Alternatively Elementary

It’s 7:55 a.m. and Susie Oppenheim’s class of sixth, seventh, and eighth graders are waiting for class to start. The sun hasn’t been up long, but the students have already been at school for half an hour, eating a government-subsidized breakfast and rubbing sleep out of their eyes. Oppenheim’s class of twenty students—roughly half white and half non-white, half male and half female—sit at a cluster of rectangular tables, sipping on the last of cartons of milk, some listening to headphones, doodling on notebook paper, or doing nothing at all, seemingly storing up energy for the day ahead. Backpacks are strewn about in an array of colors, winter jackets are slung over the backs of chairs, and feet rest in untied shoes.

So far this looks like it could be almost any classroom in urban America. That is, of course, until Susie Oppenheim enters the classroom.

Like a gust of wind, Oppenheim whooshes into the room with a pile of freshly photocopied history packets, ready for use in class today. She’s smiling, as she does often, and the 55-year-old easily commands the attention of everybody in the room.

“Okay, friends, we’re going to get started,” Oppenheim says. “Come on over.”

There is a mass exodus from the rectangular tables at the far end of the room across to several large couches positioned in a semi-circle on the other side of the room. The piles of backpacks and jackets disappear and slowly the couches line with twenty young bodies, all facing Oppenheim expectantly.

A few students ask Oppenheim questions about tomorrow’s big field trip, addressing Oppenheim by her first name as all students do when addressing teachers at Southside Family School. Oppenheim, clad in a pair of jeans and a purple zip-up sweater, takes a chair at the center of the semi-circle of couches and answers questions patiently. Her silver earrings dangle as she turns her head to address students sitting on either side of her and she readjusts the small, chic frames resting on her nose.

Tomorrow’s fieldtrip is not the standard cotton candy trip to Valleyfair, guided tour of the state capitol, or a tokens-and-pizza party at Chuck E. Cheese. Instead, Oppenheim’s group of twelve-, thirteen-, and fourteen-year-old students will pile onto a small yellow school bus and drive to St. Cloud, Minn., for an all-day conference called “Inspiring Justice Through Awareness,” sponsored by the Center for Service-Learning and Social Change, a non-profit social justice education organization based in St. Cloud. The students will get to pick three workshops to attend during the day, each centered on a different issue: environmental justice, discrimination based on disability, local poverty and hunger, animal rights, discrimination based on sexual orientation, immigration, school violence, sweatshops and child labor, domestic violence, war and terrorism, homelessness, nonviolence theory and practice, and a session on gaps in the health care system.

“You know,” Oppenheim tells me later, “the other day I was talking [with my students] about racism and the ways in which racism was constructed and I began to see us all having these enormous webs above our heads, above our brains, and it’s the webs that are based on the lies of racism, of classism, homophobia, and heterosexism,” Oppenheim says.

“It’s an incredibly dense web, just layers and layers around us,” she says. She stops for a few seconds, thinking. “You know how the first time somebody told you something that made you realize that a lot of things you were believing were just crap? Well, our job is to make little holes in that web so the light can shine through, and we need to be doing it at all moments. And then we need to think about the web that surrounds us globally,” Oppenheim says, “and all of those lies that are keeping us from seeing the truth, from seeing better ways to live. So I guess it sounds grandiose to say that that’s what I want to do everyday, but it is,” Oppenheim says. She gives a wry smile and lets out a small laugh before going back to tend her flock of students.

* * *

Field trips are nothing unusual for Southside Family School students. While many public schools go on only a few field trips during the course of a year, Family School students regularly go on field trips as an integral part of their education. Last week Oppenheim’s class of older students spent Monday through Thursday in northern Minnesota, investigating the work of the White Earth Plain Recovery Project, a group trying to reclaim Native American lands sold to corporations. While in northern Minnesota, Oppenheim’s students also visited Native Harvest to learn about organic farming, including how to harvest and produce the native wild rice of the region. They also visited historical sites discussed in the novel they’re reading for class, a fictional exploration of the plight of Native Americans near what is now Madeline Island.

And sometimes, during a regular school week, an issue will come up that students want to explore. Oppenheim sees this as an opportunity to educate her students in the classroom of the world, leaving the confines of the school.
“One day somebody came in and said, ‘What’s up with the bus strike?’” Oppenheim says. “I said, ‘I think they’re five blocks away.’ So we went. We took our video camera, asked questions, got educated, and went back a few times after that.”

A picket sign from that day at the bus strike still hangs on Oppenheim’s classroom wall.

