Categories
education life

An Open Letter to Raj Bhakta

 

To: Mr. Raj Bhakta
Re: Your Recent Purchase of Green Mountain College

My name is Kyle Callahan, and I am a homeowner in the village of Poultney.

I am also a 2006 alum and former writing adjunct with Green Mountain College. I met my wife on the campus, and after we graduated, she spent two years there as an AmeriCorps volunteer, helping the college connect with students and teachers in the local public schools.

Later, after we married under the tree where we met on campus, my wife took a position that allowed her to work with students in both our town’s public schools. I took a position at LiHigh School, the progressive independent-school about a quarter-mile east on Main Street from where you recently invested over $5 million.

We settled in Poultney not just because of the professional opportunities that opened up to us, but because we love this community. We love knowing the people who grow our food. We love the community engagement that gave rise to the Slate Valley Trails bike system, the local chapter of the Vermont Association of Snowmobile Trails, and the new REclaimED Maker Space. We love the community involvement on display at Chili Fest, Maple Fest, and our town-wide yard sales. We love the teachers and students we work with every day. We love sitting on our lawn chairs and watching our daughter run through our neighbors’ backyards with her friends.

This month marks our eighteenth year in Rutland County (fifteen of which were spent in Poultney) and our eighth year as homeowners in the village. My wife is now an English teacher in the middle school. Along with still teaching, I’m now the Operations Manager at LiHigh. Our young daughter is now a student in our public elementary school.

Vermont Public Radio reported that you “hope..to resurrect [on the GMC campus] a new kind of school that will benefit students and the local community.”

You’re quoted as saying, “It’ll probably be a work college.” The article continues, reporting that for you, “it can’t just be hands-on farm or tradecraft that’s taught[;] entrepreneurial skills [will be] equally crucial.”

According to the article, you admit your full vision for the campus is not quite clear: “the students of the college are part of the producing of the products that are growing from [Bhakta Farms], that we’re selling that they’re also learning how to sell. In turn…we’re…paying for their school.” 

In other words, an apprenticeship type of school where the students graduate as skilled professionals without any debt. 

The question, I guess, lies in what kinds of apprenticeships your new school will offer.

Clearly, you are a capitalist. Your vision seems to involve generating and selling agricultural products and using the profit to cover the cost of the free labor the students will provide in your agricultural fields and/or your sales and marketing division.

You’ll have to house the labor, educate and train the labor (ideally with skills that will carry over after they graduate), and cover the health and nutrition of the labor. But if the labor works as well as envisioned, your investment will pay off and each laborer will depart after however many years with the skills and credentials you promised, free at last, free at least, and ready to finally earn an income for their labor (assuming, of course, you don’t utilize financial incentives to increase the student’s output during their educational servitude). 

As a graduate of Green Mountain College in the years of its environmental mission, my guiding economic theories lean more towards the democratic-socialism side of the spectrum, but I’ve worked for capitalists my entire life, and I can appreciate the need to make your nut and still have some money to enjoy the finer things in life. From the photographs on your Bhakta Farms website and your interviews on YouTube, you seem well acquainted with the finer things in life (your current “not even a double-wide” trailer/office not included). 

A significant portion of Poultney residents, on the other hand, are not used to such things. According to the 2018-2019 Annual Statistical Report on Child Nutrition Programs from the Vermont Agency of Education (the latest year for which I could find data), over 46% of our elementary-school students and nearly 40% of our high-school students come from low-income families. Our median income, according to the U.S. Census, is $45,500 — which, for a family of four, qualifies them for reduced lunches at the school. This monthly income does not provide enough for food, rent/mortgage, electricity, oil, gas, auto repairs, medical bills, dental bills, clothing, Internet, etc., let alone a $250 bottle of fifty-year-old brandy.

Rutland County, as I’m sure you know, has also been devastated by the opioid epidemic, and we have reached that point in American history where the children of some of those addicts are in our school systems, not to mention the children of our county’s alcoholics, domestic abusers, and child abusers (emotional, verbal, physical, and sexual).

