Educating Middle-Schoolers
at Living Wisdom School:
An Experiential Approach
A conversation with LWS middle school teacher
Gary McSweeney
Q: You spend so much time with the children of Living Wisdom School. What kind of relationship do you try to establish with them?
Gary: It’s very individual. I try not to be “palsy-walsy” with them — I’m an authority figure for them, definitely. I have to ask them to do things, but I try to be friendly with them. I genuinely like kids, even though in middle school they can be a little exasperating at times.
Q: Because they’re starting to flex their independence?
Gary: Definitely. In his book Education for Life, which our school’s philosophy is based on, J. Donald Walters describes the six-year cycles of a child’s development. The years from 12-18 are what he calls the “Willful Years,” when they’re establishing their sense of identity.
Q: Are there lessons about life that you try to teach the kids, at that age, when they’re preparing to leave the nest?
Gary: Going back to Education for Life, the teens are a time when children naturally want to find people that they can look up to. They want heroes. And I’m not sure that our culture holds up people in that way. In our school, we do try to introduce them to hero-figures, primarily through the annual all-school theater production, where every child in the school takes part. We've done play on Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, and Buddha. This year, it’s the Dalai Lama.
When I’m working with the students directly, I try to give them a positive outlook for the future. I would love to see them not become cynical, so I try to inspire them with a sense of hope and optimism.
Q: How do you do that?
Gary: For example, we’re doing a unit on energy. They’re doing research on geothermal and solar energy, because they’re hearing the news about global warming and climate change. And it’s not as if you want to sugar-coat the news and pretend that everything’s all right. But I like to give them something to be hopeful about, that the future’s bright.
The media are all-pervasive, and the kids are bombarded with images of negativity all the time — Darfur, global warming, the extinction of species, and so on. I try to get them to be realistic, but at the same time, hopeful and engaged in being part of the solution, as opposed to passively feeling “Oh, it’s terrible.”
Q: A unique feature of Living Wisdom School is the field trips. How do they help the students?
Gary: In addition to frequent one-day field trips, we take them away for a whole week three times a year, and these experiences are pivotal. The first trip is to Point Reyes, where I have a cabin. We go up early in the school year, when we’re just getting to know each other.
The second field trip is in January, to a meditation retreat in the foothills of the Sierra, where we stay in cabins.
The third is usually a camping trip. This year, we’re leaning toward Yosemite. The students are in nature for a week, and it’s an amazing adventure for them. It’s less structured than the other field trips. For the kids who aren’t experienced campers, it’s an entirely new experience.
What happens on the trips is hard to put into words. I try to get them to become more aware, more conscious, and more responsible for themselves and each other. The field trips are laboratories for that kind of learning. They’re modeled after the way a spiritual teacher would work with us — where he’ll give us a long leash, and work with each person individually. It’s about learning to behave, and yet be themselves, to have fun and be safe, and explore and learn. We give them lots of freedom, but within very clear boundaries.
We take them to these amazing places, and it’s a challenge for them, because we’re camping outdoors, fixing our own meals, and cleaning up, so there are chores and responsibilities. But by that point in the school year they know what to expect, and everyone helps. That’s why the field trips are so popular with the kids, and why it’s a time of learning.
When you work with kids this age, learning needs to be experiential, as far as it can be — as opposed to “Here’s a book about a great person. Let’s read it and analyze why this person was great.” Some teachers can work that way, but in the teen years especially, kids are looking to learn through their own experiences.
I believe that kids can also learn a great deal if you take them into a new situation and let them learn from it. I give them a tremendous amount of freedom during the field trips, but the overarching theme is harmony, that we have to keep harmony. We have firm boundaries, and the teachers will definitely step in if there’s friction, but otherwise, it’s very hands-off.
One of the high points of the middle school field trip is a “day of independence” where we set a clear structure — “Don’t hurt yourself. Don’t go past Bald Mountain,” and so on — but we give them free time to go and explore on their own in small groups. It’s a component of most field trips, and at that age they love it.
Again, it’s very experience-oriented. They experience freedom, and the responsibility that goes with it, and they experience being out in nature. Last year, the kids spent a whole day in silence. Other times, we’ll incorporate shorter periods of silence and reflection. Maybe we’ll go to Mirror Lake in the valley of Tenaya Creek at Yosemite and write poetry for an afternoon, or we’ll be in silence from 2 to 4, then we’ll have dinner.
It’s a reciprocal bond. “Once the energy is right, once you show me that you’re being responsible, then I’ll give you more freedom.” Sometimes I’ll have to take it back, if there are antics that I think should cost them to experience the consequences by giving up some freedom.
They’re at an age where they like to take risks — climbing rocks, and so on. When we went to Malakoff Diggins State Park, a big Gold Rush excavation near Nevada City, the children and teachers from the local Living Wisdom School joined us, and all of them decided to play a massive game of Capture the Flag. It was wonderful — they had a great, great time.
