The green glass door

Yes I guess, I oughta get 'back' into a steady habit of posting relevant things rather than infrequent cerebral oozings. I wouldn’t say I ever criticized teachers for lack of collaboration or self-study, but I certainly wondered how they could get on without deep and experiential teamwork. Of course, now I understand the mindset of full-on teaching, where once the bell rings all that’s left for it is a lot of cerebral oozing. But it’s still an issue.
I spent a night and a half, and a day in between, at great hollow wilderness school, as run by Joe and Aimee, and it was very hard to leave. Pedagogy is in the air along with mountain air and mosquitoes and nature and dirt and rock climbing and compost and ropes courses and knotweed. The teachers there live in a house, sharing a bathroom and a kitchen, occupying couches and tents, and exchanging stories and word games and meals. Complete collaboration, and it had me imagining what would happen if there was that level of investment in a full time school. They do summer camp and day trips and overnights, so the 'clientele' changes pretty rapidly. But the teachers live together and go to work to play with techniques and work together to provide positive experiences for people.
So imagine if there was a school like great hollow, except for that it is a boarding school. Where the students are as invested as the teachers. Their time would be structured and they would be given no slack in the discipline department. But at the same time they would be offered unstructured activities that require them to take leadership and creativity upon themselves. The perfect balance if everyone is there all the time.
Anyway, that’s for later. What I am interested in now is going back to deep hollow again, and then again and again, seeing as how it’s not so far away. I could literally spend every weekend there, thus solving the housing crisis of sub-prime island seclusion. I don’t just want to bring kids there; I want to learn campy name games and group building activities and put a vaguely science spin on them and call that a curriculum. Along with formulas and vocabulary of course.
The future is prisons and math.
And the leaves are changing.