According to the 2017 Study Of Vermont State Funding For Special Education, the “increased demand and limited capacity for community-based mental health and social services has shifted responsibility for providing these services to schools. In the face of their own capacity limitations, schools have responded by either contracting with private providers or paying for students to attend special schools or programs outside the district.”

LiHigh, the school I labor for, is one of those special schools, so I have firsthand knowledge of how limited our community-based mental health and social services have become.

As you consider your vision for the former campus of Green Mountain College, I urge you to explore the “community school” model of education. Endorsed by the NEA and (therefore) a major element in Vice-President Biden’s education plan and (therefore, should V.P. Biden win the national election) a potential major recipient of future federal grant moneys, the model puts the campus at the center of the community. Academics, health and social services, community development, and community engagement all occur on campus.

A trade-school education results in a skilled profession, with graduates often becoming plumbers, electricians, carpenters, farmers, auto mechanics, etc., but a trade-school education can also result in graduates becoming childcare providers, family counselors, addiction counselors, nurses, elementary and secondary educators, and community artists and artisans. The very people most needed by the families in our community.

These professions are not traditionally considered “entrepreneurial,” but a talented entrepreneur such as yourself can teach students to navigate either the nonprofit system or Vermont’s benefit-corporation laws in such a way as to enjoy the finer things in life while also improving the community in which both our families have now invested so much.

Again, as you create what you called “a think tank of experts in education and in other fields,” I urge you to consider the community-school model for whatever you hope to build.

Thank you for your time, and best of luck with the still-developing vision that will, someday soon, dominate my town.

Categories
education

The Mental Health of Middle Schoolers

The 2019-2020 school year marked my tenth year of teaching. I taught at the college level for the first two years. The next two years were at both the college and high-school levels. The next four years were at the middle-school, high-school, and college levels, and the last two years were at the elementary-, middle-, and high-school levels. 

All of which is to say that I approach middle schoolers in completely the wrong way — I expect them to be college students before I expect them to be themselves. 

My understanding of middle schoolers doesn’t get much beyond the idea that all the middle-school brain cares about is the social dimension. Regardless of whether you ask them to parse a sentence or divide a fraction, all their brain will focus on is what they believe everyone else around them thinks about them.

The progressive response to this reality suggests taking middle-school kids out into the world and letting them explore: bring them to museums, theaters, natural wonders, local haunts, places of work, places of worship, places of celebration, places of mourning, carnivals, recycling factories, beaches, forges, bridges, trollies, ferries, abandoned warehouses, hospitals, sawmills, canning factories, coffee shops, activist headquarters, state houses, volunteer fire departments, parks, science labs, concerts, car garages, wood shops, architects’ offices, etc,

The key to the middle-school brain is exposure. If they focus on how they relate to their various peer groups (what this person thinks about that person, what those people think about them, etc.), let them focus on those things while being surrounded by a wide variety of opportunities. If their brain coincidentally blinks into focusing on something other than the social dimension for a moment, we want to make sure they have something interesting to focus on.

If that’s what their brain is going to do regardless of what adults might want it to do, the question becomes: how do adults help them do it in a healthy way?

First we have to recognize what it means for a middle-school brain to act healthy. In a lot of the education-focused literature I’ve read, the problem comes from the difference between the adult’s expectation of what a middle-school brain ought to be doing and what a middle school brain naturally does. Advice usually revolves around a foci of engagement and excitement, anything that will distract the students from being distracted by their peers.

Instead, I say let them be distracted. Social skills are way more important than math and reading, so adults ought to focus attention there. While we shouldn’t stymie any middle-school child from diving into a book or working on a numerical problem, we don’t want to push too hard in those areas either. We need to work to build an honest and trusting relationship so that the middle schooler is willing to take our healthy advice on how to approach their social challenges. If a teacher struggles to get a student to comply with a homework assignment, how much more will they struggle to get the student to share their hopes and fears?

So, after six years of working with middle school students, I guess that’s my advice: offer them opportunities to explore the wider world and earn their trust so they will believe you when you tell them the only thing they can do to solve their problem is have a difficult talk with the person they most don’t want to talk to.

