The Fault/Power Paradox of Traditional Schooling

The student/teacher relationship where the teacher’s job is to maintain control and the student’s job is to submit to control is a pervasive characteristic of the traditional school paradigm, and I’d bet all of us have experienced it. Sometimes the exchange is subtle and involves the student feeling at fault for an unfair situation. One episode from my own life that stands out is when I stayed after school with a few other students to get extra help from our trigonometry teacher. It’s important to note that by this time in high school I’d been trained in a hundred different ways to believe that I wasn’t very good at math. Today, this belief has probably become a reality, because at some point I gave up on trying to be good at it, but this wasn’t always true. I was in advanced math classes in elementary school and loved to help my mom figure out the grocery bill before we got up to the register. But by my junior year, I’d gone home crying in frustration enough times to feel like there was definitely something wrong with me, that it wasn’t the teacher’s fault; it was my inability to “get it.” So the fact that I was spending extra time on this class that I believed I was bound to fail was commendable.

The teacher put a problem on the board and had us solve it in our notebooks. I asked a lot of questions, even though I was terrified and confused. The last thing I remember, the moment that prompted me to ultimately go to my guidance counselor and ask her to let me drop that class, was when my trig. teacher, tired I’m sure from her own daily challenges, told us we needed to hurry up because she was supposed to meet her daughter at the mall soon. That was it for me, the moment I knew this teacher couldn’t really help me overcome my fear, much less pass her class. Because I believed she held all the power to reverse my ignorance and quell my fear, and because I was convinced that I was at fault for not “getting it” and powerless to help myself, I was at a loss for any better solution than giving up.

DaretheSchool.org Interviews Dream School Commons Founder

Note: This interview originally appeared on DaretheSchool.org. To read the interview on the original site, click here.

Jaime R. Wood is founder of Dream School Commons, a nonprofit organization with the mission of starting innovative low-cost or no-cost schools that serve populations in need. She is also the author of Living Voices: Multicultural Poetry in the Middle School Classroom (NCTE 2006). She started her teaching career working with middle school students in an alternative charter school in Fort Collins, Colorado. She has since taught college English at Colorado State University, University of Missouri-St. Louis, and Eastern Washington University. Currently, Jaime teaches writing at Clackamas and Mt. Hood Community Colleges in Portland, Oregon. You can learn more about Dream School Commons here:www.dreamschoolcommons.org.

DaretheSchool: What inspired you to create Dream School Commons?:

Jaime:  Five years ago when I was living in St. Louis Missouri and I was watching the documentary about TED, Technology Entertainment Design. The TED conference is a forum where these big thinkers come up with lofty ideas to make the world better. People basically go up on stage and say: “Here’s my idea of how we can make a dent in the problems of the world.” I was inspired by what I saw and came up with an idea of my own. My idea was to collect essays from the most brilliant minds of education and put them together. The question that would frame these ideas would be “Hey expert, if you could build a dream school what would that look like?”

However, I realized the whole “expert” idea was problematic, as was the idea of it being in an anthology/book form. I felt this was archaic. I decided that I wanted this to be a democratic endeavor that anyone could contribute to. In my 10 years of teaching, I have learned the people who never get a voice are often the most innovative.  The people we label as being ignorant often have the best answers. I decided to start by collecting stories and seeing what happens from there.  Many times we are listening to the wrong people.

DaretheSchool: Why is there a need for a “Dream School?”

 Jaime: It frustrates me to live in a city that has all of these amazing and innovative schools, yet the overwhelming majority of them are private and cost tens of thousands of dollars each year. If they are not private, then they are magnet and charter schools, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but you have to fight your way into the school which pushes away many families in need. An important part of the mission of Dream School Commons is these schools need to be “low-cost or no cost” and they should “serve populations in need.”

Daretheschool: What a great point! Thinking of your mission to have these schools serve populations in need, what are your ideas in terms of funding?

Jaime:That’s a good question and it’s something I am still researching . I must admit that with every possibility I research, there seem to be pros and cons. For example, there is a great school called the Eagle Rock School in Estes Park, Colorado,  and it’s funded by the Honda corporation and they have an amazing facility. In an ideal world, I would like to see these sorts of schools publically funded; however, then there are certain rules you must abide by that many times hinder a creative curriculum. I’m finding lots of road blocks and I’m trying to figure out what the escape route is. Many of the issues that we’re seeing now in terms of funding is that we are operating with a “top-down” bureaucracy with the people with the most power making all of the decisions. 

