Build the foundation.

A school that gives me room

I go to Alpha School in Austin. It pushes the boundaries of what school can look like, but it still cares about the foundations: reading, math, writing, and knowing what I can actually do.

Academics are in the morning. The afternoon is for projects, workshops, and the Mini-Max work that I’m building over three years.

The morning game

Academics are in the morning. The afternoon is for the Mini-Max Project.

At my school you don’t move on until you get 90 or better.

The rule I can point to is the 90. The reason, the way it’s been explained to me, is that this early on you’re learning the things everything else gets built on top of — so a hole here isn’t like a hole later.

That’s my understanding of why, not something the school published.

When it breaks

You don’t redo the whole thing. It shows you where the holes are — the specific questions you got wrong. You do supplemental work on those, then take it again. If there are still holes, you go again.

That sounds slow. It isn’t, because you’re only redoing the part that broke.

Future me feels it

Here’s the part that actually gets me. An 80 means two things out of ten have a hole in them — and you don’t find out which two.

You don’t feel it that year. You feel it in four years, when everything new is sitting on top of the part you missed.

Still testing

I’m still figuring out what makes a morning feel like I actually learned something, instead of just finishing the work. I also want to notice which holes I keep missing and what kind of practice actually fills them. I know the 90 tells me where to look; I don’t know yet what the best way is for me to close every hole.

What I’m taking with me

I want to learn how to take an idea from a question to a process, then to something another person can use. School gives me a place to practice that without pretending the first version is the finished one.

The stage test

A project last year was Alpha City Limits, a music festival run by students. Groups handled the venue and audience, the room, and the bands. I was the drummer in Backstreet Kids.

Most of us had not played our instruments before the project. The useful part was that the festival had a real date and real people were going to be there. We could not explain our way around what we had or had not learned.