First week of class: a little intimidating. I am not used to free inquiry in school. I practice free inquiry out of school, but in school I expect tasks with clear parameters—assignments, basically. Also, group work is intimidating in a specific way: I cannot simply do group work (though it is sometimes very fun). It requires participation, patience, and entertaining ideas not one’s own. I’m also not used to school or university classes being pass-fail. I’m used to lifeguarding and first aid and Foodsafe and TESOL classes being pass-fail, but not school. School is like a game where you try to get the highest score but a full score is only ever attainable in theory.

The “Most Likely to Succeed” film: good! Surprisingly limited in scope, given the vague title (from which you would not guess it was about one particular school), but good nonetheless. I would love to watch a bunch of movies like this, each one featuring a different type of experimental school. A hope I’ve always had for a university education program is that it would introduce me to competing approaches to education and compare and criticize them, but I expect this hope to be disappointed. It’s not much, but at least this one class will have introduced me to one specific approach.

Initial website-establishing efforts: see previous blog post.

Second week’s class: rather encouraging. I learned I’m not alone in my feeling of general bewilderment, and that professor Michael’s patient and question-welcoming demeanor in the first class was not a bluff.

I chose a free inquiry topic! See second free inquiry blog post.

Third week’s class: dominated by Jesse Miller’s talk which I did not find helpful. He managed (impressively) to string a lot of words together in close succession while communicating very little information. Clear takeaways: none. Okay, on second thought, here’s one takeaway: Some teachers have done some weird stuff that was unprofessional and gotten in trouble for it. Noted.