In the Fall of 2002, the Head of Clear Spring School, Jerry RunnerSmith, offered me my first full-time classroom teaching position. I remember telling him I did not think I would be a good fit at the school, but he insisted I was the right man for the job.
One of the classes he wanted me to teach was Geometry. He asked how I planned on assessing the students. I replied that I would give them a traditional paper test. There was a long pause. I broke the silence by admitting I could not assess them other than a paper test.
“Oh, there are any number of ways to do it,” he said. “For instance, in a class like Geometry, you could ask the students to dance to demonstrate their mastery of shapes and space.” I almost burst out laughing but quickly realized he was quite serious.
Today, more than 20 years later, as I look around my classroom in Bentonville, I am surrounded by the reminders of my unforgettable 9-year career as a teacher at a little school that I told my friends was “where old hippies sent their kids.” But I am no longer laughing. Instead, I am filled with a profound sense of gratitude to that community of people who believed in what they were doing, and encouraged, nay, demanded that I not be constrained by preconceived notions as I struggled to find the best ways to teach the children entrusted to my care.
There’s a pufferfish hanging from my ceiling. That pufferfish was given to me by a student who was determined to be a marine biologist. This same student built a life-sized anglerfish for a class project… out of Legos. He even added a light-up lure. Even though he was a thousand miles from the nearest ocean, at Clear Spring everyone told him he would make it. And he did.
There’s a poster of an ivory-billed woodpecker on the wall. I got that poster in Brinkley, Arkansas… on a two-week trip during summer vacation to Louisiana… to hunt for the woodpecker. Accompanying me (i.e., camping in the swamp in July) were a dozen Clear Spring students who had competed for the opportunity to be eaten alive by mosquitos… and loved every minute of it.
That trip, the brainchild of Nancy Wood, was the genesis of dozens of trips all over the country: digging for topaz in West Texas, viewing Georgia O’Keeffe paintings in Taos, eating buffalo with Lakota Sioux in South Dakota, you name it, we did it, always cooking our own food, toting our own bedrolls, and spreading kindness and tolerance all over the country. Talk about an education! And the kids learned a lot, too.
Over in the corner is a wooden periodic table, with pull-out tiles concealing a chamber to hold a sample of each element. It’s the cornerstone of the Chemistry courses I teach each year. Many years ago, I told Doug Stowe of a similar table (costing many thousands of dollars) I had seen in a magazine. “Why don’t we make one, Pete?” he asked. “I don’t know how,” I protested. “Neither do I,” he replied. “Let’s you and I and the kids learn together.” And we did. My classroom is still filled with marvelous student-made objects from that wonderland known as the Wisdom of the Hands Woodshop.
Tomorrow’s announcements are lying on my desk. One of them is from the teacher responsible for putting together the award-winning Literary Magazine for our whole district. That teacher was once a scrappy little seventh-grader… at Clear Spring. She was one of the dozens of students who followed me to the Carnegie Library one day, then to the seed tick-filled woods the next day, then to a clean-up project at one of the local springs the next day… and on and on and on. How many of her students (like mine) are getting a daily dose, intentional or not, of the magic learned at “The Miracle in the Woods?” The reach of the school extends far, far beyond Dairy Hollow.
As I sit at my desk remembering faces, events, tragedies, celebrations, triumphs, and failures, I am struck by how much Clear Spring has stuck with me and how it indelibly shaped my concept of what is possible as a teacher. And as I remember, one final laugh begins to well up again within me… a laugh of pure joy.