Educating Middle-Schoolers
at Living Wisdom School:
An Experiential Approach
An interview with LWS middle school teacher Gary McSweeney
Click here to download the interview as a conveniently printable PDF file (8 pages, 136k).
Q: How did you become a teacher at Living Wisdom School?
Gary: Helen Purcell, our principal, asked me if I knew anyone who would be a good teacher. I said, "It's funny you should ask me that, because I've had the intuition for a long time that I would be a teacher at the school."
I began work about a month later - this was seven years ago. I had taught PE and coached my son's baseball and soccer teams, and I had taught Sunday school for 20 years, so I had worked with kids a lot.
The first year, I team-taught with Helen, and it went well. It was a small class, and I knew the kids. Then, over the summer, Helen said, "You'll take the middle school next year." And I remember that summer I couldn't watch a movie without, at some point, thinking, "What am I going to do?" Because I had a fair degree of anxiety. But it worked out well, and it's gotten easier.
Q: You're with the children so much. What kind of a relationship do you try to establish with them?
Gary: It's very individual. I try not to be palsy-walsy. I'm an authority figure for them, and 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.
Q: Because they're starting to flex their independence?
Gary: Definitely. In Education for Life, J. Donald Walters describes the six-year cycles of a child's development. The years from 12 to 18 are what he calls the "Willful Years," when they're establishing their sense of identity.
Q: Are there lessons that you try to teach the kids about life 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 try to, for sure, particularly with the annual school theater production, where each child in the school takes part. Two years ago, for example, we did a play about Martin Luther King, Jr., and last year the play was about the Buddha. This year, it's St. Francis and St. Clare. Every year the play is about some truly great person.
Also, 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 in them a sense of hope and optimism.
Q: How do you do that? Through the curriculum?
Gary: Well, 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 like you want to sugar-coat the news and pretend everything's perfect. But I'd like to give them something to be hopeful about, that the future's bright, and that's the theme I try to establish.
The media are all-pervasive, and the kids are bombarded with images of negativity -- Darfur, global warming, the extinction of species, and so on. I'm trying to get them to be realistic, but 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 many field trips. How do they help the students?
Gary: In addition to frequent one-day field trips, we take them away for a week three times a year, and these experiences are pivotal. The first trip is to Point Reyes. I have a cabin there, and we go up early in the school year, when we're 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 out in nature for a week, and it's an adventure. 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 in words. I try to get them to become more aware, more conscious, 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 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 such a great time of learning.
When you work with kids this age, learning needs to be experiential, to the extent that 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 particularly in the teen years, kids are also looking to learn through their own experiences.
I believe that kids can also learn a great deal if you take them into a situation and let them learn. I give them a tremendous amount of freedom, but the overarching theme is harmony, that we have to keep harmony. We have firm boundaries, and we 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." -- but we give them free time to go and explore on their own in small groups. It's a component of most of the 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, and 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.
They're at an age where they like to take risks -- climb 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 they all decided to play a massive game of Capture the Flag. It was wonderful - they had a great, great time.
It's all energy, and we try to guide it toward wholesome choices. At the same time, we give them lots of freedom to make mistakes, though never to the point that they could hurt themselves.
We want them to experience 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 a new situation with their buddies. The peer group is hugely important to them at that age.
Q: How does the experiential approach translate in the classroom?
Gary: With our yearly 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, 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 actually words spoken by these great souls. So, again, it's experiential. (To view slideshows of the 2008 play and rehearsals, click here.)
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've 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 went faster and those who went 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." I figured 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." "No! No! I'm gonna do 10!"
So, it takes tuning in to each child and figuring out what works for that child in math. 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 then you try to find ways to support them so 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 to visit our school and talk to the kids, Keith Devlin. He talks on NPR. Our former math and science director, Dharmaraj, got him to come to Living Wisdom School. 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 went to college and majored in biology, he found out that he needed to shore-up his math skills, and that's when 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, as well as challenge them to put out energy in academics, whether they get impressive results or not.
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. (Photo: Middle school students on field trip at Tomales Bay.)
We had a middle schooler who was really challenged. He had bounced around lots of schools, and I think his parents were at the end of their rope when they found us. But they enrolled him, and it was a bumpy road.
