Spring 2008
Readers of Liberated Learners know that most North Star members are teens who come to our program from school. While many of these teens come with some degree of distress or crisis, one interesting point is that the vast majority of our members would have stayed in school and graduated if North Star did not exist. North Star, and homeschooling, is a wonderful way to improve a life, particularly for those not taking satisfaction from the superficial success they are achieving in school. Two current members who were doing well in school prior to joining North Star are Ariana Ferber-Carter and Oliver Spiro. Both Ariana and Oliver were getting good grades in school when they decided to homeschool. They each have stable, loving, and supportive families. When they attended school, they did their homework, behaved well, and appeared to be reasonably kind and well-adjusted young people. In this issue they explain how “doing well� in school felt unsatisfying, and
When I first met Ariana, she explained that her involvement in circus and gymnastics made it really difficult for her to keep up with her schoolwork. Accepting responsibility for doing well in school meant late nights and a lot of stress. Ariana could see the potential of homeschooling in her life, and she enlisted me as an ally to help her convince her parents to give this a try. Mostly, Ariana did the convincing. Now, two years older and nearly 17, Ariana has been true to her word. She has used the flexibility of homeschooling to adjust her schedule around her chosen activities, and she has worked to honor the academic commitments that she made to herself and her parents. While this process has not been stress-free, the maturity that comes from it is evident. Ariana has a strong self-awareness about her strengths and about the support she needs to accomplish her goals. Her focus, thoughtfulness, and general concern for others have led to her to become a mainstay our community. I am deeply happy that she has had this opportunity to spend her mid-teen years with such a degree of self-direction.—K.D.
Ariana
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why they jumped at the chance to leave the comfort of the familiar behind for the unknown adventure of homeschooling. They each have a parent who has written for this issue as well, sharing the adult view of walking out on a traditional approach that they thought was headed in the right direction. I hope these stories inspire you as much as they fuel my passion for this work. Sometimes we can’t settle for everything being “fine”. We want something more. Thank you to Ariana and Oliver and their families for sharing their version of this desire for a better way to live.
News and Notes North Star now has nearly fifty-five members; in addition we have welcomed several new exciting staff members. Most notably, we are honored to have Evelyn Harris, former member of Sweet Honey in the
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I’ve never hated school, but I’ve never put it before real life either. When I was 12, I joined Circus Smirkus and have been touring with them during the summers for the past 4 years. I also do gymnastics and take circus classes in Brattleboro at New England Center for Circus Arts. These interests are more important to me than school, though I’ve always tried to do well in school. I went to the Hilltown Cooperative Charter Public School for grades K – 8 and then I did ninth grade at Northampton High School. I’d never been to a traditional school before, and in some ways it was freeing; I was just another fish in the sea. I could doodle in class and the teachers wouldn’t mind for the most part, as long as I was paying attention. I had some close friends and I wasn’t unhappy, but it was sapping up all of my time. By the second semester of 9th grade, I was doing five hours of homework a night for one class alone and I was begging my parents to let me go to North Star. I’d heard about North Star from friends, but it seemed too good to be true. I suppose I was a little worried that my parents’ doubts were valid
q Ariana
and that I might well waste the next three years of my life if I began homeschooling, but the lure of freedom was stronger than the fear of what I might do with that power. After months of conflict, Ken talked with my parents during the summer and they agreed to let me begin homeschooling for tenth grade. My parents and I had long discussions that summer over the phone while I was on tour with Smirkus, and we arranged a curriculum. I had big academic plans. I was going to read religious texts and study culture. I was going to write fiction, keep a journal, and continue learning French. I was going to learn trigonometry and physics. I was going to use North Star as much as I could. I was going to be able to schedule my circus and gymnastics activities as I wished. That first year, I ended up taking a lot of North Star classes and playing games out in the sun. I was as happy as I could imagine, and I was learning. I was learning what it is to be free. I would get to North Star around 9:00 a.m., take about 3 classes, do some writing, and climb a tree or play chess. