1. That letting go strengthens trust and belonging in a community. Sometimes, in the democratic process, when the vote didn’t go my way, and then I let go of the defeat, really let go, later I realized that my sense of community was strengthened more deeply than if the outcome had different. It may seem at first to be counter-intuitive, but the experience of accepting diversity as a good thing expands the life of a community, whereas the experience of consensus can only confirm the life it already has.
2. I experienced that I could learn whatever I wanted to learn, and that the most acute learning was from my failures.
3. I learned, unequivocally, through mostly silent, even unintentional observation, that we adults have far more to learn from young people than they do from us. We are so often mired down in past truths, where they are creating the present and future truths.
4. And I learned that it is safe, and very sane, to do and to believe in what feels right, regardless of what the rest of society is doing and believing. There are no crowds on the leading edge, but there is extraordinary energy and satisfaction.

I’d like to finish now with a short poem…

My experience at HVSS has enabled me to develop the problem-solving skills, the adaptability, and the abilities needed to function independently in the world that I am about to enter because I am prepared to reflect, to change, to take risks and to confront the questions; “What do I want to?” and “Why do I want to do it?” 

At Sudbury we talk a lot about Hitting the Wall. Hitting the Wall is a time of transition. It’s when you have no idea what’s next – it’s a gap year, it’s when you’re looking for a new job, it’s when you’re right out of college, it’s when you are questioning anything and everything.  You find yourself wondering, what am I doing? Why am I even going to this school? What is the point?  You worry that you’ll never have a good idea again, that you won’t be successful, that your life has no purpose, that you are untalented and all of your accomplishments have been pure luck. Hitting the Wall is being forced to ask yourself, “what do I want to do?” and “why do I want to do it?”  When you do confront those questions head on, it’s liberating, you feel limitlessness, and opportunities seem to appear out of thin air; it’s a chance to reinvent yourself. 

This experience does not need to be induced by anyone else but rather it is provoked by a combination of curiosity and boredom. For example, when I first came to Sudbury, I loved it. I could play outside all day and do what I wanted to, at least until I was told by an older student that if I wanted to get certified for the microwave, I had to be able to read. Boom. Suddenly, the thought of reading consumed me. Eleven years later, I still remember having the exact same fears I am having today. I worried that my counterparts in public school were ahead of me and I wondered why I was even going to this “School.” I worried constantly that I would never learn how to read. But one day, something clicked. I was sick of feeling inhibited, I realized that I was the only person who could change the position that I was in, and I became determined to do so. I read books that had already been read to me so I wouldn’t have to focus on the story so much. I asked for help, and I spent all my time reading as much as I could; I was going to learn how to read. I tell this story all the time when I’m talking about Sudbury because it illustrates the point of the school. Facing a natural obstacle, realizing you alone have the power to overcome it, setting a goal, and working to achieve it. 

But there is also a lot of failure that happens at every step of this process, and while it’s painful, it’s also one of the biggest gifts Sudbury gives you: the opportunity to fail. First, it’s abandoning the idea before even trying; giving up on countless projects has taught me two things – one, it’s okay to explore things without commitment, and two, if you want something done you have to make it happen yourself. If you need help that’s fine, but you still have to ask. 

Next is failing at answering the question, “why do I want to do this.” I cannot tell you how many times I would go into School Meeting asking for money, or a room reservation, or some other privilege, and somebody would ask me, “why do you want to this?” and I couldn’t answer. I would say, “because I want to” or sometimes nothing at all, and my motion would fail. It was so frustrating because you think, why can’t they just let this pass? It’s not hurting anybody. It feels personal, like they want you to fail. While it is awful and humiliating to be put on the spot and not have an answer, it teaches you how to think logically and on your feet in an intimate and personal way that shows the relationship to the real world. It gives you the tough-love lesson that everyone learns eventually – if you don’t know why you are doing something, nobody will take you seriously. 

