Collage Photos

These are some photos of the collage I made for my Self-Knowledge Graduation Challenge. I spent a year and a half dreaming, planning, collecting materials, assembling pieces and exploring new territory. Then, at the very end, I spent two weeks putting it all together into a 8' x 4' art installment. I can't tell you how satisfying it was to finally see it all in one piece, like a million little threads of yarn suddenly emerging as a sweater. 

Even more satisfying? Quickly, painlessly, shamelessly destroying the creation in a matter of minutes. That's the beauty of process based projects- I'll always have the self-discoveries while the physical product festers on the cement by the side of my house. I was slightly thrown this morning when I saw the pile of mushed, weathered paper and wood waiting to be properly disposed of and thought to myself, "those faded colors look pretty cool! I should re-purpose these pieces into a new art piece." I stopped myself from actually walking over and collecting the decomposing scraps. Clearly, the initial intention to learn self-expression through visual art was spot-on, and an ability that I will continue to hone.

For today though, I'll stick to reminiscing over photographs of what was instead of turning those materials into what could be. At least until I can make a trip over to the Scrap store.    

Duct-Taping Your Butt To A Chair - My Experience, Part 1

                    I decided to enroll at The VFS the same day I found out about it. My dad had recently visited the school (for his own reasons) but had yet to tell me about his trip. A few days later I came home from high school in a complete depression, complaining about everything I could wrap my lips around. I was only hoping for some sympathy and commiserating, but instead my father offered up the fact that he had just been to a school where the students duct taped their butts to chairs. My initial reaction was that he was telling me this to make me feel better. At least at Cleveland High they didn’t make you tape your ass to the chair and walk around like idiots.

                    “Yeah, and the kids can do whatever they want. A group of boys wanted to do this so they spent the morning taping themselves up. Then they all went outside to play this weird game of dodge ball and came inside for story time- and all on their own will! The teachers weren‘t in charge of them at all.”

                    “Wh-what?” I whimpered, breaking out of my sad act long enough to fully understand what he was saying. He described everything he had learned that day about this magical place- how the kids vote on every rule of the school during these big weekly meetings, how there’s no set curriculum for any age group, how there are no grades or mandatory anything- except clean-up.

                    “But, is this like…a real school? Who are these people?” I learned the phrase alternative education for the first time and what it takes to go there: nothing. All you have to do is apply, he explained. There was nothing special about these kids, except that they didn’t want to be in public school. “Would you like to see it?” he asked.

                    We turned the car around (we were driving around during this whole conversation) and went into an area of town that I had never frequented. There on the side of the dirty, loud road, sat my future. The building was closed for the day, but we parked the car and looked in through the fire exit window. I could see the hallway and the fun artwork on the walls, the community bulletin board and a poster for some up coming concert. Even in the darkness, I could see that the place was softer, friendlier, not as sterile and unwelcoming as the schools I had been in.

                    By the time we had arrived home, it was pretty much decided that I should be transferring there. As soon as possible, if we could help it. That evening we made blueberry pancakes and discussed my future, my expectations as great as Pip’s in the Forge. It had taken all of an hour to completely convert me to alternative education. I began reciting the same speech I make to this day, comparing all that I didn’t get in standardized school (another new word) to all that one could gain from going alternative. I get pompous when I get excited and my speech was about as opinionated as they come. Obviously this newfangled form of schooling was far superior to the crap I was then immersed in. From what I had heard, it was a night and day difference.

                    I flipped two pancakes in the sizzling pan. “And I can make pancakes everyday!” I proclaimed loudly. “I’ll make pancakes everyday for breakfast instead of doing English class. It’s like, I’ve already read that book anyway and the essay they wanted me to turn in had to be about how much I liked it. I hate that book!  I don’t need to take that English class, I already know how I feel about this book and I don’t like it.  Why do I have to sit there for fifty minutes while the teacher talks about things I already know. It’s a waste of my time. No more! Instead, I’m going to make pancakes!”

                    My smile beamed brighter than the sizzling oil. I had found my way out of something that I hadn’t realized I needed to escape. Now it all made sense. Why didn’t everybody know about this free schooling idea?

                    I still feel bad for my mom about this. She came home from work and there I was, greeting her with the news that I was leaving public school for some alternative school. I didn’t know it at the time, but the terror I saw in her eyes was her reliving her own horrible experience with free school. “Are you sure?” she asked, “do you really think that’s the right choice for you?” But she had heard me complaining for the past two months. She knew that I came home chanting quietly “four more years, four more years,”

as if that little assurance was all that kept me going. Her next question needed a bit more of an answer.

            “What does it cost?” Uh. I hadn’t asked that question yet myself. We turned to my dad who sat at the table in front of a pile of pancake triumph. He swallowed loudly and said, “Well, I’m not sure, but we can talk to them.”

            And that’s what we did. There was no more reasoning with me that evening. I was still on a high that even my mother couldn’t bring me down from and I my mouth still hadn’t run down its supply of babbling. I had the application printed out immediately (including a second copy for my best friend who also hated Cleveland, because it was obvious to me that once he heard all of this too, he would be leaving with me. Of course, he didn’t come with me and thought I was making a bad decision. We had a falling out that year and stopped speaking. I recently heard that he’s since left Cleveland to attend a different alternative school with a half-time ‘free’ model. I can’t help but feel slightly inflated. Funny enough, my other best friend from that time thought I was making a terrible decision as well. She’s made fun of my school for years and everything ’alternative’ about it, and yet when it was time to go to college, she ended up at Evergreen College, the most free-school-y of all well-known colleges. So…I think I win.)

            I ended up only attending one more day in public school, and it was the longest day of my life. I remember every second I spent in that building on my last day, each one more painful and pointless than the last. I kept wondering what the kids at free school were doing right then. Probably something amazing. Gluing themselves to walls?  On a thrilling, spontaneous field trip? In the kitchen making pancakes?

            The next day I got join them. It’s been a blur ever since.

            Time flies when you’re having fun, but time also flies when you’re on your own schedule. Aside from isolated moments throughout the years, the only distinct and slowed down memories I have are of my first few hours there and the last few that I’ve spent. As soon as I return, those last  couple hours will replace the others. I think that’s because I was really waiting for something to happen on my first day. I showed up with a backpack full of notebooks, pens, and books that I might need, learning soon after that I didn’t need anything at all. I arrived promptly at eight o’clock like all kids do on their first day of free school before they learn what optional hours truly means. No students really show up until nine thirty or ten (or ten thirty for the teenagers) when morning meeting starts and you’re sort of expected to make an appearance. Just because the building’s open from eight in the morning until four, doesn’t hold any bearing on when people are actually present.

            I sat and read my book in the living room, probably fooling myself into believing that this was a naturally quiet atmosphere. Then when it was time for morning meeting, I got to meet my peers. They sat around the Room C couch circle, completely unaffected by the new face in their group, like a new transient in the camp. The meeting ended and they were still there, just sitting. Some drifted off, some played guitar and chatted about nothing academic. I was really confused. I wanted to text my best friend and tell him about what was going on, but I wasn’t sure if cell phones were allowed (he would have his on him because like most teens, he didn’t mind breaking the public school rule of no cell phone use. I always did mind, but I had a suspicion that this was different here. I couldn’t just pull it out though, in case it wasn’t allowed, and I wasn’t getting in trouble on my first day. They might send me back to that hell hole.) “Are we allowed to use our cell phones during the day?” I asked the group. A few sets of eyes rolled back. “Chyeah,” one girl replied before returning to her guitar. I looked to my left and saw a girl seated at a computer checking her Facebook account, with head phones plugged in to her ears and head bobbing to the beat. Clearly, technology use was not an issue here.

            The next hour was really slow, as I didn’t know what to do for the first time ever. There was no class being offered at that time for Room C kids and I didn’t know anyone, so starting some kind of activity seemed too far out of my comfort zone. I sat at a table and doodled in my old science notebook. The clock ticked by far too slowly as I wondered when something was going to happen. A girl breezed in, saw me seated all alone, and pulled up a chair. Her name was Ann and she was an intern there. She asked me all about how I had found the school, my educational past, and what my interests were. I explained  that I really enjoyed theater, especially of the musical variety. That was my big thing. Oh, she exclaimed. Had I heard of the Broadway musical Spring Awakening? It just so happened that she personally knew two of the original cast members and had seen the show a couple of times.

            This just happened to be my favorite musical EVER and she had absolutely, unknowingly hit the nail on the head for my ‘interests.’ We then got to talking about theater and putting on shows and that’s how within my first three hours of being in free school, I was already planning my first school show.

            After this point, I guess you can say I hit the ground running. I was amazingly lucky in that we had a student whose mom was a theater director in town and loved working with our students. She was already teaching a theater class when I enrolled and this became my favorite very quickly. She was behind doing a show that school year, but no one was sure what to do. We happened to be working on Shakespeare around that time and after an evening field trip to see an excellent production of “The Merchant of Venice”, we sat over plates of pancakes at the local all-night pancake house and decided that we needed to do Shakespeare. Something kid friendly, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream. So that became our new project. We assigned production jobs and cast the show while sitting at the table that night, and it took three months to get the show on its feet and presented to the community. I cast myself as Helena and became the director’s assistant, giving myself far more theater opportunity for the year than I would have had at Cleveland.

            I attempted other theater productions throughout that first year, going as far as to recruit old friends from high school who wanted to help mount a show. Unfortunately, everything fell through and Midsummer was the only thing I’ve managed to get on its feet thus far. I would attribute all of that success to having incredibly supportive adult help. That’s not a bad thing though. It was an amazingly cute production, which is probably hard not to do when you have five year olds as fairies and a ten-year-old girl playing Puck. Just darling.

            We had to get practically everyone in the school involved just to have enough actors to fill the cast. I managed to convince everyone except the skater teenage boys- they were too cool to join in. Only one of them (and he was only a part time group member anyway) agreed to play one of the lovers. I even got some staff members playing roles. Everything about the production was built from the ground up, like everything we do. We got parents and students to help with the set, costumes, marketing and everything. I never would have guessed that we could have pulled off such a nice looking show either.

             It ended up being like a community theater production. It was free school quality, as it should be. The audience sat on picnic blankets arranged throughout our ‘forest’ (we have these large ugly pillars holding up the ceiling downstairs so we covered them with paper and called them trees.) We lit the entire set with twinkle lights, giving everything a warm, pixie-ish glow. The Shakespeare itself was made rather free school-itself. We gave our five-year-old fairies one line each which they delivered with adorable shyness, one after the other. Puck and Oberon (a lovable staff member) sat behind a tree while watching Titania, eating popcorn and joking the whole time.

            There were some pitfalls while trying to put it on. When a light caught a plastic plant on fire during a dress rehearsal, the first boy to notice was too unsure of how to politely interrupt the rehearsal. He sat with his hand raised for far too long before finally saying, “Um, the plant’s on fire?” The onstage and offstage meltdowns only increased as the performance date grew closer and I was so worried for the group of shy students that we had cast (they’re hard to avoid at free school). But they all did it, and everyone was so proud. Regardless of acting ability or quality of the production, it was an amazing show just because we did it. I think that’s the best thing I’ve helped do during my time at The VFS.