* * *

Despite the social justice fieldtrip scheduled for tomorrow, the rest of the morning looks much like standard schooling. Oppenheim’s students go to a different classroom and work with a teacher whom they cheerfully call “Pete.” Peter Oppenheim, who was once married to Susie Oppenheim, teaches reading, math and science in his classroom. Oppenheim, in his mid-fifties, is tall and lean and exudes an aging-hippie coolness.

“Okay big dudes and little dudes,” he says as students file into his classroom, “let’s have a seat.” Addison-Wesley textbooks are passed around the room and a lesson on the earth’s tilted axis and its affect on the seasons begins.
Dawn, the mother of two Southside Family School students, said she likes that students see different teachers during the day.

“When I went to school you heard stories about teachers—that they were mean or scary or something—and if you got that teacher, you were stuck with them all year. But here you get exposure to all the teachers,” she said.
Dawn also likes the reading and math programs at Southside Family School.

“Alex, my son, had problems with reading,” Dawn explained. “But he wasn’t held back,” Dawn said, explaining that reading and math are subjects taught in ability-based groups in the school. “A fifth grader and a third grader can be in the same reading class, and that’s okay.” Dawn said that in a typical public school her child would probably be labeled learning disabled and be stuck with that label throughout his education. But at Family School, when her son Alex’s reading improved, he was moved back up to a higher-level reading group.

“Here we don’t have to follow lock-step curriculum,” Jess Myhre, one of the school’s coordinators, explains. “We can meet the kids where they’re at.”

And it appears that something about Southside Family School’s approach to math and reading education is working. State law requires Family School to administer the Minnesota Basic Skills Test each year and the results of those tests speak for themselves. Last year every Family School student passed the exams.

“We consistently do better than the district average,” Myhre confirms. “Across the board.”

* * *

While Susie Oppenheim’s older students have filed into Pete’s classroom next door to learn about the earth’s tilting axis, Oppenheim gets a classroom full of first and second graders. She shifts gears seamlessly, working with the younger students and drawing them into the day’s lesson on simple addition and subtraction. Oppenheim pulls out a rabbit puppet, which her students know and love as Roberta, a regular fixture during math time.

“Why don’t we make a picture of food for Roberta to eat?” Oppenheim asks in Roberta’s voice. “We’ll count them and make a chart.”

Later, when Roberta’s grasp of the students’ attention span has grown lax, Oppenheim moves them from the couches to the rectangular tables to do a mathematical color-by-numbers exercise. The six- and seven-year-old students get down to the business of adding and subtracting, counting on their fingers—“One more than nine is…ten”—and color away, concentrating heavily on staying within the bold black lines.

Suddenly, while coloring, one of the African American boys asks, “Who likes President Bush?” Several students scrunch up their faces as if smelling something rotten. Jasmine, a seven-year-old African American girl with chunky braids and colored binders in her hair, is the first to speak up.

“I don’t like Bush,” Jasmine says. “He’s just destroying America with all his wars.” A few heads nod. There seems to be a general consensus that Jasmine has said all that needs to be said, and the students go back to adding seven and two and coloring with well-worn crayons.

* * *

Sandy, a teacher from the MacPhail Center for Music, comes to Family School twice a week to teach half-hour music classes. Oppenheim and her students are in Sandy’s music classroom, putting the final touches on a pantomime act they will be presenting to each other in a few minutes. The class has been split into three groups, one of which includes Oppenheim, who gets as involved in the pantomime act as her students.

Sandy is short and wears oversized glasses. She sports a buzz cut and a hooded sweatshirt with dark green pants that, paired with maroon pumps, seem at odds with the rest of her outfit.

The music room is large and devoid of cluttering furniture and the high ceiling makes the room feel as cavernous as a cathedral. A squat, aged console piano sits unused in one corner of the room. Flamenco guitar music, which must be used by each group as the soundtrack to their pantomime performance, plays in the background. A yellow Playbill cover hangs on the wall near Smithsonian Magazine covers of airplanes and mountains.

“Family School is such a neat, organic place,” Sandy says while the students rehearse their scenes. “They’re very into open-minded thinking.”

Once the students present their scenes it is easy to see what Sandy means.

The flamenco guitar music begins, calling to mind images of a hot, lazy afternoon. The first group’s actors spring to life, carrying in two students on chairs who seem to be acting as royalty. Servants fan the king and queen while cooks and kitchen workers rush around madly to prepare a feast for the royals. Oppenheim works in the kitchen with the other servants, pretending to handle a large, heavy dish. The king and queen begin their feast, noshing on great piles and platters of food. While the king and queen feast, however, the servants and workers begin to steal everything from the palace and, before the king and queen realize what is happening, the servants and workers are out of the palace with stolen goodies in tow just as the king and queen realize they’ve been robbed. The guitar music finishes and it is the end of the scene. There is a smattering of applause all around.