Then there’s failing at the actual thing you are trying to do. For example, when I was eleven years old I decided I wanted to be School Meeting Chair and somehow managed to get elected. 

The most difficult thing about being School Meeting Chair was deciding what to do when someone called a point of order. (For those that do not know what a point of order is, it is similar to when a lawyer says objection and the judge has to decide if the other lawyer will be allowed to continue.) I either didn’t know the answer and got embarrassed, or I knew the answer but was petrified at the thought of upsetting someone or making a mistake. I was a young School Meeting Chair and had absolutely no idea how to assert my authority. Because of this, I made a lot of bad calls. For instance, one time a younger student came in and kept asking somewhat relevant and definitely annoying questions at the beginning of motions. A staff member asked me to stop answering him because it was taking too much time and he could just ask after the meeting was over. At the time, I felt that the kid understanding what was happening was more important than moving quickly, but I stopped because I was so afraid of being criticized by the staff member or even of making a mistake. I then left feeling frustrated and upset with myself more than anyone else, because I had no control over the meeting I was supposed to be running. The problem was I cared more about people thinking I was doing a good job than actually doing a good job. I did not study the policies and procedures enough, nor did I have the confidence that was required to fill that position. But all in all that was okay. I persevered and made it through the year. 

Even though I wasn’t the best School Meeting Chair ever, I grew, I learned about what makes a good argument, how to be an effective member, the difference between being convincing and being manipulative, and about all the ins and outs of our democratic process. I also learned that failure and  mistakes are OK, and that you cannot expect someone to have faith in the decisions you make if you don’t even have faith in them yourself. 

Failure is hard, painful, and frustrating. It’s also a part of life, and by refusing to demonize failure Sudbury allows you to learn from it. I am so grateful that I have had the opportunity to fail and that I got learn not to be irrationally afraid of it. 

When I was fourteen, the year I would have been entering high school, I really slammed into that Wall. All of a sudden, not unlike when I was five years old, I started worrying that I wasn’t learning and that I would never be able to “catch-up” to my counterparts in public school. I got frustrated with the school and the staff. Why didn’t they care that I wasn’t doing anything? Why did I have to jump through so many hoops just to make one class happen? Why did other students constantly drop out of planned activities? Was I missing out on the classic high school experience?  I was angry, I was frustrated, and honestly, I was bored. Some of my frustrations were legitimate: certain mechanisms at school were not functioning smoothly. But I was also avoiding taking responsibility for my own self-doubt and uncertainness.

One day I was talking to a staff member who was leaving the school; she was trying to convince me to stay and I asked her how she could tell me to stay when she was leaving. She said that because this was her job and it came with limitations, but as a student I had the opportunity to do what I wanted and was not limited by the physical location of the school, an opportunity that was unique to Sudbury. Even though I knew that theoretically, I needed the reminder. I started thinking about my fears and frustrations, and ways to address them.  One, I was scared I didn’t know enough math. I went straight to the intern who I knew had a degree in mathematics and asked him if we could set up a class with the goal being to get to same level as 9th graders. Two, I wanted to experience something different. I had been at Sudbury my whole life and while I loved it I was curious about what else was out there. Thinking about the advice of the other staff member, I asked an old intern, one that was currently working at a Sudbury school in Berlin, if I could be an exchange student. At this point I had momentum. I followed through with the intern, I went to class, and I studied. I fundraised to go to Germany, took a German class outside of school, worked with the former intern to work out all of the details. It all worked. I passed the algebra regents and I lived in Germany for six weeks. In hindsight I realize that I would get so caught up in the, “but how will we raise the money, who will teach us, it’ll never pass in school meeting anyway,”  I would forget to even try. 

Around that time a parent at the school led a storytelling workshop that I signed up for. I wrote about my experience at Sudbury, specifically being School Meeting Chair. I started thinking about everything I’d done at Sudbury, what I learned and how I learned it. I worked hard to make sure I represented the school truthfully and eloquently. 