            Not long after I started there, I figured out that I could use my new freedom to get out into the world. I contemplated getting a job or an internship, and when an interning position specifically for a teen presented itself at a local theater, I jumped on that opportunity. At the time, I was the only student who had an internship somewhere, though there have been others throughout the years. I thought I was the coolest thing, going out into the world and working somewhere instead of being at school two mornings out of the week. I didn’t even have to do any make-up work for the hours I missed at school. Absolutely amazing.

            That was the perfect thing for me at the time. It felt like a cage had been lifted on my existence. I was always one of those children who would be dropped off in the morning for school and watch my mom drive off down the street to her downtown job and real life. I wanted that so bad- I wanted to go with her, not only because she was my mother, but because she had the option of leaving while I had to be where she left me. For a “get-up-and-go” child as my parents say, this was a really harsh reality (as a baby before I could talk, I would drag my coat across the floor and drop it at their feet, like a dog with his leash. I needed to get out of the house and go. Anywhere.) I knew that my mom had a job that she had to report to and responsibilities there, but part of me believed that if she truly wanted to, she could just go. Also, even if she stayed, she was in the coolest part of town so her day would be exciting. I still get choked up seeing downtown through the eyes of my nine year old self; truly, it was the ultimate hope in ‘getting away from where I am now’ and represented the perfect day.

            I was surprised when this yearning to escape with my mother every morning followed me all the way into high school. From the front doors of the building, I could see the tops of the southern skyscrapers peeking out over the trees. There was a busy highway directly next to the school that led onto a bridge and over to the promised land. She would leave me on those front steps, turn onto this road and go off to her exciting life while I got to stare out at these skyscrapers from my third story classroom, far more engrossed in what was happening off in the city than on biology. Even though The VFS is located about as far away from downtown as possible while still being in Portland, it was just as exciting to take the long bus ride across town and be on my own time. Having the internship in the trendiest part of downtown only added to the thrill as I could never quite believe that this was my life now. I could be out exactly where I wanted to be on a Tuesday morning, get a cup of coffee or go to the library if I wanted, and then leisurely return to school where my tardiness wasn’t frowned upon at all. “What did you do this morning?” they’d ask. I’d rattle off all of my humble yet personally exhilarating adventures. “Cool!” they’d say, “Glad you had fun. We’re about to have a history class. Want to join us?” And I was always so much more willing and excited about whatever classes were happening because of my ability to go when I needed to.

            Something really important that free school allows for is an even mix of life and school. As a student, school generally captivates your entire existence unless there are other drastically large things going on for you at home. For the average kid, you give your entire day and then most of your free time towards school work which isn’t always an enjoyable prospect. I’ve been able to take some of that time and direct it towards my own interests. I learned so much through my internship that I had for a year and a half and I managed to do that during school hours. I never had a lot of homework so my evenings and weekends were never consumed by another entity. I could even leave early if I wanted to make dinner for my family or get chores done, or I could come early to attend a special lecture happening at school, or however I wanted my days to look. School was no longer the foundation of my existence which made me like it a hell of a lot more.

            The cool thing now is that theater kind of is my life outside of school. I’ve been using my free time wisely and seeing shows, taking classes, auditioning for things in town and having a blast. I wouldn’t be able to focus so much of my energy on the thing I truly love if I didn’t have the freedom that I have now. I mean, I spent all summer writing this book as a school project and that was of my own free will. I said I would complete this assignment because this is something I wanted to do and how I wanted to show that I was ready to graduate. My friends spent the summer reading books that they weren’t interested in and writing papers about them that they have no more investment in than for the grade. I willingly put so many more hours into this because this is something that I had the drive and passion to do. This is my baby. I know people say that you shouldn’t have a baby while being a teenager, but I don’t think they accounted for things like this book.

            If I’m not doing theater, I’m dancing. Yeah, I know, I’m that kind of artsy teenage girl. Around the same time that I started my internship, I also got myself a job at the local public elementary school teaching an after school jazz class. My dad had a lot to do with that acquisition (he might work at that school and teach an after school class himself). It was my first time being on someone’s payroll and the $100 I earned was the most amazing wad of cash that I’ve ever had in my wallet. At the time, I didn’t give a lick about being back in a standardized school in order to earn money. I would probably care nowadays, but even then I don’t know. The only problem is I’ve stopped dancing since then because the dance classes I was taking were no longer quite doing it for me.

            One really awesome thing about the middle school I went to was that instead of a PE class, every student had to do a mandatory year of dance. The teachers were fabulous and the program was wonderful and I miss it dearly. A few years later I was itching to get back into my regular dance class routine, so I signed up with a local private arts high school that allowed outside students to take their after school programs. It was working well, it felt good, all until they asked me for something that I just couldn’t deliver anymore. It wasn’t a dance maneuver that I was no longer able to perform, it was a homework assignment. I hadn’t known this when I had signed up, but a part of the class was turning in weekly essays about various dance videos or reflections on class or whatever prompt they wanted. This…this, wasn’t okay with me. I was in a mood change for the worst during the time, fighting every form of standardized school that came my way. I never brought this up with the teacher (who didn’t know I was even in this crazy alternative school) and I just never turned in any assignments. I was only slightly shaken by that close call. Then the grade report came. My mom called me downstairs one afternoon to report that I had failed a class. I laughed. “What are you talking about?” I asked, expecting a joke. “The dance school sent me your grade for the year and you got a D. She says she didn’t completely fail you because you worked so hard in class.” We stared at each other. The panic I had always felt towards school work that I had worked so hard to suppress for the past two years came bubbling up in my stomach. Then I remembered I no longer had a grade point average or permanent record that this could        It surprises me to say that I didn’t have to get all of my dancing kicks out only outside of school. During my first year, it became incredibly fashionable to go swing dancing, of all things. I already knew how from my years dancing in middle school, but everyone else had a year-long learning curve that they took with determination and patience. This all started with one of our favorite staff members was trying to impress a lady friend from far away. He came to school saying that he had a month to learn how to swing dance before she visited and expected him to be an expert. Therefore, he was going twice a week and would anyone like to join him? Heck yes. And because of his popularity, I wasn’t the only one who responded that way.

            In fact, he managed to get the most pretentious kids to go, all loaded up in his car talking about how much better swing dancing is than any other kind of dance and how they were on the cutting edge of this cool trend. I went with them and was amazed to discover these swing dancing venues across town. It became a weekly field trip to go down and learn the craft for a few hours during the evening. It was a grand time and soon we were all practicing throughout the day, swinging circles around the stage in the basement. Activities like that are always the most fun at free school. We could be sitting around the couches, chatting and slightly bored, and someone will say, “Hey, wanna go swing dance for a while?” “Sure, I don’t have a class until one!” And then we’ll all troop downstairs. Spontaneous bouts of dancing are the icing on the cake of life.

            Those seem to be a trend at the VFS, the spontaneous bouts of dancing, I mean. I have some lovely memories of us all shaking our bon-bons during some serious bonding time. The music of Lady Gaga especially has a place in our hearts. The staff in Room A will sometimes turn on play lists of her stuff (the tamer songs, of course) and lead the group in a raucous dance party. When you hear the funky beats bouncing down the hall, you assume it’s coming from Room C, and are always shocked to see the little tykes in Room A jumping up and down to the beat (they’re also huge fans of Ke$ha and Katy Perry). There was also the time during a school sleep over when Jackson brought in a Jazzercise video and got everyone to come dance/workout with him. Everyone came, parents, staff, and students, to participate just for the hilarity of it. It was a room packed to the brim with a bunch of people in pajamas “moving those hips and tightening that core! Now even bigger- five, six, seven, eight!” Another time, the Room C staff told us that we would be learning how to dance Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” for our Wednesday Fun-day activity. We then spent the next hour and a half watching the music video and how-to videos on Youtube before attempting it as a group. What made that day so much fun was that so many people were resistant to participating, and yet, who can sit out when Michael Jackson’s gyrating hips are compelling you to dance along? By the end of our session, everyone in the room was completely gung-ho about doing it and loving every second. Almost as good as the time when we made a Queen Tribute Air-band. Almost.

           

affect. “I don’t think I’m taking this class next year,” I replied, and walked back upstairs.

            My experience at the school has been influenced a lot by the time I’ve actually been off campus. I find that the most liberating part of the whole ‘free school’ concept. Of course, with my ever-expanding need to go, the magic of hanging around Portland soon wore off and I needed a new world to explore. I began using the off campus privilege to my advantage by going as far off campus as physically possible, like to The Mediterranean and other such places. My family’s always been big on traveling and when a family friend suggested we start taking trips to places like Italy and Greece, I said “sure, I’ll be right over!” I have no regrets about taking weeks off from my school education to go traipse around Greek Islands and Venetian canals. I will always argue that I got some of the best history lessons of my life there. Those were weeks when I had to ask myself what I would really be missing out on anyway back at school. But it was so amazing to be able to just pick-up and leave without it interfering with school. A novelty in and of itself.

            And hey, my next few trips were at least to schools. As soon as I broke the mold and started traveling during school time, I found as many ways to make that happen as possible. There were trips to my grandparents and long weekends with my parents but once college started looming on the horizon, it became the ultimate excuse. There were college visits to make in New York City and Los Angeles and all up and down Oregon. I also had these wonderful connections with people at other free schools around North America, so why not go spend some time visiting those as well? You know, to see how other people run their schools…and stuff? That’s how I ended up spending time at Windsor House and The Brooklyn Free School. It’s true, we’ve spent a lot of money to not send me to school over the years, but the experience was worth it. We bought me freedom and an education.

            I’ve come to the conclusion that I shouldn’t be paying for schooling and traveling at the same time, however, so I’ve decided to simply end my time at school early to fully pursue the other. Since staying with people at other free schools worked so brilliantly this past year, my goal is to graduate a semester early from The VFS and ‘free school-hop’ across Europe. I’m tremendously excited to see other schools and learn as much as I can about alternative education so I can hopefully be a part of it for the rest of my life. I believe there’s so much students can gain from being a part of this model, I’m just not sure that every aspect works or that I’ve necessarily seen the version that makes the most sense. That’s why I want to look at other institutions, find out how they differ, hear how they work (or don’t),  and then maybe- just maybe- start a school… of my own… someday? I’m slightly embarrassed to admit this after talking so much about some of my issues with my own school. We might not have everything right (even though we do have a lot) and someone else might. And if they don’t, there’s always room for another school to try and find a better balance. It’s like evolution, each new mutation and species has got to be a step up from the last, even if it’s not the end product. It doesn’t matter if there are still going to be hundreds of variations after yours, the next one will always be slightly better. That’s how you make it to a more perfect world. The best part of having so many schools in existence and so many being created is that there are so many more options for students to try. No model will work for everyone, so having soooo many different versions out there can only be a huge step forward in the education of society. Eventually, the standard won’t be public school. The standard will be every proven model under the sun operating in cohesion with one another.