The guitar music begins again and the second group pantomimes the actions of shopping at a convenience store. A few shoppers make their way around the store while the checkout clerk rings up purchases. Suddenly Jamal, one of the African American students in Oppenheim’s class, enters the store and holds up the clerk. A Caucasian police officer makes her way into the store as Jamal tries to flee and beats him senseless with an imaginary police baton. And voilà—we have a convenience store robbery and police brutality in a racial bias crime. Once the police officer has clubbed the African American robber sufficiently she takes the goods the robber stole and quietly makes her way out of the store. The music finishes and there is more applause.

Finally the flamenco guitar music begins one last time. Two pairs of students, looking regal and self-important, take turns pretending to speak with each other. Each grows more and more indignant and, eventually, it turns into a full-blown argument. At last it turns into a duel and everybody ends up dead. The music finishes and again there is applause.

“Tell me what was going on in that one,” Sandy asks the class. “Who can guess what it was?”

“The presidential debates?” one of the students offers.

The guess turns out to be right. The students had parodied the previous night’s presidential debates which each of the students seemed to have watched.

Once music class finished, with significant energy dispelled and plenty of giggles about the morning’s performances, the students walked back up the stairs to their regular classroom, discussing their opinions on the trustworthiness of the newspaper polls about the upcoming presidential elections.

The oldest student in the group is fourteen years old; the youngest, twelve.

* * *

The Southside Family School has been a living, growing part of Minneapolis for the last thirty-two years, albeit in various forms. The school began as something called a model city school, Oppenheim explains, a program devised by the federal government in which various constituencies, like local universities and city and county government, help inform and shape what the school becomes.

“But then the money for the whole federal grant ran out,” Oppenheim says, “and we were trying to figure out what to do. Most places die; we chose not to.” Oppenheim shakes her head. “So it was a struggle. People were working for $5,000 a year. But what happened then is that the school started to evolve.”

Myhre explains that the school moved to several different locations during those early and sometimes rocky formative years. They held classes in church basements and at a homeless shelter but eventually made their way into their location on Clinton Avenue in Minneapolis, just south of Franklin Avenue. The building, across from St. Steven’s Catholic Church, used to be a Catholic school. When it lost its funding, the Catholic school moved out and Family School moved in.

“We named the school in honor of the families who helped form the school,” Myhre explains. It was those parents, teachers, and students who decided to stick around and continue the school’s mission who really formed the school, Oppenheim says. Eventually the school applied for and received non-profit status and won a coveted contract as an alternative school within the public school district of Minneapolis, bringing in significant financial and educational resources, including food and disability services, the latter of which would have been prohibitively expensive for a small alternative school like Family School.

One of Family School’s earliest and most distinctive differences from other schools was the emphasis on social justice education. The school’s mission statement explains that a social justice curriculum “teaches students to be independently minded citizens who respect themselves and others.” The mission statement goes on to explain that learning will happen in an atmosphere “free of racism, sexism, classism and homophobia” and that the education will honor diverse cultural identities, encourage volunteer participation, use the community as a classroom, and engage students in current issues of social justice, decision-making and problem solving.

“It is our responsibility to educate our students and ourselves in the process, in a constant and ongoing way, about the world around us,” Oppenheim says, “to help them understand the systems that are oppressing all of us so that together we can do something about those systems. First we need to negotiate them personally,” Oppenheim emphasizes, “and then change them as a community. And so that feature has evolved into the center of the Family School.”

* * *

The more traditional math and science classes finish just before lunch. After lunch Oppenheim’s students come tumbling back into her room in an array of baggy pants, sneakers, colored hair, sweatshirts, and the kind of clothing accessories normally seen on twenty-something hipsters in Uptown. There is a mix of casual, preppy, hippie and hip-hop influence in the room and each of these modes of dress seem to exist in harmony in the classroom. Oppenheim’s students settle onto the couches and an air of expectation fills the room. Afternoon classes, where things usually get interesting, are about to begin.

The topic that starts the afternoon is Spanish colonialism of the Americas in the seventeenth century. The discussion develops quickly and students shout out answers to Oppenheim’s questions as she points around the room, mediating the discussion.

“What is New Spain?” Oppenheim asks. She points at a girl with her hand up.

“It’s like parts of southern and western United States and part of Colorado.”

Another hand shoots up. “And lots of Mexico and Central America and then later the French take more.”

“Spanish control is rising through the United States by 1650,” Oppenheim says, looking around the room at her students.

“Would you imagine Africans starting to live in what becomes the United States?”

A few “yes” answers pop up around the room.

