A Visit To The School For Self-Determination in Moscow, Russia
Click on writing link to left, to see the index to all the parts. You are viewing part VI.
November 17th
I was thinking a bit more about my concerns about “gurus” and communities established for teaching/healing purposes. The philosophies and mentalities developed by these gurus and communities may not work for people who actually work every day. It may only work for keeping gurus happy. The supposed devotees or students may present the perspective that they have been developing, whether or not it is true.
Another part of my ideas is that I want information to be freely available. When it is freely available, its effects are inherently different from if that information was bought for a cost. Ten years ago, I was quite fond of some programmers who gave away their programs under a legal form they call the “Gnu copyleft.” I think my ideas now partly originated with those programmers.
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Today we had another dancing lesson at school.
After that I spent half an hour in the free room. The first fifteen minutes, I was sitting with three girls who spoke very little English. They were about eight years old. They were beautiful and attentive, very mature. They were teaching me Russian. These girls were so powerful and knowledgeable in some of their human interaction. They understood a lot.
November 18th
This morning I met four kids from the school who toured me around Moscow - first an old estate then the Kremlin. It was four hours in the blowing snow learning from them and trying to teach them to teach me Russian effectively while teaching them thinking and being. Then after an hour of rest, I returned to the school again. There I spent an hour talking informally with kids in the lounge, gave a half-hour formal presentation to ten kids (giving a lecture on the challenges and benefits of wanting and getting what we want), spent forty-five minutes teaching a circle dance and a square dance (both improvisations), passed forty-five minutes with the student folk group (listening to them sing, and then me playing & singing on mandolin and piano). Then I spent three hours talking with the parents of Artiom (a kid I met yesterday from the school). We talked about their business, my life, educational and psychological ideas and realities. Everyone at the school is talking about me. I like the attention. I am doing many months of work in these two weeks.
November 19th
This morning I left the house at 9am, walked twenty minutes to the metro, rode thiery minutes from Pervomayskaya to Kievskaya, waited fifteen minutes, and then waited another five minutes past the appointed hour, and finally Olga arrived. I have been attempting to look Russian in the metro stations to avoid the possibility of being asked to show my problematic registration papers. I would like to think I am being successful because Olga walked right by me.
When I said her name, she grabbed my hand, then we dashed off to another tunnel to catch the next train there.
We were headed to a school starting some new experiments. Olga was interested in going in connection with her current work as an educational journalist. I wanted to see some more context to understand Tubelsky’s school. But we didn’t talk much about that school we would visit on the way there. Instead, as we walked and rode the metro, we talked about my time at Tubelsky’s school.
“What have you learned,” she asked. “Tell me your observations,” she insisted. Then, “Give me the criticisms.”
“You’ll have to be a little more patient than you’d like to be, I think,” I replied. “I’ll wait until later for the criticisms, I’ll just start with my most general observations.
“First of all, quite generally, I am glad to see that there are real experiments happening at the school, that the students and teachers like their school, that the students and teachers care about learning. I see an integration of life and learning very uncommon anywhere in the world - and this is particularly impressive, I believe, in a public school, and also particularly impressive because it’s in Russia, a country with a recent tradition of authoritarian policy.”
“What do you mean, with this tradition,” she asked. She was distracted and not properly ignoring irrelevant details. I ignored what she said and thought for a moment about what I would say next. But she didn’t wait. She was willing to forget her tangent too. “Tell me about the Park Studios. What did you learn?”
“So far, Olga, I have not learned too many details. I have talked mostly with people who have been critical of the project.”
“What? You have been here one and one half weeks and you have only found people who are critical of the project? What have you been doing? Have you talked to any students in the park studios? Have you visited any of the park studios classes?”
“Maybe a math class, I’m not sure if it was even a Park Studio or not; it was taught by the head-teacher for Park Studios.”
“Peter, you are disappointing me,” she said. I wasn’t sure whether she wanted to cry or to hit me, but she certainly didn’t seem to be preparing to offer me a chocolate bar. Her eyes began to get wet even. She obviously had some expectations I had let her down on. Park Studios are her baby.
She said, “I thought you were a better investigator than this. You came to Russia and you have been in the school for this time and you have learned nothing.”
Her criticism had some truth to it. She was right that I have failed to learn as much as I had hoped about Park Studios thus far. On the other hand, I think I still have enough time up to make up for this.
“You’re partly right,” I said. “But think of it this way - I start reading the old testament first, then only later do I start reading the new testament.”
“But who can you learn most from, the people who are involved, or the ones who are not involved?” She asked this as if it is an obvious choice.