Oh, and PS: get rid of their fucking cell-phone. You’re handing them a crack pipe, and while it can make a parent’s life so much easier in the short term, it’s doing untold damage to their brains that you (and they) will pay for later.

[This post was written by request. For a $5 donation to the Bail Project, you can assign me to write a 500-word [minimum] blog post on any topic of your choosing. For more details, read Writing for Bail Money.]

Categories
education writing advice

Text-Based Teaching

I’ve been teaching writing in virtually of its forms for over a decade. My resume includes working with a diverse range of students at every post-elementary level, including college and including students with mild and severe learning disorders.

My primary teaching style is Socratic. I ask lots of questions and challenge lots of answers. But I try to do so in as affable a way as possible, hoping the conversation leads us to whatever wisdom is possible that day.

But the confrontational tone of my personality sometimes gets in the way.

I am the product of a male-dominated childhood where I learned to fight with words rather than fists and where fighting was often done for fun. I try to overcome the evolutionary forces that cause me to nip and bark, but after 41 years, I’m finding it’s difficult to teach an old dog new tricks.

It might be time for a new strategy, one where the my confrontational tone doesn’t harm the learning opportunities of my students.

I can be a good teacher. I’m definitely not for everyone, but I’ve helped some students, and perhaps even many, become better writers than they were.

But now, in the absence of my job at the soon-to-be-defunct Green Mountain College, I need a better way to find those many.

Should I Go Freelance?

I recently visited one of those online freelancer-marketplaces to research what it might cost to hire a voice actor to record an audio version of my novel, but while I was there, I considered the idea of going freelance for a moment, and I asked myself what I’d be willing to do.

A couple of days ago, one of my best friends asked me to mentor his college-age son with a creative writing project, and of course, I agreed. Because they live on the West Coast, the mentorship would have to take place online.

I asked for his son’s number, sent the son a text, and off we went.

But here’s the thing. Because it’s just texting, I can work with him while also doing basically anything else. When I get a few minutes and I have something to say or a question to ask, I pull out my phone, send him a text, and move on with my day.

I don’t expect him to get back to me immediately. He could be doing anything else in the world, so why should he stop and respond to me? When he’s available and interested, he can text me back and I’ll get back him when I can.

As I browsed some of the writing gigs on the freelance marketplace, I started to wonder if that might be something many people would like: text-based access to a highly-qualified writing teacher.

This isn’t an original idea. It’s basically freelancing as a writing coach.

But that’s not all I started wondering about.

Don’t Quit Your Day Job

I teach at a school with students whose faces I know, but I often see those faces focused on their screens rather than on the people around them (including me), and I’m wondering if I shouldn’t also offer something like this at my school.

Imagine a school where teenagers come to pursue whatever projects they want. The projects don’t have to be related to anything or compared against anything or checked for excellence in any way, but during those projects (and after school hours), teachers text with the student, supporting them and challenging them in different ways, sometimes academically, sometimes emotionally, but always openly and honestly.

The teachers at this school spend part of their day working one-on-one with students, or offering group discussions or group collaborations, or working independently on their own projects, keeping an eye on student behavior while also engaging several of them through texts whenever the moment inspires or allows.

Such a school wouldn’t be much different than one I work in now, where most (if not all) of our teachers sometimes (and often) connect with students through texts.

But I’m wondering if we (or at least, I) could be more intentional about how we (I) use texts. Teachers know the importance of developing relationships with their students, but how many of us strategize the way we engage in the text-to-text aspects of that relationship, an aspect that might even be more important than the face-to-face one thanks to this generation’s connection to its devices?

Leave Me Alone, Kid (or) Go Fuck Yourself, Sir

Why would teachers not want to develop a text-based relationship with their students?

The obvious issue is privacy. Teachers deserve the opportunity to turn themselves off — not just go into sleep mode, but turn themselves off.

Giving students text-based access invites them to disturb their teacher’s most private hours, and every teacher has taught at least one student who was not yet skilled in the art of respecting privacy.

But the issue goes both ways.

Students don’t want to hear from their teachers when they’re busy with their friends or when they’re getting ready to Netflix & chill.

