The Independent Project in The Uppers (6th-8th)
Eva paints a “mural” on a paper towel holder, making the mundane beautiful.
Written with assistance from Bob Strachota, former Center School teacher and parent
In talking with Center School alum, I’ve discovered that there are many things students remember about their experience at Center School. One of the experiences I hear about is Projects Class.
This summer, I ran into a few former students who are now in their mid-20s. Each reflected on the importance of Projects Class, in particular the self-directed style of project, in their lives. One student started playing guitar and singing for their independent project in the Uppers. She is now the lead singer/guitarist in a band that recently played on the bill as Dar Williams, The Nields, and Shawn Colvin. Another student found his love of building and music in his projects class: In 6th grade he built himself an electric guitar for his independent project; In 7th grade he started to teach himself to play. He is now a professional musician and a student at the Berklee College of Music and has built his own forms of transportation. The third student I met with this summer revealed that her middle school passion for creative writing and painting has directly influenced her career as an art educator and teacher of writing.
Will’s imaginative art comes to life with fabric and sewing skills!
Finding your passion is one of the keys to Projects Class, and the Independent Project. This year, when a student asked me why I am so happy, I told the class that one of my secrets is to spend some time everyday doing one of the things that I love. For me it's building and tinkering in the wood shop. It's the same for the kids. Especially in the time of adolescence, a passion like art or music or carving or writing or painting or drawing or tinkering can pull teenagers through some tough times.
Recently the 6th, 7th and 8th graders (the Uppers) began work on their Independent Project (IP). Each student will spend 3 hours a week for 4 weeks on a project of their choosing, taking time to plan, revise and reflect along the way. This project is geared toward the critical skills of Initiative, Passion, and Independence.
This Fall’s projects include multiple sewing projects, crochet art, writing fiction and comics, woodcraft, painting everyday objects, constructing a brick pizza oven, video creation, and makeup and nail art.
Linden, a 6th grader, is designing and building a shelf for shoes. For the first few days of this project, Linden created a rough sketch of the shelf, and then moved into a scale drawing accurate measurements and dimensions. She also created a tool list, a materials list, and a cutlist of the dimensions of wood that needs to be cut to length. She gathered the materials and the tools, and made a step-by-step plan of steps involved in her project. Linden started step one yesterday, taking the rough sawn lumber donated by a local sawmill (special thanks to The J-Team in S. Deerfield!). With teacher supervision, Linden used a portable planer to clean the locally-grown 12" wide pine that she will be using for crafting this shelf.
M is cross-stitching Audrey 2 from Little Shop of Horrors.
An eighth grader, Tim, has spent hours walking the trails adjacent to the Center School and creating a map representing these trails. Last week he added important landmarks and geographical features to this map. Friday he began to work on enlarging the map to a size that can be displayed somewhere on campus for those wanting to explore the nearby woods. Once that goal is achieved, Tim will create copies of smaller portable maps that can be picked up and taken on hikes, with trail descriptions and approximate walking times and mileage.
Can you imagine doing these kinds of projects as part of your middle school education? I know I was hungry for real work and real world applications when I was a teenager, so I'm delighted to be able to give these students the opportunity to do this satisfying and grounding work. If a magic fairy / genie gave you an hour a day, what would you do as an independent project? Email c.sanborn@centerschool.net and I'll share your responses with the Uppers.
In honor of the designer of Projects Class, I will leave you with a passage from Bob Strachota’s recent work. Bob is a former Center School teacher and parent. He writes about a project he created, called the Ambitious Project (AP). The AP is a long-standing tradition that still remains in the 8th grade at Center School. The Independent Project discussed above is a precursor to the 8th Grade Ambitious Project.
The heart of the AP is less what a student is able to produce and more what they figure out that excites them or gets in their way. My task in this is to help them dissect what energizes and what blocks them. To do this I have to resist seeing the main goal in terms of the success or failure of the product the student produces. Many Ambitious Projects do succeed in the standard sense: a boy made pizza from scratch for the entire school, a girl built a surfboard, a boy rebuilt the motor of a Model T. But there was also a boy who chose to write songs and learned that he was not at all good at it. There was a girl who covered the wall behind the presentation stage with huge letters saying My AP Failed – and then during her presentation had to parse what went wrong with her efforts. There is, of course, everything in between as well: students who take weeks deciding what to do, students who flounder and then get it together, ones who flounder and only sort of get it together, and students whose projects evolve into something very different than what they had in mind when they started.
I believe that students who muddle about in this work can learn just as much as students who have a vision of what they'll do from the start and then move straight to creating a beautiful product. We all come up short so often during our lives; this course is an attempt to create a way for students to begin to learn from their flounderings as well as their successes. If I am using a hammer and bend a nail, I can adjust the way I am pounding or decide to use a screw instead of a nail or realize that I’m tired and need a little break or decide to make a career of teaching instead of carpentry.