January 23, 2020
(This letter to the LREI community follows a note I wrote on November 22, 2019, which can be found on my blog, Get Your Phil.)
And off they go! Four of our youngest students and their teacher are heading into the world in search of answers to questions they don’t yet know they have. Heading off equipped with a child’s birthright – the love and joy found
in learning about the world, brought to fruition with their developing academic skills, with their teacher as a guide, and their colleagues to provide four-year-old collegiality and to help carry the load.
The Fours’ home visits are the earliest incarnation of LREI’s commitment to merging learning and life, the schoolhouse and the world, and to using these moments of synchrony as opportunities to develop and hone essential academic and intellectual skills. These moments of being part of a larger world are an essential component of LREI’s legacy and of our current program. Connecting learning to the world, whether done in or out of the school house, has been at the core of what we do for nearly 100 years. The field trip was invented at the turn of the last century at the Little Red School House and schools like it. Trips help to answer the questions, “How can we get as close as possible to the experiences of others; how can we truly understand and empathize? What are the most authentic and effective ways in which to practice and test our learning?”
During their time at LREI students will take dozens of day-long field trips and at least nine overnight trips. Many of these experiences relate to specific classroom foci while others are more general in nature, relating to the year’s curriculum writ large, offering an overarching view of how work in school connects to work in the world. These finely tuned experiences, planned with the utmost skill and care, create opportunities to put students’ skills and content area knowledge to the test. We see this when students count leaves gathered in Washington Square Park, when first graders survey safety signs and traffic, when fourth graders paint moments from their farm trip, through the 7th grade museum research, the eighth grade social justice field work, and, of course, the last overnight trip, our eleventh grade long-trip experience, researching national issues around the country.
Connecting the classroom to the world happens within the walls of the school house, as well. The very essence of our classroom-based program in the lower school and our departmentalized curriculum in the middle and high school challenges students to gain the skills and understanding to navigate their increasingly complex world. They are asked to hear, learn from, listen to, and challenge ideas and voices and experiences that are different from their own, to begin to develop a level of cultural competency. Through the books they read, the activities in which they participate, through arts and math and science, through their participation in extracurricular activities in the older grades, and led by example by our skilled faculty who inspire this school/world connection each day, our students minimize the distance between learning and living; practicing, growing, and developing a better sense of their place in the larger society and the power that their education provides.
As lawyer, author, and advocate for justice Bryan Stevenson said, “I believe our power, our instruments, our wisdom, our capacity to change the world is waiting for us if we get proximate to the poor and excluded.” Our students develop this power over the course of their 14-year LREI experience. Progressive education relies on students getting proximate to life, theirs and that of others, and at LREI they do, every day.
KARAMU IS COMING! – The much anticipated Karamu multi-cultural celebration is right around the corner, Friday, January 31, 5:30p.m. at 40 Charlton Street. The line-up of multi-cultural performers includes a gospel choir from Harlem, NYC, dance performances from Croatia and Trinidad & Tobago, and a Korean beat-boxer! Bring a dish to share at the potluck which begins at 5:30 p.m. Let us know what dish you plan on bringing here so that we can plan accordingly. The show begins at 7:00p.m. followed by a dance party for kids and grown-ups! Ticket sales start Monday, January 27th in the lobby of the Sixth Avenue building. We also are in desperate need of volunteers to set-up, serve food at the potluck, run the craft room & wine room, etc. Please sign-up here to help ensure a smooth night for our community.