Lopsided
Eccentricity flowering everywhere lopsided living In case you happen to be interested in teen-agers and learning and a developmental way of thinking about high school, you might try this ancient work, not yet a classic. The link is below. The School On Magnolia: New Life For High School Paperback – February 14, 2025 by Roger Lewin (Author)
Let's turn to a few things about the school. SMALL: Scale matters, because it situates people within the radius of relationship with each other which makes back and forth creative collaboration in communication possible. You can't solve problems you don't have. The communication at a variety of temperatures that small scale allows gives problems the chance to declare themselves. They are then available to become as much or more inspirations as hazards. TINKERING: Teenagers are a puzzle to themselves as well as to those who care about them. Puzzles are frustrating, but also deeply intriguing. Being a teenager is about a mix of letting go and taking hold that can often leave them feeling they are a trapeze artist in mid-air panic. A teenager tinkers their way forward not quite knowing what they are doing. So a school needs to keep tinkering, keep listening, keep adjusting, keep asking questions and questioning answers. COMMUNITY: A school is always embedded, for better and for worse, in a conflicted community that lives its hopes and its fears. Its students read the tensions of the times, embody them, are injured by them, seek solutions to them and more. A school for teenagers draws on the resources of multiple generations and the rich history of previous tries, failures, part successes, complicated aspirations. A school is a generational encounter of many generations and many cultures. PLEASURE: There is no pleasure quite like learning what is new to you that makes you come new upon yourself. Teacher, student, interested bystander can all share this. A school tries in the midst of everything else that is going on to inoculate its students with the zest of this pleasure, a positive beneficial infection that opens up and can keep opening up unsuspected avenues. Pleasure in learning is the glue for a school's work and wealth. I wrote this essay almost fifty years ago during my first year of medical school, just after I left the School On Magnolia because I felt I needed to know more to be of use to people like the school's students and I also needed to be able to support a family. This essay was part consolation for the loss I felt on leaving the school. https://www.amazon.com/School-Magnolia-New-Life-High/dp/B0DX7KM5XP