            That got really preach-y really fast. We must be nearing the end of the book.

            I have friends who, after figuring out the basics of what my education entails, really want to know what I actually do during a day. This question always stops me cold. “Um, what do you mean?” “You know, what do you actually do during the day if you don’t have to do anything?” “I-I told you.” They’re never satisfied with that. I go right back into explaining my self-inflicted work load and how I’m usually hunched over a text book or two, piecing together an academic education. This part, they especially don’t understand. It’s like doing homework, I say. But instead of just doing the set of problems assigned, you make your way through the entire textbook. I do this on my own while everyone around me raises hell. There are one or two other kids who might have quiet independent work-type projects in front of them, but mostly it’s wild crazyness.

            This behavior made me kind of a loner. Except with the other quiet kids; we became friends and now I invite them on the trips I take away from school, since they’re just as thrilled to leave that noise pit as me. On days when I wasn’t out of the country, I would go off campus to coffee shops and get work done there. By a Thursday afternoon when you’ve already had three and a half days of energy shoved in your face, sometimes the only place you can really be is somewhere far, far away. I still want to get things done and work in my textbooks, but I just have to take the whole operation somewhere else. Even loquacious patrons and shrill espresso machines can’t out-do with “ PENIS AND BOOBS” in your ear all day long.

            Actually, coffee became a big part of my life these past couple of years. It started in high school when I was already pulling late nighters to finish the homework given out to a first quarter freshman. I began frequenting a coffee shop near my old high school during lunch period and my addiction slowly grew from there, even after it was no longer ‘necessary’ to finish my day. In fact, this book was written with a cup of coffee inches away from my hand. I’m lucky there hasn’t been a liquid-on-computer accident yet. It became my routine to walk to school  and then relax with a cup of coffee. At my arrival time, there was usually not enough students present yet to take away from the peaceful tranquility of reading a novel with a morning cup of coffee in hand. This tradition became weirdly sacred to me and the foundation of my school day.

            A lot of my activities are designed specifically for one person: internships, and working, and textbook studying, and writing, and generally being in my own world. I really worked hard to create that throughout my life. I made myself an outcast successfully and mostly enjoyed it. Sometimes it would strike me that I really had no friends outside of school, since most of my close buddies had dropped me when I dropped high school. I had one old, dear friend who I still saw, but we were never extremely close at any point. On any given day, I  wouldn’t have any kind of meaningful or elongated conversation with anyone in my age range. I spent all day ignoring my classmates and had no friends outside of school. This suited all of my school work and interests nicely, but the occasional  nights when I’d go to sleep crying would concern me a little.

            It was all starting to get to me in a very real way when I met all of the right people and my routine flipped. Sometimes I’d wonder if it was just me who put people off and didn’t deserve companions. I knew that it was just plain hard to make friends in a small community and if I wanted to, I’d have to go out into the world in some way (that‘s exactly what I did, as well). But still, everyone has to wonder about that sometimes. I’ve heard that good people naturally attract other good people. This brings me heart years later when I look at the wonderful, inspiring people I’ve surrounded myself with  and my previous concern is put to rest.

            I’ve even began to accept my fellow students for the individuals that they are. I realize that part of my avoidance of them was just an age issue that I’ve managed to grow out of. I’m no longer so stuck up or inflexible or unwilling to deal with disagreements and people who don’t share my views. It’s not a mini utopia in Room C yet by any means, but we’re nicer to each other than we were even a year ago. Being overly angry was a fad. Just like swing dancing.

            When you’re all grown up and ready to move on up in the world, we ask our students to complete a graduation process. This says that you believe that you’re ready to go on to college, or get a job, or basically become an adult, and you’re willing to show this by completing a set of individualized challenges that test your ability to reflect on and understand where you’re coming from and where you’re going. Anyone could begin their graduation process at any time, but since the staff vote yay or nay on whether they think you’re ready to start, it’s pretty unlikely that the opportunist eight year old will make it very far. This is what we’ve designed to replace the idea of a regular graduation in a standardized school. I think ours is a bit more thought out. And challenging. Just saying.

            We don’t just want to send our students out into the big, bad world without any ceremony or recognition. We also didn’t want to ask nothing of them- after all, the world is big and bad. It’s beneficial for them to take at least a half a year and reflect on what they know and what they want to do with themselves once they’re gone. Now, I can’t verify this, but I’ve heard that in public school you only have to pass a couple of tests or show up to a certain amount of classes or something like that. Oh, and walk across a stage. Pooh-shah. How does that show you’re ready to act like an adult in your community?

            A big time suck this past year has been my own graduation process.  I’m a big kid and get to graduate from high school and go out into the world and be an actual-factual adult. I’m excited about it, too! Sadly though, graduating takes a hell of a lot of time. I keep wondering how I can get out of this massive workload, but it’s actually helping me know more about myself and grow as a person and all of that crap, so I suppose it’s a good thing. Whatever. It’s cutting into my reality TV time. Well, that’s when I work on it at home. It turns out the graduation process is an excellent thing to undertake during school hours because what else would you be doing? Sure, I suppose I have three hours to devote to collaging or emailing people or writing. Why not? Those sneaky staff members planned it that way, I can just tell. Tricky, tricky. 

Elementary School Skills?

Check out this fantastic imagination of what life would be like if the skills drilled in elementary school were actually pertinent. I LOL'd a bit.

How Life Would Be Different (If Grade School Was Actually Important)

Duct-Taping Your Butt To A Chair - Building: A School

            Above the front entrance hangs a small wooden cross, symbolizing someone’s unity with God- certainly not ours. This is an immovable holdover from the previous occupants of the building, the Catholic Church we’re renting space from. In the current space, there aren’t any other such reminders gracing the walls, but I’ve heard that this is a new thing. The old building apparently had a large gold-streaked portrait of Jesus and a ‘count with angels’ number poster and alphabet. They were mandatory wall fixtures, whether for official Church use or for our own good.

            The door thing’s okay though. Our building is on the side of an ugly, busy street and there is a too-official looking fire exit right on the side of this road that everyone tries to use at least once before being yelled at by whatever staff member catches you. My first day started this way and so did a lot of my peers’. So if you’re lucky enough to already be in the loop about our school, you won’t be confronted with a cross on your first visit because you’ll have come in the right door. By the time everyone else knows to use the actual front entrance, they’ll already know that we have nothing to do with that little blessing.

            The people running the church are nice and understanding of our situation, being a school with sporadic financial trouble. The board of directors say that we’re current in our payments to them, but I just don’t buy that. I feel like we should owe them thousands in in uncollected rent after watching the VFS‘s budget over the past three years. It’s probably just plain robbery, but I won’t say anything.

            The building itself has some issues. The paint is chipping. The oven doesn’t work. The basement smells like, well, old basement. The circuits blow if you have the radio, the water boiler, and the toaster oven plugged in at the same time. One Monday we were attempting to make a simple brunch of bagels and toast when we were kicked out of the downstairs by a committee trying to set up something or other. We moved the operation upstairs, plugged in all of our necessary equipment and then watched an outlet spark and the whole room go dark. Someone was dispatched to flip the circuit breaker, and in the time it took them to walk back upstairs and enter the doorway, we had performed the same feat a second time. They went back and we decided as a room what appliances were the most important. Coffee, bagels and jazz music were deemed the most necessary items for enjoying ourselves, and for the rest of the morning we sat in almost complete darkness, still in our group circle, very quietly while Louie Armstrong tooted out some notes to accompany our chewing and sipping.

            Slightly more dangerous, the ceiling has a habit of falling in on us. Anyone who’s spent time in an older building is familiar with that ominous creaking and small snapping sounds that come from walking on the floors above ground level. I always thought that us kids would make the main floor fall in on the basement, and that there would be irreparable damage, either to the building that we don’t own or to someone’s life. There are no rules against running, jumping, having dance contests, throwing tantrums, or hurling hundred-pound objects onto the floor  in our building, so guess what we do? The only rule along those lines is that there are no ‘wheels’ allowed inside, except for those Heely shoes that were voted acceptable by ASM a few years ago. By the time the teenage boys had outfitted their skateboards with rubber wheel-shaped pegs that allow for performing skate tricks inside, I thought for sure an earthquake-style implosion was going to happen any day. Whenever they would “skate” in the old Room C and I could hear the Room A class below us innocently having percussion class in the music room, I would beg the boys to stop, stop, stop, before disaster struck.

            Imagine my surprise when a year later, it finally did, but in a most unexpected way. I was in the arts studio and a student exited the room, pulling the door shut behind them. A second later there was a deafening crash from the opposite corner. I turned to see six square feet of school-grade ceiling tile come crashing down onto the desk that thankfully, held no students. I was amazed that some mundane activity like shutting a door had done us in, and on the roof where no kid could have jumped down to cause a collapse. The arts studio was closed for a couple of weeks while the room was repaired, and for the next month everyone was really careful about shutting doors with a feather’s touch when they were gearing up for their synchronized jumping jack tournaments.

            Despite some structural flaws, I’ve heard that this set-up is much, much better than the previous arrangement.  The church allowed us to move up in building size during our fourth year of existence when the number of kids we had exceeded the amount of square feet they were on. They had crammed the roughly thirty kids into a two room setup, with only a small closet serving as an office. No homerooms, no libraries, labs, or art rooms which every school should have, no real organization. I can see how this was appealing at first to a fledgling democratic school where the ideal is to have an un-segregated student body and a cohesive mix of ages and activities. In real life though, teenagers, ten year olds, and kindergarteners just don’t belong in the same room every day of the school year. I’m glad I never saw this old set-up considering my biggest problem is my fellow students being in my face. That might have turned me right off.

            So these past groups of students managed not to personally tear the school to the ground, but the new batch are looking to succeed where others failed. We had a life skills class this past year in Room C that was a huge hit. It was the only class being offered at the time that had a pass/fail requirement stamped on it with certain projects to complete in order to stay the course. Along with many other cool challenges, each student was asked to learn or become comfortable with a practical life skill every week, like cooking a family dinner from scratch or filling out a job application. We all got to pick what skill we wanted to do and then share back with the group on our progress if we weren’t done. Two tweenagers explained how, as a joint venture, they were going to repair a hole in a wall that week. They reported that neither of them had any prior experience with this, but they had looked up exactly how to do it and had acquired the appropriate supplies. “Well great, boys! So where is the hole that you’re going to repair?” gushed our teacher. She was so proud of them. The boys beamed back. Very practically, one explained “We’ve got that covered.” “Yeah,” his friend added, “we’re about to make it.” He held up a long wooden pole with a slightly sharpened end.

*  *  *

             Surprisingly, it’s a trend amongst alternative schools to rent space from churches. We all have limited money and they have extra space that they won’t charge an arm and a leg for. I spoke with people from other free schools and they also had rented space from various religious worshipping centers before being able to buy their own spot of land.