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I’d go to gymnastics. I hated Wednesday (North Star isn’t open on Wednesdays). Wednesday was my big textbook day, where I’d try to learn math or physics on my own with a book. That didn’t work very well for me, so I started tutorials at North Star and that worked better. Although I didn’t do all of the independent academics we had planned, my parents and I got along well. Homeschooling was an improvement. This year I am homeschooling quite differently. I go to North Star three days per week, but I only take classes (Logic and Writing Workshop) on one of those days. With friends at North Star, I’ve learned to solve a Rubik’s cube in under three minutes. I’m doing a math tutorial once a week outside of North Star. I audit a class on early medieval history at Smith College. I am still doing gymnastics, and I go to Vermont to train circus once or twice a week. One highlight of this year was in October, when I got my first paid circus gig. Cirque du Soleil productions had a conflict at the Canadian border and I was asked to fill in for a show in Boston. In my free time, I do a lot of art. Mostly I draw pencil sketches of people, but recently I’ve discovered digital art. My life feels creative, and I’m very happy
Liberated Learners Spring 2008
Rock, offering a music and songwriting course this spring. Other new classes include Ultimate Medicine Ball (only at North Star!), Introduction to Economics, Math Games, Mountaineering Lit., Outdoor Cooking, 2012, and Controversies in U.S. History. Over our March vacation week, Catherine Gobron led a group of ten to Vieques, Puerto Rico. The group spent most of its time working with the people who led the successful protest movement to close the U.S. naval base in Vieques. The group did some construction work at a peace and justice camp so that more visitors may come and learn about this historic change and contribute to the community revitalization. The trip also included some time for touring, snorkeling, and beach-walking. Mostly, the teens expressed a sense of having their politicalawareness sparked by meeting such incredible people in Puerto Rico. The reflections on this trip have been compiled
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p Self portrait by Ariana about it. North Star isn’t the academic core of my life anymore, but I still value my time there. It’s a resource, not a school without rules. Different people use it in different ways, but it can help in setting up a functional life, and that’s a lot more than most schools can say. I’ve been at North Star for almost two years now, and I can honestly say that this is my utopia. I’m not always selfmotivated, I don’t always feel happy, and I have days when I take my freedom for granted, but I have never once wished to go back to school. In this time, my art has progressed from failed doodles to completed pieces that I am proud of. My circus training isn’t perfect, I still have a hard time getting all my conditioning done, but I’m able to devote as much time to it as I wish. I am now sixteen years old. I don’t know what the next few years will bring. I expect they will bring more time with circus and more college courses. When I imagine what I would be doing had I stayed in school, I fear I would be someone working for someone else’s vision. At North Star, I am working for my own.t
Karen, Ariana’s parent, writes:
I am grateful for North Star. I’m not sure how things would look if Ariana weren’t going to North Star. I think that it would have been difficult for Ariana to have found her way in the high school and I know that we would not be attempting to homeschool on our own. Ariana is happy at North Star and I put a very high premium on that. I also value what North Star has to offer in terms of a very safe place where the kids can truly be themselves; they are not under any pressure to conform. I love the interesting and varied classes. Ariana is a thinker and an analyzer and she loves to discuss things. North Star is a perfect fit for that. I also think that it is really great to hear about the spontaneous conversations that happen between the kids as they are spending time in the common spaces. I value that a lot. I think that taking charge and selfdirecting one’s learning is challenging and it isn’t always smooth. Sometimes I wish that Ariana were getting more exposure to language and math. For us that has been the hardest piece of the puzzle. Ariana enjoyed those things during her year at the high school and we haven’t been able to provide those things as readily and because of the nature of how things work at North Star, it’s hard to have enough kids with the same interests and schedules to create ongoing classes in those areas. Or that’s
in a newsletter. Please contact Catherine if you would like to read these stories.
