confident that he or she can contribute to a field of study—whether it is another institution’s traditional offering of British Romantic Poetry or our New New Practical of Picking a Daisy While Feeling Ugly—then the course has succeeded in bestowing upon the student all it can hope to. The role of teacher and student will always imply a disparity in authority, in command of subject. Instructors observed that students continually deferred to them. And so, many instructors took to disguising themselves in the New New Classroom. The teacher would not lecture in the galleries and restaurants and subway stations. Instead, an instructor would arrive and pretend to be meeting with the group like any other student. When no instruction came, when no one announced him or herself as the leader of the class, the groups panicked and sometimes dissolved. There were no syllabi. We didn’t anticipate the level of anxiety caused by the lack of syllabi. Many students reported the need for a clearer set of expectations. Many students walked out of New New Classes. But those students who continued to attend the classes that met in the park, on benches, under oak trees to learn to Talk About the Weather and Look Down to Hide a Reddening Face and Welling Tears with more ease, those who stuck it out reported learning “actual tools.” And this is when we saw critics suggest that we were misleading our students, pulling the wool over their eyes, insulting the educational system itself, rebelling. They said we shouldn’t delude our students into thinking that these careers were within reach.
Over time, students became comfortable with no identifiable instructor. They taught themselves, confident that an expert was among the group and guiding the lesson unnoticed. Groups of students gathered at the bar to Remember Childhood Dreams and Eye Strangers With Growing Envy. They realized that they had more learning to do; they could learn from each other, be experts themselves. The instructors, too, noted a refreshing take on subjects they had previously taken to be their forte. Instructors learned. Students taught. Walking in the woods, groups of people asked each other if anyone knew How to Return Home to Apologize Too Late; riding on buses, students looked out the window to View Passing Row Homes of Impoverished Neighborhoods and Feel Unjustified for Personal Sadness. And when class ended, they headed home to share what they had learned.
Time Frame
As if we were the arbiters of education, we, the Community School, were blind to the idea that learning could occur outside class start and class end. Many in town believed that we had vanished when the brochures ceased to be printed, when our website disappeared, when we no longer listed the courses that met outside the crumbling schoolhouse. Time was our final experiment. Now, every moment became teachable. Randomly, while playing tennis in the park, a person may, all of a sudden, Acknowledge Loss of Youth. All of a sudden, in line at the post office, a person may reveal him- or herself to be a teacher while Gripping a Long Overdo Love Letter to be Finally Sent. Buying milk and eggs can be done with deeper Distraction from Lost Ambition. Discussing a television show with a spouse can alloy with Resignation for a Life With the Wrong Person. Our classes happened spontaneously. Washing a mug from a zoo in California, right then, something educational about Realizing It Is Too Late to Take the Risk. Checking the mailbox and never seeing the letter in order to Confirm the Missed Opportunity. Sipping coffee can become a significant moment of Foolish Thoughts Over Legacy. One-on-one courses of one, two, three seconds in length. Examining one’s job benefits portfolio, quickly, a single person, teacher and student combined, squints through her reading glasses and calls class to attention in her mind, lecturing silently on the subject of Replacing Hope with Responsibility. We will not go away. We cannot stop. We want to help you. We want to be helped.
Sometimes, a member of the community will pop in at the old schoolhouse, where we began our pursuit to educate. Sometimes, people sign up for a foreign language course. And while reciting the declensions of a particular verb, students and teacher alike will look out that crackedopen window and believe this is the only way, the proper way to learn.