“It’s not so simple. I do hope to learn more about Park Studios; now that I understand the context of the school, and other people’s opinions about your project, I will be able to have much more effective interviews and observation of the project.” I wasn’t sure whether I was being defensive or reasonable. I’m still not sure.
I continued, “There is one other point, which is that now I have given all the people in the school the chance to come invite me to show me what they are proud of - they all know I am in the school - and no one has come to me from the park studios to invite me to them.”
“Has anyone come and invited you to anything?” she questioned, still somewhat offended, I thought.
I thought about it for a moment. “Tubelsky has invited me to the school council, and Vanya invited me to his folk group.”
“But that is just extra-curricular. What is more important is the learning - has anyone invited you to a learning project?”
“Mostly English teachers,” I said.
At that, we silently and mutually agreed to drop the subject for the time being.
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When arrived at the school, Olga presented her passport to the security guard. (I’ve never had to present a passport at Tubelsky’s school, perhaps because the first time I came in, I came in with a teacher.) I didn’t have to present mine in this school because we were together. Olga explained that after several buildings were blown up by terrorists several years ago in Moscow, that security had been tightened at the schools. We were escorted into the office of the “head teacher” according to Olga (the principal, I think), and we chatted with her for fifteen minutes about how to spend the day, with Olga translating. We agreed to go to a math “lab”, an English “lesson”, and an “Olympics workshop.”
The head teacher escorted us to the math lab, and Olga and I sat down at the back. We had been told by the head teacher that this was for fifth grade students only; the students had three subjects during this time break from which to choose - art, math, and the Olympics workshop - and they could move from one to the next at will. There were about fifteen students who came in to the math room at the same time as we did. They all sat down at the desks (arranged in rows) and pulled out their math books and notepads and started working on math problems. There was usually a small line at the front of the room at the teacher’s desk. She was sitting down, and one at a time the students at the front of the line would present some math problems for her inspection, then after short consultations, return to rows of desks. The students seemed pleased with their work and the work environment. None of them were too excited or distracted. They were all working steadily.
Olga said to me quietly, “This is very interesting, but what are you learning sitting here with me? Have you seen that the teacher first tried to stand up and teach a lesson, but saw that all the students were absorbed in their notepads. Then she decided to do individual consultations instead, did you notice? Have you seen the arrangements of the desks? Have you noticed that everyone is working? Look, that student just came into the classroom, late, where were they? I will go find out.” She walked over to the desks at the far side but also in the back and crouched down next to the boy who had just come in, and she talked quietly with him for several minutes. Then she came back and sat down next to me again. “He was at art lessons. He likes music. He likes everything! But he wants to make progress as fast as possible in math because he wants to spend more time on music.” So we learned that children indeed can change from one “lab” to another at any time. Olga also investigated a chart on the wall and discovered that it was a progress chart where the teacher marked off when students had mastered particular skills.
Near the end of the class, I asked Olga whether she thought it would be appropriate for me to request to put a math problem on the board. “Well you have to be very careful, Peter,” she cautioned. (I thought, “She is too reactive sometimes, but her reaction is not appropriate to me. It must be from other people she has known in the past. She apparently doesn’t possess the skill of seeing me, for whatever reason. She can see a lot about other things, but she doesn’t see me well yet.”) I tilted my head and lifted my eyebrows, judging her “caution.” She asked what I would like to do. I said I would like to invite any student to work with me on a problem on the board, and she expressed relief for a moment but then leaned forward and told a story illustrating the problematic aspects of interrupting students when they are working. Then she went to the teacher at the front of the class and received approval to invite the students to work with us back at our desk (not at the front). So Olga made the announcement that the American would present a math problem, and almost all the students wanted to participate, so we were invited to the front of the classroom after all. I wrote the problem on the board in English (How many people can fit in one metro train?) and Olga wrote it in Russian, and we asked the students for guesses and explanations. I was not particularly impressed with the reasoning or the assumptions or the estimates, although I liked their excitement and interest in mutual discovery.
Not a single one of the students came up with a good enough method (like multiplying students per bench times benches per traincar times traincars per train), and their results were all far lower or higher than I thought were reasonable. Rather than telling them the way I would do it, I told the kids to count the people next time the train was full and to write me the number in an email. They seemed to like that idea, so I gave one of them my email address. Then class was over, and one of the boys in the class led us through the halls where elementary school students were running and playing games during change-time.
We entered the English class next and sat through part of a very boring English grammar lesson, Olga and I almost choking ourselves hoping it would be over soon. Then I asked the teacher whether I could ask the children some questions, and with her agreement, I went to the front and talked with them for a few minutes. Nothing special there: typical questions and answers: “What is your name?”, “What is your hobby?” etc.