            The coolest school building I’ve seen so far has belonged to the Brooklyn Free School. They managed to buy their own five story brown-stone right in the middle of Brooklyn, New York, and it is the most amazing set-up. I went to stay in New York City last year and got to visit this wonderful place. Each floor is designed for a different age group, with the bottom level serving as a lunch area and rec room. The higher you climb, the older the ages are until you reach the very top floor where they’ve tucked in a lovely, fully stocked library with a view of the neighborhood. I guess the reward for climbing all the way up there is to have silence. Despite this being an actual residential building with just a lot of average sized rooms, they’ve created: a rumpus room, with netting on the walls and bars on the windows; two art rooms, for bigger and smaller kids; a library, as I’ve mentioned; a kitchen down on the bottom floor; and an office space. That’s along with the many other rooms (many more than we have) for various purposes and classroom uses. It felt a little like The Burrow out of Harry Potter, the way it twisted up and up with new surprises at every level. And because free schools always feel slightly claustrophobic from the many little bodies whizzing past you, leaving their playthings all around, this rambling building felt smaller than it really was. In my mind, I remember it getting more compact as you reached the top, Eiffel Tower style, just from experiencing everything as you go.

            Although, being an older building and having not just one, but five levels of free school hanging above your head made being in the downstairs a bit terrifying at times. There was so much more potential for a cave in that I found myself embarrassingly covering my head when something would crash three floors above.

            The Brooklyn Free School was featured on by the NPR radio show, This American Life in 2011. The episode was all about when kids take charge from adults, and the host, Ira Glass, went to the school and reported on their unique democratic structure. He sounded slightly skeptical when describing the ASM he witnessed and the way the students interacted with one another. The funny thing was, the radio crew almost wasn’t allowed to come because they had to be voted acceptable by the students to be on campus. Ira was shocked by this, and I thought it was a beautiful example of the power that the student body really holds in democratic schools. We were all so happy at the VFS to hear of a kin free school getting national attention and excited that we actually knew people who were on ‘This American Life.’ Alternatively, we gritted our teeth over not having contacted the host back two years earlier when we had sent in a request to be featured. He said he was interested and that we should send in a video documenting ourselves for him to bring to committee and make a decision on our potential. Of course, we never did, and spent a while griping about not having a video camera and then not knowing how to work it and then not having the time. Damn our ability to get nothing done!

            A free school with a more similar look is our good friends to the North, Windsor House School. Their public appointed building looks nice, not old and decrepit like most school buildings I’ve seen in my own district. When I visited their school recently, I was amazed at how similar they were to the VFS. Everything was basically the same, down to the days of the various meetings and the appearance of the population. There were just more of them, the students that is, and in a much nicer building. It has a few more classrooms than ours does (enough to have rooms just designated as ‘classroom’) and also has just one main hallway, like us.

             They also have real things, seeing as they’re a public school. A library that’s an entire room crowded to the brim with real books. A high-quality gymnasium (unlike the wooden beamed one the Church lets us use) with actual sports equipment that came with it. There was a performance space with a backstage and lights and a curtain that wasn’t sewn together by a group of mothers one afternoon. But the most enviable thing: central heating. That’s right…They have central heating in EVERY room and it comes on every day ALL EXPENSES PAID! I know! The rule at our school is that, the shoddy heating system can be turned on as soon as you see your breath. Even then, you wait half an hour for it to warm up, it begins blowing out cold air after two hours of power, and you listen to our executive director grumbling about all of the money this is costing throughout the whole time. Then he tells us that to pay for it we’ll have to go home late on Christmas Eve and he’ll be freezing us to death in order to decrease the surplus population.

            I also fancy their music room. I’m not sure if I’ve stated yet how much I detest our own one. Along with opening windows and performing indoor skate tricks, the teenage boys also loved to blast music from that large closet down in the basement. In the days when Room C was located right above this room, the electric guitars and bases and pianos and drums could not only be heard as if we were at a concert, but could be felt vibrating through our beings, straight through the floor. It was insane.

            But at Windsor House, the music room is kept in their only portable outside of the school building. On the first day of my visit, my friend and I (also from the VFS) were excitedly shown around by another teenage girl who was one of the earlier risers at her school. We had arrived on campus just before the district bus arrived carrying most of the student body, which also ranged from ages 5 to 18. She agreed to give us a tour, and then, just in time to be the figurines in the exhibit, the school bus kids flooded the building. After their arrival, she became extra excited and giggly at the prospect of showing us the music room, which was located inside a portable about thirty feet away from a side entrance.

            As soon as we stepped outside we could hear the thumping of a drum and the lower notes of some electric guitar spilling out into the nine o’clock sunshine. We walked inside the room and left the bright morning behind. It was cave-like in there and far, far too loud. Two teenage boys were pounding their hearts out on those instruments, making up for the past eighteen hours that they hadn’t been together in their rock-n’-roll den. This was not the most ideal way to start the day and my friend and I soon exited the room, leaving the girl behind to bob  her head and listen attentively to the ear splitting ruckus. But the fact that the main school building couldn’t hear a note of this was a truly marvelous thing, something that our school should definitely learn from.

            Windsor House School is forty years old and has always been a free school, but when things got financially hard a while back, they joined with the local school district to mixed reviews. The major change is that all high school aged students must receive at least four credits worth of classes a year, meaning that those students MUST take classes in order for Windsor House to receive funding. Yikes. And those classes have to be school-sanctioned, you know, like taught by certified teachers out of district approved textbooks and all that jazz. So you couldn’t just take “My Little Pony Playtime”, “Zombie Movie Madness”, “Basketball in the Gym,” and “Spiderman Appreciation Hour.” The biggest benefit of this arrangement is that these students also have the ability to get a real high school diploma if they want to go all out and take a full course load. I spoke with some of the students who were saying this was too much to ask of them, but I eagerly told them, “hey, at least you have the option!”

            Windsor House is located in North Vancouver, B.C. (which is actually an entirely different city than just plain, old Vancouver) on the side of a large hill covered in wilderness. The suburb surrounds this entire area, but from a visitor’s perspective it’s hard to see where the forest starts and the town begins. It’s all kind of intermingled. That also means that they have the wild at their fingertips, literally at the end of their field area which morphs directly into the side of the hill and the trees.

            So unlike in our part of the Pacific NW where we only have your typical Fire Drills and Earthquake Drills, they get to have annual Bear Drills. You know, just in case a nearby vicious animal wanders onto their field and tries to eat a small child. I didn’t get to see a Bear Drill in action so unfortunately I personally don’t know how to protect myself against a bear attack, but the idea itself provided endless amusement. I would look out across the field and just think that we were actually close enough to the Canadian outback that there was a real possibility of being accosted by a huge furry mammal while playing tag at school. Everyone there had bear stories to share about their own experience with those creatures all around the Vancouver area. It was kind of unfathomable. It just proved that I was in a foreign city. They didn’t have Bear Drills at the Brooklyn Free School. Canada should really move into the twenty-first century.

            I feel like stressing that my own school does actually have all of the normal amenities of a ‘regular’ school- just different. I mention being jealous of some of the things that the other schools have, but that’s only because they strike my fancy more than others. Like, I’m totally willing to sacrifice Room B to put in a huge, fully stocked library. And then forcing all children under the age of fifteen into forced labor to build an actual stage and auditorium in the basement. I also wouldn’t object to selling all of Room A’s toys in order to buy an espresso machine for the café. Yeah. But I will point out that we’re the only school with a fully stocked science lab, complete with an actual-factual scientist manning the chemicals and equipment. Our art studio is always overflowing (in an organized way) with new supplies and fun donated items that inspire a lot of amazing projects. The kitchen downstairs, despite being slightly leaky and broken, is huge and can hold entire classes of kids. We have a rock wall, a composting system and bin, large school grade bathrooms, and before the financial crisis, we had a honkin’ big salt water aquarium downstairs with all sorts of fun things, like a seahorse and an octopus and every kind of brightly colored fish you could want. Hopefully we’ll get all of that back when our budget stabilizes.

            Because the space isn’t ever quite what we want it to be, we play musical rooms every summer. Since moving into the new building, we’ve changed our classroom arrangements before the start of each new school year in hopes of solving whatever new bout of problems came up during the last one. Usually it’s the staff deciding that the population of one room has outgrown the space or needs a more cozy atmosphere. One year Room C was moved across the building into a space described as “more cave like” by the staff. Unsurprisingly, we are the only room that no longer plays along in the annual event, having found the perfect space for us brooding teens. The last time around, the goal was to create a rumpus room from the large area that used to be called The Living Room. This was the designated quiet spot for parents to meet, classes to be held in peace, kids to calm down, and a spot to generally be mellow in ( not that it was always used for this of course, but I’ve gone in there plenty of times and spent perfectly quiet hours without a soul around.) Now, it’ll be a designated loud space to be even louder than usual in and “get out all of your energy, so that you can be calm in the homerooms.”  So now we have the usual crazyness happening in thee homerooms and in the place where we used to be able to go to escape all of that.

            Sharing the same campus as a church isn’t as remarkable as it could be. We see no pastors in robes, overzealous congregation members, or long bell solos calling us to prayer. Sometimes we get the somewhat lost older person who comes wandering through our doors. “I’m here for the service,” they say, or, “I’ve come to volunteer.” The person behind the desk in the office balks, “Well, okay…I don’t remember speaking to you on the phone. How did you hear about our school?” It takes both parties a few moments of confused staring and false starts to then realize that the gray haired woman with the rosary in her hand is looking for the church and not our own non-profit. It’s the cross above the door. We should really talk to them about that.

            A few years back we made it in good with a city planner or developer or general politician that someone was introduced to at some event. We have a lot of random connections in our community that are always coming and going with the families themselves. People always show up at the next circle meeting bursting with the big news about who they recently met and how this relationship might benefit the school. That makes us sound like we go out into the community only to trick people into friendships with false pretenses. Not true. We’re just a lot of people who happen to know a lot of other people. And if those people can help us, then… So, okay.

            This city person liked our school so much that he talked to us about a possible development in our area that would house a new space for our school. He showed us his plans to build a huge environmentally friendly building a few blocks away from our current location that would have everything we could want.  It would be the new bees knees of the neighborhood that’s been thinking about gentrification for a while now and hasn’t quite made up it’s mind about whether to go through with it. All he needed was this proposition to pass in the next city vote and the building was as good as ours. Unfortunately, the proposition was to demolish a massive city park that’s been there since the neighborhood’s inception and is a local favorite amongst little league teams and even our own students, who go there to frolic. It’s probably a good thing it didn’t pass. Whatever.

            It’s been really fun to visit free school’s in other parts of the country and to contemplate what it would be like to go to school in those cities. Having off campus permission in New York City where Manhattan is a thirty minute subway ride away would be pretty sweet. That’s how I felt about Portland during my first year of free school, mainly because I had never had that kind of freedom. “I don’t care if I can go to the library at any other time of the day! I want to go now!” Actually, back then I was really dissatisfied with my home town and told everyone I knew that I was moving to New York as soon as I possibly could. Portland was the dullest place I had ever been to and I honestly didn’t see how my parents weren’t also pulling their hair out and trying to run away as fast as they could. It only took a little while for the freedom effect to wear off and I soon exercised my off-campus privileges much less liberally.