p The Puerto Rico group
how it has seemed to me. Ariana has dyslexia so learning things on her own from books doesn’t come so easily and so doing those things on her own is more daunting. How much a given kid can take charge of their own learning varies. It can also look really different from person to person or even in the same kid it can look different at different times. Developmentally different kids are going to be in different places with taking over the reins. Everybody has strengths and weaknesses. In our family, the biggest struggle is around where we let go and what we expect Ariana to do. It’s really all part of the parenting continuum with many of the same challenges we’ve faced all along. I know that I really want Ariana to be happy and to have as much success in what she wants to do as possible. Sometimes it is obvious and clear what things are on Ariana’s plate and what things are on ours but often things seem to fall into grayer areas. It’s also somewhat fluid as Ariana grows into more responsibility. I want her to rise to the task of taking things on yet I don’t want to see her flounder. I want to push her in the areas where she could work harder and yet I want to give her room to find out how she needs to go about accomplishing her goals. I love it when Ariana is in her element and succeeding, like when I see her perform a new circus act or when she is on tour performing with Circus Smirkus in the summers. I feel happy when she and the family friend who is tutoring her in math get excited about some abstract esoteric math thing or when she is working on the details of her latest work of art. I also love it when she takes on more responsibility and is able to handle it. Her mind is so alive and she has so much integrity. For now, she is preparing to take the GED test this May and is considering taking some studio art classes at GCC next semester.t
Oliver is among the quietest, calmest, and gentlest members North Star has ever had. (Does he ever raise his voice? Does he ever run?) He is also one of the strongest characters I have known here. He firmly chose to do no busywork to satisfy anyone: his mother, the superintendent, me, even himself. He had a vision that he should wait for inspiration to do something he knew was meaningful, and that to get that vision he needed to be fully free. Busywork might keep him from having that moment of awareness. How many 13-year-olds can articulate this feeling: I must be open to the universe and what I will discover that I need to do. Obviously, this was a difficult position for Oliver’s parents to accept, but Oliver wouldn’t budge. He even expressed how sad he felt that he was making his mother so miserable, but even so, he couldn’t do stuff just to make her feel better. She would have to wait, just like he was waiting. I can claim that I said, “Don’t worry, it will work out okay,” but I certainly had no idea how long this process would last. Weeks? Months? Years? I had no idea, but I felt confident that Oliver was doing no harm to himself and going through a necessary, if frustrating, process. This year, for fun, Oliver and some friends (including Ariana) saw a video about a child who had mastered the Rubik’s cube. They decided to find out how to do this for themselves. They downloaded, studied, and memorized various algorithms, and sure enough, within a few weeks our common room was something of a street-corner show, full of timers and competitions. Oliver was the fastest.
Oliver
Having arrived at North Star at age 12, Oliver remains in the middle of his North Star career. How lucky for us..—K.D. vvv
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I never had much trouble in school. My grades were good, and things were fine socially as well. Everything was just that -- fine. Looking back now, it all seems a bit odd. Most teachers could teach, most students could learn. The mark of a good
Our theater group will be performing their spring production May 23-25. North Star is planning a large-group end-ofthe-year trip to Ferry Beach Ecology School in Saco, Maine May 28-30. This school is now the home of former North Star members Abby and Mikey Mann. Our fourth annual Celebration of SelfDirected Learning will be on Sunday, June 8th, at the Northampton Center for the Arts, 11:00 a.m.– 1:00 p.m. This year’s Self-Directed Learning Award will be presented to John Robison, author of look me in the eye: my life with asperger’s. We have discovered many connections between North Star and John Robison, and we are thrilled that he will join us for this event. Additional speakers will include North Star alumna Jordana Harper-Ewert, now the principal of Litwin Elementary School in Chicopee, and current
