Preparing to be outdoors this school year

One of the most confusing things about the debate over how to reopen schools is that so few people are advocating that students spend their schooldays outdoors, and that so few schools (if any) are choosing to leave the schoolhouse behind. We know that the best way to prevent the spread of Covid-19 is to stay home. The second best way seems to be to avoid spending time indoors with others. But despite this knowledge, schools are focused on reducing the number of students inside the building at any given time through hybrid or part-time models, mandatory masking, social distancing enforcement, hygiene protocols, screening of students and staff, and isolation and quarantine. While these efforts will help to reduce the likelihood of transmission in schools, they are insufficient. Bringing students and staff together in schools is going to lead to outbreaks that will contribute to the spread of Covid-19.

In early June we announced our plan to operate in geographically separated, five- to eight-person operating cells in public parks. Being outdoors in small groups greatly reduces the risk of transmission among our community members, limits the potential of a community outbreak, and helps us protect our family members, housemates, and the broader Austin community. It is the right thing to do, and it allows us to continue to come together to build community with and support each other during these difficult times. But it is going to be hot. Texas is hot in September. And heat can be dangerous. And Facilitators need to keep their wits about them so that they can attend to the needs of the Learners.

In order to prepare to be outdoors this school year I am focusing on acclimating to the heat, physical fitness, and training.

Heat acclimation

There are no two ways about it, to be able to operate in the heat (and humidity), we need to spend time outdoors. To develop my heat tolerance I have been relying less on air conditioning when indoors. While I am not yet comfortable with 78 degrees indoors, I am comfortable with 75 degrees. And I will slowly allow the temperature to rise. And beginning this week I am spending an hour during the day outdoors doing activities such as reading or gardening. Each week I will increase the time I spend outdoors by one hour. By the week of August 17th I will be spending six hours outdoors, the length of our day at Abrome. I will then continue to spend at least six hours outdoors every other day for the remainder of the summer. One can lose their tolerance in as little as one week. And as the Abrome Learners will tell you, hydrate or die. I choose hydration.

Physical Fitness

Facilitating with young children and adolescents can be exhausting even in air conditioned environments. Doing so outdoors this coming September will not be any easier. I need to improve my physical fitness levels so that I can support the Abrome Learners in the Texas heat. Just like my heat acclimation efforts, I am slowly easing into my preparation and not jumping in too aggressively. I am continuing to do 7-minute workouts and pull-ups as I had been doing during the time that we were operating remotely. But I have also begun running three times per week (starting very slowly) and doing two light yoga sessions per week. As my endurance and cardiovascular fitness improves I plan to increase the intensity of my runs and pick up weight training. As we move into late August, as part of my heat acclimation efforts, I will also spend time hiking in the public parks we will be operating out of this coming year.

Training

It is one thing to prepare to be in the heat all day as an individual, but as a Facilitator I am also responsible for the Abrome Learners. Therefore, in early August the Abrome Facilitators (and prospective Facilitators) will go through a CPR and basic first aid training. I am also bringing in a trainer from a nature school to help us develop protocols and skills that will allow us to support Learners in various outdoor contexts and conditions. In mid-August the Facilitators will come together to practice facilitation in outdoor settings among ourselves. Then, the following week, we will invite current Abrome Learners to join Facilitators for four days as we practice the skills and activities that we will be using in the coming year. On the fifth day Facilitators will review everything that we experienced and learned so that we can finalize our preparations before we open on September 8th (or whenever pandemic conditions allow us to).

The challenges of this coming year are daunting but exciting. There is still so much to prepare for and so much to learn. I don’t know what I don’t know, but I am leaning heavily on people who have experience working with young people outdoors, and I am trying to remember some of the more challenging lessons learned from my Army Ranger School days (from 20 years ago). This is going to be such a fun learning experience!

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Photo by ana fernandez from FreeImages

Introducing Ivan & Ingrid! Abrome Weekly Update: August 13, 2017

Summer break is awesome, if the school is dreadful

We are two weeks into our four-week summer break. While this has been an opportunity for the Learning Coaches to catch up on work that needs to get done, we already miss the Learners! Fortunately, the Learners come back in two weeks!