            Now, I’m mostly in a denying field-trips phase. Other children are always chomping at the bit to get out of the building and explore the city, but whenever possible adventures are suggested, I generally always pass. “Seeing a show downtown? No thanks, I did that yesterday.” “The Nickel Arcade? How old do you think I am?” “For the last time, I’m not going inner-tubing down the side of Mt. Hood and then getting hot cocoa in the lodge! Stop asking!” The field trips always do sound kind of amazing and if I didn’t get out of the house so much already, I probably would be game for a lot of them. Except all of the screaming kids go, too. That’s kind of a bummer. I’m imagining that the museums and the shows and the hikes would are a lot less enjoyable when you’re surrounded by half of my school. That just doesn’t do it for me. Instead, I hang out at school while almost everyone else leaves, which gives me the peace and quiet I need in order to get work done. Field trip days are usually my most productive by far.

            The school itself is really close to one of the grossest streets in Portland, so local field trips are pretty much out. There’s a Fred Meyer’s right on that street that is pretty safe so long as you get in and out quickly and back onto our side of 82^nd. I mean, the druggies in the area aren’t too bad, but most of them hang around the plasma center, conveniently located right next to the closest library so there are no trips there either. It’s usually better to just not leave the school grounds unless you’re on your way to a different neighborhood because between the men walking around with that jean-pocket limp, the prostitutes, and the clouds of orange toxic waste floating by (I’m surprised we weren’t evacuated that day, but the City of Portland wanted us indoors, not out) you soon realize you’re in a place you shouldn’t be spending time in anyway.

            This is sad for some of the teens who are just starting to get their sea legs and go out a bit more on their own. I’d imagine they’d hang around the area and move on from there, but we’ve covered that issue. So they’re left to go straight into the city which is sometimes a big deal. Many studens are just learning how to bus on their own. I watch them staring at the Portland bussing website, as if by looking at it the long enough the information would be burned into their brains.

            They were planning this bus trip across town and it was their first time going alone. The staff told them to call while on the bus and once they arrived at their destination. My parents arranged this rule for me during my first year at VFS and I hated it. It felt so patronizing to an independent girl like me, that I would purposefully do all of my trips before or after arriving on campus so that I wouldn’t officially be on school time, and therefore didn’t have to be embarrassed. These kids needed it though, and seemed slightly more anxious than the staff. With directions in hand and worried looks a plenty, they set off into Portland, never to be heard of again. That hour. They called an hour later, lost, and the staff helped them and it all worked out in the end. But, yeah.

            One might be surprised that groups of teenagers can walk around during the day and not get stopped by police. My biggest concern when I was younger was always that I was going to get stopped and questioned about why I wasn’t in school. We didn’t have school ID’s during my first year so if we got stopped, our instructions were to have the cop call the school’s office number and speak to a staff member. Being afraid of any kind trouble, this idea horrified me and I was always on my toes when I saw an officer during any of my outings. I think this has only ever happened once or twice with our students. That’s why I was highly amazed when, years later, I visited the Brooklyn Free School and the police arrived on two separate occasions that morning to drop off loose children. I guess New York has a bit more of a street hooligan problem. I can’t imagine why.

            There are a lot of amazing places in town that make me excited that we’re located here. I tell my friends about the trips we all take on school time and they all just roll their eyes, completely scoffing at the idea that any of this is real. “You’re school couldn’t really do that and call it a field trip. Really.” They’re just jealous that taking field trips in public school requires so much work that it’s never worth it anyway. Yes, some of our choices are odd, but our goal is to have fun. Why make everything academic and serious when we don’t have to? Along with all of the unusual places, we hit up some of the children’s top 10 for the city, you know, with museums and children’s theater and what not. The only nontraditional thing that I’ve seen any similarity between us and public school was a regular ol’ trip downtown just to hang out. Every once in a while we let our kids run loose amongst the food carts, stores and parks. I equate these kind of trips to the pit-stops my parents used to take on road-trips when I was a toddler. They would stop in a rest area and literally ’run me’, sending me around trees and made up obstacle courses to let out energy. We have to ‘run’ our students every once in a while.

            “Oh, yeah. We do that sometimes. For no reason, right? Just to look at it?” I laughed when my boyfriend told me this. He lives in a suburb outside of Portland and is my first close friend ever to do so. I don’t know much about suburban life because of that and it was weird to think that all of these children are in the city so little that they need field trips to see it. I kind of assumed everyone drove into the city everyday for a little bit anyway just because. I would. But because of his hobbies and general awesomeness, he finds himself in the city quite a bit, so the thought of teachers from his school trucking him all the way downtown just to be a tourist was pretty amusing.

            One more really great thing about being in Portland is the culture that’s already here. The words hippie, hipster, progressive, accepting, young, young at heart, green, organic, and biker friendly are thrown around a lot. It’s not hard for our school to fit in here like it might be in, let’s say, a small mid-western town. I’ve gotten a lot of enthusiastic if not interested responses to my school while explaining it which I know wouldn’t always be the case. Everyone generally has something nice to say about it, or how smart the idea of it is, or how much fun it would be, or something along the lines of “good for you for doing your own thing! You must be so smart.   

            I’m just happy that I don’t have to spend all of my time defending myself. The most proving-my-worth I have to do always takes place with my judging peers who are intimidated by how interesting free school sounds and then must bring it down by exposing its flaws. Jerks. It would just be hell to have to do this with all of the grown-ups in my life, people who I look up to and would hate to have think of me in a bad light. I’m sure a lot more of them do than let on, but maybe all of the progressiveness in the air and the organic ingredients in their lunch make them willing to hear me out and try to understand. Just the fact that the Catholic church in our down and out neighborhood is willing to accept us and put up with our shenanigans is a wonder. So, thank you, Portland.  

Duct-Taping Your Butt To A Chair - The People, Part 2

            My mother’s favorite story about the people at VFS is a little something we like to call ‘Beets for Beards’. It all started out as a simple morning meeting discussion, one of our usual random bits of sharing amongst the students. Our Room C advisor at the time, Jackson, was rocking what might have been a slight hangover and a scruffy unshaved face. “I wasn’t able to shave this morning; I really hate this.” He uttered this from his seat in the circle as he scowled across at us from over his second cup of coffee. His twenty-four hour shadow was surprisingly full and amusing for us who had never seen him with anything gracing his facial region.

            “Well, I really like you with that beard. You look so cool,” an older student (we’ll call him Dan) admitted from across the room. Everyone quickly agreed and rounds of compliments for our favorite staff member issued forth. “I like it a lot!” “Yeah, you should grow it out!” Jackson stared us all down, giving a resounding “no” with his slightly bloodshot eyes. “It itches,” he said. “It’s scratchy and it’s ugly. No.” But we weren’t done.

            “Could we pay you to grow it out for a week?” Dan offered. The answer was still no, but Jackson thought a little harder before adding, “how would you like to do the thing you hate most everyday for a week? And then have that thing living on your face for the rest of the day?”

            “Ooh! You should make him eat beets!” a girl in the back quipped. We all ooh-ed and ah-ed with agreement. It was widespread knowledge for no particular reason that Dan’s least favorite food was (and probably still is) beets. I don’t blame him. Beets are a very offensive root.

            The next day, Jackson went out and bought about twenty cans of Fred Meyer brand pickled beets in a variety of fun cuts and set them on a shelf overlooking all of Room C. The agreement was this: for everyday that Jackson grew his beard out further, Dan would eat half a can of beets first thing in the day during morning meeting. This provided endless amusement for Room C students. It was almost too much to watch one of our suavest older males pucker and gag over opening the eerily colorful can with a rusty can opener and dig into his breakfast. He wasn’t allowed anything to wash the taste of dirt out of his mouth during the whole mess. The worst days, reportedly, were when he had a can of balled beets, the kind manufactured with something like a melon-baller that came in these bigger than bite sized clumps. We’d hold our breath as he squinted his eyes, plugged his nose, and bit off a chunk of beet, leaving trails of purple juice down the sides of his mouth.

            Sometimes funnier would be Jackson, sitting by and watching like a wronged king punishing the criminal at court. Dan’s gasps of pain were not enough for him. According to Jackson, the gross itching carpet on his face was much worse to live with than a few bites of beet in the morning. “I’m in pain!” he’d complain, and we’d all simply nod, knowing full-well that he could stop this whenever he wanted. He must have been enjoying this too and didn’t want to see the experiment end.

            All good things must come to an end though, and there were twelve cans of beets left on the shelf by the time it was all over. Jackson came into school with a face as whisker free as a babies, the kind that teenage boys grimace at every morning in the mirror. Dan could have done a better job of hiding his relief during morning meeting, but was also obviously sad to see the fun come to a close. He had won. We saw who the true man was, although our advisor was pretty adamant about the unfair circumstances of the bet.

            This staff member- Jackson, or “if you actually write that book, call me Bob”- should really be given some credit. Jackson has been one of the most influential people in building our school over the years and comes with the most amazing stories. It’s hard not to when you’re twenty-three and already executive director of a non-profit. It sounds like a really awful business move on the community’s part for hiring a twenty-three year old to be in charge of the whole thing, but you’d understand if you could meet him. No, I’m serious. Having had him as a teacher these past three years, I can say he has this way of talking that enlightens the words themselves. He’s incredibly intelligent and talked his way into an advisor position at the age of eighteen. No one’s looked back since. When we were searching for a new director last year and some other options fell through, there was really no one else to turn to besides Jackson. It’s been a hard year for him leading the pack and I haven’t seen him much, since he’s been holed up in his little office, but I like to remember his truly shining moments when he was a staff member a few years back.

            His first grand moment wasn’t even when I was around. I’ve heard of a school dance one year where he showed up with 200 condoms from Planned Parenthood and began flinging them across the dance floor at the teens who were bumpin’ and grindin’. That was his version of ‘safe chaperoning’. The younger kids began opening the condoms, slipping them all the way onto their small feet, and skating across the wooden floor.
            During my first few months at the VFS, he definitely topped himself. When I told my boyfriend this particular tale, he seemed to be in shock, all of a sudden stammering about “the-the normal field trips that normal kids take, Leslie. Normal teachers just don’t do that. Dear God, why can’t you just be normal?” This is an adventure that I don’t usually recount, just because I’m worried of getting reactions like that, or worse.

            It’s not really as bad as it sounds. A bunch of us teens were talking about how much fun it will be to go clubbing when we’re of legal age and how it sounds like quite the experience. Jackson chimed in that there were such things as underage clubs and that with our parents’ permission, we could all find out what clubbing is like right now! It was a school field trip, and we brought signed permission slips the night we all met at his house to go on our super awesome adventure. We piled into his car and drove right downtown to the shittiest area right off of Burnside, where you can’t tell the street kids from the club-goers in the rising moonlight. Oh yeah, it was a LGBT underage club, as well. That doesn’t make it different than any other club, I’d imagine, what with the thumping music, the fighting off of unwanted sexy dancing partners (we were on school time, after all), the sweaty bodies all crammed into what feels like the only spot left in the entire world, except that you also get drag shows starting at around three a.m. The lesbian rappers were pretty awful, but the lip-synching divas were about as fierce as they come. Maybe I was just tired, seeing as it was creeping towards four in the morning, but by the time “I Will Survive” was being belted by a queen in a purple sequined gown, I was in seventh-heaven. Jackson lead us bleary-eyed kids back to the car soon after, and we ended up crashing in his living room as arranged by our parents.