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teacher was not the ability to drive knowledge into the heads of their pupils, but the ability to make the need to drive it in disappear. Though good teachers like this didn't redeem school for me, they certainly created a set or two of 180 days that I'll never forget nor regret. I left school halfway through sixth grade. The only major problem I had in school was boredom. My assignments were meaningless, my teachers disinterested, and my peers either apathetic or pressured into overachieving. Whether it was being forced to spend my time both in school and out of school coloring maps, reading books I hated, and memorizing lists, or if it was watching the art teacher play a semi-hidden game of solitaire during class, something led me to believe I was bored. So bored. So bored. I voiced to my mother my desire to take classes outside of school. She made calls to Sylvan Learning Center and a few local community colleges but, of course, my mother’s last call was to North Star. The call was picked up by Ken. Ken said that although North Star did offer classes, they were only for those not in school. Up to this this point, homeschooling was far from being on the mind of any of my family members. In fact, we weren't fully aware of what North Star was. Despite never before considering pulling me out of school, my mother asked Ken for more information. After coming home that day and hearing what Ken had said, I never set foot in school again. Although my transition into the North Star mentality was quick, it was an odd experience. The classes were voluntary, which allowed their subjects to vary widely. Attendance was based entirely on interest, whether your interest was computer programming, writing, or maybe a weekly role-playing game session. There were no desks, just chairs, tables and a few couches. Despite this alien (for a place dedicated to education) informality, the true purpose of North Star was to help its members grasp that, being no longer in school, they were ultimately the ones responsible for their education. My first half year at North Star was fairly structured academically. I would usually figure out a weekly or monthly agreement with my parents,
and I would usually adhere to it. Life was nice socially as well. I made many friends and few enemies. When the next September rolled around, socially, little changed. When it came to education, however, I did a lifetime's worth of nothing, and I was whole-heartedly convinced that it was exactly the right nothing to do. Maybe I'm stretching the truth here. I did do something: I constantly defended my right to do nothing. I would repeatedly say that I'd wait to be inspired, that I wouldn't do busywork just to appease others. This worried my parents; it even worried me sometimes. I never knew how my education would turn out. Although I'd attend a class occasionally, I would spend the majority of my days at North Star on the couch, or perhaps across the street for lunch, and my time at home was a bit too similar. It seems, looking back, that there was some form of defiance in this inactivity. Perhaps I was trying to establish this "self"-education as truly my own, but whatever my now-forgotten reasons were, it worked. Halfway through that same year, my (now fully self) education picked up. From then on, nearly all academic decisions were on me, and I, for the most part, happily made them. After I won the battle over my homeschooling freedom, my home life changed greatly. Home became, largely, where I got my work done. Liberated Learners Spring 2008
Upcoming Events:
member Abe Jenkins. Brunch will be courtesy of our friends from Bueno y Sano, Seeds of Solidarity Farm, and The Hungry Ghost Bakery. This event is a fundraiser; guests will be asked to make a meaningful gift to support North Star’s policy of working with all interested families.
p Oliver at North Star
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I've worked in math from the very basic algebra I had started in school, to the calculus I'm currently working on. Though I was tutored through parts, I mainly worked in math on my own from a textbook. I've certainly read many books over the years, fiction and non-fiction, classic and obscure, and, of course, all of my own free will. I've read a few biographies of famous scientists, notably the particle physicists Richard Feynman and Robert Oppenheimer, the latter being a subject of an essay I wrote. My focus has largely been on hard science and technology, with home studies of chemistry and physics being my main route. In past years North Star had been entirely a social place for me. I had never taken many classes. With this past September, however, came much greater participation in courses here. In keeping with my earlier studies, I've been taking a physics class, Relativity, as well as an experimentally oriented chemistry class. Offsetting my normal interests, I've taken the biodiversity classes of Evolution Biology and Hotspots, along with Mathematical Biology, a math in nature class. I've also taken a social science class, Economics, the very philosophical Logic Class, and, in the greatest contrast to my usual path, Electronic Music. This year brought about another, even larger academic shift. School. In December of 2007, I applied to Holyoke Community College. After a brief bureaucratic scuffle about my age (15), I was accepted. My goal in applying had been to take a calculus course. After studying the necessary pre-calculus material in the month and a half I had before the spring semester, I took a placement test. I passed the test very well overall. I took the higher math section twice in order to score high enough for the class I was hoping for. I am now two months into Calculus I, and will attend more classes over the summer. My decision to leave school was very quick. I just threw myself at this idea of freedom in education. Despite a long time of uncertainty about whether homeschooling could work for me, I really knew from day one that I never would, nor could, go back. Admittedly, I was wrong. But, who am I to complain? College was my idea.t
Martha, Oliver’s parent, writes:
