Communications from the Director

March 1, 2006
David W. Magill, Director

There are many common threads in the stories I hear from the Laboratory Schools' alumni. One of them is the lifelong influence of iconic members of our faculty. This month's guest writer is among the most endearing individuals to ever be a part of this community and is one of the most dedicated teachers with whom I have had the privilege of working. He is a Laboratory Schools' legend.

For over 40 years, Wayne Brasler has taught journalism and advised the students who publish the newspaper, the U-High Midway, and yearbook, U-Highlights (Liese Ricketts is co-advisor of the latter). His classroom has been in several locations during his career and is now housed in a suite of rooms on the lower level of Judd Hall. He does not work normal hours and often can be found with a cadre of aspiring journalists late in the evening or on weekends. Work on the yearbook often extends into the summer.

Countless students have entered the field of communications as a result of their experience at U-High while many others just use the learned skills of investigation, verification, and organization in any chosen career path. Meeting deadlines, working with others, and using journalistic integrity are but a few of the experiences that are part of the journalism program. While the process used is most important, the product must certainly not be discounted. To the contrary, the Midway and U-Highlights have consistently won national awards and are considered to be among the elite student publications in America.

My definition of gifted teaching is the ability to release the gifts of interested learners. Wayne Brasler, or as he sometimes refers to himself as "Dewey's Hire," has been doing it with generations of students. I'm sure glad he's planning for the next 40 years!

The world keeps turning and schools must keep turning with it. Education, in fact, moves in an endless circle of trends that move in and out of fashion. As a student myself, I've been through functional education, progressive education, classical education, the science-and-math panic following the launching of Sputnik, the shopping mall high school, and a lot else.

But I think that kind of endless search for educational nirvana is not bad. There's naturally a longing for yesterdays that take on an increasingly warm glow as the years go by, but even as some educational virtues prove eternal there's nothing more irrelevant than a school serving a world gone by.

The Lab Schools I came to in 1964 definitely were different than they are now but in many ways they are also the same.

Today we deal a lot with tailoring learning experiences to the learning style of each student. What was thought of as disabilities, we think of today as differences in abilities, in learning processes, in personalities.

But what struck me about the Lab Schools when I came here at the age of 23 was the amazing degree to which each and every teacher knew each and every student. I was a sociable type and made friends among the faculty easily, and soon I was visiting the connected Lower School classrooms of Louise Pliss and Fay Abrams.

No children sitting in neat little rows there. It was all action, action, action, busy, busy, busy, like watching a colony of ants scurrying about their daily missions.

And I remember noting how the teachers knew exactly what each child was doing, answered questions as if the child asking them was the most important person on the earth, and the warm and relaxed and secure feeling that made school a place a child wanted to be.

In Bob Erickson's high school art and photography classes I at first became confused at the variety of activity. And I couldn't separate the work going on from the enjoyment going on. But as I watched more and more I realized how intense and intensive his classes were, how much got done in one period. And how the not-so-brilliant artists got the same attention and praise as the brilliant.

Bob was keenly invested in discovering each student's talent and helping the student develop that talent. He wasn't interested (at all) in having the student fulfill the teacher's hopes and dreams or match his curricular goals in one particular way.

As journalism teacher and Midway adviser, I learned quickly from such teachers, and soon counselors were putting into the program U-Highers with learning challenges, perceptual issues, physical issues, and out-and-out traumas (one of my most wonderful students had suffered a terrible auto accident).

I fell into tailoring each student's assignments and my expectations for achievement to the individual without ever lowering the standards. I never considered any student as deficient in some way, but simply a person with an individual set of abilities and needs. And my responsibility was to help every student find the pathway to excellence.

I think in that way the Lab Schools have not changed. The school is still dynamic, the education lives and breathes, each and every student is important, and the teachers care oh, so much.

My mentor in writing my journalism curriculum was the legendary English teacher Eunice McGuire. A better mentor I could not have hoped for. Encouraging, gentle, wise and at the most surprising moments, witty. She kept encouraging me that I did know what I was doing and to follow my instincts. And my heart. It took years to feel like a grown-up teacher at U-High, but that day came when Eunice McGuire and I had a conversation about her disappointment a class had not fallen in love with To Kill A Mockingbird. I related the conversation to some English teacher friends at other top-quality schools. As God is my witness, one said, "Fall in love with a book? At our school, we don't even dare to dream that far."

That was the U-High difference. And is. Every time Hal Hoffenkamp teaches Anna Karenina his students' discussions spill over into the journalism classes. In love with the book? His students become crazed with it.

The world was different in 1964 and so was the school. U-High was impacted heavily by its large Jewish clientele from South Shore. This group exhibited manifest destiny. They dressed, behaved, and toiled as young people certain they were inheriting the leadership of the world (which in fact in many ways they did).

But it's important to note that our African American students at the time exhibited the same traits. And by 1967 they were fearlessly making waves about gaining more power in the school and over their lives. Exciting times.

But I think the biggest difference between then and now is then the school exuded a take-a-chance, cutting-edge quality that perhaps isn't realistic in today's world. Experimental projects abounded in the areas of independent learning, students designing their learning experiences, and teachers developing curricula that went on to the public schools.

A strong link with the University's Department of Education brought a lot of master-of-teaching students into Lab Schools' classrooms to learn the art.

And the school clearly considered learning a matter of having learned something, not a matter necessarily of success or failure. May Project was begun as a way of getting seniors out of school the final month, when emotionally they already were through with high school, to get into life outside the school walls, to try career possibilities, conduct independent projects, do service in the community.

Many students left town to try challenging projects.

If a student concluded his or her May Project had turned out a bust, that was okay if the student could still say the experience proved worthwhile for his or her future life. Perhaps a student learned, for example, that a career that had captivated him or her didn't turn out so captivating in reality.

I think that spirit lessened over the years. One day in the 1980s I got a phone call from a frantic mother terrified her child might not make an A grade in Beginning Journalism.

"I have to make sure she has a success," she said.

Two days later another mother called to complain her daughter was in one of my classes with her best friend, and her daughter had planned to be the star of the class but the best friend was out-starring her.

Over the years, too, the school like an octopus has grabbed and held tighter and tighter to students' lives. We once had an educational psychologist come in to address the faculty about Senior Slump and his message was the problem wasn't the seniors.

Their turning attention away from high school after years of devoting their life to getting into the right college was natural and normal, he said. The problem was the teachers couldn't let go.

Well, that one went in one ear and out the other. We not only couldn't let go, today the school is holding on tighter. Every facet of school life, even May Project, is now invaded by the mantra of academia, by the need to require School Work in capitals.

I'm among the guilty, so I can't point fingers. But I think that reality has worked against students taking chances, sailing onto uncertain ground, or chancing a B. The school has everyone and everything so tightly supervised, monitored, and channeled there's little room for anything going wrong.

Still, today the school offers opportunities the school of yesterday could only wish for. Model U.N., the Science Team, the Math Team, and many other programs offer U-Highers the opportunity to compete with the academic creme-de-la-creme nationally, to go places and meet new people and show their stuff. Such activities make memories that will last a lifetime and provide experiences invaluable in college and beyond.

Is the school better now than it was? In some ways yes, in some ways no. But don't let anyone tell you the glory days are over or the school is living on its past reputation. There's a wind of renewal, new growth, new opportunities, and new realizations moving through the expanding halls. The Lab Schools never, ever stand still. That you can bank on. Mr. Dewey believed schools were living organisms, not fixed institutions. Well, that's what he hoped they would be. I think he would be very happy with his little school and where it stands today. And where it is going.

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