joy factor

Pilot

Friends, it’s time!

The children’s garden.

Five years ago, I was at Teach for America’s summer institute getting trained for my first day of school. We were learning how to diagnose achievement levels, track mastery, and bust value-added goals. I heard another corps member in my group ask a question off to the side. What if we want to make a revolutionary classroom?

I don’t know.

But I do have a list, in my head, of all the things I would give my students if I woke up tomorrow in an imaginary world where limitations didn’t exist. I am ready to write this list down. I would like you all to help me edit it. Then I can bring it to my students, and we can edit it some more, and then we can start to make it. Why not?

My List-in-Progress

• Constructivist pedagogy
• Curriculum on community organizing and social movement theory
• Practice in activism and advocacy
• Critical theory about race, class, gender, nationality, and post-colonialism geared for a middle school audience
• A classroom art gallery
• A library that looks like a book store display section and makes you want to stay all day
• Reinvention of classroom design, with lots more couch action
• Intensive community building, and the experience of unconditional love in a peer group
• A garden and knowledge of food production
• Hours of free-play time
• A soundtrack
• Media literacy and digital media production experience
• Conflict mediation training that critically examines the roots of systemic violence
• Math problem-solving and quantitative and logical analysis skills
• A queer-positive, body-positive environment
• Lots of peer discussion
• Journals
• Fun every day