Ha! Ken told me a few years ago that one day I’d be so confident in my son’s homeschooling path that I’d be writing this. I didn’t believe him, but I agreed to the wager… “Sure, if you can make that happen, I’ll be happy to…”. And here I sit. I am amazed at my son, but it has been a hard road. Oliver had a wonderful start to his education at the local elementary school. We had bumps, but it was working well. He left Jackson Street School, having had an amazing year with his 5th grade teacher. He seemed ready to move to the middle school. He was solid – bright, athletic, a good student, a kind person, funny…and he was excited. He hit 6th grade like a wall. In so many ways, it seemed like his world fell apart. Over a few months he quit all his sports, rarely hung out with his friends and he became seemingly very unhappy. And at school (the only problem he could identify, though I grant you there were probably others), he was “bone-chillingly bored.” While all of this was worrisome, his lack of interest in school was the biggest concern for me. He had always had an incredible inquisitive nature. What was happening to him? He had reached this turning point in his education where he would theoretically be more independent and have choices and variety, but instead of succeeding here, I saw him for the first time becoming increasingly indifferent towards any kind of learning. That was terribly unsettling to me. That was his core. We met with his teachers, set up a plan to keep him engaged…but at the same time, unbeknownst to me, I was simultaneously clearing a path to pull him out of school. It was a matter of days. One night I was sitting with him in his room. He was very down and I was talking to him, trying to fix things…trying to figure out what was wrong. All he could tell me was that he was bored. I tried a lot of parental lines. Nothing worked. He denied being depressed or upset or anything. He just kept saying he was bored. I guess I finally heard him…he was bored...bored, bored, bored! It was that simple. So I asked if he’d like to take a class after school somewhere. And much to my parental surprise, he lit up a tiny bit. “You think
Liberated Learners Spring 2008
refused to do anything that didn’t deeply interest him. But for the outside observer…NOTHING interested him! He sat on the sofa at home and did nothing; no TV, no video game, no computer, no book, no pencil, no words, no music. NOTHING!!!!! He attended nothing at North Star. He did nothing. I was completely unnerved. As a parent…this was a nightmare. This was a huge abyss of nothingness. I held onto Ken’s reassurances and my observations through the window of North Star. Inside, he was always smiling -- beaming really. That was for me the first turning point; there were many others. Then many agonizing months later, he started moving and then running and now he is so hungry for knowledge, it is hard to supply. There was a moment last year when he lost faith. And it dumbfounded me to hear my own words: “You know, Oliver, you are fine, in fact you are doing great! This was a good decision. It’s just hard at the moment. It’ll be ok…” So we walked the walk, and now…now?… I couldn’t feel better about the whole process. Oliver is an amazingly interested and interesting person. He is steady and solid and happy. And he is so completely him; no pretense. The kid is exceptional. (Oops, that’s his parent speaking). That huge abyss of nothingness now seems to be equally proportionate to the amount of knowledge he craves. It is hard to keep him satisfied. Is there some poetic conclusion to draw? Probably! But practicalities call and instead we look over college catalogues and figure out bus routes and try and figure out how to get him what he wants now, and plan out how to get him what he wants after that. He’s fifteen years old and out of the system and it wears me out sometimes. Ha! If I coulda only known then what I see now! What an amazing kid. What an amazing journey it’s been so far for us all. It’s just flying by.t
p Oliver at North Star you could find me a class in Japanese or Latin?” So here’s my home schooling naivete revealed… The next day I started calling different schools and programs, and eventually unwittingly called North Star. The conversation with Ken went something like this: “Do you offer after-school classes in Japanese or Latin?” “Well, we offer both of those classes but they are for kids who are no longer in school.” Oh…. Silence. “Can you tell me more about that?”…. and so he did. And by the end of the conversation I was in tears…quietly but in tears. It felt right. To cut the story short, Oliver never returned to the middle school. Within two days my son made the decision to leave school and go to North Star. And our lives turned upside down. For a few months we constructed an illusion of structure and the walls held. It was in the fall of what would have been Oliver’s 7th grade year that we were truly tested -- and painfully “unschooled.” Oliver wanted to be in charge, and without a clue what that meant, we agreed. This was NOT a good time. We watched him do nothing. Nothing. It was hard. I was worried. No, I was completely shaken. Oliver was doing absolutely nothing! He did so much nothing that I believe even Ken was surprised at the capacity for nothingness. But, Oliver stood his ground and 7
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t Trip to
Puerto Rico
135 Russell Street (Route 9) Hadley MA 01035 413. 582.0193 or 582.0262 www.northstarteens.org