There are also rotten apples among us who would take advantage of their age and authority to manipulate students into doing something they may not want to do (or realize they shouldn’t do).

Still, even with those caveats, there’s definitely something here to think about; something that may be worth getting right.

Categories
education life politics

Let’s Not Be Too Late

In Defense of an Undiscussed Idea Offered At the Most Recent Town Meeting About The Future of the Green Mountain College Campus

Last week, my town called a second meeting in as many months to discuss the future of the property currently owned by Green Mountain College. I missed the first 20 minutes because I had to take my daughter to Girl Scouts at the elementary school while the meeting was held up at the high school.

When I returned, the president of the college had already spoken, as had one of the representatives the state had sent our way. Now our town manager had the microphone.

I found my wife near the door of the crowded gymnasium, and we took two of the last empty seats on the floor, off to the side of the podium (see the picture above; props to my friend Bill for looking all relaxed and cool).

The town manager spoke about some of the ways he was trying to alleviate the financial losses that will come to the town proper in the wake of the college’s departure. He’s not the most charismatic speaker, so I found myself instead perusing the agenda.

After the introductory speeches, the moderator took back the microphone and told us about our two goals for the meeting. First, he wanted residents to recall the 30 ideas we’d conceived during the previous meeting, and to take a democratic vote to see which ideas we preferred. Second…

Hang on, we all thought, what’s the point in that? It’s not like we actually have any say on what happens to the campus. It’s “For Sale,” and there’ll be no stipulation in the sales agreement that compels the buyer to respect the democratic will of the town. If its board is willing to pay the sales price, even the evil corporation of Monsanto has every right to purchase the land.

Some among us voiced those thoughts, only to be told by the moderator that “It’s important” for the town to make its desires known. Doing so may attract an investor who shares that same desire. We might not be able to say who comes to town, but we can sure invite whoever we want.

Not everyone appreciated the answer, but the moderator made us move on.

The second goal of the meeting was to use this collective crisis to draw together those who are interested in improving the status of the town and commit ourselves to working together on some kind of shared mission.

To that end, the moderator had arranged six possible ideas, culled from the previous meeting, that his team believed the town itself might commit to, ideas that would still be sound irrespective of the outcome of the campus.

I was one of the people who didn’t appreciate the moderator’s first answer, so I could barely focus on the second goal. One week later, I wish I had.

(To read a full recap of the meeting, read this newspaper article written by one of my former students — you go, Kate!)

But back to the first question. The overwhelming desire of the town is for the campus to be used by some kind of hands-on educational institution, ideally centered on the intersection of sustainability, agriculture, and the trades. It would be a mixed age institution, with classes offered to high schoolers (both foreign and domestic), as well as college age and above (both foreign and domestic).

I love that idea, and if implemented, I would support it with everything I’ve got (especially to build a bridge between the high school where I work and the institution the college would become).

With that being said, I don’t know if another “agricultural, sustainability and environmental education institute” was the most critical idea.

The one I put forward during the first meeting (which received a number of votes at the second meeting but didn’t place in the top three) was for the campus to become the home of a public mental-health facility catering specifically to teenagers.

After the vote, I accepted the results and moved on, telling myself the process was nothing more than an experiment in wishful thinking anyway.

Then tonight, a woman I knew during my college days, offered the same idea on a forum of alumni.

Two people, both of whom live or have lived in Poultney for a number of years and who have direct experience working at and/or are partnered with an individual who has worked at the college, offered their disagreement with the idea.

I just so happened to be in a chatty mood (as I so infrequently am) and decided to engage with their good-faith arguments against what I still considered to be my idea. While doing so, I became disappointed in myself, not because I was arguing on Facebook again, but because I missed my chance to defend the idea in person.

Prior to the vote, the moderator asked anyone in the audience if they wanted to speak out in support of any of the ideas on the wall. Several members did. But for some reason, I did not.