After we gave our talks to the school community, I was invited to speak at the education conference TAISI in India. After TAISI I became interested talking about Sudbury and sharing my experience. I spoke at ISME (a college in Mumbai), I co-wrote and produced a promotional video for the school which was viewed half a million times, I was on the Tom Woods Podcast, and I organized a field trip to visit four Sudbury Schools on the east coast to meet other students and share experiences. I wrote about speaking in India hoping to inspire other people to share their Sudbury stories. I went from being so frustrated at the Staff and the school that I almost left, to studying math and science, (which have always been these mystifying, looming, clouds of dread), building connections with a Sudbury Schools in and outside of the U.S, representing my school to our larger community, in India at TAISI, and the rest of the world through the “What if Video.” I was able to pull myself out of that hole of self pity and frustration because I asked myself, what do I want to do and why do I want to do it? 

Fast forward to last May, I left Sudbury and New York for an internship in Bangalore, India for six months. I was equally excited and terrified, I was excited to live in new country, to have real job, to learn and to meet people. I was proud, I thought about what that would look like a college transcript or on my resume, I thought about what people would say, “She went to India to work at sixteen years old!”, I thought about how it would reflect on the school, like it would be proof that it worked. I was also terrified, what if I can’t handle it? What if I hate it and want to come home? How embarrassing would that be. What if I was bad at the job? I didn’t even really know what the job was. But I went, of course I did. 

We worked on a project by project basis which meant I really got to peer into many different worlds. I got to work on projects like curating an art show where all the works were created by AI in collaboration with human artists; I helped to build a fundraising deck for Kalaari Capital, a top-tier venture capital firm. I had real responsibility, it was scary and intoxicating at the same time.  And, for better or for worse, I got the experience of being treated like an adult. I lived alone for a few weeks, I was able to go out, I went to dinners and parties with people twice my age. Mistakes were not excused by my age and I learned the hard way that what you do, and the corners you cut, effects the entire project and the people you are working with. While it was hard, being away from my family and friends, working at an intense and overwhelming new job that required a huge learning curve. I loved it, I met so many amazing people, and learned so much about work and art and fundraising and telling stories. I got to live and work in India at sixteen years old – and that was amazing. 

When I got back to America, other than graduating from Sudbury I had no idea what I wanted to do. And that was scary. I had just come back from this amazing experience working with really ambitious and driven people and I had no idea what I was doing. I felt extremely lost, how was I ever going to live up to the standards I had created for myself?  I had been so excited about how this experience was going to propel me into widely successful adulthood and now I didn’t even know where to apply or what I wanted to do. On top of that I was no longer an adult, I couldn’t drive, I didn’t have a job, and I had parents again. I was lost, I was scared of not meeting anyone else’s or my own expectations and, once again, I was bored. I was Hitting the Wall. But there was something different this time, I was more confident and I was okay with not knowing what was next, I gave myself time to figure it out. That ah-ha moment came, like it always does. I hit my breaking point and asked how am I going to get myself out of this? What do I want to do? And why do I want to do it? So I went back to work at a pizza place, got an internship at a local photography center and got my GED. 

I am still young and my exposure is limited, but that being said, what I have found so far is that learning to jump at opportunities without being afraid of failure or mistakes has and continues to lead me to life changing experiences and opportunities. Realizing the value of  self-reflection, perseverance, and hard work has made me a better employee, co-worker, and person. Learning how to, and the necessity of, being able articulate myself and my ideas (what do I want to do and why do I want to do?) has helped me in everything I have done so far, from working in India to giving talks across the world to collaborating with others. Being able to push myself to my next goal, whatever that may be, that is the ability I need to function independently in the world I am about to enter. And I have it. 

I’m writing this paper today to show how I have grown to be a productive person in society, and how my education helped me achieve that.