DaretheSchool: What is your dream school?

Jaime: I have some strong ideas about what I think will work. Schools should revolve around what students want to learn. I think this can start at any age range. I believe in students building their own curriculum and setting their own goals. I worked at a charter school that used an Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound philosophy. In this model, students learn in expeditions. We had themes and guiding questions. We did not use textbooks or grades. At least twice a year we would have student/teacher/parent conferences and the meeting was led by the student. We ended each meeting with goal setting: educational, social, and lifelong learning goals. I think this is a good way to promote learner autonomy. Project-based learning would be key; however projects for the sake of projects would not be enough. In my dream school I would want for students to be solving real-life problems. Right now we are closing schools off and turning them into environments that are not real or relevant to the lives of children. I want to connect the real world to the school. I would like to see the Dream School connected to schools around the world and at least one university. I think there are lots of community resources that schools should be connected to. The structure we have made around schools is completely arbitrary. I think we need to re-think the grade level idea.

My idea is very similar to what we are seeing with the Occupy movement. The movement should be leaderless, democratic and participatory. I believe students should be on the Board of Directors and administrators should be in the classroom.

DaretheSchool: Who has influenced your ideas in education?

Jaime:  I’ve been reading a lot of Howard Gardner lately. His book: The Unschooled Mind is very thought provoking. My mother was my English teacher in high school and was a big influence for me as well. She put a living room in her class complete with a couch and an aquarium. Her students would rarely sit in rows. She made her classroom welcoming and inviting to her students. This goes with my belief that a school should be a community and the community should be invited into the school.

Dream School Commons Visits Occupy Portland

On a not-so-rainy morning in October, I made my way downtown to drop off some supplies for the Occupy Portland movement, and serendipitously, just as I was weaving my way through the web of tents and signs, I saw a young man holding a sign about education. Wait, I thought, I have my nifty smart phone with me. I should take this opportunity to video these people while I talk with them about education. I bet they'll have some ideas. Low and behold, I was right. Thanks to Cameron, Catherine, Rygger, and Eddie for sharing your thoughts with Dream School Commons.  

To Prove Our Brilliance

Note: Welcome Dylan Alexander Smith, DSC board member and new blogger.


This was the seventies. I grew up in a shotgun shack on a tract of land barely more than a whisper, at the bottom of a wooded slope at the end of a forgotten tongue of county asphalt. Our address was officially “unincorporated”—adrift between the fringes of one small town and another, tinier one. We were transplants to the rural scene—the Pacific Northwest, in this case—from the modestly sized city of Portland, Oregon. The bucolic lifestyle was grand in terms of wild, rambling spaces, but not intellectual scope. I was an only child at this point. When it came time for me to begin my formal education, my parents discovered that our home fell on the Podunk side of the school district divide. The school I was destined to attend was an economically-depressed, anti-intellectual catchall of boondock foundlings in a one-stoplight crossroads of a burg. My parents, a union of young earnest free-thinkers, got wind of an experimental school that seemed to align with their sensibilities in the larger of the two small towns. The school was a kind of starter school, limited to 1st – 3rd grades. It was in the basement of a church, but without religious affiliation, and maxed out at thirty students across the three grades. Supposedly it was a private school, though it couldn’t have cost any money, since we were living on food stamps at the time. Faced with otherwise sending me off to the woolly yonder, they went for it.

The teachers were real hippie types, of the benevolent, sprout-eating, corduroy-and-flannel-wearing variety. They fit with the images of do-gooder “safe” adults I saw on Sesame Street and The Electric Company. The only male, Mike, had a scraggly beard and ponytail. Another teacher, Barbara, was a round woman with a massive poofy Afro that wobbled and shook about her head like an ectoplasmic halo. These were large-hearted, fully-formed humanists.