One of those reasons was the exhaustion I feel at the end of every workday. I spend six hours a day working with students between the ages of 11 and 22, 100% of whom require extra supports when it comes to their mental and emotional health. It’s a school that is not only working as hard it can to support the students who come through our doors, but to support the teachers and staff as well (as if there were a difference between our teachers and staff). Additionally, because of a continuous increase in the demand for our services, I also work as hard as I can to grow the school in every way, shape, or form, not to increase my pay, but to satisfy needs of the crisis that exists not only in the nation and the state, but also in my own town, where, despite a stable population of residents, we feel the struggle of the increase in mental and emotional health disorders among teenagers.

Every day, as rewarding as it is, is a hard day, and every day leaves me exhausted.

So I didn’t have the energy to stand up at a town meeting and tell everyone that it’s our kids — not the state’s kids — who need the support of a mental-health facility that caters specifically to teenagers.

In my years of being married to an educator in the local public schools and my years of working as an educator in the town’s two private schools, I’ve spoken of more times than we like to admit “the Poultney Wing” of the Brattleboro Retreat (one the state’s few public, residential mental-health facilities with a floor dedicated to teenagers).

It’s sometimes called “the Poultney Wing” because…

How many people in my town have kids or grandkids who take regular medication for anxiety or depression or some form of psychosis?

How many people in my town have kids or grandkids who are so addicted to their smartphones that they suffer from withdrawal symptoms every time the device is taken away, leading to all kinds of familial and educational crises?

How many people in my town have kids or grandkids who have cut themselves just to feel a different kind of pain?

How many children in my town have retreated from their social lives due to the effects of bullying?

How many children in my town live with the trauma of parental addictions; emotional, physical, or sexual abuse; emotional and physical neglect; the ramifications of an ugly divorce; a parade of wanna-be step-parents; hunger and poverty; inadequate healthcare; etc.?

How many children in my town have attempted or have regular ideations about suicide?

The national increase in mental and emotional health disorders is not a statistic. It’s a fact that my wife and I face everyday on the front lines of our schools.

Our kids need help.

Why not do everything we can to give it to them?

This town should become the first investor.
Whatever we can give, let’s give, and then let’s see who joins us.

Categories
education

We Need To Talk About Social Practice

I’m big on origin stories. It’s why I love Game of Thrones, Star Wars, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s also why I have a hard time finishing my fiction: I get enamored in where everything came from and forget to make it to go somewhere.

Take this blog post, for instance.

It started with marijuana (as if you didn’t know). Marijuana puts me in the mood to write. It adds intensity to my every thought. I don’t smoke marijuana to get high, per se. I smoke to inspire myself. After smoking marijuana, I wait. I wait for a flash of energy whose pattern I recognize well, a combination of physical ecstasy, intellectual attraction, and forward compulsion.

The pattern might arrive from anywhere. Tonight, it came from an email I received from a colleague. I didn’t open it (my wife and I were watching an episode of Ozark at the time), but the subject line caught my attention: “We need to talk about Social Practice.”

If you don’t know me in real life, I’m a teacher, so seeing this subject line coming from one of my colleagues caused me to interpret the sentence in terms of education, as in, “We need to talk about the way we teach Social Practice.”

But here’s the thing: I’m not confident I know what “Social Practice” is.

When I don’t know the answer to something, I try to come up with one. That (more than anything) is what makes me a creative writer (it’s also what makes me fall for my own bullshit, but that’s another story).

Luckily, I’m married to a teacher, so after the episode of Ozark was over and we started to straighten up, I asked her, “Do you teach Social Practice?”

She was in the kitchen, returning her bag of popcorn to the pantry and putting her empty can of soda on the counter to be recycled later. She called back to me, “What do you mean by that?”

I rolled off the couch and retrieved my blanket from the rug. “I’m not sure.”

She came into the living room, and I started to tell her I thought it might mean…like…working with children to practice their social skills. Like, giving them scenarios that might be familiar to them and then coaching them through performing appropriate (yet still individually meaningful) actions.

I had in mind scenarios such as telling a friend you’re sorry, or greeting a stranger at a bus stop, or asking a teacher for help with an assignment, or talking to a police officer without fear or malice, or asking a new friend if they want to spend time with you, or calling a pizza shop to place an order, or asking a coworker for help with a task, or…or…or….

