Resurrection-Transformation

Yesterday was Easter Sunday and Christian and non-Christians alike realize that “resurrection” is a form of transformation, a topic that I discussed last week in regard to my grandson, Dylan’s, Athenian Wilderness Experience.

The question at hand was: What would an Athenian Wilderness Experience look like for teachers? Teachers who would be transformed, empowered by a system that is designed to achieve the opposite.

A few years ago, former teachers, staff and the principal, gathered for the 40^th anniversary of the opening of the highly innovative Canyon high school in Castro Valley, CA.  The principal was my husband, Morgan Lambert, and it also happened to be his 75^th birthday.  As teachers told their stories of the glorious moments at Canyon, several recounted a program that I, along with others, had organized: Joy of Learning.

During “Joy of Learning” week, regular classes were suspended in exchange for experiences designed around the grand passions of teachers and students.  Northern trips to the tidepools, Chinese cooking, sailing, French poetry, tennis camp, gardening, Roman history…whatever struck their fancies. Students rescheduled themselves into the experiences that attracted them the most. No grades were given; none needed.  Teachers and students learned together like peers.

Such programs could never occur in today’s rigid climate.  If it did, it might well attend to the following thoughts about the nature of transformation and adult development:

• Our work—in this case, teaching—needs to be about learning and curiosity and passion.

• Discretion and choice are prime elements in feeling alive, creative, productive.

• Teamness creates synergy.

• Learning is reciprocal; students and teachers and formal leaders are in on this adventure together.  Hierarchy dampens the soul.

• Variety in schedules and timeframe wards against tedium.

• There is no need to ignore an essential curriculum; integration is essential to learning.

Can these ideas materialize in today’s schools?  Of course they can. See Who Will Save Our Schools? (1997).  Next week…more about the writing of Cairo Diary: an Egyptian fable.

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