I hadn’t gone to kindergarten, but I’d been to preschool, and Open Community School had a similar feel. There were no desks or classrooms. Learning was a kind of constructive playtime. Problem solving. Project completing. Emphases on creative development. We spent a lot of time outside, adventuring about the property, which was a lumpy, hilly, wooded, swampy wonderland. A stagnant creek at the edge of the grounds was a source of great interest for the hunting of small water creatures. We climbed trees. We played chasing and kissing games. One boy, Adam, terrorized me every day, and I couldn’t stand up for myself because I didn’t have any violence in me. (As with a lot of the mysteries presented by the kid-centric social milieu, I was totally confused by this tough-guy development.) The school newsletter published a bit in which I opined freely about “explicit” aspects of human anatomy. The faculty apparently wasn’t interested in glossing children’s immunity to arbitrary social taboos. My mother was mortified though kept a sense of humor about it.

The setting and atmosphere of the school were about as natural and comfortable as could have been hoped for in an otherwise foreign environment. I loved it there. I thought I did, anyway. I learned to read there. I learned basic math. One of the teachers read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe to us, which confronted my imagination head-on and forever changed my life (as Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH would four years later). But apparently, I wasn’t becoming properly socialized. I was too sensitive, circumspect, and clingy with the adults instead of running wild with my roustabout cohort. Maybe I worried irrationally about my bully, Adam. Whatever the reason, the teachers were concerned that I might be headed for a brooding, depressive future. Partway through 2nd grade, they suggested my parents remove me to a more traditional environment. Structure might remedy my social challenges, thicken my skin so to speak. Exposure to the “normal” world. Sink or swim.

My parents finagled a waiver out of the Podunk crossroads school and landed me a spot in the next-closest district, which had a lot of suburban middle-class tax money going to it. The schools were new and vast and full of well-nourished, mall-clothed, housing-development-reared kids. In this new world I had my own desk… in a row of similar desks… in a matrix of the same—all stuffed with kids robotically facing the same direction, hushed into stilled silence. I cried for weeks. No kidding.

The other kids watched me and whispered. I was a distraction from the design of this space, with its demands on attention and underlying withering atmosphere of perpetual censure (despite teachers’ often cheerful attempts to sabotage it and keep our chins up). Two girls—best friends, dressed identically—repeatedly asked if I was all right, which made me cry more, not knowing how to accept fellow seven-year-olds’ sympathy.

It was the tradition of “school” that cowed my spirit: the cold contrivance passing itself off as a natural circumstance. Obviously, I didn’t possess the language to articulate the fact of my experience, but I was facing the philosophical crisis of my time: how does one intellectually reconcile imposed behavioral structures absent of meaning? And who were all these children so fluent in the incumbent rituals? What was the secret to their knowledge? How had they come to participate so easily? To me the classroom was as clinical and alien as a waiting room at a doctor’s office—laden with a similar foreboding. Here was none of the pleasantness of a native human habitat. I’d been bounced from my moon rover onto a bleak stretch of airless rock. The teachers were friendly, nice. My fellow students were too. But they were aliens. Friendly aliens. Breathing alien air, organized in alien formation. Like seven-year-old “associates.” How could these kids ever be friends?

It turned out, not knowing how to deal with me—a creature from some exotic nether-region—my new school had put me into the “slow” second grade class. After a week of covert assessment, however, they moved me across the hall to the “accelerated” side. I continued to bawl incessantly, not knowing what to do amidst these strangers—now a whole new contagion of them, with a new overseer. I was having a very natural response to the very unnatural phenomenon of being institutionalized. Instead of simply adapting to my new surroundings, I was reacting.

After about three weeks, I began to calm down, having no doubt convinced the other kids that I had some kind of mental illness. Eventually I managed to assimilate, meaning my tears dried up and I blended as best I could with a kind of practical, intuitive mimesis, biding my time like a cat in a cage, internally pacing and alert. As time passed—first months, then years—as any imprisoned person is apt to do, I found room within the institution to express and explore my creative impulses, through writing and art and performance. But, of course, these foregrounded impulses of my person-ness were relegated to the background of my so-called scholarly priorities.

