Happy New Year! I hope that this note finds you well, having enjoyed time with family and friends during LREI’s Winter Break. Post break, it has been a treat to wander the halls and greet your children and, especially, to see them excitedly greet each other.
A highlight of the Kassen Clan’s break was a long postponed outing to the Louis Armstrong House Museum. In 1943 Lucille and Louis Armstrong purchased a house in Corona, Queens and lived there for the rest of their lives, until 1971 for Louis and 1983 for Lucille. In the basement of their home, where Louie once played cards with friends, one finds a small exhibition space and a video presentation. The rest of the house has been left as it was at the time of Lucille’s death, and mostly as it was when Louis lived there. This modest home has been transformed into a picture window into the life of a hugely important musician and cultural figure. We learned so much about Mr. Armstrong, about his music, and about his times by simply being in his home, hearing his voice (he recorded hours upon hours of his daily interactions) and seeing those items that were important to him. In essence, we walked the proverbial “miles in his shoes.” The small basement exhibit and the rest of the house are filled with belongings—mundane, cherished, and quirky—that brought Satchmo to life. Speaking of walking in his shoes, Louis Armstrong owned slippers that had a glow-in-the-dark stripe on the inside so that he could find them at night. I wish they sold these in the museum gift shop!
I felt like an LREI student on a really great trip, getting so very close to the experience of another, as close as I will ever get, and I left this house, 34-56 107th Street, Corona, Queens, with a deeper understanding of someone whom I have long admired but about whom I was woefully ignorant. I thought of the Fours going on their home visits and learning so much about their classmates.
I thought of the fourth graders taking the ferry to Ellis Island dressed as immigrants from the early part of the last century; their garb helping the “shoes” they are walking in to fit a little more snugly. Maybe my experience was akin to a seventh grader walking down Duke of Gloucester Way, the high street in Colonial Williamsburg, or a 10th grader pondering the meaning of life at Walden Pond or learning about the Industrial Revolution at the Lowell Mills.
It is important to note that the experiences that take us closer to the people, places, and topics we are studying can happen in classrooms as well as on trips. They happen when reading a book that, through its language and characters and settings, transports you across time and space. They happen during assemblies—led by visitors or those that are student led, such as last month’s high school presentation that emerged from our American foreign policy class, a student created assembly focused on the rise of ISIS. These experiences happen during “Aha” moments in a science lab or when discovering a mathematical concept. Experience is at the core of LREI’s brand of progressive education.
What a wonderful world.