In 2004, when I was three years old, my mother started homeschooling me.  She taught me simple things like shapes, colors, how to spell my name, ect.  We traveled a lot, and it was the best option for my family. Around age seven I started going to a small  homeschooling group where I learned basic math and beginning reading. That summer I went to a camp at Hudson Valley Sudbury School.  I enjoyed it a lot and asked my parents if I could enroll. They were hesitant at first but decided to give it a try. When my dad started suffering from kidney failure in 2009, the structure of the school worked very well for us. We had a lot of appointments to go to and the school’s flexibility allowed me to stay with my father.   My parents wanted me to have fun at school and have a place that I could be myself. So this is how I started my journey at Sudbury.

When I initially enrolled, my reading was still poor, but with help from some friends I met at Sudbury my reading got better and better.I was a naturally shy person but slowly started to come out of that by being in a safe and accepting environment.  Being free enough to explore my personality and focusing on being a young kid helped me become more comfortable with myself. I started to take more responsibility for my life, and gained more respect for myself, my things, and the people around me. I wasn’t focusing much on studies at that time; I was just enjoying feeling free. 

 Next I want to explain my transition into public school. I enrolled my freshman year at Saugerties High School.  I wanted to try something new. This was a big learning experience in itself. Right off the bat i was told that the school would not help me “catch up” because a lack of education is not an excuse to warrant help. I was told I would be a freshman forever if i didn’t do things the traditional way.  I signed up anyways despite the discouragement and did my best. I got good grades in the beginning. But after a while I became depressed with my whole life, school, friends, family, ect. I was associated with toxic people that were dragging me down.. My grades started to slip, and so did my social life.  On January 1st, 2017, I overdosed, and a few weeks later I was taken to Four Winds Hospital after attempting suicide. I was there for two weeks, and during that time I worked hard on building myself back up from rock bottom. We did group therapy and exercises to help cope with stress like deep breathing, meditation, fronting your fears, and putting yourself in situations that make you uncomfortable to overcome them.  The first few days were rough, but by the end of it I felt like myself again – even better, actually. I adapted to my surroundings and got more comfortable where I was. Adapting to situations has always been easy for me and putting my mind to something are two of my strong points. After all this my mother didn’t think that the public school was good for my mental health and she started to arrange for me to go back to Sudbury.  I needed to heal and Sudbury is where i needed to be.

I began Sudbury again that March.  Everyone was nice and kind to me when I returned.  I wanted to do something to focus my energy on so I  asked a staff member if I could enroll in a career-tech program at Ulster BOCES. Originally I  wanted to take the cosmetology program, but it was full. Instead, I enrolled in the welding program.  My sister had done a lot of work with blacksmithing, and I wanted to try something like that. My first day was a bit nerve racking, I wasn’t sure if I was gonna enjoy it or not, but when I laid my first bead in the SMAW booth I was so happy I didn’t end up in cosmetology.  At BOCES I grew close with many of my classmates and my instructors. I know SMAW, TIG, MIG and Oxy acetylene. I can weld in flat vertical horizontal and over-head, and I have experience reading blueprints and mechanical drawings. I will be AWS and NOCTI certified in May 2019.  After graduating from Sudbury and BOCES, I plan on attending SUNY Ulster for a few basic classes before transferring to a four year college to get a BA in Criminal Psychology. During this time I hope to be working in a local welding shop to help pay for my education. Luckily, welding is something I can always rely on if my ideal career doesn’t work out.  Right now my life consists of attending BOCES and being one of two main caregivers for my father, who requires special care like home hemodialysis and help feeding, getting medications, bathing, and dressing. I also help raise my two younger brothers who are four and almost two, i’ve taught them to walk, along with teaching them colors, animals, and dinosaurs. they have helped me with patience, empathy, and understanding. I owe a lot of my growing to my brothers and I will always cherish them for that, I love be able to watch them grow into their own individual selves. Sudbury school has given me years with my father that i would not have had if i was in a “traditional school.” I’m so thankful for the ability to take care of my family and to have the flexibility with my schooling to do so. 