In high school we were tested to identify plausible career paths; my results recommended me for menial labor, things like “maintenance” and “small engine repair.” This because I undoubtedly (though I certainly don’t remember) penciled in the bubbles on the form pertaining to interests in the arts, and at the time—the late 1980’s—the importance of the humanities was losing hold on the public consciousness in a big way—as it has continued to do so in our culture of unbridled capitalism. I have since, in my adult life, dedicated much of my energies to the arts in many forms, from illustration, to writing, to music and acting, even garnering some decent, if brief, success in some of these enterprises. In other words, I did not bury my creative impulse despite the institution’s designs, and though I may not be able to claim rich rewards in calculable wealth, I can certainly claim rewards in character, wisdom, and life experience. But I digress…

It’s important to point out, in light of common notions and biases and fears regarding the failures of our public schools, that I went to a “good” school. My school was not one of the derelict, ignored, defunded, or fraudulently-managed schools that seem to be a widespread feature of our—especially “urban” (code for black, Hispanic, inner city or ghetto)—public school system. Ours was not a catchall for ill-equipped teachers. We had smart, active, involved, dedicated, and innovative teachers overall. By all accounts, the school district I came up in was well above average in terms of the quality of the general education it provided—something I didn’t understand until I got out into the world and saw firsthand the foreshortened education my workforce and college peers had been graduated with. Nevertheless, for some of us (perhaps the more sensitive among us), the institution itself undermines our ability to best learn, represses rather than promotes our talents and intellectual skills, thereby curtailing our abilities to excel in a world that ultimately demands independent thought to achieve excellence.

My intention in writing this is not to condemn our school paradigms per se, rather to comment on what should be obvious: (1) what appears to “work” doesn’t necessarily qualify as the best method or even good enough, and (2) what works well for some doesn’t work so well for others. Indeed, the obdurate structure of the traditional classroom, with its emphasis on behaviorism, may provide a feeling of welcome safety for some children, as a respite from chaotic home life. And surely there are overworked parents who appreciate the agrarian-rooted instruction on manners and respect that may not otherwise feel suitably reinforced during the brief moments they are able to share with their kids. I believe the argument worth having comes down to the notion that a functional, sophisticated citizenry needs to address the realities of just how brilliant and diverse our human imagination is proving to be: do we continue to imprint a culture of obeisance on our kids as a priority above all else, or do we give fascination a front seat and tell formality to wait out in the hall?



-- Dylan Alexander Smith

Avoid the “Correct-Answer Compromise”

Think back to the last time someone tested your performance, whether it be in a classroom, on the job, or at home. What exactly were they testing? Was the goal to determine whether you’d memorized facts correctly, whether you could perform a certain task as expected, or did the test, in whatever form in was administered, measure your deep understanding of a skill, process, problem, or discipline?  

My students assess my performance all the time in their heads, I’m sure, and at least once a year they get to do it on paper. Occasionally (not enough, in my opinion) someone in the English department will come and observe my teaching and then chat with me about it later.

When I was in graduate school, I was mainly assessed through writing because I studied poetry and, before that, English education. As a matter of fact, I can’t remember taking a traditional test or quiz in years besides the GRE (Graduate Record Examinations), on which, I don’t mind revealing, I did relatively poorly. Supposedly the GRE was meant to assess my ability to proceed successfully to graduate school. I took it toward the end of my first of two quite successfully earned graduate degrees, making the test, in my mind, superfluous, and my scores reflect that attitude, and the fact that I’m just plain not good at those kinds of tests. (This is a disclaimer in a sense because I may be more inclined to defend such testing if I were better at it, but given what I understand about assessment, that’s doubtful.)

The GRE is a genre of testing called formal summative assessment that students undertake in every state in the union, the kind that continues to be controversial. You’re probably more familiar with the term standardized testing, and you’ve likely taken more than one version of it if you went through public schooling in America. There’s the SAT and ACT for college admissions, and each state has its own test for students in grades K-12. In the state where I received most of my schooling, Louisiana, it was called the LEAP test. It sounds so energizing and forward thinking, doesn’t it?

Summative assessment is just what it sounds like; it sums up what a student has learned after a period of time. Generally, its purpose is accountability. School systems need to prove that students have learned certain skills or universities want to ensure that incoming Freshmen have what’s needed to be successful at their institutions, so they administer summative assessments to collect data. Of course, the validity and relevancy of that data is questionable.   

But I don’t mean to get bogged down in the politics and minutia of standardized testing in this blog post. There are plenty of great venues designed just for that, like this Facebook group called “OPT OUT of State Tests: Parent/Student Support Against Standardized Testing” and this persuasive article published in Minnesota English Journal called “The Case Against Standardized Testing.” I highly recommend looking into both.

