After having our autobiographies returned this past week, I've been pondering a few things about my own experience in a K-8 school. How do we imagine our schools looking different than they are now? And how was my own experience unique? And beyond that, I wish I knew more about everyone else and their autobiographical experiences. Luckily our cohort has the next year, and after, to share.
When I imagine schools rethinking their structure and design, a lot of my ideas come from my experience in a slightly out of the ordinary school. It was a very small, public school that had limited funding. It was a new school that was unofficially called a "lab" or experimental school. It was basically a bunch of portables, plopped out in a grassy field, sans playground equipment or anything else that would have been expensive. And it was one of the most remarkable places to grow and experience school. Thinking about new ways to structure schools always reminds me of me experience there, because we were grouped with multiple grades in a given classroom. I wonder now if I knew how little funding the school actually had? I think I knew that regular schools had play equipment for recess, and that ours didn't, but we made due with what we had. I'm still friends with many of the people I went to school with then, and we can still laugh about creating games with what materials we had- rocks, dirt, grass, etc.
There was a big emphasis on project based learning, and projects that involved the community around us. We didn't have enough money to actually take field trips places, but we would as a class walk the mile or so to a lake for environmental science projects, and walk to a nearby assisted care facility to interview the elderly. I remember so much of what we did, and what we learned. I think that's a huge advantage of project based learning. I certainly don't remember completed worksheet assignments I've done, but projects? Somehow I do!
One of the things I've been wondering as I've been reading the assigned readings for this week is about poverty and how that affected the learning environment we had at our small school. As a school, we were poorly funded, but as students we came from different socioeconomic situations. Kids are really perceptive and I'm sure I knew that my family was struggling financially. Because of this, my mom, sister and I moved in with my grandparents around my middle school years. I definitely couldn't afford that prada backpack I had my eyes on, but luckily I think I was somehow exempt from bullying. If I would have went to another school, where all the students didn't know each other from going to school with one another for however many years, it may have been a different story. Is that another reason to consider a K-8 model of schooling? Maybe. I had a great experience. I still joke about how poor I was growing up but it impacted me in a very real way. The poverty readings from this week are really great, I think. I'm excited to hear what our class has to share.