I want to mention a few examples of how I’ve learned to adapt to different situations. The first major one is when I was eight I learned to help my dad when he first got sick. I adapted to having to be the support for him instead of him supporting me. The second big one for me was when I went into a completely different school format that I had never experienced  before. I got good grades for the most part without having a “formal educational “ background. I think that was because of going to sudbury and having confidence in myself to be able to do anything I set my heart on. The same thing happened at BOCES. I went there with the intentions of doing awesome and that’s what I did. Another time I felt confident with myself is actually when I was at my lowest.  I was struggling with my mental health I told my mom I needed treatment and got what I needed. I knew I was suffering and needed help. Attending Sudbury taught me to trust myself no matter what and that we are all EQUAL and that is ok to need help. When I returned to Sudbury I adapted to being there by making my plan for BOCES, and I did what was needed to do it. I worked very hard and it shows because I have one of the highest grades in my class. Adapting and putting my mind to something are two of my strong points that I know was influenced and strengthened by my time at sudbury. 

I’ve achieved a lot in the past few years and have overcame many obstacles  that have crossed my path that have helped sculpt me into who I am today a strong, caring, independent person who is excited for what the future brings me.

As a child of the 1990’s, I grew up a cultural orphan, severed from the traditions and worldview of my ancestors, even of my grandparents.  I had no religion, or explicit system for understanding and thinking, and I experienced this lack as a bewildering vertigo. Nevertheless I longed for meaning, and I was thus vulnerable to every sweet-talking spiritual terrorist and ancient sage who popped into my field of vision.  The philosophical foundation of my psychic environment was materialistic and nihilistic, and for much of my childhood I tottered about swollen with anxiety like a balloon on legs. Matchstick legs. I felt, experienced, and lived all this rather than understood, thought, or articulated it; I was engulfed in a cloud of uncertainty which masqueraded as freedom.  These days, I know this to be a phenomenon new to the human scene, and that it is called “postmodernism,” but at the time it was the only world I knew – the lonely, drifting planet of my birth.

The 90s were the first full decade when the postmodern worldview predominated in mainstream American culture.  All values were equally valid, all cultures equally correct, and every aspect of identity as well as all beliefs were socially constructed.  Even individuals were mere products of their historical context. A hundred years earlier Friedrich Nietzsche had announced that God was dead, and the institutions which used to structure people’s lives everywhere followed suit by crumbling like so many sun-baked acropoleis, and among the ruins lies everything from the church, marriage, family, and the nation, to philosophy and rationality – even science is up for burning at the stake of postmodernism.   Meaning is up for grabs, or – more precisely – it’s too slippery to grab at all, or – more precisely still – it doesn’t exist in the first place, or the last place, or…any place. The only thing that exists is power. There is no place left to plant a flag; truth is dead, too.

This post is not intended as a commentary on postmodernism.  The point is just that tradition, lineage, and moral continuity have been abandoned by mainstream culture; whether you think that equates to freedom or confusion, and for better or worse, it is the psychic environment we inhabit.  The presence of traditional school in that environment creates cognitive dissonance, because the concept of school – with its structured path and proscribed, official curriculum – implies that there is truth, predictability, moral authority, a correct way of doing things, and a destination which is reliable and good.  It endows science with oracular power, sufficient to explain and nourish life. School made sense in the modern era, but its stubborn presence in the postmodern world is anachronistic and confusing, like an outmoded machine too massive to move.

Grand Perspectives

In his book, A Place to Grow, Sudbury Valley School founder Daniel Greenberg shares his epiphany that SVS is really “an American immersion school, where children and adults exist in an environment that fully embodies the American ideals that have inspired this country from the time it was founded.”

Peter Gray, an evolutionary psychologist at Boston University, considers Sudbury to be an uniquely appropriate educative model evolutionarily, because, as he writes in his book Free to Learn, it “contains precisely those elements of a hunter-gatherer band that are most essential for children’s self-educative instincts to operate well.” Gray believes that the instinct to play is of paramount importance in education.