It’s all about energy. We try to guide their energy toward wholesome choices. At the same time, we give them freedom to make mistakes, though never to the point that they could hurt themselves.
We want them to experience real-life consequences. We’ll take them out in nature, in the cold, and let them experience what that’s like. “Oh, you forgot your jacket. We mentioned it three times at the campsite, but now you’re on the hike and you forgot your jacket.” Real-life consequences. It’s one of the many reasons why it’s wonderful to take them out in nature.
We try to be compassionate. We’ll say, “Share mine,” and they’ll say, “No, no, it’s okay.” But they do learn to face the consequences of their actions. “I said bring a snack, and now we’re out on the trail and there isn’t a store within 20 miles, and you’re going to miss a meal.”
We never take it to the point of being cruel, but they do learn. And it’s got to be experiential, because there are some things that they’ll have a much harder time learning if you just sit and talk to them. It’s better when it’s real life, where they can experiment with different states of consciousness and find out “That didn’t bring me happiness.”
In 2005, we took them canoeing on Tomales Bay. Rain was forecast, and it turned out to be the worst storm in 40 years. We had four inches of rain in two days, with 40-mph winds, and the canoes were literally blowing off the beach. But it was one of our best field trips ever. It took the kids six or eight months to reach that conclusion, but the trip popped up in many of their graduation speeches. It was a real experience — the weather conditions dealt us a hand, and we had to deal with it.
They love the taste of freedom, of being out in nature and facing new situations with their buddies. The peer group is hugely important to them at that age.
Q: How does the experiential approach translate to the classroom?
Gary: With our annual play, the lessons are very similar. The students are learning about a specific period of history, and the life of a great soul such as the Buddha, Christ, Krishna, Moses, Kwan Yin, Rumi, or St. Francis. As the play approaches, we go deeply into the history, culture, and thought of the period, and the original teachings of the subject of the play. The students’ lines in the play are the words spoken by these great souls. So, again, it’s experiential. (To view slideshows of the 2008 play and rehearsals, continue here.)
While preparing for the play, they have many hours of instruction in how to act their part, and a tremendous amount of support, but the bottom line is that, come performance, I won’t be there, and our drama coach, Mathew, won’t be there. So it’s real, and it’s experiential. It’s an intense, real experience, and they have to draw on something within themselves to get through three performances with an audience of several hundred adults, teachers, and students from visiting schools.
Then again, these aren’t ordinary plays. Drama is extremely useful as a learning instrument, but the plays that we put on have an added element, in that these are among the greatest people who ever lived. They’re people who haven’t chosen the average life. St. Francis abandoned his wealth to follow a higher ideal. Buddha abandoned his wealth and family. Christ went through great trials. So it’s the tests and triumphs of these great souls, and the guidelines that they’ve left us for a successful life.
In the classroom, in math and other subjects, we try to get them to dig within themselves and do their best. And that takes time, because it takes building a relationship with each child.
It takes figuring out what works for each child. This is such a basic part of our school — the focus on the individual child. I’ll give you an example. I was teaching math to the middle schoolers, and I said, “As a rule of thumb, we should do a half-hour of math every night.” I was laying out a broad rule for all of the children, because I thought it would accommodate those who could go faster and those who learned more slowly, if they had a fixed time to aim for.
Then one of the mothers said, “I think my son would do better if you broke it down to a number of problems. For some reason, a half-hour isn’t working for him.” So I figured out that if he did 10 problems a day throughout the school year, he would keep up with the pace of the book. And it worked amazingly well, because he would do 10 problems, come hell or high water. I would say, “You don’t need to do 10 problems tonight, because we had play practice today.” “No! No! I’m gonna do 10!”
So, it takes tuning in to each child and figuring out what works for that child. That’s a great deal of what teaching is — finding out what works best for the same child in each subject. Then you have to work with their moods, and whatever they’re going through at the moment. We’ve created an intense, wonderful kind of environment where we can nurture and care about our kids.
Part of the answer for the kids is to challenge them constantly on the level of energy, because that’s what brings out the best in them. The field trips accomplish it, the play does it, and in the normal course of the year, in the classroom, we challenge them constantly to do better, at their own level.
Each child comes with a unique set of issues. Are they strong in math? Will they ever be strong in math? Who knows? For lots of kids, math is not their strongest hand, so you try to find ways to support them so that they can succeed.
The most inspiring success stories are often the kids who don’t see themselves as artists or mathematicians. We invited a world-class mathematician, Keith Devlin, to visit our school and talk to the kids. He’s the “Math Guy” on NPR. Our former math and science director, Dharmaraj, got him to come to Living Wisdom School, and he told the kids that all the way through high school he didn’t like math — it didn’t mean anything to him. But when he entered college and began studying biology, he found out that he needed to shore up his math skills, and that’s when he got excited about math for the first time.