I don’t work in the public school system, and I haven’t attended one since I graduated high school, but I have to imagine that every school has at least one teacher who actively prepares their students for significant interactions such as job interviews, and I hope all schools at this point actively work on helping students advocate for themselves as children, but I’m not sure how many schools have teachers who actively work on helping today’s students, virtually all of whom seem to have their faces glued to their screens and virtually all of whom have their most significant relationships occurring online, learn how to perform even the most basic social interactions.

At bottom, isn’t that what schools should be for? Giving students the freedom to ask questions, practice solutions, and refine techniques? If that is what schools are for, why would we exclude their questions about the most everyday aspects of their lives?

So many adults want to blame smart phones for what they’re doing to our children’s well-being (and they’re doing quite a lot). But how many adults are willing to admit that this is the world we’ve chosen for our children, and now we must prepare them to survive and adapt?

Smart phones rob children of a vital period in their development. Between the ages of 0 and 25, the brain lays down, in less and less foundational stages, the human adult it will become. If the foundation does not include the social skills that have made us so successful as a species, the entire edifice of our humanity could crumble, having who knows what result on the future of our species.

To save the future of our humanity, we could make a dictatorial decree that bans children from ever using smart phones. After all, we ban them from using other developmentally harmful products, such marijuana, cigarettes, and alcohol. But our enforcement would probably be as lax as it is for the bans we have on their activities now (excluding our ban on their right to vote, which we still strictly enforce).

We could ban the production of smart phones themselves, but good luck convincing capitalists to give up production on an ubiquitously desired product.

If we can’t ban their production and we won’t enforce a ban on their use, then our best bet is to admit defeat and adjust to reality. And the reality is that the still-malleable future of the species is deficient in social skills. That means we need to provide children with a state-sanctioned supplement: the time and space to practice their social skills under the guidance of a well-intentioned coach.

As always, some students will be more gifted than others, and some will need specially-educated attention, but all students will benefit from becoming more conscious of the way they interact with people and adjusting their performance to better match their intentions.

I told my wife all of that using just a few hands gestures and a few mumbled phrases, but after sixteen years of living together, my wife understood what I was talking about, and she asked me to follow her upstairs so I could fold my laundry and switch the towels from the washer to the dryer.

I did as I was asked, but as I ascended the stairs, my marijuana-infused brain had moved on to wanting to tell her about a lesson I taught earlier in the day on the art of writing dialogue. By this point, she’d changed into her pajamas and moved into the bathroom, and through foamy lips, told me to stop talking while she brushed her teeth.

I retrieved my now-dried clothes from laundry room and dropped them on our bed. I folded my shirts and pants while I waited for her to finish.

I heard her rinse and spit out the water, and then put her toothbrush back in the jar. She didn’t ask me to continue with my story.

I folded my laundry in silence, letting her have her space.

She did some more stuff in the bathroom, went to my sleeping daughter’s room to tuck her in and kiss her on the forehead, then she returned to our bedroom.

“Okay,” she said, and I tore into it.

But the whole time I was telling her about the lesson, I was also thinking about this blog post, wondering if I was going to write about my colleague’s email (which I still haven’t read) or about the lesson I was telling her about, the one where I received a super positive response from my students. I could actually see the wheels moving in their heads during class, and afterwards, they were genuinely excited (though properly anxious) about their next assignment.

I used a lot of hand gestures as I told her the story, and she listened with what I took to be curious attention. When I’d finished, and we’d discussed it some more, I kissed her goodnight and raced downstairs to sit at our computer.

It’s been an hour and fourteen minutes since I sat down, and I still don’t know which topic I want to write about.

(By the way, I know how long I’ve been sitting here because I listened to the soundtrack from Season 7 of Game of Thrones as I typed all this up, and it just now came to its end.)

And that, in all truth, is this sentence’s origin story.

Before I write anything more, I ought to go read that email.

Categories
education life

The Existential Threat

I mentioned last week that my alma mater (and former employer and one of the largest employers in my region), Green Mountain College, announced it will cease to exist in about six months’ time. In response, a group of alumni (myself included), current students, friends of the college, and parents declared our intention to #SaveGMC and began a fundraising effort to do so.