At HVSS, we’ve lately been describing our program as “education for the creative age,” because we believe it fosters qualities (such as flexibility, creativity, and collaboration) well-suited to the  globalized economy and the relentless advance of technology.

The Sudbury Model is all these things, but it’s something else, too – education for the Postmodern World.

In the past, when good and bad were defined and widely agreed upon, life was – in at least one way – far easier than it is now, because each individual didn’t have to figure things out, or “find themselves,” choose their values, define what the “good life” is for them, and decide what standards – if any – to measure themselves against.  But in the postmodern world, we are each called upon to do this, and our success or failure at it is far more important than the degree to which we are professionally successful, because those tasks represent the difference between meaninglessness and meaningfullness.

The capable subject in the postmodern era is the one who is able to think clearly and create or voluntarily adopt the rules, structures, and values that will support them to live a good life. The Sudbury model provides a space to practice living in the postmodern world.  We have been set adrift (or, “free”), and we need to be able to move through that uncertainty; we can no longer rely on churches, states, and traditions. Sudbury schools have an intricate structure of governance, designed to protect personal liberty, but no belief structure, and no political or even educative agenda for their students.  It is the most basic, flexible model, able to include divergent philosophies and lifestyles and also keep pace with technology and information. We don’t imply to students that education, growth, and maturation will be automatically achieved by following instructions. We don’t fool them into complacency by maintaining a path for them to travel; they need to learn how to think, move with confidence, take the right risks, and make the right friends.  They need to get sane and reliable guidance, but they need to know that nobody is going to figure out their lives for them – that ship has sailed. They need to do the work, make the decisions, and write the stories themselves – now more than any other period in history.

Art provided by Raghava. See more at raghavakk.com

Math is vital to civilization. But it doesn’t follow that everyone should be made to study it.

Math is a ubiquitous requirement in school curriculums all over the world, even though most adults don’t know any math and are no worse for the wear. So what gives? Why do we require every child in the country to receive 10-13 years of instruction in math?

One reason seems to be that math is a natural fit for our data-obsessed society; math skills are easier to measure than other types of academic skills, and educators and policy makers can compare scores, compile data, make comparisons, and utilize it all for political ends. Another reason is just that, having signed kids up for compulsory education, we need to find something for them to do, and math fits the bill nicely: it takes lots and lots of time to get a classroom of diverse cognitive abilities on the same page and progressing together through sets of skills, plus all those numbers and equations look good on a blackboard, and there’s always more worksheets if you finish early. Presumably, math is also relevant to making a living, but that’s only true for a select few.

Whatever the reasons, we plow an unfathomable amount of resources into math instruction. Conservative calculations (done with calculator) yield an estimate of 2,000 hours of math instruction per pupil in the US school system. That’s 80 days of math. As in, 80 full 24 hour periods, no bathroom breaks or meals included. A few other conservative calculations (done with calculator) yield an estimate of $30,000 spent on each pupil’s 80 days of torture. Er, I mean math instruction. And by the way, the massive investment isn’t doing us much good anyway.

Just how much math does the average person need to know anyway? The other day, I was driving around with someone (who will remain anonymous here) as they were figuring a few money-related matters out, and at one point they needed to know the difference between 32 and 8(!) What do you think they did? They used the calculator app on their iPhone to perform the calculation. They laughed while they did it, and remarked derisively that the “A” they had earned in high school calculus “wasn’t worth sh*t anymore.” Not figuring 32-8 in your head may be an extreme example, but let’s be honest: most of us don’t know math and it doesn’t matter at all.

