The School Model in My Head

Note: This was originally written and published on Qassia on February 16, 2008

Today is not a school day. It is a day for reflection. I entered the occupation of substitute teaching with teaching and education models already in my mind. These have obviously affected the way I have responded to the teaching environment at the high school where I now work, so I'll describe my experiences in secondary school many years ago (1952 - 1956) and the educational preconceptions I had last year when I first walked through my high school's front door.

You'll note that I had an elite secondary school education. I don't apologize for this.

My educational model was based on my education at one of the United States' elite prep schools, Phillips Exeter Academy, in Exeter, New Hampshire. At the time I attended Exeter, it had about 800 students, most of them boarding at the school, though a few lived with their families in the surrounding town. Phillips Exeter Academy was then (and is now) considered to be quite possibly the best secondary school in the country.

Almost all of us were there because we wanted to be there. Those few who didn't exited quickly through a variety of mechanisms, the main one being academic failure, with a smaller group departing due to disciplinary infractions.

The largest class I experienced at Exeter had 12 students in it. The smallest consisted of myself and the teacher. A gentleman by the name of Harkness had given a huge amount of money to Exeter back in the 1920's when a dollar was worth a great deal more than it is now. This money allowed the principal, the trustees and the teachers to form a school designed to specifications and methods that they believed would produce the very best education possible.

As students, our primary job at Exeter was to learn. Yes, we had athletic programs and other activities. But for each hour of class we attended, we were told that we were expected to spend at least two hours studying. In practice, the amount of time required to do our homework extended far beyond this.

Monday though Friday our daily class schedule varied. On a light day we might have just two classes. On a heavy day, we might have four. The unlucky among us occasionally ended up with one day of the week when they had five. Obviously if one had five hours of class on a given day, a lot of planning had to be done ahead of time to ensure that all the homework got finished on schedule. You couldn't just start studying the evening before and expect to do everything that had to be done for the next day.

Classes were conducted with both students and teacher sitting around either a large round or oval table. The teacher usually went over the homework, asking each individual student in turn what he thought about some aspect of the previous day's homework. These were often difficult questions that called not only for factual knowledge, but also for value judgements that had to be explained. Was the management of such-and-such a coal mine justified in having a strike broken by hired strike-breakers ? Why ? Or why not ? Were the mine owners just being greedy ? Or didn't the shareholders deserve some return on their investments ? Or were the miners really being treated unfairly and was the strike justified ? If so, why ?

If you hadn't done the readings (note the plural) about that one, you looked mighty silly in front of your classmates. It was usually the best not to try to fake having done your homework, but simply to admit that you had not.

In short the educational process we went through as students involved a lot of hard work and effort, a great deal of intellectual give and take with our instructors and fellow students, and a lot of concentrated study.

Certain aspects of the quality of this educational experience still amaze me. Yes, the faculty were extremely qualified. In addition to knowing their subject matter, they were all gifted teachers. But the quality of Exeter's education went way beyond that. Occasionally for short periods of time teachers were replaced by what we called "visiting firemen." One day I came to physics class and found my usual physics teacher sitting in the back of the room instead of standing in front of the blackboard where he usually explained physics problems.

In his place that day was a thin, mild-looking man. Our physics teacher stepped forward briefly and explained that our classes that week would be conducted by this newcomer. His name was J. Robert Openheimer. Most of us did not know at that moment that he more than anyone else had been responsible for inventing the atomic bomb.

Oppenheimer's duties for ten days at Exeter were fairly simple and straightforward. He was to teach whatever classes he wished to teach. I think that during his stay he taught English, physics and also a few classes in Chinese history !

He was also to give two public lectures, one on each of the two Sunday evenings during his stay. These were given in the Academy's large auditorium. (I remember the quality of these talks. He would make a statement that seemed like the result of an enormous amount of thinking. He would then make another statement, and those of us in the audience would feel that between each one, we had to descend logically from a mountain top and then laboriously ascend another mountain before understanding how he had reached his second conclusion. These talks were unmitigated brilliance.

Oppenheimer's other obligation was that he was to spend much of his time in a large room where students hung out, and would talk to any and all students who wanted to speak to him. Incidentaslly, Pierre Mendes-France, a past prime minister of France, had a similar stint at Exeter the following year.

This was the educational model I had in my head when I began substitute teaching in a ghetto high school in Northern California. Of course I knew the high school would be different. I just didn't know how different.