Green Mountain College is between $20 and $25 million in debt, and it runs on a deficit of about $5 million a year. Even if the college shrunk its faculty to just 18 members and its enrollment to just 300 students (a scenario the administration considered and dismissed), the college would still run a deficit of roughly $1 million a year. At this point in time, financially speaking, Green Mountain College (as a business) makes no sense.

Now, the biggest donation Green Mountain College has received from a living person is roughly $100,000. To buy the college out of its debt, the SaveGMC group will have to replicate that record-setting donation at least 250 times…in less than six months.

In addition, the group will have to convince at least some members of the staff and faculty to stop planning for their employer’s sure demise and focus instead on keeping it alive, against all of the odds and without the promise of future employment even if it stays alive.

And then there are the students. Where will they come from? A large part of the reason the college is closing is because of a lack of young people graduating from high school within 150 miles of the campus. Data shows that 58% of high-school graduates choose a school within 100 miles from home and that 72% choose a school within their state. In Vermont, however, 64% of high-school graduates elect to leave the state (the highest rate nationwide).

That’s not a number local colleges can afford. As Vermont’s governor made clear in his most recent inauguration speech, our public schools educate “about 30,000 fewer K-12 students than we [did] in 1997—that’s an average loss of three students a day for over 20 years. And that trend continues.”

So if not from our local schools, where will Green Mountain College’s future students come from? It doesn’t make sense for an educational consumer to risk tens of thousands of dollars on a college that has not only been detached from life support, but abandoned by its responsible parties. On top of that, why would an accreditation agency risk its reputation on a college whose economic future rests on a foundation of wishful thinking?

Saving Green Mountain College means overcoming a number of incredibly tremendous challenges and doing so in an incredibly short period of time.

I can’t help but notice the irony.

In the late nineties, following the best advice of scientists, philosophers, lawyers, and poets, Green Mountain College focused its entire curriculum on the existential threat that is human-caused climate change.

Despite the best advice of scientists, philosophers, lawyers, and poets, the rest of the world virtually ignored the threat, and each year, humanity (myself included) moved (and moves) closer and closer to our ecological extinction.

If we are to survive the already-here and still-oncoming storms of extensive prolonged droughts, death-creating cold snaps, lung-suffocating heat waves, massively raging wildfires, city-destroying floods, and throat-choking pollution, then humanity has to overcome a record-breaking number of incredibly tremendous challenges, and it has to overcome them in a very short period of time.

I don’t know that either of us — SaveGMC or humanity — can do it, but as a Poultney resident and a member of the human community, my continued existence requires giving it a shot.

Categories
education life

My Alma Mater Died Today

Earlier today, Green Mountain College announced it will close after the Spring 2019 semester. The institution dates to 1834, when it was known as the Troy Conference Academy. After several iterations, in 1957, it became Green Mountain College, offering two-year degrees to women. In 1975, it began offering four-year bachelor and two-year associate degrees, this time to women and men.

But then, in 1995, the school took a turn. Led by a new president, the college adopted an environmental focus. After several years of discussion and experimentation, in 2001, Green Mountain College declared a new mission statement for all the world to see:

As a four-year, coeducational residential institution, Green Mountain College takes the social and natural environment as the unifying theme underlying the academic and co-curricular experience of the campus. Through a broad range of liberal arts and career-focused majors and a vigorous, service-oriented student affairs program, the College fosters the ideals of environmental responsibility, public service, international understanding, and lifelong intellectual, physical, and spiritual adventure.

In 2002, not giving a fuck about any of that, I accepted admission to the college.

I didn’t choose Green Mountain College, and Green Mountain College didn’t choose me.

The college I’d chosen, my dream college, closed its residential program months after I enrolled but weeks before I could show. As a kind of consolation prize, they arranged a deal with Green Mountain College whereby I could use Green Mountain’s resources to pursue the highly individualized program of education they’d promised me.

I didn’t have to accept the deal, but Green Mountain’s admissions counselor assured me of its validity. They would, as my ideal college had promised, allow me to do pretty much whatever I wanted, using their resources, in exchange for money.

