Back to School wit' Youse!

This is not against the rules. It is considered an indigenous form of alternative transportation.















We love our school, Metropolitan Learning Center. It's a small, alternative K x 12 school of about 500 students within the Portland Public School System. It's been around for 30+ years in a old brick building up against a small city park. It's a gentrified urban neighborhood of old apartments-turned-condos, beautiful foursquares with no yard to speak of, victorian multiplexes, and a couple of commercial streets which mix corporate whoremongering with old school funkyness in a charming war of mercantile philosophy.

MLC uses the Experiential Learning model, which means that the kids are constantly out in the
thick of it, learning on their feet. Parents and friends teach elective classes to 1st x 8th graders in areas like lego robotics, knitting, capoeira, songwriting, theater, every kind of art imaginable, film, and classes with names like "VOLCANO!"














Each month features an All School Gathering led by one of the grades, in which they explore via songs, skits or readings one of the school's character traits (which sort of stand in for rules- like, there is no rule against fist fighting per se, but as it does not display Courage, Compassion, Discipline, Integrity or Respect, you shouldn't do it. Duh.) Community building traditions are also strongly held, such as all-school picnics in the fall and spring in which the whole school walks a mile uphill to spend the day together in one of Portland's largest city parks; Solstice celebration, a secular, suncentric spazz-fest written and performed by students and involving much teenage interpretive dance; Renaissance Faire, Egg Drop, No Ivy Day, etc.

Kay began attending in the 8th grade, and for 3 years she, Irene and Calipso all went to the same school. I still refer to it as "the kids' school" and then feel silly since there's only one kid there now.

From kindergarten on, students keep a portfolio of their best work in each area of study, as well as reflections on their process for each assignment or experience.

Instead of finals, high schoolers must present their portfolios to a panel of community members whose minds end up like so much egg salad after intensely reading, hearing and thinking about 5 (potentially wildly different) kids, their unique learning strategies, accomplishments, failures (yes, enthusiastically documented) and general state of meta-cognition (their words). (I coped via exhaustive use of post-it notes.)

The younger kids present portfolios to their parents at an open-house style gathering with cookies and sparkling water. Much easier on the brain (mine, anyway).

They also paint murals. No wall is safe.

Last spring MLC turned up in a district newsletter as the high school with the best graduation rate, 96.8%. (Students at every level also excel in all the no-child and state testing nonsense.) See there, skeptics! It works to know all your teachers by first name. For the student population to be so small that the VP knows you by not only name but personal hobbies. To have no letter grades, but 30 hours of community service required per year. Not even a real liability to be known as the Gay/Punk Rock/Aspergers High School.

There are down sides to a small school- no IB or AP classes, and the lack of grades may have been the difference between Kay getting waitlisted instead of accepted at Reed last year. But for kids who prioritize community (either because they aren't headed for academia or because they aren't sweating the fact that they will succeed in getting there) MLC is... well not a U-topia, because this is a public school and they are teenagers after all, but a topia at least, a place where all your freaky quirks are tolerated and in many cases embraced. (Gay, punk rock, and Aspergers-identified are almost passe. Transgender, synaesthesiac, and can't-remember-my-textbook-reading-unless-I-listen-to-the-same-music-as-when-I-read-it are well represented. There are even a few jocks.)

I often forget that not all schools are like MLC, or diminish in my mind the differences. Then I will talk to a friend who has recently toured the place, and hear them compliment the well behaved unattended 3rd grade book groups in the hallway, or the art (I mentioned the walls?), or the fact that the high school lockers are purposely located in the kindergarten hallway, and I remember how great the place really is.

Again, not perfect. I do not relish the 20 minute commute, and am biding the time until Irene can manage the bike ride there so that I can assuage some serious driving guilt. I grudgingly accept that PTSA meetings bizarrely take place on Thursday nights, so that working parents can attend while not interfering with the Jewish Sabbath. The parking is ridiculous, using the playground blacktop and hence no parking stripes, leading to a barely contolled state of anarchy which occasionally leaves someone blocked in indefinitely. And yet, the natural parking tradoff, a school garden, is also absent (on the top of my rabblerousing list for this year, however.)

















This year Irene is in 4th grade, officially a BIG YEAR. They take class upstairs. They have proper
homework. They take a couple of week-long trips to far-flung, exotic learning locations (but still in Oregon...) It is going to be something.














Happy first day of school everyone!