West Virginia? Cutting edge? This doesn’t surprise me in the slightest.
In the 1960s, the designers of the new high school to be
built in my hometown of Charleston, West Virginia, were faced with a dilemma –
how to make a school big enough to accommodate the huge number of baby boomers
who where about to enter high school. As
anyone who has been to West Virginia must know, large tracts of flat and level
land aren’t readily available without the creative application of dynamite.
Their innovative solution was to design a system where every
student wasn’t in class at the same time, so that the school didn’t have to be
as physically large as might otherwise be required. They called it the ‘mod schedule’ and the day
was broken into twenty-five seventeen-minute mods. The school designers then further divided
things into a six-day rotating week.
The only problem with that was we still went to school on a
five-day week, so memorizing your schedule took a bit of brain power. “What day is it?” was a popular question, but
we weren’t asking whether it was Wednesday or Thursday. We wanted to know whether is was Day 3 or Day
4, because that made a difference as to what classes we needed to be in. You might have English on Days 1 and 4, but
math on Days 3 and 6.
I shudder to think about the enormity of the job the
counselors had with scheduling all of that in the days before computer
algorithms were available.
But the result of all of the confusion was that you had a
schedule that was specifically tailored to your needs. One year when I was struggling with math, I
was assigned to math lab, which was a two-mod long extra tutoring session. Lunch wasn’t at any particular time, but when
you had some free mods in the middle of the day, you went to the cafeteria and
ate. Or not. We didn’t have passing periods, but you
always had a least one mod between classes.
Things like band and athletics were three mods at the end of the day so
they could run over for practices.
The genius of the system wasn’t the complicated schedule,
however, it was how each class was divided into three parts. Each core class had Lecture (notes), Seminar (talking), and
Quest (doing).
Everyone taking Chemistry, for instance, would attend
lecture, which was just like a college lecture in the auditorium. Every teacher that taught that class would be
present for lecture, although they might not actually speak that day. Lecture was usually three mods long.
The next thing was seminar, which was also three mods
long. Everyone sat in a circle and
discussed whatever topic we were on, whether it was the Russian Revolution or
literary devices. The teacher sat in the
circle too and guided the discussion. They
usually let us range pretty far as I recall.
Yes, that’s right – one whole class period was all about talking.
The last piece was quest.
The length of quest depended on the class. In science, quest was the lab part and lasted
six mods, but occurred only once a week.
For English, quest was a writing workshop lasting four mods and meeting
twice in a six-day week.
The schedule allowed for an amazing amount of
flexibility. By the time I got there,
the baby boom was long past and the school was physically too big for the mod
system. What that meant for my friends
and me was that there was plenty of empty classrooms that we could use during
the course of the day for homework or projects.
I rarely brought anything home because I could get it done during the
day, although I certainly wasn’t the best of students.
Sadly, since that time, GW has abandoned the mod schedule in
favor of regular periods and a regular week.
I’m sure the declining population in Charleston was part of it, but
also, for some students that schedule was probably a nightmare.
I graduated high school in the 1980s and always thought my
school was some sort of weird anomaly, a remnant of the sixties – a
touchy-feely, Kumbaya sort of thing. But
last fall, I toured New Tech High in Coppell, Texas. Much to my shock, that school was like being
back at George Washington. They have a
mod schedule, not everyone is in class at the same time, they have empty
classrooms available for teams to meet for work, and the cafeteria serves lunch
whenever people show up within certain hours.
That school is considered cutting edge these days. Hmm.
What my high school taught me was that talking about
something is one of the best ways to learn about it, second only to doing the thing you are trying to learn. After my English teacher let us select, by
vote, what novel we would read, I realized that a degree of freedom to choose
is a good thing, even for teenagers, and that an individualized learning plan
is not as hard to create as you might think.
I learned that classrooms don’t have to be arranged in rows and that a
teacher doesn’t have to be up on the stage, but can be really effective sitting
with his or her students. I learned that
education doesn’t have to be an ‘us versus them’ proposition, that it can be a
partnership built on trust and respect.
I’d love to have a time machine to go back to 2005 when the
whole state decided to adopt Project Based Learning. What an amazing undertaking! Or barring that event, I’d go to the sixties
when the mod system was proposed and listen to the community involvement, the
teacher buy-in, and the staff development that must have taken place. For both parents and teachers, that system
must have been a completely new and shocking paradigm. For the teachers, they must have had to learn
a new set of unexpected skills.
I’m sure that not all of my high school teachers were
perfect at those skills, but I remember my classes with fondness and not with
any sense of being oppressed by the system.
And that’s why I’m here today.