“They brought Africans because the Native Americans got small pox and resisted,” one student says.

“And what kind of work did [the Africans] do?” Oppenheim asks.

“They worked in mines,” somebody volunteers.

“They cut sugar cane,” another calls out.

Killian, seated on a couch on the right side of the room, wears baggy black pants, a hooded sweatshirt and a hat worn at a jaunty angle over his sea foam green hair. He raises his hand and starts riffing on the evils of the slightly mad, money-hungry, murderous, imperialistic Christopher Columbus. Heads nod around the room and Oppenheim listens carefully. After a few students have chimed in on the topic of Columbus, each decreeing him a heinous historical monster, Oppenheim has a question.

“What happens when you tell five-year-olds that people who arrive in a new place and claim it become heroes? What’s good and bad about that?” she asks. Hands shoot up immediately. “Claire,” Oppenheim says, pointing at a girl with brown hair, clad in a white t-shirt and a pair of jeans.

“It teaches kids that it’s okay.”

“How is it okay for Columbus to take what’s not his?” Oppenheim asks. “Noah,” she says, pointing to one of her students.

“They say it didn’t really belong to anybody and those who were there were savages, so then it’s okay.”

There is a brief discussion about treaties and what Oppenheim calls the “farce” of signing treaties. “Did they really have a choice in signing the treaties?” she asks.

Heads shake no.

“[Treaties] make it easier for the government to say to the Native Americans, ‘What are you complaining about?’ And what else makes it okay?”

Tristan raises his hand. “God.”

“God. Exactly,” Oppenheim says. “We want to watch how the name of God is being used and whose God. And what kind of legality is at issue? The treaties are used as law. But can you tell by looking at people if they have a way of governing, a way of doing things?”

More heads shake no.

“It’s the racist vision that if you can’t see it, it’s not there,” Oppenheim says. “And who profits from this? Who gets richer?”

“The Spanish,” somebody calls out.

Oppenheim nods. “If we always ask ourselves ‘Who profits? Who dies? Who lies?’ it gets us to the moral question of what’s happening.”

Oppenheim says later that she thinks the question of who profits, who dies, and who lies helps her students examine more carefully what is going on in current and historical situations.

“Do I think learning about racism and the immoral deeds of empire is too tough for kids? No,” Oppenheim says later.

“Because at some level [kids] always know it’s there. They see so much gratuitous violence on a daily basis, so how about learning about real violence? Kids can be agents of change,” Oppenheim says. “Look at the world—young people are creating social change again and again. From the Warsaw ghetto to South Africa, it’s been young energy putting itself on the line that creates change.”

* * *

Later in the afternoon Oppenheim’s class once again sits perched on the semi-circle of couches. It’s a cloudless, sunny afternoon and the branches of the trees outside sway in the breeze, expending a few brightly colored leaves. Inside the classroom the topic has turned to Hitler. The conversation, once again moderated by Oppenheim, turns into a discussion about photographic propaganda, then to McCarthyism, and then to Hitler’s infamous tome Mein Kamf.

“Hitler wanted to be a painter,” one of the students offers.

“And he was a vegetarian,” another adds.

“It’s true,” Oppenheim says, nodding. She adds in information about Mussolini and Stalin, and the kids have more facts to share. Sara Chabot, one of the AmeriCorps volunteers helping out in Oppenheim’s class, looks positively in shock, watching as the students nonchalantly discusses World War II.

Finally Noah raises his hand, brushing his long brown hair out of his face, and says that he thinks George Orwell’s Animal Farm relates to Nazism and dictators. This nearly knocks Chabot off her chair.

“I definitely wish I would have gone to this school,” she says later.

Finally, as the last forty-five minutes of the school day draws near, Oppenheim looks at the clock and then looks outdoors at the clear skies and the leaves changing colors.

“Okay, friends, we’ve had a good discussion today. I think we’ll spend the rest of the day at the park.”

This goes over well with the students. They clamor to the little yellow school bus just outside the confines of their imposing stone school and pile into the seats.

At the park, several blocks away, the students fan out onto swing sets and jungle gym equipment. Oppenheim and the volunteers helping out in her class stand in a clump, watching the students shriek and run around the small park. At last, these students seem like children again. Approaching their teenage years and on the verge of puberty, these students have taken a break from discussing social injustice, Spanish history, and World War II dictatorship and are, quite simply, children playing in a public park on an unseasonably warm autumn afternoon.

* * *

Nonfiction reportage.

Josh, 22, lives in Minneapolis. This piece earned him an A+ from Pulitzer prize-winning writer and professor Paul McEnroe.

(c) 2004 Josh and Josh Exclusives
No part of this writing may be reproduced without written permission from the author.