I've always wondered what it would be like to to run a school that was genuinely, completely optional for children. Partly, it's a sort of what-if, child-empowerment question that has lingered with me since my own hippyish origins. Partly, it's some curiosity as to what might be the challenges of such an operation, from the standpoint of things like curriculum.
The Hongnong summer school seems to be my chance to see how such a thing might work. Any given kid shows up one day, and not the next. A colleague teacher comes by my classroom at 10 AM, and deposits a pair of visiting nieces with me, because the teacher's got something "important" to do. "This is my nephew [sic]. Can she stay here for a while?" "Sure," I grin, and a preschooler in a soaking wet purple shirt charges happily in amongst my third graders and begins headbutting her older peers, like an ecstatic goat. I give her a paper cut-out alligator and some crayons.
The consequence is that there's very little chance to build up any kind of class-to-class "progress" – each class session becomes a stand-alone daycare operation, where even the nominal breakdown by age or ability no longer holds.
Not even the physical environment holds steady. The school is under constant, heavy construction. Yesterday morning, I entered my classroom to find two workmen hanging out the window, doing something arcane with a power drill. And then during the JET test prep class, the power went out. Whoops… I guess we need a new lesson plan that doesn't require the computer (which I was using to play the CD with listening sections on it).
And you know what? I don't mind. I'm not bad at rigidity and structure, tempermentally. But I've always harbored philosphical reservations about it. So here we are. What shall we do today?