Free School Teaching: A Journey into Radical Progressive Education

5. A VERY DIFFERENT SETUP

CHAPTER FIVE A VERY DIFFERENT SETUP The Albany Free School, in its daily operations, physical settings, grouping of students, coordination of time flow, and internal governance, does not much resemble a school in the traditional sense. Rather, it is an active embodiment of the progressive educators’ confluences of ideas on how a school should be run. The Free School is located, as mentioned earlier, in an old parochial school building in a mostly residential neighborhood in the middle of a row of four-story, nineteenth-century brick houses on a quiet side street. During the summer of 2003, the school received a brand-new coat of schoolhousered paint with white trim and it appears quite attractive from the front with its large windows overlooking the street. Entrance is through black double doors located in the middle of the street-level floor. After entering, one can either turn right or left and thus come into the downstairs area, or proceed straight ahead up a flight of stairs to the upstairs area. The first floor, or downstairs, is broken up into distinct areas. The naming of the different rooms refers to the most regular function of the room and sometimes its physical aspect (e.g., is the biggest, hence the Big Room, is in the middle, hence the Middle Room, has a rug, hence the Rug Room, etc.). If one had gone directly upstairs, one would encounter a single open space, about forty feet square with ceilings approximately twenty feet high. Here is the kitchen, bathroom, kindergarten room, and a flight of stairs for the single classroom that sits atop the kindergarten room that houses the seventh and eighth grades. The school also has a small backyard with a fairly extensive wooden jungle gym built on and amid a couple of trees. This backyard is separated by a fence from the neighbors on the west and south sides. The school and its rooms are, by typical standards, quite small, but they seemed spacious enough for the number of students enrolled in the school for the 2003–2004 school year, which was about sixty. While the school building itself is “home base,” school activities often take place in a wide array of local 59 60 FREE SCHOOL TEACHING public and private community settings. Within walking distance are three public parks, and two are within one block of the school—the “Swing Park” and the “Basketball Park,” so named for their contents or purpose. A football field is five blocks away. Within approximately one mile are two public library branches, a public indoor pool, the New York State Museum, and the Empire State Plaza (which mainly contains legislative office buildings, but also a large array of outdoor and indoor sculptures, a large fountain, a 42-story indoor observation tower, and a seasonal ice skating rink). There are also many private community spaces utilized by the students and staff. For example, about three doors down is the media center—a basement apartment area devoted to a darkroom, a video viewing area, computers , cameras, and so on. Above the media center is the family life center, a birth and parenting center that the school occasionally uses for small, intimate meetings like “girls group” or “boys group.” Also within one block is an anarchist collective that has an extensive library of materials and quiet space that the students, older ones in particular, can use. Most of the staff lives in apartments or houses directly surrounding the school, and on occasion classes or activities are held in staff members’ homes where quiet can be more guaranteed. The school also owns property in Grafton, NY, about a thirtyminute drive from downtown Albany, where there are extensive acres of woods, a low ropes course, a teaching lodge, and a maple sugaring shack, all of which are regularly used by the Free School. Finally, individual students, mainly seventh and eighth graders, also have apprenticeships in various places inside and outside the city. As mentioned, the school building and grounds themselves are home base and students always start and end the day at the school building, even if they spend much of their in-between time in other locales. In terms of staff and student groupings, when I left the school in late November 2003, the school had seven paid teachers, one paid lunch cook, one paid breakfast cook (although the job rotated among various people), four intern teachers who received room and partial board, three intern/fulltime volunteer teachers who covered...