            A lot of club-goers were taking his Religions class that year and were having an excellent time being lectured at. Unfortunately, the ability to take these crazy, kick-ass field trips at any time of the day without planning sometimes wins out over weekly standing plans. A fellow staff member decided that he really needed a Voodoo doughnut, like, immediately, and proposed a field trip across town on the double. Of course we were all going to go, I mean, duh, but Jackson wasn’t too happy. He had spent quite a while preparing the lesson plans, he told us while sipping from his fourth cup of coffee that day, and he didn’t want to be put a class behind in his syllabus. “Fine,” he grumbled, “whatever.” And we were free. Free school teachers usually know not to try and stop these kind of unexpected hindrances, but we all felt guilty for abruptly taking off.

            On our way to the donut shop, we decided to bring Jackson back a treat so that he might forgive us. It seemed only natural, going to a store that specializes in weird, questionably edible creations, that we should bring him back something bizarre that he might appreciate with his mostly fun-loving personality. When we got to the store, the answer was staring up at us from its shiny rotating platform. The item was purchased (with an extra touch added to make it appropriate for the subject of the class) with pooled money and we hastened back to our religions class, only about an hour late. He protested at first, calling us deserters, but we quickly turned into dessert-ers as we proudly presented him with the best present any one of us had ever given: a half foot long cock and balls shaped piece of dough with the words “Jackson loves Jesus” scripted in pink frosting on top. He loved it. All was forgiven.

            Jackson is one of the best teachers we’ve ever had. He knows how to get people’s attention with whatever’s at hand and is a natural at coming up with creative ways to do things. Students have always loved taking his classes because he’s so interested in whatever he has to say. He was the person to tell me this next story and I was kind of surprised that anyone wouldn’t want him on their team.

            When the school was just starting out, the adults in the community had to come up with emergency evacuation drills for everyone to follow according to state law. They followed the formula for fire and earthquake emergencies, vacating the building and all that jazz. Then, a few concerned students came forward with concerns regarding their safety. Apparently, the staff had failed to prepare for the most dangerous threat: a zombie apocalypse. A team of students was dispatched to form an emergency plan of action. They spent the next week interviewing everyone in the building about what skills they might bring to the survivors team if we were to be infiltrated by the undead. Things like having good aim, and being able to start a fire without matches were highly prized. They asked Jackson this, and in true fashion, he said he was really good at analyzing data and graphing. When the committee presented their plan, they assigned everyone jobs in case of attack based upon their various skills. At the end, the group marched up to Jackson and said very matter-of-factly, “Sorry, but you’re left behind.”

            Even better was when he was put in charge of organizing Adventure Week: Spring 10 and took it very seriously. Usually staff just arrange field trips which take enough time as it is, but Jackson really wanted to try something different. No one actually knew what was going on while he pieced together the week’s plan with the help of the other staff members. It wasn’t until the Monday of Adventure Week that he gathered up all of the older kids for a special pre-Morning Meeting meeting.

            “We’re doing a Medieval Simulation and you all are the royalty. Your job is to sit in the castle all week and make fun of the peasants. Don’t make eye contact with the serfs. The younger kids are going to move up in the feudal system over the next few days-shut up! I know that’s not how it worked- by completing tasks you set forth and earning points. Go put on dresses and robes and for Gods sake, go find some armor because you’ll never defeat the Vikings this afternoon without some. I want you in the castle in fifteen minutes. Oh, and at one o’clock, a dragon’s attacking. Go!”

            This was the first we had heard about any of this. As far as we knew, we were all going to OMSI or Powell’s, or Voodoo again if we were lucky. But our standing around in confusion changed when someone in the back yelled, “well…Charge!” and everyone rushed out of the room in giddy excitement. The costume room was quickly desecrated as we threw on anything that looked vaguely historical (togas, fairy costumes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, poodle skirts) and we tromped onto the stage, which had been turned into a fancy castle-esque room over the weekend. Jackson came downstairs carrying a purple full-length robe and plastic golden crown.

            “Places!” he cried, and we all scrambled to guess what that meant. A few people lounged across couches while others took sat on thrones of their own, as Jackson was now doing. Excuse me- King Jackson, as he was addressed to the ‘peasants’ who were presently lead downstairs by the other staff.

            Once they were all seated in the rows of chairs that had also appeared on stage over the weekend, Jackson barked at the first row to “come kiss my ring!” The five came up and did so, as he grimaced and scoffed at each kiss on the gaudy ring now adorning his finger.

            “Now,” he began, “welcome to my Kingdom. I am King Jackson, and you are lowly, dirty, smelly peasants.” He pretended to read off of a scroll until he got too into character and began excitedly pacing. The rules of the simulation were explained, kids were grouped into families to go and build lives together, and a parent stood by getting it all on video. “You will do our bidding,” he said, gesturing to us behind him. “You will spend the day making your houses and planting your crops. Those of you with special jobs better do them well or you will be beheaded. Serfs can expect no lunch break. Also, there was a dragon spotted in the neighboring kingdom, so I’d watch your back. Now get out of my sight!” With that, the kids were dismissed to construct little child sized cardboard houses and to begin earning their points. Royalty got to walk around the countryside critiquing construction and trampling on construction paper fields. When the dragon attacked, noble warriors who had been chosen beforehand were given weapons of the foam stick and plastic light saber kind. Everyone else filed outside while the brave few practiced their fighting indoors, like soldiers beneath the coliseum.

            Outside, it was revealed the dragon was of the car-horn variety. The task was to complete some unremarkable activity while blindfolded after being lead over towards where Jackson had parked his car. While attempting the task, Jackson would honk his car horn only ten feet away and the child would drop their task out of utter terror and lose the match.

            Car-horn dragon. A new favorite game. The sadistic surprise never got old and we all enjoyed watching our ten-year-old friends get the shit scared out of them. That was, until the Vikings attacked. From the opposite side of the field where they were unseen by the crowd, our school’s interns and a handful of teenage boys came tearing across the field screaming to wake the dead (or the neighbors who were probably beginning to wonder what the hell was going on at the damn hippie school today.) Dressed in Viking helmets and properly padded with skateboarding gear, they were tackled to the ground by the kids almost instantly.

            Every day that week resembled the first one. The fate of the final one was to be voted on by the peasants themselves. Jackson offered them the choice between a ball to celebrate their hard work or a revolution against the feudal system, following the French method (we had moved a good 500 years forward since Monday). Being a democratic school, they chose a revolution that was mob-ruled, ending with a trial for each member  of royalty (that ended up looking surprisingly like an ASM) and a beheading. Newly elected guards rolled out a guillotine to finish us all off. I had caught some other teens constructing this on Jackson’s orders a few days earlier as he and guessed correctly where the final day might lead.  

            I would venture to guess that the Medieval Simulation was one of the most fun times we’ve all had at school. Of course, there are years I wasn’t there for and many moments that I’ve missed by sitting in a corner. Let’s also not forget that my sensibilities seem to be different than the people’s around me, so I suppose I actually will have to retract that statement. It’s one of the best, if not the best, times I’ve had at the VFS. And I thank Jackson for that.

            Then, of course, he became a malevolent dictator (I.e. executive director) and locked himself in his office until he fixed the budget and convinced someone to haul away the Christmas trees. Sure, he comes out occasionally, but only for brief appearances, like when he told us about the boy to girl ratio and when the ten year old put the mug in the microwave. He still has to evacuate in case of emergencies, so at least we see him then.

            And sometimes he needs to come out in order to help the school run. If he needs something done, he will come out of his man-cave long enough to make it happen. I’m thinking of the school-wide survey for all of the students on the performance of the staff for that year. The volunteers in charge of making it happen online were doing a poor job, and so he ventured out of his office to put signs on every door in the school, reading “One free cookie if you fill out the staff survey!!!! -Jackson” This was not a new trick; many volunteers before him have gotten much more student participation than that for the same price. The thing is, it works every time without fail. So they got the surveys properly filled out by almost every member of the student body (I wonder who forgot…*cough, cough*) and everything was happy. Students began asking him for the promised treats and he kept shuffling them out of the office, saying, “soon, soon.”

            A couple of months later and everyone had forgotten about the undelivered sweets except for one of our Room C advisors. Every week since the survey, she had been politely asking during morning meetings if we- they- had received their cookies, always in a conversational and lightly curious manner. After two months of this, she surprised everyone by asking once again and then becoming hugely disappointed when the answer was still no.

            “That isn’t right! He promised you cookies and something must be done. Let’s protest!” Everyone was slightly confused but highly eager, once prompted, to begin making signs and taping them all over their bodies. I sat by and watched as they came up with slogans. “Let them eat cookies”, “Make cookies, not war”, “Give me cookies, or give me death”, and quite simply, “Be a better boss.”  One of Jackson’s little sisters made a sign saying, “I’m telling mom,” while the other wrote, “you’re a horrible brother” in big letters all over her posters. They were armed and ready. I didn’t really see much point in participating if I wasn’t owed a cookie, so I chose to sit that one out. Not that I wouldn’t have anyway, but it was a convenient excuse.

            While rallying the Room C troops, it was decided that they would do a silent sit-in at first, just to annoy him. The hope was that he would cave in immediately so as not to be bothered, but in case he held out, they were going to bring in more people. Particularly, the Room A’ers. Who could say no to their sad, adorable faces? They would be ushered in by someone after a while if nothing happened. Then if needed, they would bring in Room B next.

            They marched forth down the hall and entered his office just as stoic as they were silent. I applauded all of my peers as they exited Room C for leaving me with an entire room all to myself while they calmly filed into a cramped closet at the opposite end of the building, closed the door, and sat in silence. It was what I had always dreamed of!

            Before I could kick-back and really let loose in that room (by reading a book, an unusual occurrence inside those four walls), the music started. I thought it was coming from Room A at first throwing another raucous dance party, but this bubble-gum pop was in even worse taste than their Miley Cyrus and Jonas Brothers. I poked my head out into the hall just as Justin Beiber began the chorus of his latest number one hit. The music was coming from all the way down the hall…in Jackson’s office. Really? My heart fell as I realized they couldn’t actually be quiet for any sustained amount of time. They were physically incapable of it. They had made something happen and yet again, the entire building was absolutely vibrating with obnoxious noise.  

            A Room B’er who had already investigated the scene came dashing down the hall towards me. “Jackson’s playing Justin Beiber to make them go away!” he shrieked with glee.

            “And is it working?” I asked.

            “I don’t know, they’re still all sitting there, and most of Room B has gone to join them.”  

