Maya and Iola's school

The girls have picked up various Americanisms and a current favourite is the word ‘awesome!’ Lots of things are awesome: chocolate cookies, the Museum of Science, the new ‘jump-kick’ that Iola has mastered at taekwon-do, a really good thunder storm. It’s not an adjective that Nathan and I use as frequently – the word feels slightly overblown on our tongues. We are, however, all in agreement that the girls’ current school is awesome.

The girls go to school in the South-East corner of Cambridge. Their school is within walking distance to the MIT, Google’s offices, and various bio-tech companies. This is an area of huge industrial development: new drugs companies and computer software firms move in almost daily. People with disposable incomes commute into this area to work: you see them at lunchtime queuing outside designer sandwich bars and coffee shops. In terms of housing, however, it is the poor corner of Cambridge. Properties around here are almost affordable and the streets around the school house a diverse mix of long-term Cambridge residents and new communities, particularly from the Azores and Haiti.

The girls’ school is housed in an ugly brick and concrete building. From the outside and the inside, the school looks poor. It was built in the 1970s and, visually, it has not aged well: the metal-framed windows look shabby; the breezeblock interior walls are cracked in places; the floors are not particularly clean; the toilet blocks stink. But, on the positive side, students’ work is everywhere: art displays cover every notice board, and there are bits of paper and notices that children have made sellotaped onto nearly every surface. Wherever you look there is a chaos of felt-tipped paper. There is no litter anywhere.

The building’s strengths were probably envisaged in relation to its functionality rather than its appearance. There are three floors of classrooms. The school has an auditorium which has theatre-style seating for 500. The gymnasium is large. There is a purpose-built canteen. The school library is larger than our local library. There are several art rooms, including one with a pottery kiln. There are science labs and music rooms and playgrounds and a basketball court and city garden spaces where students grow fruit and vegetables. From an English perspective, it’s just really really big. And it currently only houses around 400 students between the ages of 4-14. 

Iola’s kindergarten class (which now has only 15 students) has a classroom which is larger than the entire downstairs floor space of our flat. Within the classroom there is a reading area, an art area, a work area where desks are arranged, a large cloakroom and a small toilet block. The school has two kindergarten classes. Each employs two full-time teaching staff and both have similar numbers of students. The kindergarten classes also have separate specialist teachers for Italian, art, physical education, and music. There is no national curriculum here in the United States, although Massachusetts has developed some curriculum guidelines. Iola’s learning this year has contrasted with her experience in England last year where there was much greater focus upon literacy and numeracy. The focus here is upon learning through creativity. For example, the students ‘worked’ as researchers on the rain forest for several months. Each child became an expert upon an animal of their choice. Iola can now talk extensively about bush-master snakes (not particularly nice animals, but our familiarity with them makes us feel quite fond of the poisonous little critters). Iola has made a pottery snake, made observational drawings, written poetry, produced a research report on bush-masters which has been published as a virtual book on the school ipads, and prepared and given a presentation on the snakes which was recorded and is now stored as an audio-book on another part of the school’s software. I have had periods when I have worried that she doesn’t bring home a book each evening, but she has become a confident reader over the past few months and her number work is excellent. In music, the class focus upon a ‘composer of the month’. These composers have included Mozart, Louis Armstrong, and Stevie Wonder. Iola is learning to read music, discuss musical form, and work out dance routines.

Maya’s learning is closer to the English model. She has daily homework in maths and English. Her class of fourteen students have one full-time teacher but also receive lessons from specialists in Spanish, information technology, physical education, art and music. Every child is required to learn a musical instrument. Each student has access to a Macbook and the class also work in the computer suite which is crammed with Macs, provided as part of a research project by Lesley University. Each student has an on-line mentor (a ‘keypal’) based at MIT. The children have written stories and published these online. They have had science lessons based around the CSI television program, using new forensic technologies facilitated by local drugs companies. They have been judges for the Massachusetts Children’s Book Award.

And this school is widely seen to be the poor relation in the Cambridge Public Schools system!

This September the school system for Cambridge is changing. Rather than the elementary schools catering for 4-14 year olds, a new system of middle schools is being introduced for grades 5-8 (students aged 11-14). I have been fascinated by the way that this policy has been developed. I don’t know how typically American this process has been. The chief superintendent of schools is extremely laid back with a ready smile to any question and an absolute commitment to deferring any answer. His staff are a diverse mix who like to spend meetings publicly congratulating one another, which means that every meeting is a very upbeat experience although sometimes light on actual content. 

The 11-14 year olds from nine elementary schools will move into three newly-formed middle schools. A new curriculum is being developed for these schools and new buildings will be built to house these new schools. It takes at least three years to build a new school around here so, in the meantime, the new middle schools will be squeezed into the elementary schools which the children already attend.  

There is much about the new curriculum which is exciting. The English Language Arts curriculum includes journalism, on-line publishing, and the negotiation of a range of different literacy demands as well as creative writing and analysis of more traditional literature. The Mathematics curriculum is extensive and covers areas of mathematics upon which I am unable to comment (too many squiggles and apparently random numbers). Maya’s grade will study Spanish, French and Mandarin and then elect the language in which they would like to specialize for grades 7 and 8. Large amounts of the timetable are given over to drama and music, with the potential for every student to elect to take individual music lessons and to play in a school orchestra and marching band. Awesome.

But with all of this innovation, some areas of traditional schooling have had to be compromised. The curriculum is based around 6 day curriculum blocks, so the second Tuesday is the new Monday and the following Wednesday will be day 1 of week 3. Confused? Try organizing forty-odd eleven year olds. And students will only be offered two 45 minute periods of physical education over each 6 day period. The physical education department are completely disenfranchised by this (I spoke with them on Wednesday evening and ended up feeling quite depressed myself) and have decided to maximize the time for activities by abandoning the requirement for students to shower and change. Really? Imagine teaching an afternoon class of ‘aromatic’ thirteen year old boys and girls who have been running around the gymnasium that morning. And it seems as though history and geography have been amalgamated into a social sciences department which is trying to serve so many different masters that it’s not quite sure what to include and what to leave out.

Maya’s new principal is young, ambitious, and optimistic. He talks a good talk with his speech peppered with words such as ‘possibility’ and ‘opportunity’. I asked him what the weekly timetable would actually look like, but he couldn’t say exactly as there are ‘various possibilities’ being developed. I asked what the new school’s mission statement might be, but he wants to develop this with the students in September (and I think that this is highly commendable). I asked where the classrooms would be and he said that there were lots of ‘exciting opportunities’ that they were currently working through and showed me a heavily annotated sketch which had been worked out on a scrap of paper. I asked how large his staff would be and he explained that they are still in the process of finalizing the recruitment process. 

Teaching staff are not contracted to work the summer vacation period, which stretches from June 15^th through to the first week in September. That gives the new principal a fortnight to finalize things. I’m not sure if my anxiety about this timing is a throwback to my Englishness, but I am very glad that I’m not in his shoes. I’m sure that Iola’s music teacher would tell us that ‘it’ll be alright on the night’, but if the principal manages to pull this one off I think that that will be truly ‘awesome’.