School nostalgia: we all have it for something, even me
My grandma was a teacher with an open classroom and I went there when our school holidays did not coincide. Since her classroom was first through third grade I got to go there for a long time.
Classroom design in Sweden is based on the open classroom model with a comforting nod to its 70s vibe, and my own open classroom for second and third grade. Basically any learning I did in school I did in an open classroom. I am an independent learner. I am unable to listen for long periods of time. And I wanted to have the ability to cheat when a test did not interest me.
I wonder if my sons would have been happy in school an open classroom setting. There’s a dicsussion between 1970s school refugess about open classroom experiences at Apartment Therapy. There’s a piece on Bloomberg about how teachers in open classrooms weren’t trained properly. I can see how that was true. In my open classroom the second graders were all ahead and the third graders were behind and that’s not actually a good mix. By the end of the year the teacher stopped the curricula and we just sang folk songs and grocked things.
My high school debate team produced an crazy number of billionaire tech founders, tenured professors and judges. The only other group that comes close to them are the kids in my second grade classroom.
As I write this, I just realized that my most fond memories of school are when I was surrounded by kids who were fascinating. And forget the whole topic of this post – you don’t need an open classroom or closed classroom or whatever classroom. You need to help your kids find other kids who are fascinating.
I feel lucky I got to be with those kids in second grade. I remember learning something interesting from every single one of them. For example, KT Graves told us second graders we should take a test for contractions instead of study contractions because you just put an apostrophe for the vowel. Tory Platt told us Puff the Magic Dragon was about drugs.
I think the most disappointing to me about school is I encounters all those amazing kids and I had so little time to talk with them in school.
“You need to help your kids find other kids who are fascinating.” -> I did this starting in middle school by going online and looking for them. This is how most autistic kids do it these days, I think. In person it’s a lot harder without going to school, especially in high school when kids have a bit more control over their time. Not much, but usually enough to find other interesting kids to hang around and talk to.
I’d be interested in hearing your ideas about how parents can help their autistic kids find other interesting kids to hang out with in person (for when I’m a parent).
Nami, How did you meet the kids? Z has two online friends who have been amazing and he ended up going to see them both in person. But I wonder if these friendships can last as you grow up?
Penelope
The friends I have that I see in person often, I either met online and happen to live in the area, or I’ve known them since middle or high school. I met my closest friend because we got stuck doing community service project together in 8th grade. My other friend I met because she lived in my building, so we walked to school together every day.
I have another friend that I’ve been friends with since first grade, and we gravitated towards each other because we were both weird and autistic. We kept in touch when I moved through phone calls and letters and Facebook, and then she moved to DC when we were adults, so we hung out in person a lot. (She recently moved to the Middle East for her government job, though. So now we talk on Instagram and through letters.)
So I met all three of those particular friends through public school.
I was only able to start meeting my online friends in college when I could socialize without my mother breathing down my neck. From then on, a lot of them have either come to visit or moved into the area (DC is easy to get to by airport and has a good job market). We meet up in person then.
I wasn’t able to be friends with them openly as a kid because Jehovah’s Witness kids are not supposed to be friends with non-JW kids. So I talked to them secretly. I think as a parent, since your kids are allowed to have friends, you can do what you’ve been doing for Z and help him get to see those friends in person.
I think the friendships can last for a very long time if both people in the friendship put in the effort. I’ve known a bunch of my online friends since I was in high school, so about half my life at this point. I still talk to a lot of them pretty regularly, at least once a week (not counting the folks I’ve met online and then met in person after high school).
Funnily enough, the three friends I talk to the most live in different countries, but we send each other gifts and letters, and I talk to each of them literally every day.
I’m not sure if I answered your question, so if you were asking how I met the online friends online, I met them on DeviantART, LiveJournal, and Tumblr. I was posting a lot of art and stories on those platforms, and I think I was doing that mainly to find people to talk to about my special interests (video games and anime). I do feel like it worked.
I went to an open school for three years, sixth through eighth. What I remember most was the omnipresent cacophony. It was loud from the moment you walked in until the moment you left. It didn’t matter what your class was doing, it was loud; either you were adding to the volume or experiencing the volume of others. High drama would play out on the other side of a blackboard on wheels while you were taking a test.
I do not have nostalgia for that. The idea that an autistic kid would flourish in such a setting is ridiculous. But that was a poor open school. Maybe a rich open school is entirely different.
Another friend told me she has a smiliar experience to yours. I like how you said you’re either making the noise or suffering from it.
I only had experience with open classrooms as opposed to schools. I think it might have been different — it was two or three grades in one classroom, so it was only 25 or so kids in a relatively small space and I remember it being very quiet and organized.
Now that I think about it, my grandma’s classroom always had a lot of volunteers who wanted to learn how to operate a multi-grade classroom, so the teacher-student ratio was probably 6 to 1.
Penelope
Yes, we had 25 or so kids in the same “room” (blackboard-fenced corral), but all in the same grade, and with just one teacher.
It was organized in the sense that all the little desk-chairs were lined up in rows and columns, with the teacher’s battle-desk in front. Other than that, there was always something missing, which the teacher had to send a student around to look for, like chalk or erasers, which would move from classroom to classroom.
I think maybe rich schools get a lot of people to look at them and figure out how to replicate their success, because it’s like teaching on easy mode and everybody just ignores the real reason – start with rich kids.
But the topic of this page is school nostalgia – we all have some, even me.
I went to middle school in rural southern Kentucky. This is the open school I’m talking about, and it was the worst in a long line of very bad schools. I went to six schools in four states by the time I was fifteen, and they were all terrible. In Kentucky I had to deal with being an outsider (a “damn Yankee”), deal with the incredible noise level of the tent-like school, and deal with classmates who had been held back multiple years and were already drinking and smoking. Half my classmates had a worn circle on their back pockets. If you grew up like me you know that was from a skoal can. I remember a girl dropped out of my class in seventh grade because she was pregnant.
But anyway, the school had a little gifted program, thanks to the amazing spirit of a lady named Violet Farmer. It met in a trailer parked out back. It was the only school I ever went to that had a gifted program. Once or twice a week we few would leave our regular classes and meet out in the trailer (when I say trailer, for those who went to rich schools, this is not a euphemism. It was a trailer like you see in trailer parks, one bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, and living room, and it was on wheels and concrete blocks), where we would drink tea and play games (puzzles, tests, etc., all approached as games). We all brought a mug from home and kept it above the sink in the trailer. It was the only place at that school where I felt happy, and treated with respect.
We would come in, get our mug, make some tea, and sit down in the living room to see what Violet Farmer had in store for us that day. Maybe it would be learning how to speed read. Maybe it would be discussing which people we would save in the bomb shelter. Maybe it would be chess, maybe poetry, or logic puzzles. A little normal respite from the chaos of school. That’s it, the part of school I have nostalgia for: a shag-carpeted trailer parked out back in rural southern Kentucky.
And then we would go back out into the school at large, where teachers had the vocabulary of elementary schoolers and classmates wanted to beat me up because I didn’t go to church.