Every seventh-grader at Mountain Middle School, a charter school, stood stock still in the auditorium, doing their best impression of a waxwork.
It was not a collective emulation of Madame Tussauds, but the culmination of the 56 students’ humanities project.
The doors to the auditorium opened. In flooded parents, siblings and teachers, who descended on the students like a traveling press corps, with some of the more aggressive iPhones wielders approaching paparazzi. Confronted with this mob, the seventh-graders said nothing. They did nothing. The acknowledged no one.
Then, one by one, parents pressed buttons appended to the students’ bodies – on their heads, shoulders and chests – and the students came alive, reading from memoirs they had written about their own lives.
One dark haired boy in a tuxedo read: “This won’t hurt a bit, the doctor said in a soothing voice. Whenever I hear adults say that, I know that they are lying, and it’s going to hurt.”
“It’s a cliffhanger,” remarked one parent, impressed. She asked the boy’s name. He wouldn’t break character. She pressed his button again; he repeated the passage.
Soon, the auditorium was abuzz with the low hum of simultaneous autobiographies.
Shane Voss, Mountain Middle School head of school, said the presentation capped seven weeks of work, where the students studied memoirs about famous (Michael Jordan), notorious (Lance Armstrong) or otherwise influential people (Anne Frank). Then they took what they learned about the genre and authored their own memoirs, both in long form and with digital media.
Voss said the wax museum exemplified the school’s commitment to project-based learning, where students are taught multiple skills by engaging with a single long-term project until completion.
“It’s a really unique approach to learning. It’s why they’re so engaged,” said Voss.
Indeed, the children were engaged: Many came in costume to emphasize one aspect of their life stories, including a young woman with a suitcase and a boy wearing ski goggles and a helmet.
One boy, Garnet Smith, toted a giant surfboard. Every time anyone pressed his button, he read a gripping extract, which began with his leg in the grips of searing pain immediately before a critical surfing competition. It turned out he’d been attacked by a jellyfish.
At some point, a group of young ruffians figured out how to game the system, gathering around one student and pressing his button again and again, forcing the student to repeat himself to the same mischievous audience.
When they set upon Smith, he seemed somewhat amused and bore their provocations patiently.
When they tried the same trick on seventh-grader Emery Hannum, pushing her button incessantly, she pretended feeling no amusement, and after a few sharp, well-chosen words, they sheepishly scattered to the winds.
“I hate boys,” she sighed.
When an adult acting in good faith soon after approached and pressed her button, she sweetly read an extract from her memoir, “A Horse I Once Knew,” aloud.
Mountain Middle School seventh-grade teacher leader Brian Roddiger said while the project hewed to state academic standards, students benefited from learning about memoirs while preparing for an eventual autobiographical performance.
“It’s really provides a lot of introspection for the students, and helps them to look within themselves, and it becomes very meaningful personal project. I think students get a lot more out of it.”
Nick Phillou, seventh-grade humanities teacher, agreed that students’ personal investment in the project yielded academic dividends.
“It’s a lot of student buy-in,” he said.
“It starts with this project and then it’s reflected in all of the social studies and literacy work that we do. That’s why I love this project. Kids do personal time lines. As soon as I show the time lines that they have in India, for example, everything is immediately more familiar.”
Mountain Middle featured as a seismic event in at least one student’s time line.
Sammy Southworth read his extract aloud. “Mountain, a school I begged to go to. A school that my dad said would not give me an education. Risk is what I took. Risks are the guidelines of a happy life, so go out and take one.”
cmcallister@durangoherald.com