Still, it does seem reasonable to suggest that a basic understanding of mathematical concepts is necessary to operate effectively in the world, especially for young people, who may need to know more than the basic concepts in order to accomplish a goal entirely unrelated to math (such as gain admission to a particular college). But math doesn’t need to be compulsory, and actually, just like reading, it doesn’t need to be formally taught at all. Here are three reasons why:

1. Math is just one language, one way of thinking about and interacting with the world – one of many, and it suits the disposition and cognitive capacities of only a fraction of the population. Requiring everyone to study it for more than a decade means that people who are not mathematical will have less time for the language/modality/skill-sets that suit them better. And they will be branded as failures and feel inadequate and ashamed for not being mathematically inclined.
2. Math can be learned on the job. All the math skills the average person needs to get by can be learned in a matter or months, or even weeks or days, without any fuss – when that person is motivated to learn them. Around 20% of workers actually need math in their careers, but even they can learn the math they need relatively quickly – on the job, or in training for a specific job. You won’t get stuck in your chosen career path because you didn’t master Pythagorean triples when you were a kid; if it turns out you need that knowledge at your job as, say, a machinist, then you’ll learn it. This is one of the cornerstone insights of self-directed learning: you will learn what you need to learn in order to do your life. Math is no exception. Here at HVSS, students often learn basic math principles and concepts in order to run the school store, for example, or to run their own small business or even just to play the games they want to play.
3. Without interest, math instruction is meaningless, needless, and useless. Most people are not interested or moved by math. Schools have some success using incentives to get students to learn it, but they can’t get anyone to be actively interested in it. Most people forget almost all the math they learn in school, and they aren’t going to be the people who get careers which depend heavily on math anyway. Only people who have a knack for it and find it compelling are going to become really effective at working with it. And those people don’t need to be made to learn math – you wouldn’t be able to stop them if you wanted to.

And worse. What makes compulsory math worse than a mere waste of time and money is the anger, frustration, and other negative emotions it engenders in large segments of the school-going population, not to mention the missed opportunities for spending that time in an engaging and enjoyable way.

The sweet spot. At our school, people who are interested in math can study it all they want. Others can study it when it becomes relevant to their lives; usually this comes up in relation to money, but other goals and activities sometimes provide the impetus as well. An overt example is the group of teenagers who decided they wanted to transfer to their local public high schools. In order to enter in the tenth grade, they needed to take the NY State Regents Algebra Exam, so they undertook a formal study of math for the first time in their lives; all of them performed well and entered tenth grade the following school year. These students weren’t hindered in the least by never having studied math before – and they hadn’t been burned-out or turned off, either. That’s how self-directed education platforms like our school create a sweet spot for math: students here learn the math they need, whether that’s a little or all of it, and they don’t waste time or get hurt doing math when they don’t want to or aren’t ready.

Most of my days as a staff member at the Hudson Valley Sudbury School are busy as can be. My list is often long and I usually leave having only crossed a few things off because the joys and bustle of the day took me in other directions. But, on occasion, I arrive without a list and end up spending most of my day floating, wandering through the halls looking for who might possibly want my help, or heck, even my company. But, like today, everyone is seemingly content, engaged in their own pursuits and I am more of an unnecessary fly on the wall. In these moments I struggle, much like our students, to figure out how to be productive, to answer the bigger questions about my usefulness in our community, and in the world. I struggle with being alone.

I find myself alone in a silent office, which just adds to the deafening stillness of my day. Outside a young boy is walking in the snow, consumed by his own imagination. I watch him as he turns in circles, talking to himself, and occasionally whipping out a pretend weapon. He seems so content in himself and his activity. I yearn for that type of confidence. What does he have that I don’t? Why am I struggling with grounding my own feet?

As I ponder my place, the same young boy comes into the office with his lunch and asks to sit next to me while he eats. Of course. I help him with his juice pouch (who thought kids could insert those darn little straws on their own?) We sit side by side, me typing, him eating, alone in our worlds but still providing companionship.

“What were you playing outside?”

“Telling stories of course, about Aliens who decide to study humans.“

I have to smile, I wonder what those aliens would say about humans, about loneliness, about confidence. One thing is becoming clearer. He has the time, from a young age, to practice being alone. To be comfortable in his own skin, to feel strong in a giant world, and to find someone when he needs help or companionship. I just need some more practice, and lucky for me, I have the time to do just that.