We all know people for whom school wasn’t relevant, yet they’re bright and function well in life. Then there are people for whom academics come easily, but they aren’t good people. At our school, we emphasize both. We help them cultivate values such as kindness and compassion, and we challenge them to put out energy in academics, whether they get impressive results or not.
(Photo: Middle school students on field trip at Tomales Bay.)
The most important lessons we teach the kids involve putting out energy. You’ll get a child for whom academics come easily, but he isn’t trying, and he’s sitting next to a student who’s trying hard, but isn’t quite getting it. Which student would you rather work with? You’d much prefer the person who’s trying hard.
You’ll have kids who are solid in academics, even super-academics. But then there’s the emotional side of the child’s development of how to behave, and balancing intellect with feeling, with the heart. We constantly work on both, all of the teachers do.
(Photo: Canoeing on field trip at Tomales Bay.)
Teaching is so much about working with the student’s energy in the moment. That’s why it can be hard to articulate the “method.” You end up saying, over and over, “It depends on the child. It depends on the situation.” Because that is, in fact, true. You work with each child as you get to know them and build a relationship. Sometimes it can take a year or more, until they truly begin to trust you and let their guard down. It’s about helping them find the energy in themselves to do what they set out to do.
There’s no single formula that seems to work for everybody. It’s much more about supporting them individually, and keeping it real.
There was a study where they asked a group of first-graders, “How many of you are artists?” And every hand went up. But by the time they reached sixth grade, very few hands went up. They had acquired lots of self-definitions — “I’m not good at math. I’m not good at art. I’m really good in history.” I tend to put those definitions aside, because at age 12, you don’t really know what you’re good at.
They need to have some sort of inner experience of what you’re trying to teach them. You can tell them a thousand times, but until that knowing comes from inside, until they get some real success in math, it won’t work. It has to be more than words. What counts for them is real experience.
It takes building a relationship with them, so that you can guide them to success experiences. But you have to get their energy involved, so that learning becomes experiential.
Q: In Education for Life, Walters says that engaging children’s feelings is a first step toward awakening their interest.
Gary: The good teachers can get children enthused about a project. It’s all in how you lay the groundwork for an assignment, or a field trip, or the annual play. When you can get them enthused, they’ll put out energy, and then they can have the experience.
If you aren’t putting out energy, you aren’t going to experience math, or history, or poetry. Shakespeare is wonderful, but if you aren’t listening, he isn’t going to be great for you. You have to initiate some energy.
That’s why the annual school play is so rich for the kids. When you’re on stage, playing the part of Sheriff Bull Connor, and you’re ordering the police to beat up Black people, or you’re acting the part of a Black person getting beaten up, it goes beyond a lecture. It goes beyond watching a video. It becomes “Oh, God! That must have been terrible, to have fierce dogs after you.” (Photo: Middle-schoolers on field trip.)
It’s a turning point for the children when history becomes alive for that moment in their lives. “Why did Buddha give up a palace?” The plays use the words of great people of many traditions, like Rumi, the Buddha, and Teresa of Avila. So the children get a touch of that level of consciousness. “Wow, this was real to the person when they said it — this isn’t theoretical. They were talking from their own experience.” So they can experience that particular spark of the divine, that spark of the real purpose of life, those real answers to the question “What are we doing here?”
Much of education nowadays is about getting into a good high school in order to get into a good college and get a good job. It’s all about financial security.
Walters starts Education for Life by asking “How do we define success?” Because when you talk about education, that’s what you’re talking about. And our definition of success at Living Wisdom School would be a student who might go that route, toward science or business or finance or the law, but they would also have a sense of their place in the world.
We’re trying to help kids feel that they belong in the world, and that there’s a context for what they’re seeing. I often think it would be crazy to grow up today. It was crazy enough when I grew up, with the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., the Vietnam War, and riots in the colleges. It was really unsettling.
And now you’ve got terrible tragedies happening with frightening frequency. The senseless violence is crazy, and how are you going to make heads or tails of it, when you’re 12?
Another concern that I have is the influence of technology. One boy in my class had always been a good student, but then he starting doing terribly — sloppy assignments, just junk — to the point where I thought he might actually be on drugs.
He pulled out of it later in the year, and I asked him, “What happened?” I’d had a really good relationship with him; it was the third year I’d had him in my class, and now he’d actually been rude to me. So I said, “What’s the story?” And he said, “Oh, I was addicted to a video game.” All his waking hours, he was playing the game. It was truly an addiction.