Writing for Social Change

NOTE: I originally wrote this post for a blog called Bark: A Blog of Literature, Culture, and Art. If you'd like to read it on that site, click here. Bark is the official blog of the MFA program in creative writing at Eastern Washington University, where I earned my MFA in poetry, and for which I've written blogs for the past two years.

You know how, as writers, we often feel ineffectual and separate from all those other people in the world? Okay, maybe I'm just speaking for myself, or for poets. Alright, for myself.

Regardless, the question of the usefulness of writing is one that I've been asked more than once in more than one venue. I remember just a few months ago one of my well-meaning developmental writing students came into my office, presumably to cheer me up or something, when he said something like, "Jaime, I have to be honest with you. You've seemed really tired this quarter, and I just don't know if teaching writing is worth wearing yourself out over. I mean, seriously, I'm not going to use this stuff outside of school, and I don't think most other people do either." Sigh. He was right, I was tired, but not of teaching writing or even of hearing students tell me things like that. He was, after all, telling me the truth as he experiences it.

Besides, there was some wisdom in his statement. A lot of students really don't use the academic skills we teach them: MLA format, essay organization, how to locate a scholarly article on a library database.... But, whether they know it or not, they do use the less tangible, more cognitive skills we teach them: to look deeply at a text, to analyze an argument, to question authority.

These are the reasons I enjoy teaching college composition, but I often struggle with the applicability of it. When, as my student asked implicitly, will they ever use the academic skills I'm charged with teaching them? When will essays ever become relevant to anyone outside of academia?

I know of at least two places (I'm sure there are more.) where essays are not only relevant, they are promoting social change. The first is my own, newly started nonprofit organization, Dream School Commons. The second is Eastern Washington University alumnus Ross Carper's website, Beyond the Bracelet.

Education’s Economic Divide

Not long ago, I went on a search for schools in the Portland, Oregon, area that are doing something different. By different, I mean schools whose philosophies provide parents with a real choice between their neighborhood public school and something else.


My findings were both exciting and discouraging. There are lots of great choices out there, but most of them are either private schools, public alternative schools, or public schools with specialized curricula that require a lottery for attendees outside their neighborhoods. So what, you might ask, choice is choice, isn’t it? I’d argue, no. Not all choices are created equal. As a matter of fact, some of the differences between these schools practically make them no choice at all.

Let me explain:

If you’re a parent looking for a school for your child, you’ve generally got two choices: public school or private school. The most obvious difference between these schooling paths is financial. Private schools cost families money while public ones don’t.

So if you’re like me and you can’t afford to dish out thousands (or sometimes tens of thousands) of dollars each year to educate your child, then you’re stuck with public schools. I say stuck, but I’m an advocate of public schools...in theory. After all, I went to public schools, even to earn my three degrees, and I turned out all right, as they say. (I’ll argue against this platitude later.) Besides, public schools are offering students many choices nowadays that they didn’t offer when I was in school.

Charter schools, for example, are great laboratories of innovation, as are magnet schools (to which I did go for a few years in elementary school). Parents can choose to send their students to schools that emphasize the arts, science, mathematics, technology, foreign language, etc. Often times, these public schools, because of their independent nature, can keep class sizes smaller and make decisions about curriculum that “regular” public schools can’t.

Sounds great, doesn’t it?

How Do We Break Free?

If our goal is to create a new kind of school, how do we break free from the traditional ways of thinking about school? I think we have to start with a process of negation: to examine what schools currently are and then imagine the opposite of that, the negated version of reality. It’s kind of like playing a game of “What if...?” Here’s an example of what I mean:

This is Not Your Great-Grandmother’s Oven

My very first teaching job was in a brand new charter school in Fort Collins, Colorado, called Pioneer School for Expeditionary Learning. (It’s now called Polaris.) And our director there, as a way of helping people better understand why our school did things so differently, used to tell this story:


There's a tradition in his family of cutting the Thanksgiving turkey in half before cooking it. It's something his mother did, and her mother, and hers. When it came time for him to cook his own turkey, he asked his mother why they cut it in half instead of baking it whole. "That's just the way we've always done it," she said.