The Abrome Twitter account (@AbromeEd) follows dozens of teachers and administrators that by most measures could be considered progressive. They warn against the harmful effects of homework, testing, and standardized curriculum. They often recognize that school practices perpetuate inequities and promote authoritarianism and injustice. These teachers are by and large decent people who care about children. Yet, over the summer, they celebrate being away from young people. And it baffles me.

Not too long ago I read a blog post, perhaps by James Altucher or Seth Godin, that talked about an experience the author had. While writing on his laptop at some beach one evening, two inebriated vacationers walked by, and as inebriated people are sometimes apt to do, one of them decided to share her thoughts with the other loudly enough for all to hear. She said something to the effect of, "can you believe he can't get off his computer even while he's on vacation!?" His response, though he did not share it with the vacationers, was something to the effect of, "can you believe they work 50 weeks a year just to get away for two weeks of vacation?"

We recognize the value of down time, and we celebrate the learning that can come from new experiences in new settings. Vacations can be amazing, but they should not be an escape from a miserable daily existence. No one should have to live a miserable daily existence, especially children. But for far too many students and teachers, school is that miserable daily existence. And for that reason, they find any break from school to be the highlight of school. 

At Abrome, we removed the practices and structures of schooling that make it miserable for so many. When Learners have the opportunity to drive their own educational experiences, without being dragged down by homework, testing, grades, and mandatory curriculum, they come to see Abrome not as a place to avoid, but as a place they want to be at. 

Our Abrome Learners do not need summer camp to recharge or recuperate, although we encourage Learners and their families to take time off whenever they need it for camps or vacation. We also endeavor to be available for our Learners as often as possible, which is why we have extended our academic year to 210 days. We feel extremely fortunate that our Learners want to be at Abrome, and that our Learning Coaches cannot wait for the Learners to return. It would serve as a huge red flag for us if our Learners and Learning Coaches were more excited about time away from Abrome than time at Abrome.

Deschooling: How Long Does it Take?

Parents should not enroll their children in traditional schools when their children become school-aged, especially public schools, even if they are advocates of public schooling. The reason being is that they do not know what the future holds for their children, and it is easier to go from a self-directed learning environment (e.g., emancipated learning, unschooling) to a schooling environment than vice versa. For example, if one enrolls their child in school and that child later decides to homeschool, the family opens itself up to the very real risk of malicious truancy claims by school officials.[1] Homeschoolers, however, will not be calling the police if your teenage child leaves the local homeschool co-op to enroll in a public high school. The more likely risk parents invite when they enroll their children in traditional schools is that their children’s inborn love of learning will be replaced with a passive resignation that learning is only relevant and worthwhile when it is being measured by people in positions of power.

We live in a society that emphasizes conformity over curiosity, tradition over progress, and authority over liberation. Schools are both a reflection of society and a force that perpetuates the worst of it. Our society and our schools are most forgiving to those who have the most, and most punitive against those who have the least.[2] And while affluent and white students are usually given the benefit of the doubt in terms of grading and discipline relative to low SES students and students of color, all students are reminded every day that they are viewed as incompetent and ignorant, and needing constant direction from adults. Schools do not allow young people to believe that they are able to chart their own course in life. After all, there is a curriculum that the students must conform to. There is only one approved path that students can take, and it is the same path that their peers are expected to take.

The rigid and unforgiving practices and structures of schooling leave students incapable of experiencing true autonomy or intellectual vitality. The learning that matters most is the learning that is mandated for everyone, without concern for the unique needs, goals, interests, and contexts of individual students. The best students are those who subjugate their curiosity to meet the needs of adults who believe that a student’s value is determined by where they rank relative to same-age peers. The worst students are those who get distracted and wander down paths of personal inquiry, or those who engage in acts of resistance in the hope of holding onto a piece of themselves. And the majority of students who make up the center of the bell curve are those who do what is necessary to keep moving along through the conveyor belt of schooling from one grade to another. Most students quickly resign themselves to the reality that their education is not their own. And that leaves most of them helpless when presented with the opportunity to make meaningful decisions about their education. It is this learned helplessness that gave rise to the practice of deschooling as a transition from school to self-directed learning.

