First Person: Summer School

Think globally, teach locally.

Like many teachers, I generally use my summer break to get as far from

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whiteboards as my paycheck will take me. But last summer I was offered an opportunity I couldn't refuse: La Mesita, a nonprofit some friends and I are starting, won a $15,000 grant from the McCune Foundation to pilot a five-week summer school for high school boys. And we could do it however we liked.

Think about it. 15 K. A few teenagers. Five weeks. What would you do?

I'd been through a similar exercise once before, during my freshman year in college, when my education professor, Ted Sizer, put us into groups of four and gave us the semester to design an imaginary high school, from the building to the daily schedule. My group played with outdoor classrooms, week-long field trips, and interdisciplinary units, but ended up compromising down to a disappointingly traditional high school, in which the unlucky imaginary students sloughed from one class to the next.

Twelve years later, with some real teaching under my belt, I wasn't going to make the same mistake. I met with La Mesita and we set some ground rules for our program.

Rule No. 1: No one, adult or kid, would spend more than three hours a day in a classroom.

Rule No. 2: No more than two classroom teachers. (No offense, colleagues. We just wanted to leave room for some other folks to get involved.)

Rule No. 3: The students' work would be relevant, both to their lives and the world, and focused on the single question: "How can we live more sustainably on this planet?" Students who could present, at the end of the program, a knowledgeable answer to this question before a panel of community members, teachers, other students and experts in the field, would be granted academic credit for their work.

Cut to July. Somehow we had wrangled up seven good-natured guinea pigs from two charter schools in Santa Fe and Albuquerque and convinced their parents to let them live with us, Monday through Friday, at my brother's 7-acre farm on the Pecos River. We'd named our program the Summer Sustainability Institute, hijacked tables and computers from my school, stocked the cabinets of the barn-cum-classroom with beans and peanut butter and hired ourselves a team of sustainability experts: a "green" builder from our partner nonprofit, Food & Shelter; an alternative energy scientist; a watershed restoration engineer; and an organic gardener.

We sat the kids in a circle and asked them to define sustainability.

Chickens clucked. The kids shrugged.

Well, we said. Let's find out.

And for the next five weeks, the kids roused themselves from their tents at 7 am, ate breakfast and went to work. Three spent their mornings with the builder, stacking adobes and cutting local lumber for an off-the-grid spec house down the road, learning about passive solar design, thermal mass and embedded energy. Three chose to work with the alternative energy specialist, and spent painstaking hours carving wooden blades and coiling wires for a fully operational wind turbine that will soon generate electricity for the farm. One spent his mornings weeding raspberries and tending to infected tomato plants, chatting with the gardener about the tenets of permaculture. Mondays, they worked with the soil restoration engineer, creating upland structures to reverse decades of man-made erosion. Wednesdays, we field tripped to Ralph Barela's eco-friendly lumber operation in Las Vegas, PNM's monstrous coal-burning power plant outside Farmington, organic and conventional farms along the Rio Grande and the DeVargas Center for a screening of

An Inconvenient Truth

. We went backpacking to consider what humans need to survive, debated the merits of water versus Coke, discovered squash and quinoa, climbed Hermit's Peak, pitched horseshoes and watched evening thunderstorms ravage the skies. Social conflicts were discussed by firelight. The kid with attention deficit disorder chased chickens to refocus. If a tool had been misplaced, or the bathroom improperly cleaned, no one ate supper until the error was corrected.

And yes, every afternoon the other teacher, Zoë, and I dragged them into a traditional, academic classroom, where we helped them identify vocabulary, keep track of their learnings, write papers and read Barry Lopez, Rachel Carson, Hemingway and others. We had them stand before us and their fellow students every Friday and explain, in detail, how we can live more sustainably on this planet.

At the end of the five weeks, we sent them home to clean up and dig out ties for their final presentations at the McCune Conference Room in Santa Fe. One by one, these seven young men, some of whom had never spoken in public before, delivered well-organized, knowledgeable presentations about the science and philosophy of sustainable living. The community panels passed them all with flying colors. For the first time in my young teaching career, I felt I had done my job right. I had truly helped every one of my students grow intellectually, socially and ethically.

True, the adult-to-student ratio was nearly one to one, and we spent around $80-a-day per student, which is double the New Mexico public school standard, but the Summer Sustainability Institute worked. It worked for Zoë and myself, who returned to our classrooms newly inspired; it worked for the experts, who had a meaningful way to share their knowledge with public school kids; and it worked for the students, who reported learning more in five weeks than they had in a year of high school.

Someday, if the funding dice fall our way, we hope to grow the Summer Sustainability Institute into a free, semester-long program that would reach dozens of public school kids every year. For now, McCune has hooked us up again, and seven high school students-girls, this time-are out at the farm as you read this article, exploring their own ways of softening up the human footprint.

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