After that we spend about one class period with the “Olympic groups” which were being organized to “design home countries” and compete against one another in some sort of Olympics. This is a new experiment in the school, just starting this week, and there were two 11th or 12th-grade students in the classroom, each organizing mixed-aged groups of six students from 5th to 10th grade. After this, Olga and I met with the head teacher for another fifteen minutes. We each had a chance to share a few thoughts.
I said, “Leadership styles can be divided into three types.” Olga translated. “The first type is to be an active leader, setting goals and making decisions; the second type is to be an active facilitator, drawing out others to their own development; the third type is to sit down and watch what is happening.” Olga translated. “What type do you find is most important to your work?” I asked. Olga translated.
The head teacher answered, “I think, the second type. Also note, that I prefer to work with students to be the leaders of new experiments. I prefer that to working with teachers - I hope you noticed that today.”
I mentioned that I think all three leadership styles are important in their own place, that I didn’t necessarily have a bias about one being simply better than the others. The head teacher said she agreed.
Then Olga and I left and headed to her office, to eat lunch in the small restaurant in the basement. We talked as we walked.
“I want to tell you a criticism now that I have of Tubelsky’s school,” I said. “I think that the student were not thinking critically about some of the most critical questions of life - what do we want our lives to be like, what do we want our world to be like, what do we want our country to be like. Maybe it’s going on and I don’t know about it, but it seems they were engaging in ‘self-determination’ as individuals, and to some extent as a school, but not as a society or culture or on behalf of humanity.”
“Maybe this is a Russian thing,” she said, “Or maybe it is teenagers - no teenagers think about that.”
“I did when I was in high school,” I said. “My friends did. That was one of the most important things about our lives.”
“Well, maybe for Russians, we can just be happy when the sun is shining, we can just learn about something and be happy, we can just spend one month’s wages at one time and be happy, we are not obsessed about being so pragmatic as Americans.” She then gave a few examples of Russian impulsiveness, perhaps different at most in degree but not in character from any other people’s impulsiveness, I thought.
“There’s some value to that,” I said. “But I think it has to be understood in context. It’s good to be able to simply be, but it’s also limiting. It’s a new age, it’s time to get over where we were born. I think I’ve gotten over being an American, I want you to get over being a Russian.”
(I know it sounds a bit absurd in the politically correct modern mind. Is it a good thing I am not hamstrung by that mind? Or is getting over being American simply being American?) I was glad that Olga had the courage to let me know what she thought earlier, and I was also glad that she was open to my feedback in return. I think we are developing a real friendship.
We also talked about another set of questions. Olga would like to figure out whether it is possible for public schools to incorporate park schooling or not. I understand now that what she means by park schooling is that students can choose their activities on a daily, even hourly, basis, like wandering around a park. She valued it because it made the teacher absolutely accountable: in her opinion, teaching incompetence is immediately exposed. She wondered whether she should suggest to public schools to try it more widely. I said my opinion is that if she doesn’t know, what she should write is that she doesn’t know, and simply to provide some ideas for others without committing herself to claiming they are good.
She also wanted to know whether I think there are rules that good teachers use that make them good teachers, that she could use to tell teachers how to teach effectively. The thought occurred to me that she is hoping for a magic solution, some easy phrases like the ten commandments or the golden rule or the eightfold path to convert a bad teacher to a good one. Unfortunately, there isn’t one. Helping a bad teacher to become a good one is not necessarily impossible, but it occurs as part of a relationship. (Or maybe I’m wrong, maybe just reading something can do it.) Yet the most compelling analysis for me is that progress is a matter of working one-on-one with people who are not trees to be pruned, but persons who have to invent their own models.
I represented this by saying, “Yes, Olga, I believe there are rules, but one of the rules is that those of us who understand can’t effectively explain the rules to those who don’t yet understand.”
Then she gave me a copy of a book she wrote this past year, her reflections on 6 weeks studying the Danish educational system - but it’s in Russian, so unless I come across someone to translate it for me, I’m supposed to pass it along to a person she knows in America. She says that she proposes three rules for effective education in the final chapter of the book: the education of everyone is different, there must be mutual evaluation (teachers and students of each other), and students of different ages have to learn together, helping each other and learning to communicate (in her inimitable Russian way she calls this "vertical structure"). Well, after my big talk about there not being clear rules that effective teachers can use to explain education to less effective teachers, I wondered whether I had been wrong. It appeared that Olga had managed to present some rules that might work in that way after all. Olga is a great teacher and thinker and friend and I look forward to understanding more about these things in ourselves and each other together.