Q: Research has shown that watching TV or a video screen stimulates the back part of the brain. It’s why you can sit in front of the TV and zone out for hours. Hours pass, and it’s time that you haven’t spent in the forebrain, where qualities such as ambition, concentration, planning, and perseverance are localized. Children’s prefrontal cortices don’t develop fully until their twenties, and if you’re spending all your free time in some other part of the brain, you’re not developing essential tools of a mature adult.
Gary: I have a student in my class who’s addicted to computers. He’s really bright, and he’s into programming. You can see where it might work for him as a career, but something is completely missing in the equation. The tech side is interesting, but it’s in the forebrain where he would find real inspiration, or expansion of his awareness, including other tools he’ll need to be successful in his chosen field.
“Clever” is held up as the goal. Many kids who do well in school are actually just very clever. As far as I can see, it isn’t the crying need of the world right now, to have more clever people. It’s to have people who have tremendous energy and will power to do good.
Gary: It’s the same with experts in every field. We brought in an expert in yoga who showed us various yoga postures, and I asked him, “How many hours a day do you work at this?” He said, “Oh, about six.”
A virtuoso violinist came to the school, a Chinese woman, and I said, “Oh, by the way, how many hours do you practice a day?” She said, “About six hours a day, if I’m lucky. But I don’t really see it as practice. I just love doing it.”
When these people come to the school, and the kids can see what they’re like, artists and business people from Silicon Valley, there’s always a model of being bright, heart-oriented, forward-thinking and expansive. Success always ties into energy, being able to martial energy and keeping your energy straight.
There’s a magic in our school, but without the spiritual component, I don’t think you can be truly happy, even if you’re doing wonderful things externally, such as designing software that will help people. What if you suddenly get a brain aneurysm, or someone you love dies? And then there’s the huge question of where they went. What happened?
There was a wonderful scene in our Buddha play, where the young Buddha rides through the city in his father’s chariot and for the first time sees suffering. “That person is sick? What do you mean, sick? Can that happen to me?” And then he sees someone who’s growing old, and someone who’s dying.
Our culture seems to think that you can’t answer these questions. “Oh, well, that’s religion, that’s over there.” But, really, it’s everyone’s question. It’s a matter of discovering the universal principles of life that apply to everyone, regardless of their creed.
We’re arriving at a point where you no longer need to be dogmatic about your religious beliefs, and you can talk to kids about those big questions. Because they’re having them.
Many people have said to me, “Private schools are selective, so you don’t get the problems we have in public school.” There’s a bias, born of ignorance, “All the kids are wealthy, and all the kids are happy.” If only.
But if you can give children hope, then you’re giving them a lot. Regardless of their native abilities, to give them hope and a sense of their place in the world.
Q: Do the students who’ve been at Living Wisdom School help the others that are just coming in?
Gary: We have a really good school culture, as far as accepting the new kids and making them feel at home. When children leave elementary school and enter a public school with 1200 students, it’s a big shift in energy for them, and some of them just don’t do well with the transition. The kids who are new appreciate our school, because of the contrast with these big, impersonal schools. And the kids who’ve been here longer are versed in how things are done, so they do influence the newcomers.
I’m sometimes amazed at how kids come into our school and behave. Then I realize, “They’re not used to Living Wisdom School; they’re acting the way they’re used to.” They tease other kids, they’re mean on the playground, and when I call them on it, I see the response in their eyes: “This is what we all do...” I say, “I don’t know about other schools, but we don’t do it here.”
The older kids help the newer ones by their example. Usually there are one or two in the class that I can really count on. Hadley, right now, is dynamite. She can be very quiet, yet set a strong example.
One girl, Rose, did eighth grade over, because she wanted to spend a second year in the school. Another girl stayed an extra year because she said she needed to get more mature before she went on to high school. Neither of these kids needed it from an academic point of view — they weren’t being held back — but it served them beautifully. One of them, Sinead, is at UC Berkeley, and Rose is at The Bay School of San Francisco. But they intuitively knew that another year of our school would serve them.
Several years ago, we had a boy who just took to everything we offered — the academics, the spiritual, everything, and he loved it. We had him for a year until the family moved to Texas. His mom wrote us from Texas, “Elliot’s year at Living Wisdom was a godsend to him.” He’d been beaten up at a public school, to the point where they broke his collar bone, and the school administration brushed it off, saying, “Well, these things happen.”
We wondered, what will this kid be like? But he was just wonderful, engaged and bright and high energy. Public school works for some kids, so it isn’t an issue of black or white, but for a lot of them, they die in that environment, and when they get to our school they feel like they’re respected, and that they can be freer about their expression. Some kids just blossom in our school environment.
It’s so expansive for them. It’s so much more inclusive and broadening. That’s what we’re trying to create, a place of inclusiveness, an understanding of the whole picture of educating each child, and an expansive environment where the children have a chance to grow.