Deschooling is the “process of decompression from the effects of school.”[3] It is an adjustment period where parents step back and allow children to be free of all formal schooling activities such as required attendance, readings, journal entries, worksheets, and tests. It allows them to begin to recuperate from a schooling environment that in many ways mimicked the structures and practices of prisons or factory farms. Deschooling also allows children to break away from the schooling mindset and mentality that learning is about performing for adults, and that meaning is dictated as opposed to discovered. It allows them to restructure their concept of learning, and reframe their understanding of their role and responsibility in their own life. Deschooling also allows for rejuvenation, as they rediscover that they can have interests that are worth pursuing for their own sake, as opposed to for the sake of appeasing adults.

For parents who believe that education is about keeping young people busy and engaged, deschooling can be difficult. It asks parents to step back and not interfere with the child for a protected period of time. In this way, parents also go through a period of deschooling.

The general rule of thumb for deschooling is that it should last one month for every year a young person was in traditional school.[4][5] Abrome finds this rule of thumb problematic for three reasons. First, just one year of traditional schooling can do immense harm to a child. One month of freedom is unlikely to be sufficient to allow a first grader to embrace learning again. Second, the effects of schooling compound over time, making it much more difficult to rewire one’s mind after years in traditional school. It is this reason that teenagers who try to move from a schooling environment to a self-directed learning environment often flounder for extended periods of time.[4] And third, every person learns and develops on their own timeline. Just as schools wrongly expect every student to learn by standardized periods of time, it is wrong to expect every formerly schooled child to be able to transition to self-directed learning along a preset period of time.  

A better rule of thumb for deschooling is to step back and wait for them to celebrate their freedom, then get bored of their freedom, and then actively make use of their freedom. At Abrome, we have Learners who came to us from traditional public schools, traditional private schools, alternative private schools, and who have been homeschooled or unschooled their whole lives. Those who have been subjected to the more formal schooling of public and private schools have a much more difficult time deschooling than those who have only had progressive schooling or homeschooling experiences. For these reasons, a 13-year-old who spent eight years in traditional schools may require up to two years to navigate the deschooling process, while a 9-year-old who comes from a more progressive school may only need a couple of months, and a 5-year-old who was never subjected to schooling can transition seamlessly.

It is best for parents to not put their children in a position where they need to deschool in the first place. Extend unschooling beyond the age of five, and allow young people to retain their natural love of learning in a self-directed learning environment through adolescence and into early adulthood. Parents should seek out homeschooling and unschooling groups and cooperatives, or find self-directed learning spaces such as Abrome or democratic schools to enroll their children in. However, for families who enrolled their children in traditional schools because they thought it was the best option at the time, the most important step they can take in the present is to immediately withdraw their children from traditional school and begin the process of deschooling. The longer they leave their children in traditional school, the longer (and more difficult) it is going to take for them to move to a self-directed learning mindset.

1.     Every year, there are numerous examples of school districts harassing, threatening, and calling the authorities on families who decide to pull their children out of school to homeschool them. Some parents have even been arrested and have had their children taken from them. The Home School Legal Defense Association often posts about such examples on their website. 

2.     As both Bryan Stevenson and Immortal Technique have pointed out, you are better off rich and guilty than poor and innocent. Being identified as an ‘other’ in terms of ability, age, ethnicity, gender, immigration status, physical appearance, race, religion, self-expression, sexual orientation, or other identifier often becomes an aggravating factor when it comes to the way society collectively treats someone.

3.     The Homeschooling Option by Lisa Rivero

4.     Summer breaks should not be considered deschooling periods. Many students already see the summer as a season of respite from school, and if we hope to free children from the mindset of schooling, they need to recognize that they are being released from the practices and structures of schooling during periods in which they would normally be in school.