            Soon, I saw little heads peeking out of the Room A doorframe to see what all the hub-bub was about, and they quickly began trickling out to join the fun. After fifteen minutes, the music hadn’t stopped. I couldn’t hold out any longer and had to go see for myself what the heck was going on. Inside the small office space, big enough for maybe ten people at most, the party was pumping. Jackson sat at his desk with an excellent poker face on, apparently completely absorbed with his computer screen and unaware of the six-years-olds coloring on the notepad next to his hand. It would be pretty hard to be unaware of the screeching music coming from his speaker set and the whole of Room C behind him though, carrying on as if it were any other occasion. Along with some Room B and A kids, they were drawing and talking, playing a board game and blasting their own music from a laptop- some horrible country song.

            I was only in there for a moment before Jackson whipped suddenly around in his chair to face the crowd. Some action stopped while others carried on, now completely oblivious to the reason why they were in there at all. It seemed like their moment had finally come. That was, until he shouted, “alright, for every five minutes more that you’re in here, you wait an extra day for your cookies. They’re coming on Monday. Now get lost.” The party seemed to slow down and kids began picking up their various forms of entertainment. The whole gang was gone within the minute and Jackson closed the door firmly behind them. They trailed back to their homerooms in a state of confusion- was this the outcome they had wanted?

            “So,” our teacher asked, looking up from the chapter book she was busy reading aloud from, “is he going to the store right now?” We had all figured that he would walk right down to the Fred Meyer groceries and be back within fifteen minutes, taking care of the problem quickly and efficiently. This had been the widely anticipated response.

            “Um, no. He said we get them on Monday.”

            “So, you…lost?”

            “Well, yes.”

            And after all of that effort and the whole big protest, they had really all lost. It’s the running joke in school to call Jackson a dictator and King Jackson just because of his very blunt, but effective way of keeping us all in check. However, his power is never truly appreciated until situations like this come along. Literally, the entire student body can be protesting inside of his office and he will still win the battle. It’s kind of amazing, actually.

            Being amazing, and not just in that formidable way, is a trait amongst Room C advisors, past and present. I know all of our staff members put up with a lot- and come to think of it, I’m sure dealing with the younger crowd is actually far worse- but it sure feels like the Room C folks put up with the most pure shit. I mean, who really wants to deal with a bunch of unresponsive teenagers who are constantly getting into fights and dating and breaking up and destroying furniture? There used to be an old coffee table that was falling apart and a staff member mentioned getting rid of it. So when they left the room, our skaters jumped on top of it on the count of three and the whole thing exploded in a cloud of woodchips and splinters. I sat in stunned disbelief literally two feet away, as this was the coffee table that our circle of couches surrounded. Then they picked up the biggest pieces and left the room as well, leaving a crash test site in their wake. Us teenagers, we’re all trouble.

            Our meetings are always unbelievable, as well. Our advisors stand up at the chalkboard for hours trying to coax any kind of reaction out of us to absolutely no avail.

            “We’re going to be making brunch on Monday, so what do you all want?” Silence. “Do you still want to make brunch?” Silence. “Is that a no?” One head shakes. “…Okay, so what do you want to make?” Silence. “Waffles? Pancakes? Breakfast burritos?” Silence. “Cereal? Turd Sandwiches?” No reaction. “Okay, moving on!”

            Every minute of every meeting follows this pattern. I feel bad and try to answer these insanely easy questions as much as possible, but I can’t be a prick and answer everything all the time. This is unfortunate because nothing ever gets said otherwise. I don’t know why being unresponsive is desirable, I can barely stand these meetings as much as our staff can. One time our advisors had a checklist going on the board for various items we wanted to get done throughout the week. They were trying and trying and trying to get us to participate in discussing these, and eventually one of them wrote “staring blankly at each other” at the very bottom and checked it off. It was the only one so far.

            And you see, this is not because of poor leadership which is what one would suppose from teachers in any other school. Our advisors are completely competent. It’s the environment of a free school to not be coercive, not to force anything out of students, to let them be. If they’re not going to talk, they’re not going to talk. Try again tomorrow.  So the staff are following the conventions of a free school, which just happen to make these meetings comparable to having hyenas ever so slowly gnawing at your flesh.

            They’ve tried to make it better this last year, because for some reason, this last year has been the most unresponsive yet. And we’ve had more tweenagers than ever before. Correlation? Yes. But our staff members have come up with all sorts of group bonding activities to try and break the arctic-grade ice that’s perpetually stopping communication amongst us kiddos. Part of the deal with only having two meeting days a week was that Monday was Room C brunch day- where we all go into the kitchen and prepare a feast for us to devour while meeting- and Wednesday was Wednesday Fun-day- where after we meet, we all play a surprise game-like activity arranged by the staff.  Brunch-day is the best because most of the time I like food more than I like my “room-mates.” On Wednesday we vote on what to make on Monday and it’s always something delicious. I was telling my friend about this and he got very confused when the list of menus started to sound only like dessert. “Wait, so you all had chocolate chip waffles and ice-cream?” “Yes, and cookies.” “But I thought cookies were last week?” “Only because it was Craig’s birthday. We just felt like having cookies this week, too.” “So what’s next week?” “A pie swap.”

            Wednesday fun-days usually include something like having board games out, Queen tribute air bands formed, or a group favorite happens, like ‘Bowl full of nouns” (I hate that game only because one week we played and penis was submitted for use five times). One Wednesday we had a “Getting Ready Relay Race,” where we had two teams going through all of the morning activities before coming to school. A balloon was shaved, cereal was fiercely gulped, tricycles were raced around traffic cones in the parking lot, and once the teams had arrived at school, I raced my friend in writing lines on the chalkboard. We spelled out “I will not be a cog in the machine,” ten times. I won. I have one extra year of public school on her, so…

            Towards the end of the year, Wednesday Fun-days became all about organizing a Room C trip. We’ve done this in years past, but only when the present advisors had taken on full responsibility for making it happen. This past year our advisors asked that we actually get off of our butts and make something that we want happen. Laughable, I know. But they were really adamant about this crazy scheme and turned Fun-days into time to plan fundraisers and make whatever tokens needed to be assembled for use. I sat out of ALL planning because I guessed correctly that this trip would never be taken and I was much more content to sit in my worn-in corner and read that day’s Willamette Week. The group decided to sell these things called “finger-pianos” at Last Thursday on Alberta Street to earn some income for their trip. They then spent weeks and weeks being coaxed by our staff to actually go and create those little pianos like they said they would. “I’m kind of busy listening to my ipod, maybe later?” they whined from their lounging positions on the couch. It made me tired just to hear the staff trying to get those kids into the arts studio. I’m so sure it took them less time to make one hundred pianos than it did for the staff to force them out of Room C. My growing belief that those kids would never pull this off was confirmed when the first Last Thursday selling attempt was cancelled due to rain. We live in Portland, Oregon. I just couldn’t believe that anyone’s heart was truly in this- in fact, I was pretty sure they were being forced into this group lead activity. 

            They were talked into trying again the next month, but the night before a rather mild Thursday, disaster struck. The precious finger-pianos had been packaged in a big box in the trunk of our staff member’s car and some passing thug in the night had thought the box held something a lot more valuable than the teenage equivalent of macaroni art projects. Fortunately, nothing else in the car had been taken and the car itself wasn’t damaged. But. The finger-pianos, they were no more. Everyone got to school and our staff called an emergency Room C meeting to tell the grim news. The day turned sober and depressing with everyone in an emotional state. I got home that day eager to tell my mom what had happened since she had been privy to the whole saga. Well, she began laughing. Surprisingly, that also got me going and I also began cackling uncontrollably. It took me until that moment to realize just how hilarious this was. At school, the air had been so sad that I hadn’t been able to see the comedy. “Hmm I wonder who took those damn things…” she joked. “I would check your classmates cubby’s, if I were you.”

            At least they tried to organize something and actually had group bonding time, which is way more than I do.

            The other staff come with fun stories too, I’m sure. I just don’t know what they are. I only experience them when I’m in their classes (which isn’t that often) or in passing. I can say that they all look the part of free school teachers, with their dreadlocks and round chemistry glasses and hip clothing. They’re all extremely nice, and I’ve always liked every advisor the school’s had throughout the years. Our hiring committees do their jobs well.

            We always get really awesome interns, too, which is not a given. For putting in the same amount of work as the staff, interns get paid only $200 a month which is barely enough to cover lunch everyday at the Taco Cart. So I’m always surprised we get anyone willing to hang out with us for 30 hours a week for basically nothing. But every intern we’ve ever had has been amazingly nice. I think they seem even cooler because they don’t technically have advisor authority over us. They’re generally young people, fresh off of earning or beginning to earn teaching degrees, and just want to spend their time playing guitar, board games, Sprout, ping-pong, 80’s karaoke, or whatever else we want all day long. And they want to get the most out of their time with us as a “learning opportunity” so they always say yes to things like being Vikings during Medieval Simulations, or running field trips when the staff don’t have the energy, or even leading the after school program for three more hours of screaming children and only a couple extra bucks.

            All of the adults hanging around our halls (hall) truly do love us. As I’ve said, there’s no way they would be doing any of this if they didn’t. You can really tell with such events like the Start-of-Year Camp-out, the multiple Adventure Weeks and the End of the Year Ceremony. All of these special community things that take so much extra time to pull together make us as close as we are. I personally really enjoy the Start-of-Year campout, at least the idea of it. Getting all the parents, students and staff together for a two day retreat in the woods full of games and hikes and community meals and lots of bonding sets the tone for the year. Of course, I’ve been busy with…things these past two years and haven’t been able to attend the whole time, but I’ve heard it’s still as great as ever.

            On the last day of the school year, the staff gather us all downstairs and present a video year book that they’ve usually thrown together in the prior three days. It’s always  touching and emotional for the parents watching. Next, the staff acknowledge the kids who know they won’t be returning to the school the following year and get their chance to tear up. Finally, the kids are asked to come up and say something about the one or two staff members who are usually on their way out and get their chance to join the crying fest, effectively leaving everyone in the room bawling by the time the party’s supposed to start. But it’s always the sweetest thing, and my avoidance of that somewhat mandatory event is also completely coincidental. Is it my fault that I’m always busy with…things and have very important places to be?

            Needless to conclude, all of the extra time they put on top of the extra time they’re already giving really makes our school fun. My mother went to a free school for two years as a child, and she said that they were the most miserable years of her education. This was because the school was led in the most hands off way possible. Teachers would let the kids be free to the extreme of never planning any classes or activities and never interacting with them. She said she spent most of her time with the thirty other students sitting in a classroom with absolutely nothing to do. Picture all day, every day of an unruly high school class before the bell rings and the teacher walks in. Or every day of the school year being like The Breakfast Club. I’d imagine that after a full week of that, one would want the structure and goings-on of a standard program. She was skeptical of me attending a free school in the first place because of her own experience, but after a year of coming home with all of these stories, she changed her tune. The staff really do make the school come alive.

            After the staff, come the parents.

