News & Notes from a very busy week

REMINDER: We are CLOSED on MONDAY for the holiday.

_________________________________________________________

This week was so busy it's hard to know where to begin.  The art room was descended upon by at least 15 members led by staff member Michelle and is now covered in paint and art.  Have a look if you have time!

Last week we had our most attended Open House ever with 7 families filling up the room!  Meanwhile the phone is ringing off the hook and it seems like Ken is in meetings with new families all day.  Some kind of critical mass/collective consciousness is afoot, and we're very happy about it.

The parent coffee last Friday was again a delightful way to spend the morning; we hope you can come next month on March 5th.

_________________________________________________________

FROM CATHERINE:

One of the great strengths of North Star is the diversity of teens that we accomodate.  We don't have an extensive amount of racial or ethnic diversity, a la the Pioneer Valley, but we do have a great collection of individuals, each with his or her own set of experiences, world-view, assumptions, expectations, and needs.  This range is considerable, indeed.  We are proud of our ability to work with each teen in a highly personalized, tailored way.  An even more challenging task however, and one at which we largely succeed, is to create community from this motley assortment of unique beings. 

As North Star continues to grow we find ourselves spending a lot of time on community issues, and though Ken and I and the rest of the staff can certainly become exasperated in some moments, we are happy to put in this work because the skills that we are hopefully imparting- tolerance, acceptance, empathy, self-understanding, communication- may be among the most important aspects of our teens' educations.  We see the fruit of our work on this front every day- teens who would not likely speak to each other due to age, class, or identity in another setting have engaging and positive interactions with each other at North Star.  That kind of learning, becoming open to the Other, is invaluable.

_____________________________________________________________

FROM JOHN:

North Star is brimming with life these days.  New families show up every day.  Our class schedule is overflowing. However, in the true North Star spirit, it is what happens spontaneously, self-directedly, that is the heart of what North Star is about.  Here is one of many vignettes from yesterday.

Towards the end of the day, I knew that something was going on in the piano / dance room, but hadn't looked in yet.  So finally I looked in, and this is what I saw:

There appears to be a theater workshop going on. Quite a few kids are sitting or reclining as audience, facing the back of the room where two students are performing a scene.  The first is reading his lines from a text, and the second is responding quite dynamically with lines that she appears to have memorized.  The whole effect is high quality.  Finally they finish the scene, to lots of group appreciation, and then I ask what's going on. They explain that they have  the scripts of three plays, and the game is: one person reads lines from a play, and a second improvises his or her lines in response. The improvised lines do not have to fit the original play and may create a completely different scene from the one in the actual play. This seems to have been going on for a while, since they talk enthusiastically about previous scenes they had created.

I was amazed; it seemed so creative and well run, requiring a lot of cooperation and group synergy.  No staff was involved.   At that moment, I felt like North Star had reached a new level of member initiated, self-directed learning activity.