Connections

In John Carlstroem’s welcome to prospective BPC families last Saturday, he quoted John Phillips, educator and founder of Phillips Exeter Academy: “Goodness without knowledge... is weak and feeble, yet knowledge without goodness is dangerous.... Both united form the noblest character and lay the surest foundation of usefulness to mankind."  In various classes at BPC, we see our current John’s reference to that past John.  Through the support of their teachers, students are thinking about how elements of their lives connect to the lives of others.

In history class, Aly Mitchell examined the labor movement with the 8th graders, learning about labor movements such as the the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the deadliest industrial disaster in US history, which resulted in improving  factory conditions and workers’ rights.  They also studied the Singing Strike of 1912, where people of different ethnic backgrounds came together--women, in particular, had a strong and effective role in improving conditions.  Students then read Bertold Brecht’s 1935 poem, “Questions from a Worker Who Reads.”  Brecht asks, “Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?/ And Babylon, many times demolished/ Who raised it up so many times?  In what houses/ of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live?”  

As a response, the 8th graders wrote their own poems, examining the labor and people that comprise our everyday lives.  A student, considering the Starbucks holiday coffee, asks, “How much do these elves in orange get paid?  90 cents to 4 dollars a day!”  Another student’s writing--“With a nice name like Hershey/ We could never see” that there are “people working with cut-up feet/ While Hershey makes money off our feast/ They are struggling to eat/ Now doesn’t that sound bittersweet?”--evokes the lawsuits, since dismissed, brought against chocolate makers Hershey, Nestlé, and Mars related to packaging and the use of child slave labor in harvesting cocoa.  Recalling the ongoing farmworker-led boycott of Driscoll’s berries, another student writes,  “Back bending, back breaking/ Toiling for hours in the scorching sun/ Arms aching/ Sweat staining/ Picking strawberries one by one.”  

Echoes of the same lesson are evident in Rachel Frycke’s gardening classes.  In the Permaculture Tea Party, 7th graders enjoyed two types of herbal tea blends from a local--very local, being only half a mile away--tea distributor, Leaves and Flowers that sources its products from Northern California farms.  Ms. Frycke said, “Students created a diagram to represent all of the resources, processes, and people that went into their cup of tea. We discussed the difference between an industrial system and a permaculture system: whole system perspective, closed loop, etc.”  She noted that students were surprised by how complicated these systems were.  She is going to work with students to grow and process their own herbal teas at BPC.  

Similarly, science teacher Jonathan Cohen is also working with 8th graders in workshop class.  All students in 8C are building chairs out of a limited amount of wood.  Students worked with partners to draw designs, make models with toothpicks, and ultimately build the chairs.  The model part was so easy, but actually constructing the chair was another story.  A student reported, “It was harder.  We couldn’t even get the drill in.  Sawing took way more time than we expected.  Being precise was hard with the limited amount of wood we had, and it ended up wobbly.  We had to use the very last of our wood to make it stable.  I don’t think differently about a plastic chair, but if I see a wooden chair these days, I feel differently about it.”  An 8th grader noted that it felt “weird that other people do this for a living.”

It is clear that students are acquiring knowledge here at BPC.  What makes this knowledge good is that they are considering perspectives and experiences outside of their own.