            Everyone arrived in school on the first day of the year, all bright eyed and bushy tailed, ready to see all of our lost companions. The staff hijacked the Monday Morning Meeting that day to welcome us all and play some bonding games. The most time consuming activity that morning was the task to try and learn everyone’s name. It’s not that there’re ever that many students or much turn over, but the circle in which we all stand, students, staff, present parents, is asked to state their name, do a funny move, and have the group repeat along with the gesture. Sounds simple enough. But you have no idea how long five year olds can take in coming up with a move on the spot. They giggle, look at their feet, “umm…” for a minute, until a staff politely encourages them to do something, anything, so that we can move on.

            It’s usually always the same behavior. But from a clump of little ones taking up a good ten minutes on their giggly group, came the wild card. He looked up from his homemade, hand-sewn pleather shoes to stare at the group. Very still in demeanor compared to his squirming friends, he looked around and said “They named me after a vegetable.”

            There was a pause. Everyone waited in anticipation for him to continue on and actually say his name, but he was finished. Finally, the Room A staff member declared, “this is Kohlrabi!” and gave him a silly gesture that didn’t match at all the grim look on his soured face. I’ve been in love with this one moment for years now as the perfect illustration of the relationship some children have with their parents and their given lifestyle.

            First off, they were already a “they.” Not “my parents“, not “mommy and daddy” as most five year olds would say, but a “they”. People in an entirely different class than himself. Secondly, he’s blaming them for being named after a vegetable, something that they’re probably growing in their huge garden with chickens circling around it. Kohlrabi seems like a normal enough name (for free school), but this young man apparently groups it with artichoke, broccoli and rutabaga; foods you would not want to share a name with. It was sad to see that he already felt this way at a young age. I hoped phrases like “they sent me to a hippie free school” and “they won’t let me cut my hair” weren’t also circling in his head waiting to come out when prompted.

            As you’ve probably guessed, this is not the only weird name we have on tap. Unusual naming is a trend amongst parents in our community although , fortunately, Free School parents can’t take all of the credit for the names I’m about to list. Most are from my childhood in various alternative and arts based schools in Portland. I’ve met The Colors: Blue and Red, The Numbers: Seven and Eleven (x2 no less); The Foods: Jelly and Mead; The Domestic Animals: K9 and Cat; The High Gods: Thor and Juno; The Celestial Occurrences: Aurora and Solray; The Majestic Trees: Asher and Cedar; Every Flower in a Bouquet. The best (with no offense to those other worthy contenders) has to be Boye. There really is a boy in Room C named Boye. Supposedly his parents couldn’t decide on a name for him for his first few years of life. Eventually, the family had to take a plane ride and the airline company needed a name for this two year old child so they simply said, “Boye.”  It just kind of stuck.

            You know, this is the population here in Portland, and the free school just holds a magnifying glass up to the more eccentric parts.

            Around the building at any given time, you can find a large group of parents just hanging around, usually about one fifth the size of the present student body. Everyone’s generally lovely, but my favorite are the Mother Hens who take roost in our couch circles and around our coffee machines.  Out of all the parents who mysteriously don’t need to work, the mothers have the most free time to come and do their motherly thing with their children all day long. I remember the mornings in elementary school where tearful mothers would part from tearful children on the first day of school, both parties wishing they could just stay together to face the challenges of school and social situations by the other one’s side. The school would even send out reminders asking parents to please leave the school grounds by a certain time so that students had time to fly solo. The free school sends out no such messages. We welcome family bonding and feed off of parent volunteers, so if the two never wish to be more than a few feet away, more power to them. Surprisingly though, the mothers don’t hound their children by actually being in the same room with them. They mostly hang out in the living room or in Room C where they can create a coffee shop-like experience. Three or four of them sit in a circle and gossip to their heart’s content as if they were in their own houses. I love these impromptu get-togethers because they gossip about serious shit! Marriages, affairs, money, fights, and usually the one mother who isn’t currently there and how her child did such and such. I love it, love it, love it. And because we treat our students like real people, we’re all (mostly) allowed to listen and jump-in when appropriate. Best way to spend a morning ever. And this all happens right where we have classes, so you have an equal chance of walking in on a history lecture or a lecture on who’s dating who and why. Love it.

            If you took a survey of the various characters at any group event, you would see a couple of distinct types and not much else. Remember- snap shot of Portland.

You have: super skinny vegan ladies, some sporting the “all natural” hair state of dreadlocks; the vegetarians who are usually clad from head to toe in tattoos (they’re not quite as pure and organic as the vegans who would never inject ink into their skin); the mothers hens who actually appear quite chicken like with their bodies puffed out from carrying children; and gentlemen who always seem to have facial hair. We have other kinds of men hanging around, like the ones also clad entirely in tattoos, the big bulky men who look like they’ve just gotten back from a month on the side of a mountain to pick their child up from school, but the common denominator is always facial hair. Yep.

            All of the parents are really supportive in that unsupportive way. Being ‘ideas people,’ they’re all more than happy to stand up in meetings and declare how important some issue is or how in support they are of a certain thing, but no one will actually follow through on making those things happen, or those long winded and accusatory rants worth while. Frankly, I’m tired of circle talk just so every parent can give their support to everything at least twice per item so that they can hear the sound of their own voice and how motivational it sounds.

            I would be remiss not to touch on the trend of not eating meat that has swept through our population. Really, it’s kind of amazing to be in such an ideally healthy habitat, and as a mammal just looking for a comfortable environment, I find it wonderful. So the children don’t always do that good of a job of taking care of themselves (if you’ll please note the ban on High Fructose Corn Syrup), but if you look at the lunch their parents provide for them, it always appears quite nutritious. We don’t have enough money in the school to house a daily lunch program, so everyone brown bags it (or goes to the Taco Food Cart two blocks away which, for the record, carries vegan and vegetable stuffed options.) Almost everyone’s concerned with organic, healthy food which is a relief because those are the arguments that usually start sounding like Republican v. Democrat debates. Either you understand and believe in healthy living, or you don’t.

            We have a lot of different food sects. There are meat-eaters, vegetarians, vegans, and a few raw foodists, macrobiotic gurus, gluten-free and sugar-free people all running about. Unfortunately, like as with any religion you’ve bought into, it’s hard not to want to convert your friends and neighbors which leads to problems. The second biggest group (after carnivores) are the simple vegetarians and they’re after us, especially since they know they have the health and humanitarian angle covered. We’ll watch documentaries or read news articles about food, the environment or health in Room C and the few vegetarians will always begin preaching about their ways, using whatever was just presented as evidence.

            I went to a café with two vegetarian students and we were all standing in front of the big overhead menu, deciding what to order. I commented on how I had just watched some documentary the other night all about the meat industry in America and that I really didn’t feel like having any animal product that day. Their eyes immediately lit up and small, knowing smiles appeared. “Well, it’s never too late to start being a vegetarian,” they said. “We’re glad your eyes have been opened.” They were missionaries hearing I had finally accepted Jesus into my life.

            Sometimes though, I wonder if our community hasn’t taken the health food craze a little far. Children like to imitate the adults in their life and up to a certain age, if mom and dad do it, so will they. This goes for things like diet and food choice which the parents dictate in their house anyway. I’ve seen lots of families where the parents are vegetarian or vegan, or even raw food-ists, and their child is too. Some of them say that their kid chose on their own free will to follow this path while others admit to having a strict position on what comes out of their kitchen. I really worry sometimes for the kids who are living on the diets that their parents can handle because they’re grown adults, but that deprive growing bodies of vital fats and nutrients. I’ve seen some people literally eating a head of lettuce like an apple and calling it lunch, but the small child next to them always looks eerily skinny when nibbling on the same meal.

            And then there are the children who are more gung-ho about their diet than the parents. During some community lunches, I’ll be working down in the kitchen preparing whatever dish, and students will come in and see what’s happening. At the sight of the block of cheese on the counter, they’ll bolt out of the room, angrily yelling “Why are you doing that!?! Cheese is murder!”  They run around with self-satisfied looks of smarty-pants-ness and continue their chant “Cheese is murder! Cheese is murder!” until told to “Stop Seriously, and go the ____ away!” They generally don’t until you physically chase them with the accursed block of cow product in hand.

            Parents and staff make up the bulk of the adult presence in the building, but there are always a few outside volunteers hanging around at any time. Even more than the staff, or the interns, I have to wonder how we get these volunteers who truly find the school on their own. A surprising number of them aren’t connected with any educational organization or personally know any community members before signing up. I believe Google has provided a large portion of our free labor to us over the past few years and we really should be paying them for this service.

            Every year we get a few hipsters from town who are thinking about being teachers when they’re done working at coffee shops, a few education fanatics who have already been studying schools like our for years, a couple national and international visitors, and a handful of mystical sun children who have just blown in from training at their massage program and really jive with our flow and want to know more about our energy and what celestial alignment we fall under (get what our school’s about and want to know more about our program and when they can come in to help). Some of these people have taught the most interesting classes I’ve taken at the VFS. Others have sat and stared across at us on the couches in Room C, feeling rightfully out of place and unsure of what to do with themselves. It’s always  really awkward when they don’t get that things don’t always happen at school even though there’s infinite potential. Then they try to talk to us or introduce a conversation about some academic topic that no one cares about. We’d rather go back to playing on Facebook and reading our newspaper. But really, who’s to complain. I’ll say it again: we wouldn’t run without volunteers.

             There definitely is a larger free schooling community, as well, bringing in extra attention. Believe it or not, there are free and democratic (they don’t always identify as both) schools all across the world, especially in North America, South America, and across Europe in countries like England and Germany. Our school has always been close to Windsor House School up in Vancouver, BC because of the proximity, I believe. I’ll have to ask someone soon how that relationship started, but we have lots of student exchanges and  some staff members have worked at both places. Other staff members here have gone to free schools off in New York, like The Albany Free School, and know people at the Brooklyn Free School, and other such places.

            We’ve only been in existence for a turbulent seven years and it’s getting on the impressive mark. Free schools are hard to keep alive because of cost and  fluctuating populations (there was a huge burst and then dwindling of them in the sixties and seventies as the hippie fad came and went). It’s good to see that the few landmark schools, the ones that have been around twenty, thirty, forty years, all keep in touch and attend conferences whenever possible. By the way, international conferences are so much fun. If you’re really into alternative education, that is. There are days and days of mingling with people from all over the world connected with alternative schools and it’s sometimes enlightening and sometimes funny to hear them share and mostly brag about their own schooling set-up. Everyone thinks their democratic shit smells and operates in a non-conformist way the best.

            I personally like having my free school right here in Portland. The city is already so much of a hippie den and alternative wonderland, that it’s really no surprise a free school cropped up here. It fits in too perfectly. Recently, I was asked to explain my school to someone and I got through the name before being stopped and asked “The village of what?” I stammered and said, “Well, I don’t know.” I had never even thought of this before, as the name had always just sounded catchy and properly back-to-roots. He replied swiftly, “Because Portland feels like a Village most of the time.” We laughed and I realized that this was the village that was supporting me and my school and letting us co-habituate with all of the standardized schools all around. It was an especially profound realization, considering one of the main principles of our school is that we exist in and learn from the outside world, and not through a musty textbook and a bored teacher. I thanked my lucky stars from that joke, to finally know on a larger scale who the people were exactly that were raising me.