Here’s a room with a bed. Here’s a library. Here’s some pretty cool faculty members who you might not have heard of but who are totally chill and totally willing to encourage you while also calling you on your shit. Here’s a pretty decent rural setting where it snows a lot so you’ll have plenty of opportunities to sit under a blanket and read incredibly rich books while outside giant flakes of snow fall upon the trees and fields of a picturesque northern New England college campus. Here’s no one telling you what to study, what to read, what to write. Here’s no immediate financial obligations like food and rent. Here’s your curiosity unleashed and your ignorance upended.

Just give us the money.

Sure, I thought. Sounds fucking great.

But then something happened.

I started paying more attention to the world around me. I started noticing the environment. I started valuing sustainability over growth. I started seeing effects as multiply caused, systemic ecologies in peace and war, policies and politics interpreted through ethics, guided by the parable of the farm.

I started giving a fuck.

I didn’t choose Green Mountain College and it didn’t choose me, but Green Mountain College made me the person I am.

I met my wife at this college. I got married on the campus of this college. I taught my first class at this college, collected my first academic paycheck from this college. I won awards and set records at this college. With my friends, I left several marks on this college, legacy marks that still existed long after the students forgot our names.

And now it’s gone.

But…

I wonder what will happen to the campus.

The Troy Conference Academy opened its doors as what we would now call a high school (though it offered advanced classes that rivaled a college’s). Somewhere along the line, the high school became a junior college, then it became a full college, then it became an environmental college.

Yes, that particular legacy might be dead, but if the environmental mission of Green Mountain College taught me anything, it’s that everything leaves something behind, and that something must be put to use.

Green Mountain College was not just its mission. It was also a physical place, with buildings, books, heating systems, and toilets. It was a tastefully manicured landscape of open greens and powerful trees and a river and a farm and its barns. It was the geographical capstone of a rural village’s Main Street.

These things, that place, they don’t just disappear because the spirit of the college has passed on, and they don’t stop being haunted by the charismatic energy of all the people who ever passed through there: Carl’s Corner is a plaque in a wall; Carl’s Corner is still there; and it will be for as long as that wall is.

Who now, I wonder, will mend that wall?

People I love had their lives upturned tonight.

People will have to move from the area, important people who contribute heavily to the health and well-being of this ~3,500-person town. People who intermingle with the men and women who were born and will die in this town. People who lively up what could easily become an elderly rural community firmly set in its ways (I speak now as a homeowner, taxpayer, and father of a young child whose only home has ever been this community). People who are professors, cafeteria workers, admissions counselors, executive assistants, librarians, curriculum developers, informational technologists, farmers, mathematicians, and more. People whose children have only ever called this community home and who now have to uproot their lives and become migrant workers, moving not where they want to be but where the economy will allow them to be.

People who have dedicated themselves to a life of environmental responsibility, public service, international understanding, and lifelong intellectual, physical, and spiritual adventure — these people have had their lives upturned tonight.

In my wildest dreams, the people who love Green Mountain College would pool their resources to give it another go as a radically democratically socialist educational-institution.

The buildings are there, the farm is there, the library is there…all just waiting to be occupied.

Among us are knowledgeable and charismatic leaders, innovative and iconoclastic thinkers, policy wonks and consciously recognized bullshit artists who know how to turn it on for the old, white men in suits.

Everything Green Mountain College taught us tells us we could pull it off.

But then I remember that so many of us have so many tens of thousands of dollars in student loans to pay back, and mortgages to pay down, and that all of us now are debtors to creditors, and then I think about the difficulties of working with hippies, and across generations, spiced with an unhealthy dose of toxic masculinity, unrecognized privilege, and traumatic victimhood, and I remember that my experience at Green Mountain College was *my* experience and their’s was *their’s*, and the doubts set in, not to mention the legal questions surrounding the settling of the college’s debts and how that would affect the squatting nature of the occupying force, and while it’s always fun to outwit and outrun authority figures, it’s not so much fun if your child counts on you to wake her for breakfast in the morning, and the doubts pile on doubts…

But still…in my wildest dreams…

I wonder what will happen to the campus.

I wonder who will save the people of this town.

And I wonder who will mend that wall.