The thing that you had to say about this kid was that he was wild in the classroom. He was literally like Robin Williams -- he was truly funny. He would have me laughing so hard that I'd hide behind my laptop so he wouldn't see that he'd gotten to me. He would be literally jumping out of his seat to do his shtick, and we had to control it. But he also had a great work ethic. Whenever we would say "You need to do this. You need to sit down and finish this," he would do it.
He called us recently to say that he'd graduated from high school and been accepted at Stanford. For this kid to go that far was amazing. He was so out of control, and so turned-off to school. He was hard to handle, and what would a teacher with 35 kids be able to do with a student like that?
He had a sixth sense about what would make people laugh, but it would always be at the wrong time. I took him out of the classroom one day to really ream him out. I was ratcheting up to ream him out, and he turned and reamed me out, and I let him do it. It was good lesson in humility, because 
there was a lot of truth in what he was saying. He said, "I'm so sick of you! I'm so sick of school!" I let him go off for about 10 minutes, and I said, "Okay, are you done?" He said, "Yeah." "All right, let's go back in."
This year, another student and I really had it out, and it broke the tension, to where we're more real with each other. It was the kind of smoldering friction that comes up between adults, until you finally express what you really think, and they tell you what they think, and it opens up a connection. (Photo: Middle-school students on hike during camping trip.)
It was on a field trip. He'd been good all week, but then he just completely defied me. I said, "We're going to put all our suitcases in the van." It was such a stupid, small thing. I said, "We're going to sit in the same seats in the van as we did on the way up." And he didn't want to do that. It was time to go home, and we were on a tight schedule. I said, "Just do it the way I'm saying. I just can't have an exception." Because kids always want to have an exception.
He started pulling out his suitcase, which was buried, and it was delaying everything. It was crazy, and I completely lost my temper and told him, in ironworker terminology, that he needed to shape up, and that I was sick and tired of his behavior.
I'm not your average teacher. I do things that are fairly outrageous, but I think sometimes it's what the kids need. It doesn't always work, but I think it's what happens when someone really cares about you.
This boy was putting out no effort -- that's what got my goat, because he had real potential. When a child puts out no energy in the classroom, it sucks the energy down. But after we had it out, it was like the fever broke, and now there's some sort of relationship. He knows I like him, and that I want to work with him, and he's putting out energy. He's coming around.
Q: What do you attribute the change to?
Gary: He knows "Gary cares." That kind of change takes a tremendous amount of energy on my part. But, basically, it's making them realize "This person cares about me." I did have to apologize to him, but there's genuine respect on my part for him.
These kids are in middle school now, where there's a whole new structure, and it's hard for some of them. This boy is challenged by writing. And, who likes doing something that they aren't good at? As an adult, if you're terrible in math, you can find a job where you don't have to do math, but kids can find 
themselves in an environment where they're set up to fail. If they aren't good in math, well, we do math every day. And maybe they look around and see that everyone else is doing okay, no problem. (Photo: Canoeing on field trip at Tomales Bay.)
We have some prodigies in our school -- we have a fifth grader who's doing 10th-grade geometry. At that age, in middle school, you're keenly aware of what everyone's doing. So here's this fifth-grader who's doing math that's five years ahead of you, and you just aren't getting it.
I'm not sure what snapped for him, but I think he realized "I have some skills. I have some talent. Someone cares about me."
We have many people come to the classroom to speak to the kids, And I always tell them that the students' body language will work against them. My friend Todd is coming to talk about Web design, and he'll be talking, and the students will be sitting there looking around blankly while he's talking, or they'll doodle. But two years later they'll say, "Oh yeah, I remember Todd - he came in and explained about designing websites."
So they are listening, even though it's hard to know if they're aware he's in the room. We've had people come to talk about writing, yoga, music -- a museum docent came who was a jet pilot in Vietnam. When you bring in someone who knows what they're talking about, the kids respect it, because they're hungry for knowledge. I tell them, "Look up at the person. This person is coming to speak to you. Give them some energy. Raise your hand." And they do it to some extent, but even if they look like they're in another world, they do get it, because they're taking a more than you think.
When the kids have success in learning, I ask them, "Does it feel better when you do an assignment well, compared to when you don't put out any effort?" And what's scary is that some students will say "No, it doesn't feel any different to me." Then I'm worried, because if you don't get a reward, a feeling of accomplishment, why would you try? Maybe they still need to find their field of study. I hold out that hope, and I try to help them find it. Because once you're out in the adult world and find what you're interested in, then you can pursue it. But you need a foundation of education to reach that point.
