What's going on next door?

Ray Bradbury wrote a wonderful short story called "The Pedestrian" in 1951. In the story, the protagonist wanders the streets of his dystopian society and is met with the muted flashing lights of TV screens projecting the latest shows. The idea is that no one has a personal connection with anyone else. The screens have taken over, and people do not interact with real people - they only interact with the two-dimensional ones on the various screens. He wonders as he walks, “What’s going on next door?”

While I could at this point launch into a diatribe about how Bradbury totally called it in 1951, how our society is starting to resemble the dystopian world created by Bradbury in this story (and in Fahrenheit 451, and in other stories), instead I'll talk about a different world altogether. It is my world at school. (Groan if you will, but I haven't posted on a topic like this is a while, having been completely consumed with finishing a story about a squirrel.)

So what's going on next door in my world? I love teaching at this school because the walls are so thin. On Tuesday morning, I can hear my good friend Mr. K talking about criminology next door while I blather on about media literacy and digital communication and bias and truth. Criminology sounds fascinating. The criminal element has been around for quite some time (forever, I think is the term), and so the study of criminals - the state of criminality, the people who become criminals, the system that deals with criminals - is absolutely important for our understanding of how part of our society functions. 

Later that day, after switching classrooms, I can hear two sets of voices. Mrs. K is enthusiastically informing students about Calculus (or Algebra 2 or Trigonometry or basic arithmetic, I can never tell the difference). Knowing that the universe can essentially be explained with math, especially the higher orders of the discipline, makes me wish I could sit in and watch the show, tinker with numbers (rarely) and letters (more often) and symbols (quite often), figure out the universe.

Comingled with this voice is the voice of yet another colleague, Ms. B. She’s talking about childcare and about human development and about the psychology and physiology of children. I cannot think of anything more intriguing than learning how we have all travelled through the same stages of development, but we have all done so uniquely and with a different result – us. She takes her students to schools and preschools and has young people at one end of the development spectrum work with other young people at the other end of the development spectrum. Youth informing youth: beautiful.

I go upstairs. There, I see students working independently on various online curricula. Some students are huddled around a single computer and are collaborating and learning together. Others are simply using the computer for purely social reasons and taking a break from learning. (Again, I could launch into a rant about how long that break often lasts, but I won’t. Yet.) A teacher, Mrs. M, works with individually with another student who is having trouble with a particular mathematical concept. Here, one can almost hear the hum of students’ brains, or maybe it’s the lights overhead and the screen and the printer/copier.

In another office upstairs, our director is busy captaining the ship – sometimes meeting with the crew, sometimes with the harbormaster, sometimes with the customers who fund our little expedition. In my own office, I sit and unpack my computer and continue working as I eat lunch. My officemates come in and we have a conversation. We talk about work, of course, but we also talk about our personal lives and about our mission and about our country and our society and our world. We are intelligent people and we talk about intelligent things, until we don’t. It is inspiring and challenging and comfortable.

Still later on this typical day, I descend the stairs once again to class and through the wall I hear Mr. H. He discusses journalism and the school newspaper and then he discusses issues that are tangentially related to the newspaper but have real meaning in the lives of the students. They laugh. Everyone laughs in this classroom, now that I think about it. He stays in that classroom as I stay in mine for the next class, wherein he discusses drama and the art of creating life on a stage from the words on a page. If that isn’t some sort of magic, then I guess we’ll have to rely on Hogwarts after all.

This is just one day. The next day, while I hack away at my blog and read my students’ thoughts, I hear the projected voice of Ms. B again, mixed with the distinct vocal delivery (and laugh) of Mr. Mc. She teaches first aid and CPR, while he teaches about the history of our country. In another room in the building, someone is administering a science lab and helping students experience the learning that so often stays up in the abstract regions of the brain and soul.

All of that occurs in only one building of our four. Down the block, a teacher holds court in the art studio, and is peels open the creative genius that has been dormant for many years in so many students. Here, another form of magic exists, the art of visual composition in various media. In the same building, but in a separate room, another teacher incongruously provides instruction and facilitation in Geometry. What strange building mates these two make, until one sees the art of geometrical shapes reflected in the photography and the sculptures and the painting and drawings of the art studio.

What’s going on next door? Allow me to completely cheese out and say that Life happens next door. Nearly every facet of Life is represented through the walls of this school if people will listen. Students move from class to class, just as teachers do this year. What happens in those classrooms, what happens next door is just as important as what happens outside. We are not mindless screen-watchers content with flashing lights and images. We are the wanderers of Bradbury’s story. We walk the nights and seek out the experience and the knowledge. And we fight against the ending of that story by noticing the people and engaging them in our wanderings.