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.
It's teaching 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, how it works. You work with each child as you get to know them and build a relationship. Sometimes it takes a year or more, until they start to trust you and let their guard down. I'm not trying to get inside their heads; but it's about empowering them and getting them to find the energy in themselves to do what they set out to do.
You'll start the year wondering, "Wow, I think they're really going to struggle with math this year." But the kids who keep plugging away will surprise you, because work ethic has a lot to do with success. 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 put those definitions aside, because at age 12, you don't really know what you're good at.
They have to have some sort of inner experience of what you're trying to teach them. You can tell them a billion times, but until it comes from inside, until they get some real success in math, it won't work. It has to be more than words. It's real experience that counts.
It takes building relationships with them, so that you can guide them to have real success experiences. It has to get their energy involved, so that learning becomes experiential.
Q: In Education for Life, Walters says that engaging children's feelings is the first step to awakening their interest.
Gary: The good teachers get children enthused about a project. It's all in how you lay the groundwork for an assignment, a field trip, or the annual play. When you can get them enthused, they put out energy, and then they feel the experience.
If you aren't putting out energy, you aren't going to experience anything of 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 great for the kids. When you're on stage and playing the part of Bull Connor, and you're ordering the police to beat up Black people, or you're acting the part of a Black person getting beat 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, 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." That spark of the divine, that spark of the real purpose of life, those real answers to the question "What are we doing here?"
The saints offer a different model of what we're doing. It's not about money. Much of education now is about getting into a good high school, in order to get into a good college, to 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 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 success in science or business, 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, 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 Darfur. I watched a documentary about the Congo, and it's as if Satan has taken over. The senseless violence is crazy, and how are you going to make heads or tails of it, when you're only 12?
Another concern that I have is the influence of technology. One of the boys in my class had always been a good student, but when he came to school in September, he was doing terribly -- sloppy assignments, just junk - to the point that 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. I said, "What's the story?" He said, "Oh, I was addicted to a videogame." 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 at all, where qualities such as ambition, concentration, planning, and perseverance are localized. Children's prefrontal cortices don't develop fully until their late teens and early 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 any real inspiration, or expansion of his awareness, including 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 quite clever. But, 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.
Q: I worked for two years part-time at Stanford, helping the manager of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, who was a wonderful woman. The department conducted a search for a new faculty member, which meant that the top professors would gather every two weeks, and I got to be in that room because I was handling the correspondence and record-keeping for the search. There was a wonderful vibration in the room, and what it was, was energy - high energy. They were among the top people in the world in their field, and they all had extremely high energy. They also had tremendous concentration. Both qualities of the forebrain.
I had one-on-one contact with them during the search, and it struck me that nearly every one of also had feeling quality. They had strong enthusiasm, intense interest. As Walters points out in Education for Life, strong feeling is a key quality of will power, and refined feeling is essential for making good decisions. In fact, a study by a famous neurophysiologist, Albert Damasio, showed that people with damage to the areas of the brain where feeling is localized have a terrible time making good decisions. Walters also points out that feeling, not logic and reason, is the faculty that enables us to tell right from wrong. When something is wrong, we feel it, without having to reason it out.
Gary: It's the same with experts in every field. We brought in an expert in yoga. He 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. 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's 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, they're 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 the eternal, universal principles of life that apply to everyone.
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, that's a lot. Regardless of their native abilities, to give them hope, and a sense of their place in the world. "Okay, you have some gifts, and you can explore with them." Every child has a gift. God gives everyone opportunities to expand.
If they only grow happier, it's often a big step. One girl in our school is very shut down, but the mom said in a recent parent-teacher conference, "She's hugging more at home." I thought it was a good sign, that she was expressing herself more. But we try to empower them, and give them a sense of their place.
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 at this age leave elementary school and enter a public school with 1200 students, it's a big shift in energy, and some 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 influence the newcomers.
I'm sometimes amazed at how kids come into our school and behave. And then I think, "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 through 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 and set an example.
We had a boy, years ago, Elliot, 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. But he embodied it. And another girl, Rose, did eighth grade over, because she wanted to spend a second year in the school.
Another girl 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 knew intuitively that another year of our school would serve them. Elliot would have loved to stay. 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 a black or white issue, 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.
